TEACHING FEBRUARY 11-15; 18-22

                                                      TEACHING FEBRUARY 11-15; 18-22


                                                                                   

                                           SIDE ENTRANCE TO THE NATIONAL
                                              UNIVERSITY "ODESA ACADEMY
                                                                    OF LAW"

Well finally, I am writing about what I came to Odesa, Ukraine, to do; teach Alternative Dispute
Resolution to law students.
ADR: When I visited Odesa, Ukraine in May, 2011, to determine if I wished to apply for a Fulbright fellowship and teach here, ADR was a very hot topic. A national commission had finished its work at the end of 2010 and sent a proposed draft law to Parliament. The European Union, Ukriane is not a member, had ordered all member states to adopt a mediation statute and most had complied. But by 2012, the momentum had died. Ukraine had not adopted an ADR statute; mediation was not being widely used in many European nations. UK is probably the leader. Estonia, where I have taught three times, adopted a statute but no lawyers had been trained, the judges did not order it and "conciliation" as mediation was termed in the Estonian statute was just not used. With that background, we will turn to the Academy of Law in Odesa. (Odesa is the Ukrainian spelling of Odessa.
THE ACADEMY: In 1997, the current President of the Academy came to Ukraine and took over a barely functioning school. Since then he created an academic monster. The school has 17,000 law students in Odesa alone and has campuses in three other cities in Ukraine. Not only is there this facility, but the school also operates out of a ten story building in the Odesa city center.

                                                                            

                                                       ACADEMY MAIN ENTRANCE
         (Yes, that is a giant TV screen which shows various scenes of Academy life and many pictures
          of the President in various activities. The Orthodox church behind is on the campus grounds.)

                                                                                

                                                    ACADEMY SPRING HOUSE
                One may not drink tap water in Odesa (or in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv) so access to
                 spring water is very important. The Academy has tapped a spring and here a line of people
                 wait their turn to fill water bottles.

                                                                               

                                        SIDE VIEW OF CHURCH NEXT TO ACADEMY

THE CLASS: On Tuesday, Feb. 12, I held my first class. It was in a very large hall (pictures will be shown in another blog) and there were about 50+ students in attendance. Classes are for 80 minutes. The first
and second weeks, I taught on Tuesday and Thursday in the "great hall." The classes meet 6 times a month, so I would only meet once a month for the rest of February.
It took Ilona, a student who works in the International Office, about 4 minutes to call the roll, as it listed not just the students who came to class, but rather the 110 students eligible to attend my class. I never received a list of the students who were taking the class. I did receive the same list she used and an electronic list I could use to send out 110 emails with class schedules, topics and assignments. I usually learn all the students' names within 2 or 3 class meetings, but it was impossible to do that in this class because many did sit in the same place; attendance was uneven due to many scheduling conflicts and my brain had trouble connecting the names with the faces when I would only see them once a week.
I sat on the stage at a table. (Think back to high school and your cafeterium, that is what this room is like without the food and movable tables and chairs.) An electric curtain had been lowered from the ceiling dividing the auditorium into two parts. I gave my first lecture feeling very removed from the students. I had been asked if I needed a projector before arriving and this room is the only one that has that feature. Had I known, I would have brought a power point projector; however, the class rooms have non movable chairs which would make it very difficult to have role plays, which are an integral part of my course, so actually this auditorium turned out to be one of two rooms which accommodated what I do.
LIVING ACCOMMODATIONS: Showed the apartment in the last blog post, it was adequate but I the Internet connection would not work. Barskyy actually did not come over to hook up the wireless router until Tuesday, Feb. 12; and though it worked for five minutes, after that it did not. On Friday, Feb. 15, he arranged for an "engineer" from the provider to visit the apartment. Turns out that two actually came inside with Barskyy and his wife. One worked on it for over an hour, then announced that my laptop was the problem and it needed to be taken to a "service center" where Windows could be removed and re-installed. I said to Barskyy, that doesn't make sense because I can connect wirelessly at the Academy in the Admissions' Office, at Peoples' Restaurant in the evening, at two different hotels in Kyiv. He responded that it must be my laptop and he would be happy to take me to a service center. I declined. So for the next two weeks, I had an Internet connection in the Admissions' Office at the Academy, where I started staying until 7:00 p.m., and at Peoples' Restaurant and Bar, which was a 5 minute walk from my apartment.
Unlike the universities in Tartu, Estonia; Riga, Latvia; and St. Petersburg, Russia; wireless was not in every corner of the Academy. Only the Admissions' Office had it all the time and I became a fixture there. I am not certain when the director offered me this hospitality  he expected me to create a permanent office in the room but I did. Each time I would go online in the apartment, the Internet would work for up to 45 minutes then go out. Finally, one night in the last week of February, I did what we all know to do when our wireless router goes out in the states; I unplugged it, waited 5 minutes and plugged it back in. Eureka! I had wireless a again. My nightly visits to Peoples stopped.
I can not explain the magnitude of not having reliable Internet connections in the evening. Peoples was OK, but there was a continual loop of techno music playing that after a few nights became extremely annoying. Odesa is 8 hours ahead of Austin and 7 of the East Coast, making Skype phone calls really could not be done until 5:00 p.m. for Odesa time; I needed the Internet to conduct any business and to talk to family and friends. What was initially annoyance the first week or so, by the end of February was a slow burning anger at Barskyy for putting me in the apartment and then not trying a different router to see if the router was the problem. His doubt about my laptop's capability was so great, that one afternoon (the only time that this ever happened) he showed up in the admission's office to check if my laptop really could access the Internet by wireless as I had told him it could do.
But, I am over emphasizing a discomfort, this week established that I had students, they were interested in the course, and the teaching at the National University "Odesa Academy of Law" would be fun.