Fluent Essays

11 Me Talk Pretty One Day – By David Sedaris From his book Me Talk Pretty One Day At the age of forty-one, I am returning to school and have to think of myself as what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.” After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich. I’ve moved to Paris with hopes of learning the language. My school is an easy ten-minute walk from my apartment, and on the first day of class I arrived early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya. Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke what sounded to me like excellent French. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence that I found intimidating. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well-dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show. The first day of class was nerve-racking because I knew I’d be expected to perform. That’s the way they do it here – it’s everybody into the language pool, sink or swim. The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and proceeded to rattle off a series of administrative announcements. I’ve spent quite a few summers in Normandy, and I took a monthlong French class before leaving New York. I’m not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this woman was saying. “If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall begin.” She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, “All right, then, who knows the alphabet?” It was startling because (a) I hadn’t been asked that question in a while and (b) I realized, while laughing, that I myself did not know the alphabet. They’re the same letters, but in France they’re pronounced differently. I know the shape of the alphabet but had no idea what it actually sounded like. “Ahh.” The teacher went to the board and sketched the letter a. “Do we have anyone in the room whose first name commences with an ahh?” 12 Two Polish Annas raised their hands, and the teachers instructed them to present themselves by stating their names, nationalities, occupations, and a brief list of things they liked and disliked in this world. The first Anna hailed from an industrial town outside of Warsaw and had front teeth the size of tombstones. She worked as a seamstress, enjoyed quiet times with friends, and hated the mosquito. “Oh, really,” the teacher said. “How very interesting. I thought that everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all the world, you claim to detest him. How is it that we’ve been blessed with someone as unique and original as you? Tell us, please.” The seamstress did not understand what was being said but knew that this was an occasion for shame. Her rabbity mouth huffed for breath, and she stared down at her lap as though the appropriate comeback were stitched somewhere alongside the zipper of her slacks. The second Anna learned from the first and claimed to love sunshine and detest lies. It sounded like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets, the answers always written in the same loopy handwriting: “Turn-ons: Mom’s famous five- alarm chili! Turn offs: insecurity and guys who come on too strong!!!!” The two Polish Annas surely had clear notions of what they loved and hated, but like the rest of us, they were limited in terms of vocabulary, and this made them appear less than sophisticated. The teacher forged on, and we learned that Carlos, the Argentine bandonion player, loved wine, music, and, in his words, “making sex with the womans of the world.” Next came a beautiful young Yugoslav who identified herself as an optimist, saying that she loved everything that life had to offer. The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of the saucebox we would later come to know. She crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the young woman’s desk, and leaned close, saying, “Oh yeah? And do you love your little war?” While the optimist struggled to defend herself, I scrambled to think of an answer to what had obviously become a trick question. How often is one asked what he loves in this world? More to the point, how often is one asked and then publicly ridiculed for his answer? I recalled my mother, flushed with wine, pounding the table top one night, saying, “Love? I love a good steak cooked rare. I love my cat, and I love …” My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear out names. “Tums,” our mother said. “I love Tums.” 13 The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad. While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, the hobby is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited controversy. When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pates, brain pudding. I’d learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French word for bruise, and my electric floor waxer. It was a short list, but still I managed to mispronounce IBM and assign the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. The teacher’s reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France. “Were you always this palicmkrexis?” she asked. “Even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine.” I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking – but not saying – that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object which is incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied? The teacher proceeded to belittle everyone from German Eva, who hated laziness, to Japanese Yukari, who loved paintbrushes and soap. Italian, Thai, Dutch, Korean, and Chinese – we all left class foolishly believing that the worst over. She’d shaken us up a little, but surely that was just an act designed to weed out the deadweight. We didn’t know it then, but the coming months would teach us what it was like to spend time in the presence of a wild animal, something completely unpredictable. Her temperament was not based on a series of good and bad days but, rather, good and bad moments. We soon learned to dodge chalk and protect our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question. She hadn’t yet punched anyone, but it seemed wise to protect ourselves against the inevitable. Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages. “I hate you,” she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. “I really, really hate you.” Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help but take it personally. 14 After being singled out as a lazy kfdtinvfm, I took to spending four hours a night on my homework, putting in even more time whenever we were assigned an essay. I suppose I could have gotten by with less, but I was determined to create some sort of identity for myself: David, the hardworker, David the cut-up. We’d have one of those “complete this sentence” exercises, and I’d fool with the thing for hours, invariably settling on something like, “A quick run around the lake? I’d love to! Just give me a moment while I strap on my wooden leg.” The teacher, through word and action, conveyed the message that if this was my idea of an identity, she wanted nothing to do with it. My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for a coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak. Before beginning school, there’d been no shutting me up, but now I was convinced that everything I said was wrong. When the phone rang, I ignored it. If someone asked me a question, I pretended to be deaf. I knew my fear was getting the best of me when I started wondering why they don’t sell cuts of meat in vending machines. My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overhead in refugee camps. “Sometimes me cry alone at night.” “That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.” Unlike the French class I had taken in New York, here there was no sense of competition. When the teacher poked a shy Korean in the eyelid with a freshly sharpened pencil, we took no comfort in the fact that, unlike Hyeyoon Cho, we all know the irregular past tense of the verb to defeat. In all fairness, the teacher hadn’t meant to stab the girl, but neither did she spend much time apologizing, saying only, “Well, you should have been vkkdyo more kdeynfulh.” Over time it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve. Fall arrived and it rained every day, meaning we would now be scolded for the water dripping from our coats and umbrellas. It was mid-October when the teacher singled me 15 out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying. Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult. “You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain, do you understand me?" The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.” Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. New York: Little, Brown, 2000. 166-173. AS OTHERS SEE US Rebekah Nathan As a partial outsider in college owing to my age, I found myself drawn to other partial outsiders, and vice versa. Those of us who in some way deviated from the norm perceived something in common and ended up, I noted, seeking one another out. Thus, the transfer student on my hall became a friend; I was close, too, to the more withdrawn and rural students at Previews, the lone African American student in my freshman seminar, and the international students in my dorms and classes. My conversations with students from other countries were often illuminating. As anthropologists have come to know, culture can be invisible to its natives— so taken for granted that it seems unworthy of comment. Although I could view student life with an outsider-professor s eye, there was much about the U.S. college scene that, in its familiarity, was invisible to me as well. The more I spoke with international students, the more I noticed familiar refrains that both educated me and reminded me about my own U.S. and academic culture. After having many such informal conversations with both international students and teachers, I decided to add formal interviews of international students to my investigation of U.S. college life. In all, I conducted thirteen formal interviews, as well as several informal conversations, which included perspectives from Somalia, England, Japan, Germany, China, Mexico, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, India, Malaysia, France, and Korea. In this chapter I share the comments made and stories told by international students as they grappled to understand and to fit in at AnyU.1 Their struggles, surprises, and dilemmas pointed to both mundane and profound revelations about U.S. students, professors, and the college education system. Getting to Know “American” Students One of my earliest international contacts was with a young Japanese woman, Toshi, who lived on my floor. During Welcome Week, after we played volleyball together, I introduced myself and began a casual conversation. When I saw her again at a workshop, we eyed each other like long-lost friends, and she introduced me to two Japanese friends accompanying her who lived in other dorms. The four of us talked enjoyably for a while, and it was clear that the three exchange students were pleased to be engaged by an American student in this first week of activities.2 I told them that I’d like to make dinner for them, and departed intending to stop by Toshi’s room and ask her to invite her two   2   friends to a Friday night dinner at our dorm. As I left, though, one of the women (whom I’ll call Chiho) asked me a brave question in slightly halting English: “Excuse me but I don’t understand. How can we have dinner together if you don’t have my phone number and I don’t have yours?” I saw her confusion. After exchanging telephone numbers with all three women for assurance, I asked Chiho whether people had invited her before without following up. “I think so,” she responded “but I’m not sure. I have been here for two months and I am still very confused by the customs. American students are so friendly and so nice. They are so open about wanting to get together, but they never take my phone number and they never contact me again. When I see a woman I met two days ago, she does not seem to know me or remember my name.” I winced at the truth of the friendly American veneer. “Nice to meet you,” “Drop by,” “See you soon,” all sounded like authentic invitations for further contact. And yet the words were without social substance. It was not just Japanese, or even non-Western, students for whom deciphering friendliness was a problem. One German student commented: “There are some surface things about American friendliness. Like ‘How are you?’ A girl asked me that one day when I was feeling sick, and I answered that I wasn’t too good; I but she just went on like I had never said that. Maybe it’s a sign of caring to say that. But in Germany, ‘How are you?’ is the actual start of a conversation rather than just a hi/good-bye.” Meeting and befriending Americans in more than a superficial way presented challenges to many international students. Even in class, students found it difficult. One Asian student told me how, in her linguistics class, the teacher had told the class that the native speakers should try to include international students in their groups for the study project. “But when we formed the groups,” she recounted, “nobody even responded or asked us to be in their groups, so the international students had to make their own group.” In some ways, their dilemma was like my own. Where is community in the American university, and how does one become a part of it? International students learned quickly that being a student, being a dorm mate, being a classmate—none of it automatically qualifies you as a “member of the community,” that is, someone whom others will seek out for activities. “In Korea,” one woman told me, “if we all take class together and our class ends at lunchtime, we would go out together as a group.” No such group outing was available as a way for new students to meet others in their classes. Because   3   in Japan, creating a network of friends and contacts is a major purpose of going to college, Midori found it surprising that U.S. students “leave the classroom right after class is over. They come to class to get a grade, not to meet people or talk to people. They leave right away and don’t talk to other people. I don’t get why students run out of class, packing up and running out immediately.” Many students expressed surprise at the dull reception they received and the lack of interest they perceived from American students about their experiences and backgrounds. “Students don’t ask me anything about my life,” a Somali student lamented. “Even my friends...they don’t ask me questions about how I got here, or my life in other places.” A student from the United Arab Emirates observed: “Here everyone minds their own business. They’re not that hospitable. Like if someone from the U.S. came to the UAE, people would take them out to eat and ask questions. It would be a long time before they paid for their own meal.” A Mexican student concurred: “I’m lonely here. I don’t think an American coming to Mexico would have the same experience as I’ve had here. We’re more social, more curious. We’d be talking to him and asking questions.” “When I talk to them,” one Japanese woman noted with dismay about her American classmates, “they don’t try to understand what I say or keep up the conversation. They don’t keep talking, and I realize that they don’t want to take the trouble to talk with me.” She thought that maybe the problem had to do with her thick accent. When I asked another Japanese student what questions students had asked him about his country, he answered: “Well, mostly nobody asks me anything about Japan. Some Americans don’t care about other worlds. They don’t ask questions, but those that do sometimes know more about Japan than I do.” Almost all international students discovered some individuals who were interested in their lives, but it was much more the exception than the rule, and these tended to be U.S. students who were well traveled or who had been exchange students themselves. “What I miss most,” admitted one student, “is to have someone to talk to, to feel that someone else is interested in you.” A Mexican student agreed: “I’ve met people who are interested in me, but for a lot of other people its...‘whatever! My [car] mechanic is more interested in my life and my background than other students.” It was difficult, even for someone born in the United States, to see that the outward openness of both college and American life was often coupled with a closed attachment to a small set of relationships, many of them (as we saw in   4   chapter 2) developed early in college and focused on people of very similar background. International students were often forced into the same structure, finding that despite their interest in forming friendships with Americans, they seemed to end up in relationships with other “foreigners.” In many ways the active international programs, which ran socials and trips for its students, reinforced a pattern in which international students came in contact mostly with other non-U.S.