Journal for emcentee

Hey all!

I’m back again! This must be a new record for me! (Actually, I have a deadline so I have a little more incentive to get my blog posts out. ^__^) This time round I am going to be blogging about the education system in Ireland. As with any experience, there are good aspects and also some not so pleasing ones. Anyway, here goes!

Some new things that I’ve experienced at a university in Ireland, much less a public university, have been exciting and a bit intimidating. For starters, I am one among many. I know NUIG is still a small school by comparison, but 8,000+ students is four times the amount that I’m used to for a college. I know that everybody at Willamette says the same thing, “I don’t want to be a number.” Well, here it can be exactly that. The lecture halls are meant to sit quite a few people. I was overhearing a few people talking about how they had to show up ten to fifteen minutes early so they didn’t have to sit on the stairs. Intense, huh? I was very lucky with the two classes I took. I had an English seminar class that only held about sixteen people and a history lecture that could have been gigantic, but only about thirty people attended. I’m not quite sure if there should have been more or what, but that’s the number that regularly showed up. And of course, my Irish language class was only for international students, so only a small number of students were in my class.

The course load is very different from Willamette. There are only two hours per week per class. Willamette’s classes are three hours for a week, maybe more. Another difference is really the course work. Instead of handing out specific reading assignments to discuss the next day, the lectures hand out reading lists. Quick aside: the lectures are classes that have one speaker, the professor, who uninterruptedly gives a lecture and then leaves. The seminar classes and tutorials are more like Willamette’s classes. One professor or tutor will talk, but he or she will expect students to participate in discussion as well. Back to the reading lists, professors hand these out hoping that the students will read at least one book from each list. I was lucky to take a lecture from the history department’s chair. He was an incredible guy, but I really can’t begin to portray how intimidated I was to take his class. He handed out a new reading list every OTHER class. I hate to admit it, but I was so intimidated, I didn’t even know where to start. It turns out a lot of people were in the exact same boat as me. A reading list contained about fifteen books on a particular subject, such as the rise of the Carolingian family or the Barbarian Invasions. We were not given any more instruction. Go to the library. Pick out a book. Read it. Repeat the process next week. Find a topic you like, as you may be writing about it for the exam. A Dhiabhail! (Literally, ‘a Demon!’ It’s Irish for damn.)

Exams are also another interesting difference. Instead of continuous assessment, like we have at Willamette, your entire grade depends on one single test or essay turned in at the end of the semester. Crazy, huh? Can you imagine that your entire semester is determined by only one two-hour exam or a ten page essay? I would much rather have three tests throughout the semester than one huge final! There’s also another thing added to the stress of exams. Because there is only one exam at the very end of the class, can you guess what happens to class attendance? You named it. There’s no point to show up. Most of the lectures are put up online on Blackboard. So it turns out that many students don’t even show up for class until the last few weeks of school. To tell you the truth, I found that pretty upsetting. I guess I just feel sorry for the lecturers. They come to school to teach and hopefully they like their job. When a majority of the students don’t come to class, it almost seems as a lack of respect for the professor. Call me old-fashioned or what have you, but I feel it’s a student's duty to show up and participate in class. OF COURSE everyone has their days where they may need a mental health day or just a day off, but it’s bad form to miss practically every single class, or at least it is to me. Gawd, I'm sorry I sound like such a priss. I apologize! >__<

Entrance into college is one heck of a stressful ordeal. Remember those nasty tests? Ones like the ACT or SAT? Secondary schools (similar to high schools) have things called ‘Leaving Certs’. These exams are terrifying because if they are not completed with high enough scores, they can ruin a student’s chance of entering college. Not only that, but you can only take them once AND they determine what you will be studying in college. Scary!

One benefit to the Irish education system is that college is free. Well, ideally it is, but in actuality there are student fees to be paid. Still, they are nothing like tuition from back in the States, even with the conversion rates from USD to Euros. This creates an interesting Catch 22. On one hand, free higher education means that more and more people are likely to have access to new opportunities for careers and learning. However, this means that the students do not have the chip on their shoulder of having to be responsible for their learning. What I mean by this is that because college is free, the students don’t have debts looming overhead or frustrated parents watching over them, making sure that the money is going to good use. If school is free, then what does is matter if a student doesn’t go to class? Nothing has the potential to be lost. I guess free education really is a double-edge sword. Still, I would prefer to have it than not!

Cheers!
~Elyse

Posted by Elyse A McEntee at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello again! Instead of apologizing for another drought of updates, I am going to actually answer a few of the questions expected of me from the study abroad office. And no, I’m not brown-nosing when I say this, but the questions asked really do apply and they even entertain the very same thoughts that I’ve been pondering in my time here in Ireland. So let’s get down to business, shall we?

The first entry that I will make is one concerning assumptions. Basically the question was: what did I assume before ever touching Irish soil, (or rather rock, there are a lot more rocks here than dirt after all) and what was I wrong about assuming?

