Escuela in Spain

After being here for about four weeks now, I think I have a pretty good handle on things. I realized though, I never gave an update on my school work.

Palm tree path on central campus

Lets start with the good stuff, my campus is gorgeous. Yes, it's huge and I still don't have it all figured out yet but I'm working on it. A wide walk way stretches the length of central campus and has green grass and palm trees down the middle where students often eat their lunch, take naps (literally), or just stop to talk. There's also a climbing wall that's always busy in the middle of campus. The buildings are, again, huge, and sometimes kind of hard to navigate. Some are very modernized on the inside and other's not so much. All their names are in Valencian but luckily it's close enough to Spanish I usually get the gist of it. I am still getting use to "zero floor." You know how you walk into a house in the US and that's floor one (first floor)? Then the upstairs is floor two and the basement is just, well the basement? Yeah not the case here. The floor you walk into is floor zero. Then after the first flight of stairs it's first floor, second floor, etc. Some buildings have underground parking beneath it and that's floor -1. Strange I know.

All my classes are small which is maybe why my lectures don't really feel like lectures? The teachers here more so want to walk you through things step by step and have you work along side them instead of throwing a bunch of information at you all at once and having you figure it out at home, which is super nice. Classes here are much longer than back home which was easier to adjust to than I thought (probably because I like all my classes besides calculus 2). For example, Spanish is Mon-Thu and two hours each day. Normally, at NAU, if you have a class everyday, it's 50 minutes long. Math is an one hour and forty minutes (yikes, I know), and physics is the normal one hour fifteen minutes and lab is two hours. On the bright side, we have no Friday classes, kinda sort of. There are five Fridays throughout the semester where we have to come in for one of our Spanish classes to make up for the amount of missed class due to holidays. Oh, that's another thing, holidays are big here and we usually end up having three or four days off of school when they happen.

View from the student union

Spanish class is very similar to the ones I took in the US, just a little more hands on here. So less lecture time and more peer practice and group assignments. Class work for my other classes is different here because they usually present an idea, vaguely, then do a bunch of examples after to explain how to apply it. I'm not the biggest fan of this method so I'm hoping I'll adjust to it soon. One thing that had me thinking, "excuse me, what?" happened in my physics class. Our teacher has had to cancel class twice due to her being ill, which is fine and normal. The last time we had class though, she said we had to figure out a time OUTSIDE of class where we could do a make up class to catch up on the content we missed. Personally, I really like physics and I have a light class load anyway so I can fit it in but adding a class period is unheard of in the US. So now we have tacked on an extra hour of class to next week, which is whack.

The teachers here are either really strict or pretty lenient there is no in between. They don't have office hours (I did not expect that) which honestly sucks because I am that student who usually needs an extra few minutes of help so I usually have to google YouTube videos or turn to Chegg for help when I don't understand. They don't respond to emails on the weekend, which makes sense because the life style here is much more laid back. 

 Walk  minutes from campus and you'll end up
with the gorgeous view on the beach.

Homework here is light, which I'm finding is both good and bad. The teachers understand that we are probably traveling over long breaks and rarely give homework then, which I appreciate. On a daily basis though, it's different. My Spanish class gives us a small assignment due the next day, math gives us a homework assignment due every twoish weeks, and physics hasn't given us anything yet. It's nice because I have more free time but it's also frustrating because I don't feel like I am practicing enough to understand what I am doing but I don't know how to change that.

No grades have gone into the grade book and I'm getting mixed reviews from the international students who have been here for a year. Some say teachers curve everything, some say they curve nothing. Some say the grading scale is different and a B here translates to an A in the US. Some say it's not different at all and honestly, I'm nervous to see how they end up.

So far, school has not eaten me alive, thankfully. Speed is starting to pick up and I am settling into living in a foreign country and finding that I love it here more and more everyday. P.S. there is a lack of pictures because I didn't want to seem too much like a tourist.