So now that it’s midterm season (and ok, as I’m writing
this, it’s almost a month after midterms, but pretend it’s early May…) I have
to study for my course with Argentines—Touristic Geography of Argentina—you
know, the class I loathe with a passion that begins at 8am every Tuesday? Being
that we’ve had a whole semester full of nothing, we finally got our prof to
tell us what would be on the midterm (which was all of Patagonia) and I started
to study like a crazy person. The one problem was that I still couldn’t find
the map guidebook we needed for the class and being that we could use them on
the test, I definitely wanted to get myself one. I’d browsed at least 10 of the
types of bookstores my prof recommended to me with no luck so I had to do what
I didn’t want to do—send him an email.
I not only asked him about acquiring a copy of the map book,
but also about how to study for a test
over all of Patagonia. Expecting a sarcastic, rude or unhelpful response I was
shocked to see that he actually answered all my questions and told me not to
worry about the test, but to study the geographic features/climates and basic
touristic activities for the most important cities, so that’s exactly what I
did. I then responded asking him why he wasn’t this nice and helpful in class,
to which he said, “sometimes I like play the hard guy” then he asked why I wasn’t
always this engaged with the class—touché!
Suddenly I realized he wasn’t a douche, I just was still
holding on to my perfectionist academic attitudes from the US, because “if I’m
paying for this, I better get my money’s worth!” which to me always meant, you
know, information that was relevant to
the course. But especially at the UB, this just isn’t the case. Sure there’s
the 75% attendance policy, but if you don’t feel like showing up, you just have
someone scan your card and go about your day. You’d think it would be the
opposite at a private university, but the UBA, the major public school that’s
free, is actually the best school in town (if not Argentina overall) with
private schools being the grab-bag schools that are often for rich kids to pay
for their degree, but not necessarily get educated. That’s not to say there’s
not great students at the UB, but it is to say that there are a lot of
professors that view class time as personal time where they can talk about
whatever they want and see your
personal time as time you should be doing the actual learning for the class. I’m
not really sure I’m for this type of education, but it’s what exists for me
during this experience here, so hey, I guess I should just shut up and enjoy a
class where we literally talk about whatever for 3 hours and barely ever get
homework. Really, I just need to see it that way. There’s no reason to keep
hoping for something that doesn’t exist. Something that is still sometimes hard
for me in Argentina…but maybe I’ll get it.
I studied quite a bit and was running through all the major
Patagonian cities every day on the bus like my old nerdy self and was starting
to remember that stressed out test feeling that I thought I’d forgotten. But
finally the exam date came and I was ready to get it over with, as I had low
hopes for myself. I’d be happy with a 6. Just to be safe, I brought some mate
to the exam to share with the prof, who is notorious for just snatching my mate
in class and enjoying it. Couldn’t hurt, right??
I later found out I got a 9 on my exam, which is pretty much
as good as it gets because hardly anyone gives out a 10 because nothing is ever
perfect. And for those of you thinking, “but isn’t that only a 90%?!?!”, here’s
the grading scale they use here (and many other countries) which actually makes
it a lot simpler. You still only have 60% of the scale being passing, just like
the 0-100 system, but the A-B range feels a lot bigger.
10=A+
9=A
8=A-
7=B+
6=B
5=B-
4=C
0-3=F
9=A
8=A-
7=B+
6=B
5=B-
4=C
0-3=F
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