Back to School Blues

It's that time of year again: thousands of university students getting ready to go back to school. A summer's gone by, and now it's time to hit the books again. Let's be honest: most students look forward to the start of classes about as much as they would to a root canal. It's just tough to get back into the routine after a summer of fun, frolic, and travel, especially when the weather's still nice and you're cooped up in a classroom listening to someone drone one about something you don't really care about anyway except the course is a requirement of your program.

To any of you freshmen out there reading this, jumping in for the first time, or any of you upper classmen returning for more, here's a little secret: your professors dread the start of classes just as much as you do, if not more.

We've also enjoyed our summer, and have been frankly thrilled not having to deal with your complaining emails, quibbles about your grades, and your ever-fancier excuses for not being able to take exams -- which are especially annoying if they involve being someone warm or exotic while we're battling it out back at the ranch.

I know some of you are nervous about meeting your professors for the first time. Here's another secret: we're as nervous as you, if not more. I've been in this game for fifteen years, and worked as a teaching assistant while a grad student, so I've been doing this pretty much for my whole adult life. Even then, when I face a new class and a new group of students, large or small, I've got a case of nerves as large as that keg you've hidden in your dorm room's closet. (A sip or two from that keg will help calm the nerves, but then you already you knew that.) Small classes are easier, since you can at least see everyone you're talking to, and everyone has to pretend that they're listening, at least for a while.

The large classes are much tougher. For some reason, perhaps the early onset of insanity, I volunteer to teach a section of our first year introduction to economics course, and so confront about three hundred freshmen, just out of high school, usually in a large lecture theatre where I'm standing at the bottom and looking up at rows upon rows, so much so that I can't even see to the back of the room. I have to be wired up to a microphone as well, since, unlike some of my colleagues, I don't have stentorian lungs and don't much enjoy shouting to be heard.

They tell me that I'm teaching this class because I have a Ph.D. and it's important to indoctrinate these young minds early, before they gravitate to other fields and bring down our enrolment statistics. Now, it's true I have a Ph.D., but to be honest I wish I had a background in stand-up instead. Because that's what it takes to keep three hundred eighteen-year olds engaged for an hour and a half at a time, when they'd rather be chilling with their friends or trying to chat up that cute new barista at the coffee place in the library. Spoiler alert: like real stand-ups, I hone my one-liners and my bits, and use them on successive classes, making them appear as spontaneous when they're actually rehearsed. The biggest thrill I get is when my first year class laughs at my jokes: it means somehow I'm connecting with kids who inhabit a totally different mental world from me, who are old enough to be my kids if I had any, and who've never known life without the internet, cellphones, or music downloads.

The other thing I've figured out the hard way is to keep things short and sweet. I know I'm allotted just under ninety minutes per class, but I try to wrap things up in an hour. (I hope my department chair isn't reading this.) Psychologists say that that the average person's attention span is about forty-five or fifty minutes, maximum. For a university freshman, it's probably closer to fifteen minutes. In a culture of the sound byte, in which wisdom has to be distilled down to 140 characters or less, brevity is most certainly the soul of wit.

The last and maybe most important thing I've learned is that, not only is it OK, it's absolutely necessary, to deviate from the script. If you can do without one, even better. In our technological age, a class in which the professor just wades through the textbook on PowerPoint slides he got from the publisher, seems a total waste of time, yet that is more often the case than not. The truth is, despite all our complaints about being underpaid and overworked, we've got a pretty good life as university professors. The least we can do is add some intellectual value when we're teaching. In economics, it can be as simple as connecting a concept from the textbook to something that's just been reported in the news. And when I sense that the kids have gotten that connection, when I can feel the jolt caused by two facts intersecting and sparking an idea in their still-impressionable minds, I feel I've earned my pay packet for the day. Now, if only it were a little fatter ....

Check out my latest!!

http://www.the-nri.com/index.php/2010/09/differences-between-indians-living-in-usa-and-canada/

A provocative look comparing Indo-Americans and Indo-Canadians -- check it out!!

A new piece, on another blog site

Hi folks

Speculation about my demise is premature! I'm back! I have a piece on an exciting new NRI blog site, with fabulous content. My piece just came up today. Check it out!

http://www.the-nri.com/index.php/2010/09/mining-dispute-vedanta-resources-tribal-people-orissa/

Cheers

Back from the dead

Back from vacation, and quoted by Macleans

Well, folks, I'm back from a month-long vacation in Italy. More on that later, as well as sundry and scintillating politico-economic and sociological comments on the Old World vs. the New. In the meantime, I'm cited extensively in an article in this week's Macleans, Canada's premiere weekly news magazine. (Actually, it's the only one, so a fortiori it's the premiere one.) The interesting thing is that it's as a music critic, not an economist. Did I miss my calling? Here's the link:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/09/02/more-cried-the-conductor-more/

Oh, yes, there will be more economics later.