-born students. It was interesting to me that, echoing the camaraderie I felt with “others,” a number of international students indicated that they found it easier to get to know U.S. minority students than white students. One student told me, “They [minorities] seem to be less gregarious than other Americans, in the sense that they seem not to have as many friends and they are looking [shyly] for people themselves.” In practice, despite the fact that many students had come to the United States expressly for the “international experience,” the majority fraternized with other foreign students. “I think I know how to meet Americans,” Beniko, a Japanese student, told me, “because my boyfriend meets people and has some American friends. Its his interests.” Beniko explained to me that Americans find relationships when they identify hobbies or elective interests in common. She went on: “My boyfriend likes playing the drums, and he plays them in the dorms and people come into his room. They’re like a friend magnet. It’s the same with martial arts. He likes that, and other boys do too, and they watch videos together, like Jackie Chan. If you don’t have a hobby in this country it’s harder to meet people. I need to develop a hobby.” Relationships and Friendships Both Midori and Reiko had been excited, if a little nervous, to be assigned a an American roommate. It was surprising to Reiko that there was no formal | introduction; roommates met, instead, when they both happened to be in the room at the same time. Midori had heard that many Americans were messy and loud, but she knew that wasn’t true across the board and hoped her roommate would not fit the stereotype. As it turned out, Midori’s roommate—neat and fairly quiet— was different from her expectations, but she presented challenges on another level. She spent most days and nights at her boyfriend’s apartment, returning only one or two days a week to their room. And when she did, as Midori explained, her personal and spatial boundaries were sharp:   5   It bothers her if I change anything in the room, even though she only came to the room one or two times a week. She would say, “This is my window—don’t open it”—even if she is not there and I am very hot! “Don’t change the heater setting.” I ask her, “Can I turn on the light now?” “Can I put some food in your refrigerator?” It had almost nothing in it. After a while, she just comes back to the room and ignores me. She let me know that I am her roommate and nothing more. The separateness and individualism of the roommate relationship was something that Reiko encountered as well, albeit without the hostility. Her roommate had also communicated that they would be “roommates and nothing more,” but Reiko came to appreciate the advantages of this arrangement: I like the American system. My roommate is just my roommate. In [my country] I would be worrying and thinking all the time about my roommate. If I want to go to dinner, I feel I have to ask my roommate, “Have you eaten yet? Would you like to go to dinner?” I must ask her about her classes and help her if she has a problem. Here I have a roommate and I work separately. I don’t have to care about her. It’s easier. International students saw “individualism” and “independence” as characteristic not only of roommate interactions but of relations with family and friends as well. When Arturo was asked about how AnyU students differed from those in his own country, he responded: “There’s much more independence here. At home, students live with their parents. Here families aren’t that tied together. My roommates call their dads and moms maybe once a week, and that’s it. It would be different if they were Mexican.” Alicia, another Mexican student, thought similarly that “Americans have a lot of independence. At eighteen in Mexico, I can’t think of living by myself. Maybe it’s the money, but we think united is better, for both family ties and for expenses.” For Peter from Germany, Nadif from Somalia, and Nigel from England, the disconnection from family had repercussions for social life with friends. Americans, they felt, sharply distinguished their family from their friends and schoolmates; more than one international student remarked about the dearth of family photos on student doors, as if family didn’t exist at school. International students generally saw family as more naturally integrated into their social lives. “When you’re not near your family,” Peter told me, “its hard to know where do I invite people. No one here says, ‘Come on and meet my family.’ Here I have to invite people to come to a home with two other people I don’t know. It’s strange.”   6   Nadif continued in a similar vein: I have American friends, but I haven’t been to their houses. I don’t know their parents or their brothers and sisters or families. Back home, if I have a friend, everyone in their family knows me and I know them. If I go over to visit [friends] and they’re not there, I still stay and talk with their family. Here friendship doesn’t involve families. I don’t know where my friends live and who their families are. Nigel found the American system peculiar, much less similar to his own culture than he had expected. “My friends come to my house, and they just walk in. It’s like they’re friends not just with me but with my family. You know, a lot of my friends’ parents buy me Christmas presents.” He went on: If I have a party—like at Christmas I had a big party—my mum and dad, they’d just join in and drink with everyone else and have a good time. My American friends would think that’s daft. I have friends [at AnyU] who have all grown up in the same city near one another. They wouldn’t know how to have a conversation with anyone else’s parents. They get their friends to come over when their parents are out, like, “Hey, my parents are away, come on over.” At home, it doesn’t make a difference whether your parents are there or not. For Alicia from Mexico, this was all evidence of American “independence.” But “independence,” she argued, was one side of the coin. The other side “is that I’m not sure that they have real friendships.” The issue of real friendship was often more problematic in interviews than I had anticipated. I typically asked what I considered to be a straightforward question: “Do you have friends who are American?” “I’m not sure,” answered one Japanese girl. “My American roommate might be a friend.” “What makes you unsure?” I queried further. “Well, I like my roommate,” she explained, “and sometimes even I cook and we eat together at home, but since August [six months