Classroom Experience

In my short trip to Argentina I had almost two full weeks of class. In that time I discovered that the student-teacher relationship and overall classroom etiquette was quite different than it is in the United States.

First, all of my professors insisted that students call them by their first names, regardless of their academic prefixes. Calling my International Marketing professor Jorge, as opposed to Dr. Almada, never felt right. For professors at Marietta, this isn't unheard of, but feels generally unacceptable in a formal classroom setting. So this wasn't was earth-shattering, but it was odd at first. Calling an instructor by their first name made me feel more like peers, and admittedly, it eased communication in an otherwise foreign setting. That said, it would make sense that class had a more laid-back tone than I am accustomed to.

So, it is no surprise that student behavior in classes was also different. Local students had no issue speaking out in the middle of a lecture. I could tell by the faces of my European peers that even they were caught off guard by these tendencies. The local Argentine students didn't hesitate to stop the lecture to get up and change the thermostat or tell the professor that they were hot or cold. Something like that might seem arbitrary or rude in the U.S. At one point, two students went back and forth asking our professor to adjust the temperature to their liking throughout class. No one seemed to mind.

The last thing that I noticed was timeliness of classes. It's widely discussed how much the perception of time differs amongst cultures. The United States is notoriously time oriented and if you're not fifteen minutes early then you're late. In Argentina, the sense of time was not pressing, If dinner was said to be at 9:00 PM, then you just knew that it wouldn't actually start until 10. Further, it was weird to show up right at 9. In the classroom things weren't that relaxed, but it was certainly more laid back than I was used to. Students would come in nearly 20 minutes late with food in their hand. The professor would welcome them briefly without a sarcastic retort like, "nice of you to join us." These late-comers wouldn't rush to their seat either. They would make sure to find their friends, give them a customary kiss on the cheek and say hello before sitting down.

These are three major aspects of classroom life that I experienced in a short two weeks of class. I thought you all might find them interesting as the show obvious contrast to a classroom in the United States.