The Devlin Diary by Christi Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

curriculum and style of teaching. If she had landed a job at an American university, she would have understood the environment and the people at once; God knows she’d been in school long enough.
    “It isn’t just being a woman and a minority that worries me,” Claire explained. “It’s being an American. It’s being me. I have a habit of saying exactly what I think at the moment that I think it.”
    “Oh, that.” Three thousand miles across the Atlantic, Claire imagined her best friend’s head bobbing in agreement. “Yes, you might want to keep that in check,” Meredith offered.
    “You think?”
    “Don’t be cheeky.”
     
    Claire quickly learned that supervisions—one-on-one, hour-long teaching sessions held in a fellow’s set of rooms—were the primary mode of instructing students at Cambridge colleges and were considered the cornerstone of Cambridge’s academic environment. In theory, undergraduates were taught by all members of the faculty, even the most senior. In practice, the junior members of a department bore the brunt of the supervisions, some of them carrying a load of twenty students a week or more. Perhaps because she was so new to Cambridge, Claire was assigned a mere twelve, for which she was grateful. They arrived at her set Monday through Thursday afternoons, three students per day, beginning at one o’clock. Claire was required to assign an essay each week, and each week the students were required to turn it in twenty-four hours before their meeting. Claire read and marked them in advance of the supervision, at which time she would go over each student’s paper, offering insights and tips on how to improve it. In addition to the supervisions, once a week she helped a small group of first-and third-year students prepare for their Historical Practice and Argument paper, during which they would discuss questions such as, What is the difference between history and myth? The students weren’t expected to attend any other classes per se, although there were numerous lectures and seminars on constant offer. The first-year undergrads would not have to take a test until the end of their second year.
    It was a system that expected a lot from young students: superior writing skills, the ability to work independently, and, Claire soon realized, a certain maturity that was not always present in eighteen-year-olds. She quickly ascertained that her students could be neatly separatedinto two camps: those who were inordinately well prepared and those who apparently planned to make no effort at all, except perhaps for the effort involved in making up excuses for missing supervisions or not completing their work on time.
    In addition to the supervisions, Claire was required to lecture once a week in one of the small, nondescript lecture rooms in the history faculty building. Most important of all, she was expected to research and write papers in her field of study, papers that would be published in the appropriate journals, then published in the appropriate anthologies. In time, she would have to write a book of her own. The publish-or-perish sword hung above every academic’s head, but in truth she looked forward to the day when she’d be working on a long, complex project. For the time being, however, Claire concentrated on doing her job and learning her way around the college, the town of Cambridge, and her new life.
    Within a few days she discovered that her new position was accompanied by numerous, often intriguing, perquisites. Two she’d known about before leaving the United States: like the fellows, she was lodged and fed at the college’s expense. But dining in hall at High Table with the fellows, more than a few of whom, like Professors Hammer and Residue, had already achieved an august and tweedy dotage, was an experience slightly more daunting than she’d anticipated. It didn’t help that portraits of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Dryden, and Lord Tennyson gazed upon her