The Gringa Student, Part 3

This is part 3 of a four-part series of posts.
Part One
Part Two

I had one class that was originally reserved for foreign students, but the professor allowed a few Chileans to take the class as well. It was an art history class where we studied Pre-Hispanic art and culture in Chile and Peru. Though this class wasn’t as difficult as history or geography, it was definitely challenging. I had never had to take an oral test outside of a language class before going to Chile. The final in our art history class went as follows: one student would enter the boardroom and pick one of the ten slips of paper lying face-down on the table. That student would then have ten minutes to study the question and jot down some notes before moving to the other end of the table where the professor sat. He or she then had to tell the professor everything he or she could possibly remember about the topic. While one student reported to the teacher in broken and nervous Spanish, another student desperately scribbled out some notes at the other end of the table.

When my time was up, I moved to the other end of the table and sat down in front of my professor, a diminutive, no-nonsense woman, and grinned nervously at her. I handed her my slip of paper and struggled for the next five minutes to tell her everything I could remember about stone art in the Tiwanaku culture. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

In my gringo classes, however, the professors were, for the lack of a better word, nicer—though this didn’t mean that they graded easy. My other history professor made sure his students knew exactly what they had to do, and he assigned maybe fifty pages of reading the whole semester (in comparison to over 2000 pages in my direct-exchange history class). My Spanish teacher, a younger woman who taught us Advanced Writing, corresponded with us by email throughout the semester, letting us ask questions and send her assignments.

Those two professors stand in stark contrast to my other history professor, who announced in the middle of class one day, “They don’t understand anything, do they?” in reference to me and another foreign student, causing the all of the native students to laugh loudly. I had misunderstood some question the professor had asked me minutes before. It wasn’t because I didn’t understand the Spanish, but that I actually didn’t hear what he had said. However, when I answered him, he smirked and turned back to the board. I leaned over to my friend and asked her, with a confused look, had she heard the same thing I had? She said she had, but the professor turned around in time to see my confused face, which led to his proclamation. My friend dropped out of the class that day. This was the worst example of the way that professor teased me; and though my Spanish is excellent, it isn’t quite good enough for me to come up with witty retorts under pressure, and in my opinion, I shouldn’t have ever needed to do so.

Continue to Part Four.