Culture Shock

On the eve of my second control de lectura or reading test for geography, I would like to share with you how shocking the first control was, and how a test like this would have never happened in the States. The articles we had to read were not very difficult to understand and revolved around fecundity in Chile. In the class, Geography of the Population, we study demographics, concepts such as birth rates, fecundity rates, population growth and composition, etc. 

After reading the one-hundred-and-eighty pages of text required for this test, we each took a section of thirty or so pages and made study guides based off the key terms and ideas. “We” are the six gringas in the class of around sixty Chileans. Next, we met together and went over each section, studying for at least three hours. Altogether, the study guide came to twenty-six typed pages.

All in all, I felt pretty well-prepared, but still nervous as I walked into the room at 8:15 that morning, well, probably 8:25, as the professor is chronically late, and the door stays locked until he gets there. The next few minutes were slightly chaotic as we rearranged the rows to put more space between the desks. We even put desks on the small platform at the front of the room—amazing how the class grows on test days.

Once we had settled down, the professor handed out the one-page test. The first eight questions were fill-in-the-blank, easy right? Not so much when you can’t seem to make your answers concise enough to fit in the blank. Nonetheless, the questions weren’t totally unfamiliar, and I slogged through them.

           

“Qué significa: ES, CENTA, MJH, TGF, SUF, CEE, RIP”

“No… no way, he cannot be asking us random abbreviations,” I thought. “One-hundred-and-eighty pages of text, and I’m getting asked about abbreviations?”

These were seven of the eight multiple-choice questions that followed the fill-in-the-blanks. At this point, my normal test nervousness turned into panic as I laughed silently at the absurdity of these questions.

“Now is SUF subsidio unido familiar or subsidio unico familiar?”

Glowering, I waivered somewhere between wanting to ball the test up and bounce it off the professor’s head and wondering what an F would do to my average. Looking up, I made a face at one of my classmates, who looked slightly nauseous, and turned back to the dreaded abbreviations. After a few well-educated guesses as to whether CENTA meant Centro Nacional de Tecnologia Argicola o Centro Nacional de Tecnologia Agropecuaria, I moved on to the final section: true-or-false. This section consisted of random sentences lifted from the text.  

“Yes!” I thought. “I remember reading this sentence. It has got to be true.”

Or not. One word of the sentence had been changed, therefore making it false. Needless to say, I didn’t do well, though I felt somewhat better when the majority of the class failed with me. The highest grade was a 4.7, which is more or less equivalent to a 77.

Now, in my experience, if something like this happens, the professor then realizes that he either didn’t teach the material well or that he didn’t give a sufficient explanation of what the test would cover. Instead the professor told us, with a completely straight face, that you know if there are eight true or false questions then four have to be true and four have to be false. That statement caused quite an uproar. If you tell me to read a text because you’re going to test me on it, I’m going to focus on main ideas and terms. I probably won’t pay much attention to the abbreviations; I mean, why would I waste my time memorizing that? Fortunately, the professor explained the next test, over our notes instead of readings, better; and it went slightly better, though the grades were far from good. I made sure that I had an even number of true and false answers on that one.

Tomorrow, at 8:15, I will be sitting in a desk close to the window on the fourth floor of the Ruben Castro building in Valparaíso, Chile, taking my second reading test for Geography that covers an 11-page text, plus 11 news articles.

I have memorized every single abbreviation, so much for the overall ideas.

June 8, 2009

The Gringa Student, Part 4

The is the final post of the four-part series. If you missed the previous ones, you can find them here:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

 

The United States’ university system, in contrast, is different. Normally, if you want to meet with a professor, you can drop by his or her office during office hours or send an email to request a meeting time. On a number of occasions, I’ve just gone and knocked on the office door, but that’s an advantage of attending a medium-sized school. Most professors want you to do well, if possible, and many will try to meet with struggling students. This doesn’t mean that hard teachers don’t exist in the United States or that some teachers could care less whether or not their students do well. However, in my experience, professors in the United States are more accessible and generally more helpful than the ones in Chile.

