Today I went to the Department of Alumnos because I was absent last week and had to explain the reasons for my absence. Ybti asked me if I had a doctor's note. (!!??!!) I went down and told them my teacher sent me because I was absent. They checked my file and told me I had missed two classes (that is supposedly the limit) because I missed the first day of class. I told them I was there the first day of class but she did not pass the list, which was true, but somehow other students had signed. I remember there were 12 of us on the first day, but there were not 12 signatures on the list I was shown. The girl in the window told me I had to tell the teacher to write a note vouching that I was there on the first day of class and I did not sign. Apparently, my word was not good enough!
Class was pretty much more of the same. Ybti bounced around from one thing to another. First she taught us the numbers, when she realized we didn't know them. What she doesn't understand is that her teaching us something is very different from us learning it. So, even though she wrote the numbers on the board and went around the room and had us each say one number, I can only tell you that seven is sabat because I remember the Sabbath and five is hamza, because that is the letter that looks like a zero that I thought was ha and then thought was tamarbuta and now I think is both, in addition to being five!
I am learning, but I think it is in spite of Ybti and not all thanks to her. I feel like her role has become one of inducing me to ask questions, which might be a good thing, even though I wish her role was more of a positive than negative one.
If you look at the little sample of Arabic script I posted here, you can see that there are these little marks above and below some of the letters. These are the vowel sounds i, u, and a. They can change a consonant like b to bi, bu or ba. I learned this from the website I am going to to clarify what I missed in class.
So today as we bounced from numbers, to the store to the restaurant to saying, "is this a book?" and I copied from the board, I began to notice that Ybti was not always putting these little marks, which to me are essential to trying to figure out how to say a string of letters. If there are no vowels, then something like sbt makes no sense to me, but when you put the vowels in there and get sabat I understand.
I asked Fernando, the guy who was sitting next to me blissfully copying things down in perfect Arabic writing because he already knows how to read and write in Arabic, why Ybti was not putting the vowels. He answered me, but the room was noisy and he was on my left side - bad for hearing, especially another language - so I didn't understand his answer. I responded, "it is to confuse us". And confuse us it did.
The nice thing about this class in comparison to last night's is that I am NOT the lowest student. There are other students who are more confused than me. Not that this is a competition or anything, it's just I don't like being the one who is obviously confused and then have the teacher continously point it out (as she did last night). I still am not stressed about last night's class, or even today's, but I am really trying to understand this situation and think about how I as a teacher might do things that put my own students in similar situations. I know I have done things that have left some students out and taught to the higher level students rather than the lower ones. I know that it is a real challenge to teach really low levels, especially when they don't have the skills they need to reach their own understanding of things.
Here I am in this class with a master's degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages, along with experience studying several other foreign languages and some strategies and resources to understand things on my own, yet, this class continues to be a challenge, mostly because it bounces all over the place, there is no focus, no clear objectives and the teacher allows several outspoken students to set the agenda. I hope that when I see that deer in the headlights look, or when I see a student looking extremely frustrated or lost, I will remember this experience and try to think about how I can help.
One of the most interesting things that happened today was that I overheard Ybti tell Fernando that last night's class was dynamic. She sort of posed it as a tag question. "Last night's class was dynamic wasn't it?", to which of course, he had to respond "yes". I thought it was kind of comical, since I did not think the class was dynamic at all. I had a student last semester who every time I gave them evaluations to see how things were going, wrote that he wanted the class to be more dynamic. I did all kinds of things in my class, but it was never dynamic enough for him. So, here, this class, which was total confusion for me, was being described as being "dynamic". I think she thought it was dynamic because there were students in the class who could read and write Arabic already. Since the class is supposed to be "phonetics" and a phonetics class is supposed to help us LEARN how to read and write, they shouldn't be there, but anyway, I guess for Ybti, it is nice to be able to see some students who are not totally confused like those of us in her Saturday morning class.
In spite of all of this struggling though, I do like the class. I like Arabic writing, and what little I have learned of the vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation is interesting. Also, the students in my class are really nice.
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