My friend Vira and me

After visiting Bonn for the DW Global Media Forum, I spent two days in Berlin with my friends. It had been almost exactly two years since I last saw them. It was a little bit like being back home.

I went back to the student housing unit I had lived in for a year and, suddenly, I stepped back into the conversations we used to have. I have missed them dearly. My friends stayed at the ECLA, and they are now moving into the fourth year of the BA program, in which they have to work on a project for a full year. Vira told me she is going to do her project on an artist who takes on the relationship between the capitalist market and art. We had good conversations about the creative process and the struggles we both have when facing it.

I was so very happy to see my friend David, as well. He is Mexican, so, as the other Latin American student at ECLA, the two of us became very close. Since I have been back in Argentina, he has been working very hard on his German, taking lessons at the Freie Universität, sometimes making presentations, and also writing essays in German.

My friends David and Dana

Dana also told me about her project and what she expects to do afterwards. She said she was definitely going on for an MA. As we talked, I realized this is the kind of conversation I missed: filled with reflections and the ins and outs of academic life. In the rush of the everyday working world with putting in your time in the office and everything else, this approach to conversation is quite rare indeed.

Right after travelling to Germany, I told my parents how I wanted to go back to university and study something else. I feel like I haven’t done it for some time, and I miss the challenge of it.

As I think back on all of this now, an idea occurs to me: Education – or, better, learning – is an attitude towards life. Accepting the challenge can take you far. The big question is how to make accepting this challenge possible for everyone. That means finding ways for many students to avoid frustration, perhaps by adopting a teaching model that does not rely on model students, but, rather, that is open to everyone alike.

My English exam certificate

The week seems to have gone great! I’ve read the entries by Kathrin and Emmy from the Global Media Forum, which I find quite interesting. In spite of the red tape that prevented me from visiting the conference and meeting my fellow bloggers, several positive things relating to education happened to me, as well, this week. They brought about a storm of emotions, but they also gave some food for thought.

First of all, shortly before the launch of our education blog, a group of my adult students and I took part in an international English exam. And I’m really glad to hear that most of my students passed it successfully and got their certificates from Europe this week!

During the course we’ve also touched upon their expectations and life goals. Despite having different ages and positions in society, everyone agreed that learning a foreign language would give them many more opportunities abroad. For some, that meant in terms of working (one of my students was an international journalist). For others, it was about having the chance to study abroad. Some even hinted at encouraging their children to emigrate – if they end up not doing it themselves (This is a topic I discussed here). I hope the summer will give my students a chance to put their skills into practice and endow them with new ambitions.

Summer: time for some relaxation

Secondly, my university group had to go through defending our senior theses, the research papers that are required to earn our degrees – and we did it successfully! Looking back on the months we spent on preparing our research and analyzing statistics, I wonder to myself whether out efforts were worth it; did we pursue anything apart from getting a top mark? But unfortunately, I cannot answer with an emphatic “yes.” Why?

Well, any department offers its students a range of topics for their senior papers – but in regional universities, there are more chances to get a topic that has nothing to do with real life and the skills you may need in building your future. It’s mostly because some universities give courses for appearances’ sake – to show off (“Look, we’ve opened a new department this year – it’s like in the X university, which is in the top 50 in Russia. Of course, what they do not say is: We don’t have enough staff to deal with the curriculum and the equipment is a bit out-of-date.”). This is where the issue of a degree’s value arises. Still, in my group there were research papers devoted either to the professional sphere (a project on a new type of language school) or to vital social topics (like tolerance).

It kind of makes me think of Pink Floyd and the image of a wall. In a positive sense, I now have a new brick to add to my educational wall, and I intend to continue building it.