Monday 26 May 2008

Learning grammar...



Male student:
"You sure do make love good."
Female teacher, in bed next to male student: "Well. I make love well."

Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies-June Casagrande

Wednesday 14 May 2008

Thinking about it....

For the end of this second semester we again have to reflect on our intercultural competence. To help us in this hard task we had a questionnaire.

It is always a good thing to stop and reflect on what you did, in order to understand what concrete goals you achieved, and in what way.

This exchange with American students gave us first of all an occasion to reflect on our own culture. I had to reflect on my culture, in order to explain her things in the most objective way, and then to add my opinion. I was always glad to answer her questions and discuss the "topic of the week". I like the idea of comparing our two lifestyles, but sometimes I had to remind me that she's younger than me ( Elena's 18, while I'm 24), and probably we have different approach to life.
I have never had problems or misunderstandings, even when we compared things different for our cultures. For example when we talked about death penalty, although our opinion were so different, we compare our ideas respectfully, I really appreciated it.
I learnt many things about their lifestyle, about education, and of course many about election system that was the topic of our final project.
Another particular thing was that those guys are children or grandchildren of immigrants, and so discussing with them about immigration provided a particular point of view, it was no more a matter of American and Italian culture.
I really appreciated this activity, and I think I was particularly lucky because doing it not inclass but in my spare time there were always just the two of us talking. I hope that Elena too had found it interesting, probably the fact that at a certain point we realized that we spent more than an hour talking together reveals that we enjoyed the conversations.

Tuesday 13 May 2008

To whom it may concern...

... here it is the URL of our webpage on the wiki. I'm posting it just because in the latest comments someone told me that was interested in it.
The lay-out is almost fixed!

http://tulanepadova.pbwiki.com/ItaliaUSA_Election_System

Hope you find it interesting.

Thursday 8 May 2008

The three of us...

chatting together to organize our page on the wiki... a mess! Definitely a mess!

Elena is so kind, she wants to do more than what is her duty, because she's worried that Anna and I are doing too much! Anna is trying to understand our project and wants to make some changes, but it is no time for changing, our deadline is next Monday! She's doing an awesome work with graphic! She added marvellous pictures!

But chatting instead of talking was... such a confusion, because we were writing at the same time three different things, and when you're writing you don't wait until the other finish what she's saying...

"excuse me, can't we have a call?"

Oohh, ok girls, that works! We managed to decide who's going to do what...


Just to answer to some of your comments, after Monday I'll put a link to the page, so you can go and read a bit of stuff! Remember, part of it is in Italian!!

Thursday 1 May 2008

so much time...

... I haven't been writing for so much time!

But I was busy trying to understand what to do with my final project, and preparing the presentation for Prof. Taylor (also English), and trying to find something interesting for the final project with prof. Busà too. Yes, our English course consist of many different parts (this year only three, but in my last year before the degree there were 5 different exams to take and last year they were 4 written, and 2 oral parts to have the final mark for Lingua inglese I!), and I have to dedicate them time enough now, in order to do other exams in June, like German literature and so on...

This idea of comparing Italian and American culture through the analysis of a particular topic is really a good thing! The other great thing is that we're working with American students! Tomorrow I will be skyping with Elena to point out our job, what she is going to do, what I'm going to do and so on, and I'll make sure she has properly understood how the elections in Italy work, while she will be solving my doubts about American election system!

I keep on wondering in the blogosphere, and I always find something surprising! I've put a couple of new URL in my blogroll, and I visited different websites! And I'm still fascinated by the possibility of technology...