Day 25

February 13th

This day was actually one of the rougher ones I have had in Cairo. First of all, I woke up and wasn't feeling too well. This probably had something to do with the kinds of food I have been eating as of lately. My stomach did not improve in throughout the day so that made an already long day even more difficult. I also didn't eat any food so by the time the afternoon crunch hit I was tired, really tired. Luckily my classes are really easy right now. My Comparative Politics class has some of the worst pedagogy I have encounter in my time as a student. We are supposed to be learning the geography of the middle-east, so at Notre Dame, the professor would hand out a map with a list of places we need to know, possibly go over it for 15 minutes, and then have a test in a week. If the map wasn't already labeled, then we would have a term list and would then need to go find it on our own time. At AUC, the teacher has spent 3 1 hour 20 minute classes blabbering about Geography, pointing to the straight of hormuz on a map (that only he had as an overhead) then going off on a tangent which would connect to another tangent. If you already knew the stuff it didn't matter, but if you didn't his way of teaching the information would have proved completely ineffective. It just shows a lack of caring on his part to actually sit down and even think about a lesson-plan. If I could only write a TCE for this professor. I guess I didn't realize how much I appreciate good professors until I lose them. The other thing the Professor did was when two kids showed up 5 and 10 minutes respectively he wouldn't let them into the class and pushed out of the room. I thought this was a little extreme until I got to the next class. In this class we were about 10-15 kids short at the time class started. Over the next 15-20 minutes, Egyptian students would show up and interrupt the whole class as they came in. Now I think the first professor was using a little bit of deterrence to make sure the students showed up on time.