Blue Christmas

I spent the past two and a half months at Arabic school here in Tunis. Standard Arabic class stretched from 8 am until 1.15 pm or so (divided between two teachers), and three days a week I also attended two hours of dialect class in the afternoon. That sort of schedule would be tiresome enough on its own, but I augmented the exhaustion-level by spending hour upon hour complaining about the quality of the teaching when I might have been doing more constructive things like studying, or speaking to people in Arabic, or even watching paint dry. Today I finished my final exams and, thanks to all that is sparkly, I will never take another class at this school again!

Not everything about the school was terrible, of course. My fellow students were delightful. In the morning I was always thrilled to chatter with the two lovely Italian girls in my class. They taught me various useful Italian phrases, such as “Tu se ritardato,” and a great many others which were not quite so PG. And I always had a fantastic time in dialect class because that teacher was (and is) fantastic. Some of my fellow dialect students became so hilarious to me that they had only to say one word, or make a facial expression, for me to commence cracking up.

But, and it’s a big but, the quality of instruction that I received in the morning was, shall we say, horrifically bad. The main problem was that my teachers were perhaps too busy outside of class (fighting crime?) to prepare lessons, grade homework, or confer with each other. As a result, we suffered through repetitive lessons during which we were given half an hour to do five-minute-worthy tasks. Our teachers graded homework during class, or else not at all. We had no syllabus, no consistency from one day to the next, and no idea what half of the exercises were meant to accomplish. And when we were given information, some glaring aspects were incorrect.

For example, one teacher explained the term “stereotype” by saying (all in Arabic, so I paraphrase) that this means when a country thinks it is better than all others so it tries to force them to be the same as it. You know, like America. I got very disgruntled to hear this and tried to offer an alternate (i.e. correct) definition, only to be shot down. And not in what I’d call a friendly fashion. In fact, whenever I tried to say anything in class other than answer the prescribed questions I was greeted with a grimace. It soon became apparent that one of my teachers was rather anti-American and the other was anti-creativity. We were treated to readings about Rumsfeld, Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo. Our teacher spent hours lecturing us (in the guise of the topic “cultural dialects”) about the evils America has perpetrated, pausing occasionally to glance in the direction of us Americans. And the text on our final exam explained that the clash of cultures theory was created by the (unspecified) West as a tool of domination (okay, maybe slightly true), whereas Islam is a beacon of peace and understanding.

What is the lesson to be taken from all this? I’m not sure, but it certainly wasn’t a grammar lesson.

And most surprisingly, other countries were seemingly blameless. We had five Chinese students in our class, but when we were asked to give mini-presentations about the treatment of Muslims in our respective countries those students had nothing but positive things to say. Not a single student other than we Americans had ever heard the word “Uyghur.” One student even claimed “there are no Muslims in China.”

Those are the more substantive, lesson-based complaints. Other complaints went along these lines: our teacher not only didn’t turn off the ring tone but also routinely answered calls and text messages in class. One teacher ostentatiously gave so much special help to one student in particular, going so far as to check her test and give it back to her to correct during our final since she had missed some questions. The rules were completely inconsistent; one student was punished missing class by being told she couldn’t take the exam while all other students (some who came less than once a week) were allowed to do so without problems. And on several occasions one teacher just up and left class, without warning and without a substitute, after only an hour of our prescribed lesson time. We were told to bring our cassette tapes (yes, cassettes) to use on Fridays only, and then were chewed out on Tuesday and then on Wednesday for not having the tape because "I told you to bring it every day!" One teacher would break off lecturing to walk out of class at break time without announcing that the break had come (this actually became rather entertaining because it was so bizarre). But all of this might have been tolerable were it not for the lack of substance. I learned a few useful vocabulary words. I learned absolutely nothing else (other than dialect, of course!) and I was grumpy a whole heck of a lot.

But now it’s over! And I can turn my attention to more important, extracurricular pursuits, such as making myself look ridiculous by dressing up like Elvis.

My friends and I threw a Blue Christmas Party and I did my best to create an Elvis costume. I was unfortunately unable to recreate Elvis’s beloved, shiny gold suit (one day it will be mine), so I went for the Jailhouse Rock look since I conveniently already own a stripy sweater. The crowning touch of my costume, however, was the hairdo. Do not think for a moment that I possess the skills (or the hair products) to fix my hair myself. I went to a salon and described as best I could the hairstyle I wanted, although I didn’t mention the Elvis aspect of it. I even demonstrated the look I wanted with a personalized drawing.

This rather confounded the hairdresser, and I had to continually tell her to make the hair “higher, higher!” complete with emphatic gestures. Because I have so much hair it was necessary to collect much of it in the back, although the hairdresser offered to snip that off for me. I was not that dedicated to the look, but all in all I was very pleased with the results, and proceeded to dance like Elvis as best I could (i.e. badly).