It was only my second day in Origen y Evolución de la Vida, my biology class here at Universidad Diego Portales (UDP), and I was close to panicking. I thought I was following what the professor was saying in Spanish just fine, until he suddenly handed me a piece of paper and told me to do... something. I stared at him, blankly. Then he handed a girl a couple seats down another piece and she promptly began tearing it into quarters to pass to the students around her. The professor was writing a list of questions on the board for us to answer. I breathed a sigh of relief and copied her, but I was puzzled. I wasn't expecting an activity like that in a college lecture course, especially a general class like this one that isn't even intended for biology majors!
It turns out that biology at the university here is far more participation-based than my previous classes, with group discussions and worksheets, a bit like you might expect from a course in middle school or high school. However, the material we're covering seems much more formal and scientific than I expected from an intro-level class, and it's nothing like my high school-level or even my college-level biology in the United States.
