Lincoln Hall Project
Diane Musumeci (AB ’74, Italian; PhD ’89, Italian/SLATE; associate professor, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; and associate dean in the College of LAS) and her advisee, Silvia Kunitz (at left, graduate student, Italian), talk about the pros and cons of teaching younger college students
Diane Musumeci: I’ve always loved teaching undergraduates. The advantage of undergraduates is that they are much freer in expressing their opinions, their insights. The graduate students sometime seem to be very hesitant. They want to be sure they’re saying what the professor wants to hear. They don’t want to be wrong. There’s a lot of face-saving. The undergraduates think that the knowledge they have is worth sharing. And that’s very exciting. One of the most interesting, exciting classes I ever taught was a freshman discovery course.
Silvia Kunitz: What is that?
Diane: So it was first-year students. Small group. There were about 20 of them. They were concurrently enrolled in my Italian 101 section. And then we had this freshman discovery class where we talked about language acquisition. That was fascinating to me. They were very eager to share all of their ideas. They were very creative in coming up with experiments to test their hypotheses about language learning. And part of it was because they didn’t know the rules of behavior—what was appropriate, what wasn’t appropriate.
Silvia: Have you ever been openly challenged in class?
Diane: Yes. And again in Lincoln Hall, in an Italian class. I’m sure it was 103. 103 is third-semester Italian. It was grammar review. And we were doing a particularly tricky concept for the students, which was the present perfect and the past descriptive. And one young man, in particular, wasn’t getting it. And he raised his hand in class and said to me, “Perhaps it would be better if your husband came in and explained this.” So my husband was also a professor of Italian. And I think everyone in class let out a gasp (gasps). I took it as a challenge. The challenge to me was that maybe a man could do this better.
Silvia: Do you think it was a problem of him being a man or him being a native speaker?
Diane: Well, they were other native speakers, so I don’t think it was the native speaker issue. In fact, lots of times the students didn’t know that I wasn’t a native speaker. I think it was the man thing.
Silvia: Oooh.
Diane: And that kind of got me. Of course I told the student he was getting the best possible explanation. And I would keep trying. Other things the undergraduates said once—someone asked me once which level professor I was. And I was a graduate student. I was a TA. And I was surprised. And I said, “Well, I’m not a professor here. I’m a graduate student.” And the student looked at me and said, “Oh. But usually graduate students are so young.” (laughs)
Silvia: How old were you, if I may ask?
Diane: I was probably about 25.
Silvia: Okay, so much younger than I am right now.
Diane: But definitely looked much older than 18 I guess.
(Length: 3:42)