Annalisa en Panamá

I don't think I've done a tour (via the blog) that is of the neighborhood I've been living in here in Panama. We used AirBnB, and originally found a place much closer to the Ciudad del Saber, but less than ideal in a few other respects.  That's fairly normal; I booked that first place for three months, using the time as a chance to get to know the area better while looking around for something that might suit us a bit better. Just FYI, "a bit better" in this case means (a) closer to grocery stores, (b) having a bit more light, as the first place we stayed was quite dark, and (c) still on the bus line that I'd found so convenient.  This new place has all that and more.  Our previous neighborhood was a gated community, and so it was very walkable, but also quite homogenous.   The current place has a gazillions of twists and turns; I can get a lot of variety, even on very short walks.  The AirBnB we're staying at is amazing for a bunch of reason, but in t...

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...