A Week in Paris: When Professors Turn Into Personal Tour Guides
ParisWEEK on The Village Program was our time as students and faculty to spend an entire week living and learning all over the amazing city of light. It went by so fast that sometimes it’s hard to look back and remember anything other than the insane amounts of walking each day. (Actually, it’s not hard to remember all of the laughs and smiles that came along with the sore feet.) ParisWEEK is The Village’s crash course in how to make a huge city become a place you know really, really well. Because it came early in our semester — the fifth week in fact — most of us were still pretty green as world travelers when we embarked on ParisWEEK. Did I sometimes get lost and think I’d end up sleeping in a Metro station had it not been for our professors leading us on walking lectures all over the city? Yes! But one of our mantras on The Village is that nobody gets left behind. So even if it took me most of the week to get the full lay of the land in Paris, by the time we left I knew where I was going most of the time and could find my way home from anywhere I ended up.
Although the amount I learned about operating in and inhabiting a world city was expansive, I learned more about art, history, and French culture then anything else. Having professors take us on walking lectures through the historic streets of Paris felt to me like the definition of priceless. Even though Dr.Mackaman and the other faculty tend to walk at the speed of light and don’t always care if you keep up or not, he and they were constantly pointing out things we’d never have known about on our own. As tired as up to 10 miles of walking a day made me, the fact that our professors knew the city and its secrets so well made it so I worked to stay at the head of our group during our site visits.
Learning in the streets of Paris was one of the most interesting experiences of the entire Village Program for me. Nothing can beat what it feels like to stand at a particular point in the great city of Paris and discuss exactly what happened there in the French Revolution, or during the Nazi occupation. It’s truly a different way to learn. For me, the two most amazing learning experiences I had during ParisWEEK were related to the walking lectures and site visits I did on my art history course. Paris is a hub for art and always has been, so there was no way our class was going to miss doing intensive visits to The Louvre and The Musée d’Orsay. Seeing the pieces of art I had been studying during the previous weeks of class made me ecstatic and made the worlds painted in the art we saw really come alive. Words cannot describe how it felt to have had class in front of The Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Le Petite Danseuse de 14 ans.
ParisWEEK was one of the most memorable weeks of The Village semester. Not only did it get the our group used to what it’s like to live and learn in one of the greatest cities of the world, but it also provided us with endless places to have class and learn deeply about history, art, culture and ways of life that for many people at home — including me before The Village — live only in a world of dreams.
