International Law Field Lab - Kochi, India

        For my International Law class, there was a field lab today.  Our class was taken to a Gateway Hotel, where we went to a dining hall.  There were many lecturers who were going to talk to us about various human rights and environmental policies in India.  Most of the presentations focused on the State of Kerala and not on the whole of India. 

          The human rights lectures were very interesting, and I learned things I did not know.  We have not yet talked about human rights in class yet, so it was a nice change of pace.  Most of our class time has been spent on learning about environmental policy and climate change.  Our field lab overall was a large waste of time; it was 8 hours of lectures that barely had any relevance to class.

          The presentations on climate change were not what I expected.  I had been anticipating lectures on how climate change will affect India, what their current status is, and how they plan to handle it.  This was not the case.  Most of the lectures did not truly talk about these things, and one lecture even just talked about where you should place certain rooms in your house to balance your environment.  I was appalled that our professor did not stop this presentations, because he did stop one.

          One woman was giving a speech on land reform and the caste system.  She was providing us with many laws that they currently have in place.  Our professor got up and told her not to cover the laws because they were irrelevant and do not apply to us.  He said we would not remember them!  She had no idea what to do, because her whole presentation was on things that Kerala was doing.  He just wanted to go straight into women’s rights, but that was a completely different presentation by another person.  After trying to get her to stop multiple times, he stood up and said that we did not have enough time, so we would go to questions and answers.  He explained that that is the “American style.”  I was so embarrassed by the way that he had acted.  Through the other presentations he was constantly getting up to talk to specific students about something they needed to do, instead of meeting with them all at the beginning of the day.  I feel that Semester at Sea was poorly represented on his part.

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