When you arrive at a school for your first visit, usually someone will become your sponsor and walk you around. They will introduce you to the principal, all the English teachers and find classes for you to visit. Meeting with a principal is always interesting because there is the expected sit down and chat (How do you like it here? Oh, so your children are here! What school do they go to? Are you doing ok?) which eventually moves to…
Teachers will understand this. There are a lot of feelings associated with teaching. For example: Then there are the first day of school Pinterest photos showing the utopia of teaching. What I miss though is the day to day because I really *like* teaching. I avoided this career. I come from a family of teachers. I mean EVERYONE is a teacher (mom, 3 aunts, grandmother, multiple cousins of all generations, you get the picture). My dad was planning on being a…
As promised to some of my students, here is a video of me speaking Arabic. I am reading off my homework sentences for all to hear. My homework for this evening is practicing reading some conversations, but honestly I am terrible at reading Arabic script so I skipped videoing that one! Give me a few more weeks! For those of you wondering if I am forgetting my Spanish. No. I actually keep tossing Spanish words in accidentally when I forget…
Today was my first class in Arabic. It began at 8 am so I had to travel from my apartment (north of the city) to the class in the center. We have only traveled by taxi and someone had told me that you can prearrange a taxi, but I was too chicken to talk to the cab driver the day before. I thought I’d go to the cab office in the morning and ask. Ha! In the morning there are…
As I have mentioned before, my research deals with finding better ways of teaching writing for Arabic speaking students. Possibly using oral history as a motivator to WANT to write and thus gain better proficiency. To get a handle on the situation and how it is taught in the schools here, I am doing 3 main things: 1) taking an Arabic language course 2) observing English writing classrooms and 3) interviewing teachers and students. Class starts Tuesday: check. So the…
Still on school vacation. I’ve never been more ready to go back to school! In the meantime, we are entertaining ourself by tooling around town. We went out on Tuesday and the city was quiet. Everyone was home with their families still. There were a few shops open (maybe the Christian ones?) so we were able to get our shopping done. On our short list of things that we needed in the apartment (and couldn’t do without): stoppers for…
During my time here, we aren’t just hanging out and eating good food. (Hard to believe, right?) The purpose, funded by Fulbright DAT, is to research methods in teaching writing to native Arabic speakers, perhaps by using oral history as the tool and motivating factor. Many of the native Arabic speakers that I have taught in the past have struggled the most with writing. As I speak to more people, anecdotally I have been told that many Arabic speakers have a…
So, we have been here for a little less than a week. We still haven’t gotten to our final location, but we will be by tomorrow night! I have however noticed a few things in the interim. My children are completely unconcerned about everyone else speaking a different language than us. Maybe this is normal for children, but most adults I know get freaked out and are constantly asking what others are saying. There seems to be a ingrained part…
Normal family travels (even or maybe especially to Target) include a lot of short calls saying, “Where are you?” We got to Amsterdam and quickly realized that none of our phone solutions worked unless BOTH of us were connected to wifi and the connections kept dropping. We had a couple of misadventures and even got directed to the “meeting point” once. Dan’s fix is to have a meeting point wherever we go. My plan is to not split up until…
Initially, after reading all the suggestion blogs and in talking to friends, we had intended on packing 1-2 weeks before we left. However, in reality, we don’t own enough clothes to do that. So we set aside the things that we intended on packing and have them stacked on top of the suitcases and in the corners. Did I mention that it is really hard to pack for winter in August? We did accomplish: Buying new suitcases – Our old…