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Going through the other posts, I notice that a bunch of them comment on how loud our class is. On thursday, that was very true. As loud as we are, we don't have those side conversations normally, and we don't usually have to yell to get a chance to talk.  The impression that Anne's class got was influenced a lot by the size of the class, and by the fact that there were new people invading (not really, you're all welcome :] ) what is usually a very private bubble of culture.  I think the side conversations and the flaunting of inside jokes (not gonna lie, i did it too) were mostly to validate ourselves as a "culture" or as a group.  In other words, we totally showed off.  We wanted to prove that we are comfortable with each other and I think we were a little over the top. We were overwhelming indeed. We can't really approach our cultures interacting without thinking about the psychological aspect of it...I'm no psych major, I've never even taken a class. But it's logical enough that when another group enters your territory with the intent to judge ("observe and draw conclusions," put nicely) that we'd get a bit defensive.

Anne's class was just like o.o (that's an "i'm scared" face, if you can't tell) at first, but they seemed to get more comfortable as time went on. I think it was just too big of a class to really understand each other and interact in the way that we were supposed to. Yes, our cultures are different, and I think the differences are more because of Anne and Paul more than the people in the class (though we're almost as important). However, we can't really judge the differences based on thursday because of our group psychology...or lack thereof, for those of us who just sat there silently.