"The score contains everything but the essential"

A while back, I wrote an essay comparing two performances of the Mahler Fourth Symphony, for the National Arts Centre's new "musicbox", which archives some of the NAC Orchestra's finest performances as captured by the microphones of the CBC. Here is a link to the article in English:

http://tinyurl.com/mu7c7x

And here's a link to the article in French:

http://tinyurl.com/l5zdd8

Bons baisers de Montreal

If you've been following me on Twitter, you know I'm back from Montreal. It has been my primary source of urban oxygen for the past year, when, for a variety of reasons I don't want to bore you with, visiting New York City, where I lived as a graduate student and subsequently visited frequently, wasn't possible. Now, a couple of disclaimers. It doesn't make sense to compare New York, a city of, what, fifteen million people, with Montreal, that has two, or perhaps three, if you include the metropolitan area. If you wanted to compare by population size and rough geographical area, Boston, Barcelona, or Munich would be better comparators. In the same way, you wouldn't compare Vancouver to Los Angeles, you'd compare it to Seattle. Having said all of that, I'd argue that, for my money, if a weekend of urban pleasures is what you have in mind, Montreal is hard to beat, and hits the sweet spot in terms of the trade-off between urban density and depth on the one hand and liveability and manageability on the other (the same might be true for a choice of where to live, but I'll leave that bigger question aside).

Like New York, Montreal is eminently walkable, and it has an excellent metro system, and easy to hail cabs. Dining and shopping, as you would expect, are excellent, and, even with the Canadian dollar moving back towards par with the US dollar, still a good deal cheaper. Ditto for hotel rooms. Of course, it also has the unique appeal of being the world's most important French-speaking metropolis outside Paris, and has a distinctly un-Anglo-Saxon character, a refreshing change from Ottawa (where I live) or Toronto (which I have never really taken a fancy to, despite its many attractions).

Also, like New York, and like all great cities indeed, Montreal is a city of neighbourhoods, cheek by jowl, but yet each distinct, offering its own particular brand of urban interest. Downtown is the area that most tourists know, and stick to. The old port area by the river has also become rather touristy as of late. But for me the real interest lies in the area where "+" marks the spot, the intersection of Sherbrooke, the main east-west drag, and St. Laurent, the main north-south one, that, in fact, divided the city into the traditionally English-speaking and French-speaking zones, west and east of St. Laurent, respectively. While this is more myth than reality nowadays, with Anglophones and Francophones living on both sides of the putative divide, it's not entirely wrong. Look at the election map: the constituency just west of St. Laurent votes Liberal, and just east Bloc Quebecois (in fact, it's the seat of the party's leader). From this intersection, you can walk up St. Laurent, or the "Main" in Montreal slang, the old Jewish main street of the city (made most famous by Mordechai Richler). Most of the old establishments are gone, replaced by hip and trendy restaurants and nightspots. My favourite, Buonanotte, entices you in with a gaggle of waitresses who look and dress like runway models (I'm not complaining, by the way), but backs it up with superb food and a deep wine list. More like Europe than Anglo-America, it's both a fine dining establishment in the early evening and then happening nightspot into the wee hours. (If you're there after midnight, by the way, and have a large enough group, go for the bottle service in the VIP lounge area. $200 for a fifth bottle of Grey Goose, split five or six ways, works out much cheaper than individual drinks.) If you go further up the street, into the former Little Italy, you can try Casa Napoletana, or Bottega, for authentic wood-burning-oven pizza.

Go further east, to St. Denis, and walk across Mont-Royal, and you're in the heart of the Plateau, the traditional centre for French-speaking intellecual life in the city. It's where most of the Francophone writers, filmmakers, artists, and so forth live. It has a laid back, bohemian character, a little bit like the Village in New York, that's in marked contrast to the glitz and glamour of the Main. Connecting these two neighbourhoods are interesting cross-streets, such as Prince Arthur, a pedestrian-only thoroughfare with some interesting cafes. The most interesting new arrival is Marche 27, on Prince Arthur, just west of St. Laurent. Step in here, and you feel like you're dining in the Village, or maybe Nolita. Head south down St. Denis, as the street slopes steeply down towards the river, and you get into the Latin Quarter, another packed with restaurants and bars, many catering to the university students at UQAM nearby. And all of this is just scratching the surface of potentially interesting neighbourhoods to visit, walk around in, and dine and shop in.

All of this ... just two hours' drive from Ottawa, the civil servants' town that fun forgot? It feels more like jumping into a transporter a la "Star Trek" and winding up on an alien planet!

Back from the Big Apple

If you've been following my tweets you will gather that I was in New York City for a while, and am just back. You'll find some pictures on Twitpic - links from my profile on Twitter - and in due course, after some further ruminations, a post here will follow. In the interim, some random (and, hopefully, sufficiently impertinent) observations:

(1) New York City is more like Bombay or Bangkok than it is like Boston or Toronto, i.e., more a Third World City than a First World City. Piece of evidence (1): the ubiquitous Korean grocer. Piece of evidence (2): restaurant washrooms. If you know NYC, 'nuff said.

(2) The New York yellow cab is one of America's great contributions to world civilization. Second only to ice machines on every floor in hotels. Actually, now that you can swipe your credit card and go (without signing), I'd say in first place by a hair.

(3) Dining on the Upper West Side is marginally worse than dining in Ottawa, and marginally better than the average Glebe restaurant. Dining in Nolita is better than dining anywhere in North America, except Montreal, which has even honours.

(4) The lobby lounge of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Columbus Circle is a reminder of how breathtaking beautiful New York is, when seen from the correct altitude. Also, a reminder that you should bring your American Express Platinum card.

That's about it for now, folks. Agree? Disagree? Don't care? Post a comment either way. (Now, that's a subtle reference to NPR's "Car Talk". If you get that one, you're very, very good.)