From Bell Ringing to Biomath: Scenes From Interterm 2015

Students on campus during this year’s Interterm were offered an exceptional variety of credit and non-credit courses, workshops and special events. Subjects included animal tracking, entrepreneurship, poetry, physical conditioning, foreign languages, science and biomathematics—to name just a few.

During the Interterm session, students can explore new subjects or delve deeper into areas of special interest.

Scott Johnson, director of outdoor programs for the athletics department, has been offering non-credit Interterm classes in animal tracking and rock climbing for several years and says he enjoys seeing what students make of that time.

“Interterm frees them up so they can get into the nitty-gritty of an experience,” Johnson said. “What I also like about Interterm courses is that you get more of a mixture of students in each class.”

Some of the non-credit classes are taught by students who wish to share a special interest or talent, giving them the experience of being head of the class.

Emily Kaplan ’16 spent her Interterm in Mendenhall Tower, co-teaching a workshop on English change ringing with members of the Smith Bell Ringers. “I learned how to do this at a workshop last year,” said Kaplan, a physics major and a member of the college’s Handbell Choir. “I thought it would be cool to get more Smith students involved.”

Here are scenes from some of the credit courses offered during Interterm 2015:

Speaking (Like the) French

“Bonjour. Ça va?” Christiane Metral called out as the 15 students in her French immersion class came in from the cold to begin their daylong session.

Metral’s class is among the few four-credit courses offered over Interterm—and one of the most popular, frequently drawing twice the number of students it has room for, she said.

Sophomores Molly Kover (left) and Claire Horne play a French version of the board game “Apples to Apples” in their interterm class.

The class, which met daily from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., helps students move beyond a basic command of French.

“It’s really a course where you learn to express yourself in the language,” said Metral, a longtime lecturer at Smith. “We watch films, and we do a lot of role-playing, activities and games.”

Carson Patterson ’18 said she was looking for a way to move her French skills up a notch before a hoped-for junior year in Paris.

The immersion model works well, Patterson added. “The other day I just started talking to people randomly in French,” she said.

On this particular day, students first discussed a film they’d seen, “Blame It on Fidel,” about a Parisian girl in the 1970s with radical parents, then played a French version of the word game Apples to Apples.

The room filled with the hum of French conversation, punctuated by occasional bursts of laughter.

“Je ne comprends pas la carte,” said one student, bemoaning her failure to identify a word in the Apples to Apples game.

“Encore une fois?” a classmate asked, challenging her to another round.

Metral, who has been teaching the Interterm course for more than a decade, said in recent years she has incorporated more contemporary issues and online activities.

She has also expanded Moodle capabilities to “flip the classroom” so that students can be engaged online, outside of class, leaving daily sessions for extended language practice.

Claire Horne ’17, a studio art major, said the variety of class activities helps ease the challenge of speaking a foreign language all day.

“I like that we do role-playing and other exercises,” Horne said. “It’s never the same, and it’s very useful.”

Reading ‘Tinderbox’ at Smith

The student bloggers gathered in a classroom in Seelye Hall were engaged in a wide-ranging critique.

One by one they gave their opinions about blog entries written in response to the book Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It, by journalist Craig Timberg and epidemiologist Daniel Halperin.

The web essays students were reviewing were their own, written as class assignments for instructor Kim Yi Dionne, Five College Assistant Professor of Government at Smith—and herself a blogger on politics for The Washington Post.

“I wanted you to write out your ideas, but also to think about an audience,” Dionne told the class. “I’m not saying this style of being funny and personal is always the right approach to every subject. But if you can learn to write for more than one person, that can be a useful skill.”

Rahma Haji ’17 said she had never blogged before signing up for “Reading ‘Tinderbox.’”

“I’m not used to writing in that personal style as opposed to critical summaries,” said Haji, who is majoring in anthropology. “I love writing what I’m passionate about.”

As students shared their reactions to each other’s blog essays, their discussion touched on health disparities, race, politics and media coverage of AIDS and Ebola—among other issues. At Dionne’s suggestion, students also explored ideas for solutions to global public health epidemics.

In the end, the blogger who got the most votes across all three essays was Shreya Sengupta ’18. Dionne presented her with a small prize: a tailored apron from Malawi made of fabric from Tanzania.

“So, where do we go from here?” Dionne asked the group.

“More classes in this subject,” Haji replied.

And more opportunities for blogging, added Juliana Mishkin ’17, noting that “writing from a more personal perspective has made me more confident in arguing for what I really think.”

Introduction to Yiddish

Crossword puzzles, babka and YouTube videos were among the aides students used in presenting their final projects in the Introduction to Yiddish class last month.

The course, taught by Justin Cammy, associate professor of Jewish studies and comparative literature, was a collaboration between Smith’s Jewish studies program and the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst.

Cammy’s 23 students met daily at the Book Center for morning seminars on the cultural history of Yiddish—the vernacular of Eastern European Jewry and its diaspora, including millions of immigrants to America. They spent afternoons with Book Center staff, exploring examples of Yiddish literature and popular culture in the center’s one-of-a-kind collection.

“The idea was to allow students to be in a Yiddish space, which is a rare thing, and to ask big questions about the relationship between language and identity among minority groups,” said Cammy, who has taught the J-term class for the past five years.

Engineering majors Fatima Bassir and Adrienne Saludades, both seniors, said they were drawn to the class because it offered a chance to focus in-depth on a subject in the humanities.

“It’s been surprisingly entertaining,” said Bassir. “I didn’t think I would learn so much.”

In class, Saludades gave her presentation on New York’s Yiddish theater, which in the early 1900s was a rival to Broadway. She created a crossword puzzle around the word shmendrick, Yiddish for fool—and also the name of a character in an 1877 opera by Avram Golfaden, the father of Yiddish theater in Eastern Europe.

Other final projects explored Yiddish/Jewish cooking (hence, the babka), Cynthia Ozick’s 1969 novella Envy, or Yiddish in America, klezmer music in post-war Germany, and the history of Birobidzhan, a failed Stalin-era enclave for Soviet Jews where Yiddish was the official language.

Perhaps the most surprising presentation was by Mary Ann Maestas ’15 about The Oy Way, a book and YouTube video by Harvey Gotliffe that melds Yiddish phrases and tai chi moves.

“You might have found a gem of Yiddish culture here,” Cammy told her with a smile.

Sarah McElhone Moriarty ’72 and Emily Kaplan ’16 practice change ringing in Mendenhall Tower during Interterm.

Smith students (from left) Molly Kover ’17, Sadaf Ahmad ’17 and Madeline Undis ’18 are deep in French conversation during their Interterm class, Speaking (Like the) French. Photo by Dia Roth ’15.