R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Before I left for Australia, I tried to prepare myself the best I could by learning about the culture and the different kinds of things I might encounter during my trip.  I looked into family life, the kinds of food they eat, what the weather would be like among other things.  I knew all of these things would be different from what I was used to, but one thing I did not expect to be different was school.  I knew that I would be going to a small, private Christian school and I assumed it wouldn’t be entirely different than Northwestern.  I was so far off.

I was amazed at how different the class structure and dynamics were.  I made sure to be at class on time or a couple minutes before and I was always surprised when there was hardly anyone in the classroom and the professor wasn't even there yet.  Students would slowly start straggling in, throwing a ball around or playing games until the professor arrived about 15 minutes after class started.  He would take his time setting up and eventually the students would put the ball away and went to their seats for class to begin.  However, once class started, it did not get any more formal or organized. 

It’s not that Australians are not respectful, but they come from a very different background than we do here in America and they have a different perspective on authority.  Since Australia was colonized by convicts, they started out as a very anti-authoritative group of people.  That tradition has continued and is especially evident in Australian classrooms. 

In a couple classes particularly, I was amazed by how the students acted in relation to the professor. They would talk through the class and often interrupt the professor.  There were many times that he had to ask them to be quiet and they rarely listened. It got the point where he was so frustrated that he asked a couple students to leave, and they actually refused at first. I tried to imagine something like this happening in an American college classroom and just couldn’t.

It was also different how time was managed in class. Australians in general are much more laid back than Americans and they are far-less concerned with time. My classes in Australia only happened once a week so they were each three and a half hours long. They hardly ever started on time, and since it was such a long class period the professor typically gave us a break half way through the class. He would tell us we had 15 minutes, and many students would take the time to walk around to stretch their legs. Some guys would take the opportunity to play a pick-up game of cricket in the classroom. The professor and students would typically take much more than 15 minutes to come back from break and when they did, they would often join in the game of cricket and spend another half hour just messing around. This video is an example of one of the ways we used our time in class. The man in the red shirt that everyone is jumping over is our professor.

Can you imagine something happening like this in an American classroom?

This amused me to a certain point but it also annoyed me because I figured if we did not waste that time, class could get out early and I could be getting other important things done. That is because I grew up in a culture where time is a commodity valued over almost anything else.  However, looking back on it, even though there was time wasted in class, it was also a very insightful and fun glimpse into Australia’s culture.  And in retrospect, I actually learned more in those classes with that professor than most other college classes I have taken.

Nevertheless, I do appreciate being back in classes where I can count on them starting on time and being productive for the whole hour. The reason I even thought of all this in the first place was because a student in one of my classes asked a professor to repeat himself because all that the he could understand was “blah, blah, blah.” My friend looked at me with wide-eyes and whispered that she could not believe the student had said that, and if she ever said anything like that to an adult her parents would have slapped her. All I thought about the student’s comment was that it reminded me of home back in Australia.