DESCRIPTION

Follows the evolution of labor from the early 1900s to now, including topics such as the Industrial Revolution, the age of services and the development of labor unions.

REFLECTION

Class Content– This was a good class for a foreigner because the professor went over the material from the past class at the beginning of every new class.  I would write down the words that I heard in lecture and didn’t understand on the top of my notes and look them up after class.  By the time he was reviewing the material I had already learned the vocabulary. 
            The main assignments for this class were readings, a 20 page paper with a partner and a 10 minute PowerPoint presentation with a partner.  The readings were interesting and familiarized me with some organizational structures typical of Spanish scholarly texts.  I used similar structures to write my own paper about how immigration affects the Spanish job market.  My partner and I then presented to the class the material from our paper.  We tried to use all the presentation skills we had learned in the US: make eye contact with audience, bullet slides without too much text and refer to slides during presentation.  The Spanish students typically did not look up during their presentations, they pasted large paragraphs of text on their slides and they read from their papers during the presentation.  It was a proud moment when the professor came up to my partner and me after class and told us that our presentation was very good, even better than the other presentations that day. 

Tutor- In this class I met my tutor/best friend from Spain, Julia.  I still remember how during the second class I practiced saying in Spanish in my head, “If you have time would you be able to tutor me for this class?”  Julia kindly agreed and we met twice a week for an hour to go over the course material.  This was an added benefit of this course because eventually she invited me to hang out with her and her friends and I was able to learn a lot of Spanish from them.  She was learning English so we practiced languages together and we still help each other to this day.

SEMESTER: Spring 2008

GRADE: n/a