Annalisa en Panamá

One of the things I wanted to learn during my visit to Panama is what it's like to teach in the universities here.  I'm not sure what exactly I wanted to know --- how prepared are the students? what are typical class sizes? how many courses does a person teach? Just, I know that I have certain unexamined assumptions about the way stuff works, and I figured being in an entirely different country might help me re-examine aspects of academia I'd taken for granted. So, when I got to lead a week-long professional development workshop for instructors in David, Chiriquí, --- and when, doing this workshop meant that I ran headlong into busywork and pedagogical buzzwords and bureaucracy --- instead of feeling frustrated, I feel like I'd struck gold.  Here, here was the kind of cultural difference I'd been hoping to uncover, and I waded right into the middle of it up to my knees. Yay! In retrospect, I'm somewhat impressed at how incredibly proficient the administrative le...

USACH In both Panama and also Chile, abbreviations include more than just the first letter of each word, making the abbreviation more pronounceable.  In Panama, I'd spent a week at the Universidad de Chiriquí, called UNACHI; here in Chile, I kicked off my talks at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile, called USACH. In the fortunately/unfortunately genre . . . unfortunately , the department secretary there forgot to send out an announcement about my visit: fortunately , the chair figured out (the day before I arrived, at 10 p.m.) that it needed to get sent out; unfortunately , only 6 people showed up for the talk; fortunately , that gave me a chance to fix the mistakes in Spanish in my slides before I showed it to lots more people.   One delightful thing I discovered at USACH was that their wifi is "eduroam", the same system my home college uses, and so I had zero difficulty logging in.  That was a delightful surprise, as I haven't discovered eduroam anywhere in Panama....

In some place on the beaches near me in Viña del Mar, Chile, you can see these tiny creatures about the size of a thumbnail scurrying through water and then tunneling down under the sand.  In English, they are sand fleas . In Spanish, they're pulgas del mar . Not to be confused with pulgares (thumbs) or pulgados (inches), although given the size and shape, you can see why those words are similar.   They don't chase people; they scurry down river or down into the sand. Rivers flowing through the beaches here have beautiful, tiger-like patterns formed by two colors of sand.  Why two colors of sand?  If I were going to stay here longer, I'd have to do some real geology learning because I'm fascinated by what little I can see of the geological history revealed on these beaches.   Stripes of brown stone alternating with stripes of black stone. There are stone croppings and seams of stone on the beaches here that are so black I thought they'd been painted....