Taylor-CP #6

So after countless times trying to get in touch with my CP, I finally gave up. Last I heard from him, he was in Miami returning Sunday. I hope everything is ok with him, Miami can get a little rough if you don't know where not to go. Anyway, this week I filmed my class and was lucky enough to have 5 students. After filming, I ordered some pizza and chatted with Cherry from China and Paulina from Colombia. Paulina not only has an international drivers license (which is apparently easy to get in Colombia) but also a car! I thought this was really cool because I think it would be scary to drive in a foreign country. We also talked about how here in the United States people for the most part obey the driving rules/laws but, in Colombia most everyone does their own thing.

Cherry, Paulina, a CIES teacher (I didn't get her name), Edwin and I also had a long discussion of education. Paulina was a Philosophy teacher in Colombia. We talked about how the literature from ages ago was so advanced for children and now high school students can barely understand it. She told us that many times in high school her teachers would assign Cervantes and many students would give up because it was so difficult. I told her it is pretty common in the US too because in some literature classes in high school we had to read Moby Dick and the Sound and the Fury and these books could be pretty tricky with the language. We also discussed structure of schools. Cherry told us that China had a very structured school system, but Paulina said that mainly in elementary school there is structure but when you get to college, like in the US teachers are allowed to make their own classes and teacher whatever they want to teach. I thought this was pretty interesting that our two countries schooling techniques are pretty similar because "grades" and "subjects" are not the same. We did not go into detail about the grade levels and subjects but I do know it is different from the US.