English AI

My latest adventure involves volunteering with the English Department here at the university. My responsibility is to co-lead an hour-long practical English class once a week with two other American students. We've got about thirty students who have to attend 70 percent of the sessions for the semester, during which everybody practices their English skills, and the semester culminates with final presentations over something or other.

Last Wednesday was the first class. It was a disaster. First of all, I overslept. I was about fifteen minutes late to the class I was supposed to teach. Fortunately, Spain doesn't exactly possess a culture of punctuality, and this didn't seem to bother anyone (I had a class a couple weeks ago where the professor was fifteen minutes late and didn't start class until half an hour late, and no one seemed to care). Much worse than my tardiness was our disorganization. We'd expected the class professor to give us AIs something to do. But she didn't. So we talked about ourselves for a few minutes and read a five minute Encyclopedia Brown-esque mystery. As inept and rambling as it felt, I would have been happy with how the class went if that had been all. However, for some reason my fellow AIs seem to be laboring under the delusion that we're teaching elementary school students rather than students in Spain's most prestigious university. The tone of their conversation was spectacularly unsuited for what we were supposed to do, which is stimulate conversation amongst already proficient English students, not explain what it means to say starving ("It means I'm huuunnngrry. HUNN  GRRY.") Needless to say, it was embarrassing.

Fortunately, this morning went much more smoothly. We three AIs met last weekend to plan for today, so we had an idea of what we were doing. We split the class into groups and each of the AIs took a group, the idea being to increase the amount of students talking at any given time. My group talked about what we did the last weekend, how ridiculously early Americans eat lunch and dinner, US alcohol laws, and Al Gore's Nobel Prize. We spent a lot more time talking about drinking than climate change, which was what we were supposed to be talking about, so we had to extend discussion time. This wasn't an accident, and by doing this I significantly reduced the amount of time available for the others' planned Condescension Time. Maybe it was a little passive aggressive, but it was in the best interests of everyone involved, and it resulted in an extended and stimulating discussion. I feel like lot more people will participate if you treat them like adults.

So that's that. Next week I'm leaving it to the other two, as I'm getting up early to fly to Barcelona for the long weekend (no more buses!). Much like every other year, November 1st is All Saint's Day, and, Spain being a thoroughly Catholic country, we have a four day weekend. That reminds me, last weekend was also a four day weekend, albeit the surprise kind. On Monday and Tuesday I only have one class, and both days the professor didn't show up. The students waiting outside the classroom in the hall with me agree that the lessons were probably cancelled. It was somewhat irritating.

Okay, bye.

My Apartment

Here are a couple photographs of where I live in  Madrid.

This is my apartment building. I live on the first floor, back on on the courtyard. 
This is Calle de Galileo, the street in front of my building.
This is at the university. On clear days you can see the mountains from the school. 

Well, with this post I run out of my Internet allowance. I use a USB modem that connects to Vodafone's wireless 3G network. This way I get Internet access anywhere in Spain, but I only signed up for a one gigabyte plan (the next plan up costs almost 100 dollars a month... no thanks). Since I've reached my data quota, for the rest of the month my modem will only connect at 2x dial-up speed. As my connection was spotty to begin with, I suspect that this slower connection will prevent me from doing large uploads like photo albums. Fortunately I can still connect to the school's (relatively) high-speed network, but its hours are limiting. Now I don't know how I'll watch next week's episode of The Office. The next ten days might be trying. 

Fotos

Weekend in Portugal

Fotos

Sunday in Madrid

Holiday Weekend

Friday was Columbus Day in Spain, so we had a long weekend. If I had stayed in Madrid I could have seen a military parade featuring the king and queen of Spain, complete with tanks and fighter jets, but instead I decided on a whim to buy a bus ticket to Lisbon. Only after I bought the ticket did I remember the inconvenient fact that in Portugal the people speak Portuguese, not Spanish. Fortunately, most of them also speak English (as it turns out, Spain is far, far behind the rest of the European Union in learning English; it’s one of the EU’s 23 official languages, and the commonest second language).