earlier] we have gone out together three times. That’s really not much, not what friends would do in my country, so I don’t know.” Another student responded to my question about friends with one of his own. “What do you mean by ‘friend,’” he asked, “my version or the American   7   version?” A French student responded quickly to my query about friends: “Sure I have friends. It’s so easy to meet people here, to make friends.” Then she added: “Well, not really friends. That’s the thing. Friendship is very surface- defined here. It is easy to get to know people, but the friendship is superficial. We wouldn’t even call it a friendship. In France, when you’re someone’s friend, you’re their friend for life.” Their trouble answering my question taught me something: There were recurring questions about what constitutes friendship for Americans. A prime difficulty in sorting out the concept centered on judgments surrounding what one did for a friend. When Maria made her first American “friends,” she expected that they would be more active in helping her settle in her new home. I was living in a new country and I needed help. Like with setting up a bank account and doing the lease. It was new for me. And looking for a mechanic to fix my car. Or going shopping—I didn’t know what to buy [for my room]. And when I tell my friends that I had a hard day trying to figure out all the things they say, “Oh, I’m so sorry for you.” Maria found it unfathomable. “In Mexico, when someone is a friend, then regardless of the situation, even if I would get in trouble, I would help them. American people are always busy. ‘Oh, I like you so much,’ they say. But then if I’m in trouble, it’s, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for you.’ ‘So sorry for you doesn’t help!” Geeta’s roommates seemed just the opposite. When she told them that she was planning on buying a used car, they told her, “Oh, you don’t need a car. We have two cars and one of us will take you where you want to go.” But then after a while, she explained, I see how life is here. It’s like I’m a little eight-year-old girl, and I have to say. “Could someone please take me here?” “Could someone take me there?” So I don’t ask much. One day I said that I need a ride to school, and my roommate says, “Fine, but you have to leave right now,” and now isn’t when I want to go. After a while, I saw that I needed my own car. Nigel told me: “I don’t understand the superficiality in friendships here. Americans are much friendlier than the English, but then it doesn’t really go anywhere. As far as deep friendships are concerned—I know there are people who have deep friendships, but it’s a lot harder to figure out who those people will be.” I asked him, “What’s so different about friendship at home?”   8   I think friends at home are closer. We’re in touch every day, for one thing. For another, when one person is doing something, the others are supporting them. Here one of my American friends graduated, and I went to the graduation to support him. A lot of our other friends were here for graduation, but they didn’t even go to watch him graduate, and they weren’t even doing anything. That upset me. There’s a lot of incidents like that. It’s confusing. “Confusing,” “funny,” “peculiar” were all words used to describe American social behavior. “Why do so many students eat alone in their rooms rather than go out or cook together?” “Why don’t any of the guys on my hall know how to cook anything?” “Why does everyone here use computers [Instant Messaging] to communicate with people who are down the hall or in the same dorm?” “Why do young Americans talk so much about relationships?” The way that Americans socialized was also a prime subject of comment. Two points stood out. First, Americans don’t socialize as much, tending to spend more time alone, as this British student explained: People back home of my age socialize a lot more. On a free night, you’d go out and meet friends and be doing something together. You’d probably go out as a big group. In a week of seven days, I’d probably go out two or three nights. It’s all student-based and promoted. Here, in the evenings, you walk down the hall and people are sitting in their rooms playing video games and watching television. The second thing consistently noticed by international students is how Americans seem to separate socializing and partying from the rest of their lives. “Social life in Japan,” explained one student, “is different. It’s not like, ‘This is party time.’ It’s more integrated with the rest of your day and your life.” A French student noted this same pattern, but with regard to clothing. “We’ll be hanging out; and then we decide to go out. The American girl in the group says, ‘I need to go home and change.’ I think, why? It’s the same people. We’re just going to a different place now. We’re not going to anyplace fancy. What is so different now that you have to go change your clothes?” For one British student as well, the American “party time” mentality was perplexing: I don’t understand this party thing in the U.S. When you go out here, it’s get drunk or nothing. If people go out with people and drink, they have to get drunk. If they don’t get filling-down drunk, they think, “What’s the point of   9   doing it?” I find it difficult to understand. It’s really a European thing. You socialize, have a few drinks together, and go home. For many international students, then, there was more flow between family and friends, school and home, and between academics and social life. Classroom life In the classroom, most foreign students notice what U.S. adults, if they have been away long from academia, would probably notice too: there is an informality to the U.S. college classroom that some, including professors, would interpret as bordering on disrespect. A Japanese student giggled as she told me: “It makes me laugh when I see how students come to class: