Personal Post #12: Getting Closer to the End (Sort of...)

Tomorrow is the first day of December! 

aka my second favorite month of all time!

This past week was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in Spain is a lot less eventful than Halloween was (obviously). No one really showed up to my classes. My translation class was missing a lot of people, so we just talked about a ton of random stuff that had nothing to do with translation, and then he let us go like 35 minutes early. On our attendance sheet, my professor had written, ¡Feliz "San Givin!" If you say that with a Spanish accent, "San Givin" sounds like "Thanksgiving" if a Spanish person who wasn't that great at English was trying to say it. I cracked up at it; I probably found it more funny than I should have. Anyway, my second class of the day was about the same, except he let us go like an hour early after someone convinced him to let us leave early since it was a really important holiday for us. I can't believe he bought that (well, it is important holiday, but seriously...he just doesn't seem like the person who would agree to that). At my internship, the same as the past two weeks or so, I taught more about Thanksgiving. I am seriously a Thanksgiving history expert now. Finally, I went to a pretty decent Thanksgiving dinner that JYS had, but it could really never replace a real Thanksgiving. They served salad, soup, and for those who eat meat, they had turkey and other normal stuff (I didn't really pay attention), and I had roasted vegetables and tofu (not trying to be hateful, but once again, a place that doesn't know how to make tofu), and for dessert everyone had little apple tarts, and I had some lemon sorbet stuff. Really, overall, it was pretty good. Also, I've only listened to Christmas music since Thanksgiving. I'm so ready for Christmas. 

So yeah...it's the last day in November. I've been here for 2 months and 27 days, which basically feels like no time at all. Things for this semester are starting to wind down, and while I'm sooo glad to get this semester over with and start my winter break, it's still so weird to think about that my first semester in Sevilla is almost over. Look at how things are starting to wind down: this is my last week of "real" classes. Next week (the week of the 8th) on Monday and Tuesday I have exam reviews in my classes, and then Wednesday and Thursday are just exams. The last day of school is on the 11th. Then I have a week more of my internship, and then the week after that I'm going to Belgium for Christmas! Classes won't start up again until the very beginning of February, so that's kinda crazy to think that I'll just have a ton of free time for almost two months. I'm definitely not complaining, though. 

However, I still have (approximately) 5 months and 11 days left until I go back to the States. So while things look like they're winding down, they're not really. I'm glad. I can't imagine having to leave Spain so soon!

Personal Post #10: Second Chances and Good Teachers

Second chances.

Third chances.

Fourth chances?

I have to admit, I'm not a fan of second/third/fourth/etc chances. I usually say, "If you're going to do something, do it right the first time." However, PSA: that's definitely not the best thing to say. It's actually ridiculous to expect that (something I still struggle with accepting). Anyway, this week showed me how important second chances really are, and this is why:

So, on Tuesday, I got my exam grade back for my Cervantes & Quijote class. It was less than good -- aka definitely failed. Luckily, as much as I always say I strongly dislike my professor, I can't say that any more because he totally let me redo part of my exam so I could improve my grade enough to pass the exam. Turns out I bombed the exam because I actually didn't have one of the documents...well, not only did I just not have it, I didn't know it existed. Good ol' misunderstandings. Let me explain. Before the exam, he asked everyone if we had Cervantes' biography, and I was like, "Yep, I definitely have it." Well, I thought he meant Cervantes' autobiography (autorretrato). That's not what he meant.

When I got the exam with questions on it with stuff I literally had never even seen before, I was like, "Welp. There goes my GPA." I have never BS'd an answer so much in my life. It's really hard to BS history, by the way. And by really hard, I mean impossible. I got half a point on that question, and that was probably only because I wrote something about him living in Sevilla at one point. Also, there were only three questions on the exam. The other two questions were, of course, on the most confusing poem I have ever read in my life, so my analysis of it wasn't the greatest, and then the other question was about a theatre piece Cervantes wrote, which I totally didn't understand. It doesn't help that the hardest stuff we had to learn was during the beginning of the semester when #1. I couldn't understand the professor because I wasn't used to the Sevillian accent and #2. I couldn't even understand what we were reading because my vocab skills were quite horrible (still aren't the best) to be reading such old writings from the 1500s in Spanish (so nothing means what you'd think it means anyway!), especially with no previous Spanish literature experience. Ugh...

After class on Tuesday, I stayed after to see if there was anyway to raise my grade, and when he saw me, the first thing he said was, "Kari, ¿qué te pasó? (Kari, what happened to you?). Yeah, my grade was that bad. After class when I was trying to explain to my professor that I didn't even know what an "arcabucero" nor did I remember even learning about that (which I now know that's the word for the type of soldier Cervantes was at one point), he was like "Did you even study?" and I was like "Yeah, but this definitely wasn't in the autorretrato...this wasn't anywhere!" I was so frustrated, and he could tell. After an awkward silence, he rummaged through a pile of papers, pulled out the actual biography pages, handed them to me, and said, "Don't you have this?" and I skimmed it and I said, "No, when did we get this?" Apparently we got it like the first day of class. I don't know why I didn't get it, but I think it might be because he didn't make enough copies those first few days of class and I probably ended up sharing with someone and never got my own copy. Or maybe I was trying out another class? Who knows. I'm just glad that conversation ended with him giving me those pages and telling me to study them for Thursday, and he would let me redo that question. Thank goodness for professors that are willing to give second chances.

Thursday came around, and after class, I went with him to his office, and he basically just had me recite as much as I could remember from the biography, and then he asked me some more specific questions. He told me it was obvious that I had studied the biography, so he gave me the minimum passing grade on the exam. He said if I could memorize as much stuff as I did in those short two days, he thinks I'll probably be able to even get an 8 or 9 on the final exam. It's so nice knowing that your professor believes in you like that. It definitely a confidence booster.

I wish more teachers/professors would make it known to their students that they believe in them. It was so encouraging to hear that from my professor. Earlier this week, someone was telling me that she had a bad experience with one of her professors recently, and I think when it's clear that your professor isn't really confident in your abilities in the classroom, you lose respect for the teacher, and it discourages you from learning the content. If your own teacher, whose job it is to teach you the information, doesn't even think your classroom performance is good enough or that you're not going to succeed, then why bother? I think some teachers forget, or just don't know(?), that teaching isn't just about literally teaching (providing information to the students); teaching is so much more than that. Teaching (and learning) is a process; you can't just throw the information at the students and expect them to learn it all on their own without any complications. It's not that easy. Each and every student is a completely different human being with different life experiences that are going to affect their learning styles, which are going to affect their classroom performance. And I know there are some teachers who think that being "hard" is the best for their students, but I have to disagree. There is definitely a happy medium. You can still be "hard" and want the best for your students by giving difficult work while making an effort to be there for them by letting them know that you believe each and every one of them can succeed by being by their side through the class to make it possible. Knowing that my teachers believe in me helps me believe in myself, and that's one of the most important keys to success.