So after class on Thursday I hopped on a bus and traveled for just over eight hours to Portugal. From this I learned never to travel by bus, no matter how much more it costs to go by plane. Our bus drivers got lost and had to ask for directions, what should have been a six or seven hour drive took 8 hours to get there and 10 to get back, it was hot and icky, and I was extremely car sick, probably because the driver’s goal in life was to become a Disneyland teacup-ride operator and he felt he needed to get some practice in whenever he could. He tore up every roundabout we encountered.

Other than the bus, it was a pretty stellar weekend. The city is much smaller than Madrid, with about 600,000 citizens and 2 million in the metropolitan area. But it felt even smaller. There was no grid to speak of—the streets seemed to be laid out randomly in a spider web design, even more than Madrid’s, which are difficult enough to navigate themselves. Many were paved in cobblestones, and almost all the sidewalks were tiled. They were too narrow to allow much traffic.

Most of our time we spent visiting various old churches from the Romanesque period. We also visited a monastery and a ruined castle. Both of these were almost completely open to tourists, with few areas prohibited. We could climb to the top of the towers and along the walls and see the whole thing. It was neat.

We bought tickets for a double deck tour bus and went on a cursory tour of the city. It was a hop on, hop off deal, so we also used this as transportation to go to different places we wanted to look at.

On Saturday we took the train to a seaside town about half an hour from Lisbon and spent the day on the beach. We went to an open-air café on the beach and I got a fantastic swordfish steak. The water was absolutely freezing, and I had left my swimsuit in Madrid, so I read a book and enjoyed an Irish coffee while the others braved the water. The beach was very beautiful, and reminded me a lot of Hawk’s Cay in the Keys.

Saturday evening we returned to Lisbon and went to a club on the river. It was expensive and the music was awful, not nearly as cool as some of the clubs in Madrid, but we managed to enjoy ourselves anyway.

Then we woke up early on Sunday and caught the first bus back to Madrid. The rest of the day was spent in transit, and by the time we got back to the city I was wiped and went straight to bed.

I’m having a lot of trouble uploading pictures, but as soon as that’s resolved I’ve got a few to share with you.

Classes

The building which houses most of my classes.

We American students all got here a month before classes in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid actually began, and in that time we took an intensive course over Spanish history, politics, art, architecture, grammar, and composition. Four hours of class a day for a month, which equates to one course in Bloomington. It was very intense. It appears now that I passed, barely. Now our actual university courses for the rest of the semester are beginning.

I'm enrolled in five courses right now. They are: Spanish Linguistics, Latin American Literature, Religion and Society, Spanish Foreign Policy, and Novels in the United States since 1950. The last course is actually conducted in English, which is refreshing though not at all conducive to the goal of immersion. Most of these classes seem doable. I had to immediately drop Spanish History from 1492 to 1808, because, although the topic is very interesting to me, the professor was utterly incomprehensible. A couple of my fellow Americans felt obliged to drop it as well, for the same reason. I'm looking forward to Religion and Society, which also has a nearly incomprehensible instructor, but after our first lecture he asked the foreigners to meet with him after class. If I understood him correctly, and it's entirely likely that I did not as he speaks incredibly fast, he requested the three of us (an Italian, a Mexican, and me) to write an essay comparing the religiosity of our home cultures to that of Spain, in lieu of a final assignment. I gathered that it was as much an merciful exception to the requirements to which the Spanish students are held as it was a personal interest of the professor's. Although he could have been requesting the paper on top of the other requirements for all I know. I still have some work to do on my comprehension skills.

The other classes are more or less unremarkable. Most of the work is piled up into two weeks at the end of the semester, as our grades are entirely based on a test or two and a final paper, but it would probably be wise to keep up on outside readings. At the beginning of a class the professor generally provides a basic syllabus of things the course will study, as well as a recommended bibliography. It's the student's responsibility to track down whatever books might be helpful and supplemental to the lectures. Maybe one or two books are to be actually purchased (four in my American Novels course), but the rest are optional (as there's like twenty of them). A 35% in any given course here is transferred to Bloomington as a passing grade. I interpret this as an omen of the difficulty of the final exams more than a break, so I think I'll be gauging my studying effort accordingly.

K! Adios.

Palace of Justice

One of David's many summer homes here in Spain, I assume.

Happy birthday, then.