First Class

Some of you have asked about my first class at Universidad di Tella, which I had last Friday. Part of the reason I haven't written is that I was already sick that evening (the class meets Friday night, every other week) and I didn't recover until a day or two ago. But it was also rather uneventful. It is a big class of graduate students from two programs -- history of cities and architecture and historic preservation who come every other week on the weekends (because they all work -- virtually no one is a full-time graduate student). Some of the students were surprised that the class would be in English and their speaking ability certainly varies widely. (Eve's Spanish teacher was shocked to hear I would be teaching in English -- that never happens, she said). But we managed to have a decent discussion about a difficult text (Pierre Nora's essay on history and memory) and I have a slide lecture about the key issues in historic preservation in the United States. I think it is good that they have two weeks to read the amount of pages I usually assign for one week. We'll see how it goes....