Owned In The Face

This is the term used to describe how well our class did on our first quiz. Apparently the teachers are displeased because we are behind, and we do not know as much vocabulary as we "should." I have a little bit of a problem with this, because our quiz covered things that were not in our study guides or lesson plans. It is difficult to study for things when you do not know what to study for. While we had assumed the quiz would be a quiz on vocabulary, it was much more like a quiz on everything we'd learned. There was a section where we had to listen and circle the characters we heard from a recording. Then there was the part where we just had to do a translation of something written. There was a section where we had to listen to a dialog and answer questions about the two speakers and their conversation. 

After school, I ran for about half an hour and the endorphins helped me feel better. 

What Homework?

Him, "Did you get the homework done?"

Me, "We didn't have any...?"

Him, "Lesson 3. It's on the Schedule."

Me, "I thought [the teacher] the whole class schedule is pushed back because we haven't received our laptops yet. Besides, we barely started lesson 3, much less get through it."

Him, "It's on the schedule, and I don't want to risk getting in trouble for not doing it."

After having almost exactly the same conversation with another classmate, I decided I should do the lesson 3 homework, even though it was already 9:30pm at this point.

Tuesdays Rock

For as much as I hate Monday, I love Tuesday. I believe the reason for this, is simply because it's no longer Monday.

We're approximately half-way through learning the alphabet, and as I understand it, the journal entry is due in the morning. So I stumble my way through altering some of the example dialog and creating something about myself. We are specifically instructed to only use the things we've been taught in class.

Imagine, for a moment, writing a paragraph about yourself in your own language, when you can only use half the alphabet. I think our teachers are confused.

We have on teacher that is particularly good at the calligraphy of the language. When he writes on the board, it is always beautiful and makes me wish I had time to become a master of the art.

Here is an example of what you can do with Arabic.

Day 2 of 320

Apparently we have a relatively standard pattern of homework, which we are given a schedule of. For the duration of the class, we are to have a second notebook which is to be used only for journal entries. There will be one journal entry due every week. We are told that our give assignment for this week is to write a paragraph about ourselves.

I found it amusing how everybody in the class thought it was redundant. We'd already written almost an entire page about ourselves during our "Smart Start" English class. I tried to explain to them, that the reason it's not redundant and it's only ONE paragraph due, is because we have to write it in Arabic. They laugh and (reasonably) suggest that it would be ridiculous to assign us a written paragraph in a foreign language, which we've studied for one day, and that we have only been taught the first 8 characters of a 32 character alphabet. 

When the outline is finally distributed to the class, I feel justified in raising my arms and saying, "I told you so." This was accompanied by several groans and much complaining from people who barely know how to greet others in this language, much less write in complete sentences.

I think it's exciting!