shorts, flip- flops...torn T-shirts. Some students come to class in pajamas!” A Middle Eastern student exclaimed: “You have so much freedom here. You can step out of class in the middle of the class! We could never do that.” For one Asian student, one of the surprises was how often students interrupt the professor in the middle of a lecture to ask their own questions. This would not be tolerated in his country. An African student shared his thoughts: “There are certain things that surprise me about American students. I look at how they drink and eat during class. They put their feet up on the chairs. They pack up their books at the end of class before the teacher has finished talking.” One European student noted, “We used to eat and drink in class sometimes, but at least we hid it!” Indeed, as any American college student knows, stepping out of class or interrupting a lecture with questions is now quite acceptable. Eating and drinking during class, sleeping openly, packing up books before the teacher has finished talking have come to be standard behavior that most professors will ignore. For the most part, international students liked the American classroom and American professors. U.S. professors were described by different international students as “laid-back,” “helpful,” “open,” “tolerant” (of scant clothing and sleeping in class), “casual,” and “friendly.” Some, like the UAE and Somali students, appreciated that “teachers are not as involved in your lives— they don’t see where you live or try to force you to study.” For others, including the Japanese and Korean students, it was the interest in listening to students’ problems and opinions and in helping students that was refreshing: Teachers think helping students is their job. In Japan they don’t think that way. I e-mailed my prof in Japan because I am doing an independent study and I   10   asked her to send me an article. She got mad at me and thought this was very rude for me to ask her to do this. American professors are more open; they give you their phone numbers and some let you call them at home. You can really talk to them outside of class and they are willing to give you extra help. Although American professors and the American classroom received high marks for openness and helpfulness, they received mixed reviews on course content, including its rigor, organization, and modes of evaluation. Although one Indian student appreciated that “profs tell me which points to concentrate on when I read; they sometimes give chapter summaries so I know what to focus my attention on,” more than one other mentioned the controlled way in which the American college classroom is run. The student is given a small chunk of reading and lecture to absorb, and then there is a test, usually short- answer format. Then there is another chunk of reading and a test. It is a system that one student described as “forced study,” but one in which its generally fairly easy to master the material and do well. Most international students were used to a less pre-digested academic diet. Their course content was delivered by lecture, and it was students responsibility to fully understand the content without the benefit of outlines, projected overhead notes, and other aids, as in the American classroom. Their grades for the semester would be based only on two long comprehensive essay exams and sometimes a lengthy theme paper. The American approach—frequent small short-answer tests sometimes coupled with study guides and lecture outlines— was criticized by different international students: [It works but] in some ways...its like elementary school or grade school. The teacher tells you exactly which chapters to study, and then you review just those chapters. The advisers tell you the courses to take and approve your schedule. Sometimes it’s annoying. Students here have lots of exams, really small quizzes. The quizzes make you study. You learn a little bit for the quiz, then you learn a little bit different for the next quiz. But people forget from week to week. Once the quiz is over, they forget.... Really, I wonder at the end of the semester what people remember when they leave. I find it difficult to take the exams here seriously. You can go into a multiple- choice exam without studying really and still come out all right from things you   11   remember from class, and a process of elimination. You could never go into an exam back home knowing nothing. They’re essay, and you start from a blank page; you wouldn’t know what to write. Knowing almost nothing there, you’d get a 20 percent. Here you could pass the test! Still some students appreciated the American grading system, with smaller, non-comprehensive exams and a syllabus, serving almost as a contract that laid out exactly how tests, papers, and presentations would bear on the final grade. As one Asian student explained: We don’t know what were getting for a grade in [my country]. We don’t have small quizzes, just one final exam or sometimes two, and there’s no class participation. I had a class that I thought I was doing well in but I got a C. Expectations are much clearer in the U.S. They are much clearer about grading. It’s easier to see results of a test or paper and how it related to a grade in a course. “Teaching in America is like a one-man show,” argued Élène, a French student, in the middle of our interview. “Teachers tell jokes; they do PowerPoint. There is audience participation.” “I thought you just said that in France it was a one-man show,” I followed up, “because the teacher basically just stood up with a microphone and lectured.” “Yeah, that’s true” Élène went on, “but it’s not entertainment. It’s a lecture. They’re not trying to interest and entertain the students, and where I went to school we never rated the professors, like entertainers, with evaluations at the end of every course.” Opinions of the U.S. system varied somewhat with a …