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Foreign students get up to speed on In-n-out and all things American
January 5, 2010 in In-n-Out Burger by admin
The topic was baseball and the class members, foreign graduate students recently arrived in the United States to attend the University of Southern California, were befuddled.
Not only were they struggling to follow the instructor’s litany of batting and pitching rules, they were mystified by the title of the hallowed championship games. Why is it called the World Series, one Chinese student wondered aloud, if all the teams in it are from North America?
Instructor Edward Roth was both taken aback and pleased. The grandiose title might reflect America’s arrogance about its national pastime, he acknowledged, but he also praised the question. It reflected the type of cross-cultural debate he encourages in a course aimed at helping these newcomers from overseas adjust to life in Los Angeles.
Then Roth reeled off some American sayings that spring from baseball: Step up to the plate. Knock it out of the park. Get your bases covered. Don’t drop the ball.
“These are very useful English phrases and we use them quite a bit,’’ he said. The 17 students, mainly master’s degree candidates from China, dutifully took notes.
Called “The United States: An American Culture Series,’’ the USC class is an unusual semester-long effort by the university to help its international students learn about the strange food, difficult idioms, and bewildering customs that surround them.
To succeed academically, the theory goes, foreign students must also adjust culturally and socially to their new surroundings. So in Roth’s class and four similar courses by other teachers, these are some of the topics: What are tailgate parties? What are baby vegetables? To whom should you give Christmas gifts? Is it an insult to call someone a couch potato?
By semester’s end, Jingjie “Ginger’’ Li, 22, a Chinese graduate student who is studying public administration, said she felt she could interact more easily with Americans. “Everybody from outside the country gets culture shock and needs to get over that,’’ said Li. The USC course, she said, gave her topics for conversations with American classmates and, more important, “taught us to express your own opinion.’’
The university has reason to offer the free, noncredit courses in American culture. For the eighth consecutive year, USC in the last academic year enrolled the largest contingent of foreign students of any US university last year: more than 7,500, or about a fifth of its enrollment.
Final numbers for the current school year are expected to be even higher, with India the largest exporter of students to USC and China second and growing fast, officials report.
The university has recruitment offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Tokyo, as well as in Mexico City, and it holds numerous events for prospective engineering students in India.
The culture courses began as an experiment last year with one section each semester and were expanded this fall to five sections, each meeting for two hours once a week for 12 weeks. Field trips took students to downtown Los Angeles, the California African American Museum, the Getty Center museum and, for gourmet tourism, an In-N-Out Burger drive-in. Total enrollment was about 60, mainly Chinese students with a sprinkling from India, Pakistan, and Turkey.
At USC, part of the goal is to ease international students’ isolation. Some say they feel trapped by their heavy academic loads, strong accents, shyness, and cultural confusion, while an alien universe of parties, study groups, and romances swirls about them.
Ironically, it can also be tough for many Chinese and Indian students to break out of their own national circles at USC because those groups are so large and are concentrated in engineering programs.
Electrical engineering student Fang Li, 23, said he was homesick his first few weeks at USC. He disliked American foods, except for turkey sandwiches and coffee, and lost weight. Now he is feeling better, partly because the American culture class “helped me adjust more quickly,’’ he said.
Still, he has yet to make strong friendships with Americans. He hopes to widen his circle soon and “become more familiar with the way American people think and the way they live.’’
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