State of the Stadt

21 March 2005

This is going to be a pretty short update, not even any pictures. Everyone survived the first week of classes, even Herr Direktor. Classes started Tuesday, 15 March and everyone had at least one lecture that day. It also became warm enough to officially lose the heavy coats and gloves by Wednesday. There was snow at least 25 of our first 30 days here, but the last traces were gone by the weekend.

Seth and Eric had their schedules pretty well arranged a while back. All of their classes are from Tuesday through Thursday, so they have a nice 4 day weekends with weekday rates for travel. Chris did not have a full schedule until Thursday, 2 days after classes started. We found out that some of the courses that we expected in English were not offered, or at least offered in English. Unfortunately, that included the two classes most important to Chris, dynamics and circuits. I am teaching Chris dynamics as a sort of an individual study and lecture mode using an English language textbook from the library. Of all the courses to teach as self-study, dynamics is pretty close to the bottom of my list, but not having it would really mess up his classes when he returns.

My own class went pretty well. I had been warned that students can be pretty loose about if and when to attend. Only six of the eleven students registered for the class actually showed up for the first lecture. Otherwise, it went pretty well. The class has students from just about everywhere except Germany. This is the second semester for the program, so everyone is still adjusting. The biggest challenge is covering a topic pretty heavy in materials science and manufacturing processes to a class which includes some students with very little background in that area without boring the mechanical engineers to death.

The other big topic at the Villa was a visit from Herr Till of the Föderkries and Herr Fleckinger of the phone company. I had been pursing the possibility of a DSL line to the Villa so the students could get internet access using a wireless network. Unfortunately, a deal for free installation expired in the meantime (28 February). It may cost as much as 400€ for installation if we can’t get the deal extended. I sent all the gory details and a justification to Tom in CIS on Thursday, so we’ll see. To “rub it in” as I tried to get the DSL line, our dial-up service to the Villa is pretty much non-functional. Over the last month, it has gotten slower and would usually give a time out or DNS error instead of connecting to email or whatever. I was able to access email for only about one hour in all the last week.

After the fun of the week, all got quiet. All our students took off Friday AM for Venice and won’t be back until Monday (today). In addition, all five girls living in the Villa were also gone for the weekend.