Egypt: Predictably unpredictable. Arabic: Usually predictable.

In six and a half weeks of class, I’ve picked up some aspects of Egyptian teaching styles that differ markedly from that ingrained in me by 20 years of U.S.-based education.

The most notable of these cultural differences is the approach taken by our teachers at the language center to test taking, and what’s permissible mid-exam. In U.S. classrooms, a hush settles over test-takers, and every gurgle of an anxious stomach can be heard for those 50 weighty minutes. In our classroom in Alexandria, the eight or so of us may be silent, but across the street a car alarm whines dissonantly with the melodic call to prayer. It may be a suitable day for construction, in which case our floor will rattle from the jackhammer next door. And without fail, one of the receptionists’ cell phones diddles its 8-bit tune on the quarter hour, piercing silence and cacophony equally. If our own teacher’s cell phone doesn’t chime during class, it’s a rare day.

What threw me off most was our teacher’s tendency to talk DURING our exams. He’ll inquire as to our progress, ask what’s giving us trouble, and occasionally head to the board for a mid-test mini-lesson in grammar. There’s a 70% chance that, if asked during an exam for clarification on the meaning of a word, he’ll give it to us. (In my U.S. Arabic-language classrooms, any word on a test that we didn’t know was a word that WE FAILED TO STUDY ADEQUATELY, and therefore were doomed to wallow in not-knowing until submitting the exam.)

Finally, my coup de grâce: On our last test, a two-chapter examination of how well we had memorized the vocabulary (DAMN me for thinking there would be silly concepts like GRAMMAR on the test. I could have spent those precious two hours beforehand in robotic word memorization which would have helped significantly more than conceptualization of what happens to the vowels in “weak” verbs under every conjugal necessity!) I sat for a solid five minutes in front of ten sentences with big, fat blanks, in which we were to fill in the appropriate vocabulary word from one of the two chapters we had last studied. With no suggested words to be found! THERE WERE SO MANY OPTIONS! The two chapters alone constituted maybe 130 new vocabulary words, and we were to pull the TEN APPROPRIATE WORDS from those 130 to fill these blinking blank lines!

I raised my hand. Our eager teacher, who eyed us throughout the entire test hoping for such an opportunity to be put to use, eagerly called on me. In Arabic: “Is it possible for you to give us a bank of words for this section?” Six out of seven of my classmates breathed “Yesssss,” and the teacher agreed. So on the board, in his immaculate handwriting (right guys? It’s absolutely immaculate) gave us options like: to be committed to, indicators, to exaggerate, exceptions, issues, the elite, possibilities, and disengagement.

But that didn’t solve all our problems. The sentences themselves, and my tenuous grasp on their meanings, made me dizzy: “Despite the agreement of Israel much of agreements with Arabs except that she doesn’t want (BLANK) at-her.” Umm…exaggerate?

Or “Continues danger nuclear weapons and striving for achieving for-it threaten the world [WORD] that there is (BLANK) to the role [WORD], and the danger not consist of the together.” FML.



This morning I woke up with what felt like a hangover, except made of homesickness. I was SO homesick. I felt suffocated by the amount I had to learn and memorize and prepare for class in such insufficient time. My guts gurgled through the remnants of whatever surprised them yesterday and sent me running to the bathroom in the middle of class. I remembered steaming heaps of delectable Indian food consumed so many times with friends in my home town, and the homesick hangover got worse. And oddly enough, it doesn’t help to have such wonderful friends who are SO DAMN ENCOURAGING of me and say stupid things like “Liz, I support you and miss you and think you’re doing an awesome thing.” THAT’S NICE. BUT I JUST WANT TO EAT CHEERIOS IN MY UNDERWEAR AND READ THE STAR TRIBUNE FOR AN HOUR WITHOUT THE DANGER OF BEING STARED AT BY HALF A DOZEN MEN WHO SMOKE AND TAKE PHOTOS OF US IN THE HOTEL LOBBY. (Fact: Yesterday half a dozen of us were photographed by a hotel patron who walked by with his camera phone.)

But then it was time for class – or rather, time to study in preparation for class. I cracked open volume three of Al Kitaab (literally, “The Book”), to chapter two in which we’re learning words that mean “to cite as an example or proverb” (that’s one word in Arabic), “to hold someone accountable for,” “to seek the help of something/someone against someone or in doing something” (that’s one word, with a preposition), and “to dance.” I flipped through a few pages in which rules for conjugating verbs with “weak” middle vowels were presented systematically and comprehensively, tying together lessons woven throughout the previous two books. And I banged out a couple simple exercises that were due later in the day. And I felt…FANTASTIC.

The predictability and systematization of Arabic grammar is remarkable. We juxtapose this daily with the unpredictability of life in Egypt – rather, how predictably life here is unpredictable.

And finally, here are a couple photos of what makes my roommate and me awesome:



How we plug in.



We agree as to the best use for the TV.