My AFIS students’ impressions so far

Harry asked me to write about my students’ first impressions of London.  The students in this American Institute for Foreign Studies (AIFS) Study Abroad program are all American community college students from northern California. Many of the AIFS students have never traveled abroad before, never had a passport or used public transportation.  For them, everything is new—and I love seeing their excitement when a tour guide tells us about a medieval church or we walk into the restored Globe Theatre.  Many of them, like us, seem to be eating up the history and culture.

But they are also college students, the average around age 19.  The drinking age is 18 over here, which means easy access to alcohol for all of them and some are taking full advantage.  Falling asleep in my classes is no longer the result of jet lag!

Also, the students are in different living arrangements.  Roughly half live in student apartments in the Kensington area.  They have Resident Assistants from AIFS but in large part they are on their own, to find or cook meals, and so on.  The other half of the students are in home stays scattered in different boroughs of the city.  These students are interacting more directly with the British and many have similar aged “brothers” or “sisters.”  Two of my students reported teaching their British “brother” how to do tequila shots, for instance. 

In our British Life and Culture course every Wednesday, the instructor, a British sociologist asks the students about their observations.  They have commented on the great diversity of language, dress and ethnicity here; the “old” architecture; none of them seems concerned about the recent riots or safety in a big city.

In my Shakespeare class this week, we discussed Much Ado About Nothing, in particular the scene in which the friar counsels Leonato to pretend that his daughter Hero is dead in order to make Claudio regret forsaking her.  He says: “That what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, why then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us”—or in other words, we don’t value something until we lose it.  I asked the students what they were missing from the US and their responses were mostly food-related: Mexican restaurants, peanut butter. . . also a fast internet connection, transportation by car. . . .No one seemed to be missing their families—yet.

More on Shakespeare later. . . .

Beth