Who Am I?

This topic has been used for a workbook exercise, a hand-in essay, and an oral presentation in front of class. I'm finding this semester's Beginning German is an exercise in self-revelation. Rather than learning artificial dialogs, we are being taught how to tell people about ourselves, our needs, our interests, our desires, our family, our studies, etc. And our professor, who must have a photographic memory, has a depth of knowledge of the students in her class that is unrivaled in any other "beginning" class. A professor who has worked with a group of students for three or four semesters might start to have the same knowledge of his or her class. And profesorin Martin makes it clear that she is paying attention as she will catch us if one day we say we have three brothers and a couple of weeks later say we have two brothers, she'll ask what happened to the one brother.

It isn't quite as clear that the students have gotten to know each other better than many other classes although I think last semester's Conversational Spanish class seemed to have more camaraderie at this point in the semester than we do in German 401. Perhaps it is because we're too concerned about what we're going to say next to really listen to fellow classmates reveal themselves.

Have you ever had a class where your classmates or your teacher learned a lot about you, maybe more than you felt comfortable sharing? Does it make sense on a language teaching level to be so "I" centered?