Before I came to Ireland and even still to this day, I have been in love with Irish films (or fil-ims, as the Irish pronounce them). I think my first assumptions came from those movies like “War of the Buttons”, “The Secret of Roan Inish”, or “Waking Ned Devine”. Even the Welsh movie of “The Englishman Who Went up a Hill, But Came Down a Mountain” provided me with stereotypes of Irish culture. It was a culture I loved. I can’t really explain what it was about those movies. Perhaps it was how light-hearted and fun they were or maybe it was the stereotypical characters such as the Irish rascal, the woman that still loves him after all those years, the out of place foreigner, and the batty elder all inhabiting one tiny, rural town. Eventually, some big event would take place and everybody would have to come together. Perhaps what was so attractive to me about the culture was that even if the ‘big event’ wasn’t in an American’s reality a life-changing incident, it was important to the people of the village and they did their comical best to endure through it together.

With this in mind, coming to present-day Ireland couldn’t have been more different. The movies really prepared me for the rural and old Ireland. Needless to say, Ireland has changed into a modern country. A lot can happen in ten years, and Ireland is no exception, especially after joining the EU. I guess what I was expecting was to be situated in a small town, like in the movies I loved, EVEN though I knew that I was going to study in Galway. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Galway! I guess I was just expecting to be situated in a much smaller place, surrounded by farms and open fields, not shopping centres. As a quick aside, I was fortunate enough to stay in a small Irish town in the Gaeltacht (the heart of Irish culture) called Carraroe for a few days. If I had had my way, I would have spent the whole semester there, just learning about their culture and their language. If I move to Ireland, that's where I'm heading.

The pace of life has changed dramatically. Ireland has become a fast and efficient Western-European country. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the people have completely changed their ways, but here’s the biggest difference: Ireland is a young country now. What I mean by that is Ireland’s population is very young age-wise, with the vast majority being under 35. The older people that I was expecting to meet have either passed on or emigrated. (Wherever they have gone, they do not seem to be in Galway.) I suppose why I haven’t run into the characters from the movies that I grew up with is because the main characters from all of those films were all over forty. The movies may have been an accurate representation of Ireland ten years ago, but because all of the characters were old, no wonder I can’t find them in a young city.

I suppose that I am probably making this to be a bigger deal than it really is. The Irish are still very Irish. But you know the funny thing? I see it mostly in Irish men. The women of course are lovely too, but the real characters to watch are the men. They’re the ones that tease you and are there to have a good time. Maybe women are just not expected to behave like that. Who knows?

My biggest shock was with the Irish youth. This youth really just encompasses the majority of the female population under thirty. I have never seen so many girls try to look so American before. It’s awful! Irish television shows are all under the influence of American drama! (Well, not all, but a massive chunk are.) Shows like ‘The Hills’ or ‘90210’ seem to have a big impact. I’ve really seen this in the nightlife. To be fair, not every female is involved with going out to clubs. But practically every single girl that goes to the nightclubs has to wear that terrible fake tan with bleached-blonde hair and wear way too much make-up so that she looks like she just walked off the set from ‘The Hills’! Kayleena once remarked that when in the nightclubs, the only thing that changes from girl to girl is the little black dress that they’re wearing. Astute observation, I thought. I don’t mean to say that every girl is the same, far from it. But from the outside, they all look like American wannabes. Melissa even found her flatmate to have an imitation of an American accent. And she’s 100 per cent Irish! Weird. The four of us have taken to calling the clubbing girls Oompa Loompas. I think it fits them perfectly.

As far as imitating other cultures, the Irish have an interesting history. It’s not their fault, really. After so many years of colonization and horrible things done to them by the British, their pride has really taken a beating. One of my Irish professors made an interesting observation. I can’t remember when she said it was, but the Irish had lost their flag. And she didn’t mean that this was a physical piece of cloth. It was in some major sporting event (I am so sorry I can’t remember which it is!), but the Irish won a tournament against England. And it was then that they reclaimed their flag. Suddenly people were proud to be Irish again. I don’t mean to take you through all of Irish history, but let’s just say that everything about being Irish was repressed. And even up to the present day, through the Troubles, Ireland has had a rough history. Think about the loss of their language. (It turns out that Irish don’t speak Gaelic, they speak Irish. Gaelic is a general term, or base for Ireland and Scotland.) People were actually beaten for speaking Irish in school. Can you believe that? So naturally, they were forced to abandon their culture and turn to England. Through a lot more history that if you are truly interested, I can explain more another time as I was required to write four essays on the matter (>__<), the Irish eventually reclaimed their heritage. They stopped looking to England as a role model and began to look at their past. The only thing is that now, in 2009, the Irish may have turned their gaze away from England, but concerning popular culture, they’ve refocused it on Southern California.

Well, until next time,
~Elyse

Posted by Elyse A McEntee at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)