Arabic-English Exchange

Hello! Sorry, I haven't posted in awhile. Technology has not been my friend this week as my internet has not worked in my room since I returned from Tangier this past weekend, and on top of that I had my first busy week of schoolwork since I arrived at Al Akhawayn...so basically my week has consisted of going back and forth between the library, packing and unpacking my backpack, re-setting up my labtop, reading, doing work and studying. Ah, the life of a student.

But, an update about travels and classes later, for now I want a bit of excitement from teaching English at the local high school here in Ifrane tonight! I and some of the other international students (about 10 of us now) made a commitment to teach English two nights a week starting about 2 weeks ago after meeting with the government delegate in charge of education here in the Ifrane province. We were all a little nervous at first, but its been a great experience so far!

We're teaching about 80-90 girls overall (broken up into about 5 classes) who live in the residential part of the school as they come from all over the province. So, we come at about 7:00pm and teach until 8:30 in this huge school with echo-y dark hallways, a huge room full of chopped wood to heat the classrooms, and classrooms lining hallways that consist of basically desks and chalkboards (sometimes with chalk, sometimes not) and of course the students! The students range from like 15-19 and are all at varying levels of English preparing for the big test they have to take before graduation, so we're trying to help them review and get ready!

I and my co-teacher Caly basically go in and teach whatever "lesson" we've prepared and then help them with their homework, which usually takes up the majority of the time as their English book is awful. To give you a sense, their latest lesson is a two page reading on pollution in the mediterranean sea, complete with a list of diseases like typhoid and cholera and a lot of hard verbs and nouns that seem a bit ridiculous for beginning-intermediate students, but whatever. Of course, its a little harder to get over the grammatical mistakes like misspelling "paragraph."

Anyway, we've had a lot of fun teaching them the words for clothing (today I made a worksheet with pics of clothes & accessories from the internet!) and talking about verb tenses and parts of speech. Today, we went over time which was also really fun...and convenient as we just finished reviewing time in my Arabic class, so I got to totally pull out my fledgling Arabic skills, and it totally even helped me explain the conecpt of "15 minutes till, 20 minutes after" in English! A small step, but I was excited nonetheless!

The girls are all really sweet and eager to learn and they love Caly and I so its a fun hour of us acting out English concepts, laughing and attempting to teach them a little something too!

Although, Caly and I were talking today about how its still a bit crazy that we're doing this...just being thrust into a school as volunteers with no curriculum, supervision, or really any goal except the overall "teach English." Granted we were vouched for by the chaplian and have the reputation of AUI international students, who are at least from an English-speaking country...but still, certainly a long way from the rigidness of the US educational system at home with benchmarks, requirements, and probably background checks...okay maybe not that much, but you get the picture.

Anyway, I'm really excited to continue the experience partly because its good to get away from abstract academic thinking and do something active where i really get to help these girls and try out my Arabic skills a bit, but its also fun to think about different ways to teach English, and realize again and again how hard it is to learn another language!

Okay, the library's closing. So there's my fun experience for the night. And here's a picture of me and some of my students!

Ma-salaama!