My second observation was Felicia Ciappetta's reading class. This class was a little less exciting than the first class because the students spent a lot of time reading passages. Ciappetta went over plagiarism, summarizing, and paraphrasing during this class. She had the students read a passage, close their books, then discuss it in their own words to a partner. I thought it was very interesting that she told the students to close their books. In my Spanish reading class, my professor does not tell students to close the books and many people end up reading directly from the passage. By telling students to close their books, the students had no choice but to come up with their own words to summarize the passages. Additionally, this reading class taught me that a teacher must be flexible with their lesson plan. Originally, Ciappetta had a passage on genetically modified food for the class to read. However, the class realized that this reading was not in their CIES text book. Ciappetta realized her version was probably an older one and this passage was recently taken out. She did not spend too much time stressing over this, however. She quickly came up with another idea for the students to do and went on with her lesson. I think this was a very important thing for me to witness because things like that are inevitable and instructors need to be quick thinking to keep the lesson running smoothly.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
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