I was briefly taken aback that my lessons were in a class format rather than a lecture, more like how I was taught at Sixth Form. Back at my home university lectures would usually consist of a hundred or more students crowded in a big lecture hall, but here a class was considered big if it had twenty students. Oddly, this smaller class size and closer setting went alongside a far more distant and alien teaching style. This, along with an attitude to assessment that verged on punitive, made this period of my education almost completely unlike anything I’d experienced in the UK.
During my time there I was careful not to slide into Britishisms. Once or twice, when tired and hungry, I would ask the guy at the trash food stand for chips, leading to a few seconds of uncomfortable silence before I said “oh sorry, I mean fries”. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology this was not an issue with essays, as I could just write them naturally in British English and at the end change the language settings on LibreOffice to Canadian English. The one time my inconsistent use of Canadianisms actually created an issue, however, was when I accidentally addressed one of my teachers using their first name.
Over here the idea that you’d still refer to your teachers using their titles even at Sixth Form, let alone university, strikes one as childish. While it’s an illusion, encouraging the use of first names among students and lecturers does create the idea that they are on the same level intellectually, which encourages students to debate frankly and give their own ideas the credit they deserve. I had been told before to refer to my instructors as Professor Surname, but years of habit are hard to break, and in Canada failing to use proper titles in this context seems to be taken as presumptiveness rather than politeness. It wasn’t really that big of an issue, my main reprimand being a rather passive aggressive email from the Prof in question, but it did shake me out of what little sense of familiarity I had developed.
Beyond the strange setting, the system of assessments took me off guard as well. In terms of essays, Canada prefers quantity over quality, to the extent that in terms of wordcount I wrote more during that one semester there than I did for the entire rest of my degree, including my dissertation. Half way through a class you have to do your midterms, which are a mix of exams and essays, and with some of these tests staggered by a month or so by the time you’ve done your last midterm it’s already time to start writing your final essays and getting ready for the final exams. I had been knocked out by some of the worst flu I’ve ever had just at the beginning of my midterms, putting me over a week behind on my assignments, a margin I never made up.
Back in Britain, where I would have three essays of about two and a half thousand words each and then three exams at the end of the semester, the pace was such that I could write a couple of hundred words a day and feel proud of it. In contrast, my final mini-dissertation for my Media course (which was only one of four courses I was doing) was six thousand words long, which I completed in three days. On top of essays and exams, I had to write a weekly seven hundred word blog for my Gender course, of which every single post was made at five minutes to midnight on the Friday.
While stressful at the time, this rushed pace taught me how to write quickly and without undue perfectionism. When I returned home suddenly everything seemed pretty sedate, and being able to write my essays without dilly-dallying left me a lot of free time to pursue other hobbies, eventually leading to me abandoning a career path that I was never really sure about to instead try for a career in the games industry, leading me directly to where I am now, about to start a Masters in Game Design. My exchange took up the first half of my second year at uni, and thankfully the student house I was placed in for the second half was full of nice quiet people, which made a welcome change from the Canadian dorms which I will tell you about tomorrow.
