Spanish views from a small town

I suppose every university has certain, problematic professors. One would expect that of a large, urban university with thousands of students and the necessary professors to teach all of them. But the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, though urban, is not that enormous. It’s even short professors, which is why the students of now three departments are maintaining the occupancy of the main buildings of their departments twenty-four hours a day. But there are, so far, three disturbing stories of professors acting abusively or discriminatorily that have at some time hit the news. The first one was reported about three years ago. A professor in the Education Department related homosexuality to child molestation, and affirmed that homosexuality was contagious and possibly congenital (where the logic is in that, I'm not sure ) . Apparently he was replying to a student’s question about child molestation just before beginning a class. The student complained to the dean. But the...

Today is September 7th. Today is the first day of classes at the universities in Spain. From being the last to begin work, university students have become the first. Strange, unexplicable tweakings of the education system. But, today being the first day means that yesterday was also the first Sunday of a long school year of transport.  Most students attend university locally. In Galicia there are three universities, in A Coruña, Santiago, and Vigo, and an extension campus of the University of Santiago in Lugo. Almost all the Galician students who attend college can go home on the weekends. Most do. A lot of them are within driving distance of their campus. Which means parents become Sunday cab drivers.  It's not just making various trips with a full car to set up the dorm room or the (more common) student apartment. Though those trips do make for marathon drives sometimes in late August and early July. It's that the students generally go home on the Friday evening buses or...

The other night my daughter remembered to tell me that I could now apply for her scholarship. She had forgotten to tell me that the period opened on the seventh of August. It's a good thing the deadline is the thirtieth of October. I had thought it would begin this month. At any rate, I got down to the job on the computer.  The application has to be done on internet, so if you're poor enough not to have internet and really need the scholarship, you're in a bad spot. Another thing, be prepared to pay for your child's room and board until probably February. Because between the application at the beginning of the school year and final decision, you've got about five months that aren't covered. And if your child has to buy textbooks, you also have to shell out, unless you have any money left from the year before. Generally, there isn't. My daughter is lucky that in the Philosophy Department they don't use textbooks. But she still has to pay for the photoc...