But the introductory week has its charms for Dijkstra, with students taking the occasional plunge in the campus pond. It's fun, he says, and socially it's very useful, especially when they meet some of the older students who tell them the tricks. Students settle down after the first quarter, he says. First they have to learn to deal with their freedom, and the atmosphere in the class often dictates their performance. The more fun the students have, the more motivated they are. Classes with more individuals are more likely to run into trouble.
Dijkstra is of the opinion that students are the same everywhere. With a full professorship at Soochow University in China, he is in the unique position to compare. When he walks into a class in China, he says people are always taking pictures. The evidence, he says, is right there in those photographs. In a typical class there will be students laughing and joking, and there is always someone looking at the ceiling. But what he thought most typical of China turns out to be just as typical here in Enschede. There is always someone asleep, really asleep, he stresses, especially on a Friday morning.
In Soochow he faces different challenges to those at the UT. The interactive education in China remains difficult. The language is a barrier, and there are cultural differences that prevent the students from communicating inside the classroom. Textbooks are in Chinese. Only the master's classes are provided with English textbooks. At the UT, says Dijkstra, students at the bachelor level have English textbooks in their first year. Their English, he says, improves right from the beginning, and gives them a great advantage. But when it comes to language, Dijkstra claims that teaching foreign students is never difficult. Chemistry and Physics, he says, are languages in their own right and universal.
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| Dr. Piet Dijkstra |
