Yes! We really do have to go to class!

Between all of these field trips, adventures, and sighseeing we do actually go to class, sometimes.  In theory we have class Monday through Thursday from 10 till 2.  This rarely actually happens. When field trips fall on weekdays we do not have that class that week, or we move it to another time. We have four classes: culture, literature, history, and a general study abroad class.

For the culture class we have been learning some basic phrases in Irish.  Irish is not an easy language to learn because they use multiple sounds that the English language does not have.   This makes even repeating after the professor difficult. 

Irish literature is a homework intensive class.  We are assigned multiple readings that are due the following week.  Everything we read comes from Irish authors set on Irish lands.  We look into the lives of some of the more famous authors like James Joyce.  Joyce’s short stories were controversial at the time they were published because they did not sugar coat the lives of people in Dublin at the time.  The people of Dublin wanted to make others believe they had the ideal lives, but Joyce showed the truth behind these masks.  Reading his stories now give us an insight to the true lives of the people that lived in Dublin in the 1900s.

Irish history has some hard concepts to fully understand.  There are many historical figures that are celebrated in England, but seen as a criminal in Ireland.  One of these people is Oliver Cromwell.  In England he is seen as the father of their democracy whereas in Ireland he is seen as the man that used ethnic cleansing ideals to murder or enslave 25% of the population. Seeing how different Cromwell is viewed by different groups of people opened my eyes to the power of perception.

Our final class in the week is our general study abroad class.  In this class we work on our blogs, watch movies, or talk about upcoming field trips.  It is amazing to be given the opportunity to learn about something, watch a movie about it then actually get to travel there.  It makes the history and the stories of what happened at these places seem much more real than just learning facts out of a book.