For the past 5 weeks, I was taking Spanish classes at La Universidad Latina. The atmosphere of classes and school is very different here than in the States. The school is very small, but nice. It is constructed very openly to the outdoors, to help keep it cool because air conditioning is not common in most places in Costa Rica. The openness of the school also means that it is easy for animals to get in. Street dogs are everywhere here and they often come into the school and wander around, and have even ended up in the classroom with us several times, but this is seen as normal here.
I have the same teacher or “Profi” for both my classes, and she is unlike any teacher I have had before. She is very upbeat and passionate about what she does, and is always thinking of new games and ways we can learn. My professor runs on “tico time” which is basically the idea that punctuality doesn’t matter. She shows up for class at least 10 minutes late every morning, and will often keep us long after class is supposed to end, even if you have another class to go to. This has probably been one of the hardest things for me to adapt to here, because being on time is very important to me. My professor also brought us food or some other sort of surprise almost every day. I think one of the funniest days was when we were going to be learning a hard, kind of boring concept in my Phonetics class, and she said she felt bad we had to learn about something boring so she bought us donuts.
My first class was a Spanish Phonetics Course. I have never taking a Phonetics course before, so some of the concepts were hard to grasp. We learned a lot about the construction of language and communication, and how dialect differs between different Latin American countries. One thing I was not expecting was the amount of big group projects I would have for my classes. Every week we would have at least one huge project due, which ranged from having to film a 10 minuet Romantic Comedy in Spanish, to creating new products and infomercials.
My other class was a Latin American Literature Course. I found this course a lot more interesting than Phonetics. We learned all about different literary movements in Latin America. The difference between different literary genres like theatre, poetry, novels, short stories, etc. One thing I really liked about this class is that my professor really expected us to be creative and learn by doing. We would spend the first half of class learning about the history of theatre or poetry, and then we would spend the second half of classes performing theatre shows, or writing our own poetry in Spanish.
Since classes were only 5 weeks long, we had a lot of information to fit into a short time. At times it was hard because we were moving through material so fast, and there weren’t laid out expectations about what was expected from us, or as much structure as I am used to in my classes. I had a lot more work and presentations than I was expecting, but it was overall a positive experience.
Costa Rica Study Abroad: Summer 2015 