lunes, 14 de noviembre de 2011

Only in Costa Rica...

So several things.
  1. Groupwork here is such a ridiculous thing. Sometimes (rarely) groups are super organized and things get done. However, quite often this strange phenomenon happens where people say things that they don’t actually do. For example, for my Costa Rican dance class we have groups. Each group has a region and needs to find out information about the region and choreograph a dance to go with it. The professor was not in class for four weeks, but she told us to come to work on our dances anyway. I came the first week, only one girl from my group was there, and she told me that we would work out a time to do the dance when the other guy was there. I told her I would give her my contact information, she told me she was bad with that kind of stuff and not to worry about it. I then came every other week, and there was no one there. One day I saw her in the cafeteria and insisted on giving her my e-mail and phone number but never heard from her. Finally, for the first class for which the professor was back my group didn’t show up. We had yet to meet and were supposed to have a dance by then or at least an idea of one. Needless to say, the professor switched my group. I moved into Anna’s group which already had a lot of a dance done and seemed really on top of things. However, people kept dropping out and joining the group which messed up the dynamic of the dance. We planned to meet the following Tuesday at noon at the dance studio (by the way a 40 minute walk from my house) to work on it. Five minutes after I get there, Fabio (yes, his name is Fabio…), says he has a meeting in San Jose at 1:30 and that we should make it the next day at noon instead. Strange but okay. I run into the girl from my original group on my way out who tells me that the group was almost ready to start working on the dance…clueless much? Anna and I show up the next day at noon, and no one is there. The first girl in our group who doesn’t know what’s going on comes at 1 pm. And Fabio gets there at 3 pm, just in time for class to start…Then we learn that the only guy who could memorize choreography in our group had dropped the class. Then Fabio and the only other guy in our group leave class early without any plans for working on our dance. That left Anna, this girl Alice and me to talk to the professor. The professor then told us (two American girls who can’t dance and this tica girl) that it would probably be best to make something up on our own. Especially because we realized that the old dance was exactly the same thing the professor had taught us that we would be performing but only in a different order. The only day we all could meet was later that day, but the earliest a studio was open was 7:45. Thank goodness for Alice that she offered to make up the dance in the meantime, we returned to the studio until 9 pm to learn it…seriously, what was that?
  2. Today I was supposed to have a quiz on different types of mines and mineral deposits, different mining techniques, and mineral purification for which I had spent about 10 hours studying. We get there, and the professor puts us to work in groups, assigning each group a topic with a huge article to read, a powerpoint to make, and a verbal presentation to compose. I found my way of helping my group, actually getting pretty into it and thorough while trying to retain all of the information and new words I had tried to learn for the quiz. I was preparing myself for not reading off of the slides since the professor was making sure people had what they wanted to say memorized. Anyway, among other groups, we ended up not having time to do our presentation, and there also wasn’t time to take the quiz. Mind you, this class is 3.5 hours long…So, he said that he could tell everyone was prepared for the presentation and had studied for the quiz and gave us all 100s…such is my life. Now I’m thinking of giving my 14 pages of underlined and annotated quiz notes away as a gift…

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