Classes, finally!

After being in Chile for three weeks, I finally got to have a class.

The first one ended up being "Geografia General de Chile," or General Geography of Chile. After a huge fiasco of finding the right room and time, since apparently it is perfectly normal to change those things without telling the students, we got there and only two students other than the international students that were there. Apparently, most of them had another required class at the same time, which they didn't realize because of the time change. What a mess.

When the professor went on to explain what the class would be about, there was a large pedagogic element to the class. She made it clear that most of the Chileans in the class were taking this course in order to be able to teach it. This wasn't really something that interested me. The experience of the class got about a 2 out of 5 in my book, and I don't think I will be taking it.

The next class I attended was the "Introduccion al Montanismo," which is probably best translated as Introduction to Mountaineering, and it really captured my interest. Most of the grade is based on three excursions that we will be taking as a class to various types of terrain in the area. We will be learning everything from knot tying to the basics of survival. I am very excited about this class and will definitely be taking it.

On Thursday, I had "Introduccion al Cuento Chileano," or "Introduction to the Chilean [Short] Story." I assume that we will be reading short stories that the professor finds particularly important to the literary world of Chile, but in the first class, he simply went over a lot of history. I wasn't really psyched about this class, but I figure that I will take it anyway since it will probably be useful and will most likely transfer back for Spanish credits in my Modern Languages and Linguistics major.

There are still three classes that I have yet to visit, but I am fairly certain that I want to take them anyway.

Getting ready for classes and attending them has been quite a mess, which I may feel for strongly coming from a very structured system. However, I don't believe that Chileans involved in the University system think it is perfect. Talking with Sigrid, she said that there has been some call for reforms. Although Chilean universities are supposed to be some of the best in Latin America, many professors cannot be professors full time because it doesn't provide them with enough income. This means that they cannot be focused on their classes.

According to Country Studies and the U.S. Library of Congress, the Pinochet government opened up the path for many more higher-education institutions in Chile, which meant that there were many more Universities than before. However, there was also, "an increase in part-time faculty teaching, a decline in full-time faculty salaries, and a much greater dispersion of resources needed by important facilities, such as laboratories and libraries."

Clearly I'm not educated enough on the subject to guess when and if reforms will happen, but I think that it is more likely for reforms to happen at individual institutions that want to improve themselves rather than it being a government reform. For example, the Technical University that the other students at the pension attend seems to be much more strict and focused than the Catholic University. This is a choice that the university made in order to be one of the three best engineering schools in Latin America.