Does this mean that people in the United States get A’s when they don’t necessarily deserve them? Would we be better served by remembering that a C means acceptable, a B above average, and an A excellent? Does the Chilean system set you up to only achieve the minimum? I don’t really know the answers to any of these questions. I think a four is more acceptable in Chile because it is understood that the classes are more difficult, but that might have just been the fact that I was studying at one of the most difficult universities in the country.

The classes reserved for foreign students were more like classes that I have had here in the States. I don’t know whether these classes were geared more toward the U.S. style of teaching or if they were simply easier. The class that mixed foreign and native students was more difficult than the gringo only classes, but it wasn’t as difficult as my two direct-exchange classes. All of the professors taught in Spanish so the varying difficulty level wasn’t due to language.

One would think that teaching wouldn’t differ that much from country to country, but now I know firsthand just how different teaching styles can be. Studying abroad was more than worth it, and I’d recommend that everyone should do it. Even if the transition is difficult, you get to learn about the way things are done in a different country, and I got to learn more about Latin American history. I got to learn details that we didn’t cover in the United States and got to learn about Chilean history from a Chilean perspective. However, I am glad to be finishing my last year of college and writing my theses in the United States where at least I know what is expected of me. 

November 2, 2009

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.

The Gringa Student, Part 2

This is the second part of a four-part series about being a foreign exchange student in Chile. If you missed part one, you can find it here. 

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That is how I felt most of the semester, especially in my two, direct-exchange classes. The education system in Chile is a little different from the one in the United States. To me in the United States, many of the classes are more focused on the students. Professors often encourage student discussions and interaction between the students and the professors. While I found some of this in my direct exchange classes, the Chilean classes focused more on straight lecture. The classes in Chile lasted longer, usually an hour and a half instead of fifty minutes or an hour and fifteen. It was a difficult transition to make because I had to listen to long lectures in Spanish with little to break the monotony—it’s much easier to zone out when listening to your second language.

           

The history "castle" where I had two of my classes. 

My other classes were either a mix of foreign students and Chileans or were reserved for foreign exchange students. Those classes were much easier than my direct-exchange classes, though still difficult. Though I managed to make A’s and B’s while abroad, I worked hard for them. Of course, you assume things will be different when you’re studying abroad, you’ve even been warned about it, but until you’re staring blankly at a blank piece of paper this fact doesn’t really hit home. I did manage to pass that history test, but I’m pretty sure that the professor just took pity on me.

           

I had never been so unprepared for a test in my life—though some of the geography tests were probably just as bad. The professor didn’t give out study guides, really. The only thing we had was something our teaching assistant, an older student, had written up to explain some of the texts we had read. It isn’t as if the professors wanted you to do poorly; it’s just that they weren’t as focused on you getting an A or the Chilean equivalent, a six or seven. The Chilean grading scale goes from zero to seven, with seven being equivalent to a hundred in the United States. The students didn’t seem very focused on getting sevens either. Passing, getting a four or better, appeared to be more important. I’m still not sure whether it was the students’ attitude or the professors’ that made this the case.

Did the students not care as much because they knew that a four was all they needed—that a five was slightly better, but still a B by U.S. standards? I was happy with my fives in my two hardest classes, but when I came back home, I had to explain why I, a traditionally straight-A student, had gotten B’s. Perhaps the professors made their classes so difficult that it was almost impossible to get a seven? At least one kid, however—out of seventy—managed to do it in my history class. And as I said, the professors weren’t out to get me, except for my history professor, who teased me mercilessly, but they didn’t make themselves very accessible. Many classes didn’t really have a syllabus and the professors didn’t have office hours. I didn’t even know where my history professor’s office was until the last day of the semester when I had to meet with him to discuss my grade. My geography class was slightly better because there were six foreign students, including myself, and we did manage to meet with our professor a few times, but sometimes he wouldn’t even show up at his office.

Continue to Part Three