School school school

• Hey guys! Hopefully you all have seen that I added an updated blog about my trip to Chile a little bit ago, because that one is probably more interesting than this one- although I guess it is called "study" abroad :) Here in Argentina I took 4 classes from four different universities, and I just finished with all of them last week, woo hoo! And yes, I passed them all!
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• The grading system here in Argentina is much different than the United States. There are no As, Bs, Cs or Ds, but rather a grading scale from 1-10. A 4 counts as "passing" a class, anything lower is a fail and 9s and 10s are almost impossible to get. Average grades here are anywhere from 6-8, and most students are very happy with those grades.
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• My first class that I finished was my Art History class from the University of Salvador, a private catholic university. For my final grade, we had to write a 15 page paper and take an in-class final. First, we had an in-class exam that we had to take with all the other Argentine students, which meant no special treatment for being foreigners. The exam was 3 essay questions about the different cultures we studied in class. My friends and I studied really hard, and it paid off because I got an 8.5 on my exam (higher than a lot of the the Argentines in my class!). The class is supposed to be a year long class, but since we were leaving after one semester, all the foreign students were asked to write a paper to make up for the material we would be missing in the second semester. For the paper, we had to go to a museum in the city of La Plata and pick four different artifacts from northwestern Argentina, preferably made of four different materials, from different time periods and from different groups of people. Although this sounded like a pretty easy assignment, the paper was all in spanish and there was not a whole lot of information on the pieces, neither at the museum or anywhere online. Regardless, I turned in a pretty well-written paper about four interesting artifacts (you can ask me about them later if you are really interested), 15 whole pages long in spanish, woo! I got an 8 on the paper, which again was very good, so I should end up with an A- in that class.
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• The second class I finished was my hardest class- The emergence of Popular Culture in Argentina, which I took at the public university, UBA. I do not need many more classes to finish my spanish major, so I basically only took this class to ensure that I was a "full time student". Since it wasn't going to count for anything back at Wisconsin, I was a little aprehensive about just trying to pass the class and not taking away too much time from studying for my other classes. The only grade we were going to recieve in this class was a take home test, which was 2 essay questions, 4 pages each. We got the questions and had a week to turn in our responses. The class is very complex and hard to understand (even for native students), and the essay questions were equally as difficult. Luckily, my friend Hannah was in this class with me, so we worked on the questions together and put together pretty well written essays. I turned it in hoping I would just pass (receive a 4 or higher), and was shocked to learn that I got an 8! (Again, that is like an A-). I am now in the process of trying to make that class count for something back at Madison since I got a good grade, but I am honestly just so happy to be done with it because it was a very challenging course all year!
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• My class at the catholic University (UCA) was my favorite class, it was Argentine literature with an amazing professor named Clara. The class was structured more like a class in the United States since it was for foreigners, so instead of just one exam or essay we had many different requirements throughout the year. We had a midterm halfway through the semester, we had to lead discussion one day, and towards the end of the year we had to write "micro-relatos", short stories that were only about 2-3 sentances long. The final grade, though, was a 12 page paper researching a topic from the works that we had read throughout the year. I really loved reading short stories by Julio Cortazar, so my final paper had a lot to do with his works and techniques that he used in his writing. I have yet to recieve my grade on this, but I have been doing well on everything else in the class so I am not worried about it! As a plus, our teacher was really amazing and taught us a lot! I actually just went out to coffee with her and some girls from my class where she announced to us that she has just gotten engaged, yay! (sorry for the side story but shes just a really great teacher!)
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• Lastly, everyone had to take a class through our study abroad program. I took a class about documental films from Argentina, which was actually pretty interesting. The class is mainly designed to keep up our spanish skills, so the final grade was really simple. For my class, we had to write a 4 page paper comparing the different documentaries we watched (very very simple!). Also, we had to give a 15 minute oral presentation about our paper, and then be "interviewed"- which consisted of asking us how we liked our classes and what our favorite documentary was. This class was by far the easiest, but then again it was soley designed to keep up our speaking abilities so I guess it wasn't supposed to be hard.
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• Although I don't have my final grades for all my classes, I am DONE DONE DONE with school work, woo! This year was extremely challenging just for the fact that it was all in a foreign language. Even if the subjects of our classes weren't hard, we had to work doubly as hard as everyone else to make sense of it all and sometimes try to translate it back to english. No matter how comfortable I feel with my spanish, there are always jargon words that I will not know, especially within different subject matters (aka Art history). Also, since Buenos Aires is so large and travelling takes so much time, most classes were only 1 day a week. This meant that each class was 2-3 hours long. It is difficult to pay attention to a lecture in English for 2-3 hours, let alone trying to stay alert enough to translate what is going on and figure out vocab words that you do not know for a long period of time. Reading took much more time than usual and at times it was very frustrating to be reading a book for an hour and only finish 20-30 pages. I will not say that the classes themselves were any harder than classes in the states, but the fact that it was in a foreign language made it much more challenging for all of us. As a Biology major, these classes were very different than what I was used to (Art History, Literature, Documental Film, and Popular Culture).
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• I apologize that this blog isn't very exciting (and there are no pictures!), but that was my "study" part of my study abroad experience! I know that usually people focus on telling about traveling and cultural experiences while studying abroad, but I really did learn alot in all of my classes and it really pushed my spanish skills to have to take classes with other Argentine students. After finishing all my classes, I had time to do some last minute travelling and do some fun activities around the city that I hadn't gotten time to do yet. I will add another blog soon about my final activities in BA! Besos!