Maria Goes To Spain: School Review-Entire summary coming soon!

So I am deciding to start off with my blog again from what is now the beginning of my second semester abroad, recapping the end of my first semester. I arrived here August 26th and today is February 5th, 2012. Without even making reference to my first 5-6 months here (which I promise to do in the upcoming week), starting from the week after we returned from our wonderful winter break, January 7th, 2013 my life has felt like a hurricane.

The classes that I took last semester included, Art in the Prado Museum, Spanish Linguistics, Comparative English/Spanish Syntax, Intro to Spanish Literature and a Spanish Theater class, which was half lecture and half acting. My finals for each class included an essay of around 2,000 words and a written final (with the exception of theater, where we performed our final play and were graded based on our midterm, which we took in November). After the most exciting, incredible, fun and thrilling 2 weeks of my traveling life to Paris, France and Athens, Greece, where I did not once commit myself to writing or studying for school I was put to the test hardcore when I returned up until my last final, Tuesday January 29th.

For my Art History class, which taught us the broad spectrum of art from the 12th century, with mural, tribal like paintings through the 16th century with Michael Angelo, El Greco and Manierismo (the type of art). We were expected to memorize the dates, style, technique and the evidence/significance of the transition in between one style and another and recognize the symbolism, being able to analyze what the artist painted, commonalities, regional/teacher influences, etc... For our essay we had to choose a piece from the time period, not yet analyzed and write about it based on what we already knew as well as take a written final that gave us 5 minutes to write the most important info about the 10 paintings that he was projecting to us out of the 50 or so that we studied, with nearly no sleep and a jumbled memory I am just happy that I survived haha.

Proceeding art was Linguistics, very grammatical and particular questions, about the structure of a sentence and basic definitions and I also discovered how interesting I find Social Linguistics to be as it is the way that different people, genders, classes, ages and regions speak. This is the topic that I chose to write about for our essay.

For our Spanish Literature class I was fortunate to be able to write about the play that I performed in for theater, "La Casa de Bernarda Alba," (Bernarda Alba´s house) written by Federico Garcia Lorca, an infamous writer, of various mediums, from Granada, España. The written test required that we recognize the chosen excerpt and identify from which piece of literature we had read, the title, author and time period and then we had specific questions about the 2 pieces (out of maybe 10).

Syntax was killer, with her requiring that we choose an excerpt both available in English and Spanish and compare certain forms of writing between what is customary in Spanish and the same or the contrary in English and put it in the form of a chart along with a written commentary. The written final was also a slight surprise being that she did not solely stick to the material that we had studied but tested us on colloquial Spanish! Kill me! Prior to taking the final I hadn´t slept in nearly 24 hours and with the proceeding hours partying, 48 hours passed before I layed my head down. We were celebrating my friend´s birthdays in addition to the end of finals. With a lovely Spanish school system we were given one whole day inbetween the last day of finals and the beginning of our second semester of finals.

NOW-

I have settled on the History of Vanguardian Art on Monday and Tuesday mornings, with a break on Wednesdays and an occassional required additional practice for my art class and Thursday and Fridays I am enrolled in Composition, where we will be able to write works of fiction as well as incorporate newspaper articles and written works relating to Spanish culture/society, followed by the History of Latin America, Ethnology of America and the importance of the Islamic perspective and culture in Spain (who conquered España from 711-1492). I am very happy with my choices and have 6 students that I tutor in English inbetween my school schedule. 3 hours on Monday afternoon, 2 hours Tuesday afternoon as well as a new conversation partner inbetween. The extra money is helpful and the experience is one that I most definitely could not obtain in other means. I am however looking for a language exchange partner (despite the fact that I express my self in spanish with my students sometimes and of course with Spaniards that I meet as well as the Americans when they want to).