empollar

empollar = to cram (for an exam)

I know I haven't updated this blog in a while. I've been busy!

Anyway, I had an in-class essay today in my History of Iberoamerica class, and I naturally didn't start studying until this morning. So I had to cram. My señora began to make fun of me, saying that I am the first student she's ever seen who's studied before June.

It was at that moment that I realized I may be taking my work too seriously. I honestly thought that I was being a rebel, the badass who does not start studying until the morning of a test. But to not study at all? That would be crazy, right?

Apparently not. Well I got to the "comentario," as my professor called it and received the exam with one question on it. Only problem: there was no question on it. It just had the citation of a 40-page reading on our syllabus. I asked my professor (an extreme socialist who believes the rich should be taxed until they make the same amount as the poor) what the question was, and he just pointed at the article title. I guessed we were supposed to write everything we knew about that article, but, as I'm sure you readers have guessed, that was the ONE article I hadn't read. I had literally no idea what it was about, and began to write random facts about Latin America. Looks like I should have studied.

The class itself is pretty interesting, if not awkward at times. The United States' has had a very...tumultuous...paternal presence in Latin America, and it makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes to hear about how America "robbed the Panama canal from the columbians," or "forced Nicaragua into an external debt." It's one thing to hear about these events from an American professor, a comrade in criticizing the evil past of our country. But hearing it from a foreign professor turns it into an America-bashing session, leaving me to hide my head as I take notes as he stares at the American students in the classroom. Sometimes I want to stand up and shout that I APOLOGIZE ON BEHALF OF MY COUNTRY PLEASE DON'T HATE ME. Learning about the Spanish-American War from the Spanish perspective gave me the same feeling.

I feel like it's good for me, though. It's super humbling to be placed out of your element like that, and it really forces you to see the consequences of war and imperialism. The key is not to continuously bash our country into the present (even though we may be doing similar things in the Middle East...), but to look at our misdeeds, learn from them, and try not to repeat them.