Today was my last day of class. It was a fun class... we learned animals, so all the instructors had to act out different animals, and it was hysterical. My teacher from the first two weeks had to be a dog, and he crawled around barking, and then he went over to someone, lifted his leg, and pretended to pee on them!! I seriously about died laughing.

The cultural differences evident through the teaching have actually been pretty interesting. One day, we were learning transitive verbs (verbs that have an object), and they included "kiss" and "hug" to teach us. The way this pedagogical approach works is that people act things out, using only the target language. So they told people to kiss other people, hug other people, push other people, etc. It was all quite funny because people were dramatic and funny about it, but you would NEVER be able to do anything like that in the US. Another day we were learning words to describe things, like soft, tall, short, fat, and thin. Then they'd have people describe someone else, or have them pick out four "fat" people from the class. This was all actually quite funny, too, because people were dramatic and good-spirited, but man, can you imagine that in a US classroom? No way. (We later learned that, culturally, being "fat" or "medium" was a lot better than being "thin"... the opposite of US culture).

I actually got to know a lot of the students and teachers in the Tulane program, and I really liked everyone. So it was sad to say goodbye. I didn't really expect that when I came down here, since I didn't know I would be with a group. It's nice to know other people with related interests, and this is why things like Facebook and MySpace are infinitely useful.

I also made a good connection with one of the teachers who's written books on Mayan spirituality, and I hope we can stay in contact. I know OSU is trying to establish some sort of program for our students to learn Mayan languages, and at least 3 (very good) instructors here would be interested in working on something like that. So when I get back to Columbus hopefully I can see what's possible there, if anything.