Classes Here Vs. @ Home

"Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” ~Chinese Proverb

Classes in Ecuador seem to be extremely different than they are in America. Granted, I only really have Spanish classes here, and besides about ten other students, our Seminar in Ecuador group pretty much encompasses the population of Amauta. Let me start about the punctuality of classes. I was warned ahead of time that, though Ecuadorians usually never arrive on time, to always be on time for classes here. I can almost laugh at that now, because from day one, we have never started a class earlier than five minutes late. In fact, as the weeks have gone on, we tend to start later and later. With just a week left, our new normal time to start has reached as much as fifteen minutes late. In the U.S., this would never ever happen. Sure, some classes get a late start and some teachers are more lenient, but students would actually start to get annoyed if class always started more than five minutes late.

In addition, my teacher is wonderful, but she can be quite easily swayed from her original decisions. For example, this weekend we were to be assigned a good chunk of reading/grammar homework. When one of my classmates mentioned that we have two papers, blogs, and a super-long PowerPoint due in our other classes in the next two weeks, our teacher simply said that we could go over it together in classes next week. Again, I realize there are teachers who are like this in America too, but we are in college, and I never expected someone to so easily change their mind about an assignment, just because the students had "other work" to do.

Lastly, one of the major differences I've noticed here is that our teacher does minimal "teaching" and, instead, uses conversation and discussion as the most important form to learn. This seems way different than classes back home, because except for a select few classes I've taken, most of them have been solely or mostly structured around a lecture. I personally prefer the conversational method of teaching, because not only does it force to think about my own opinions of things, but it also gives me the best chance to use what I have learned in conversational Spanish (in the case of this specific class). Although many of these differences can transcend into classes back in the U.S., it has been very interesting to me to observe how teachers think so differently in their way of teaching, and how neither is wrong as long as the students are still learning what they need to learn.