Day 72

Monday March 31, 2008

Two Observations for the Day.

1. Thank God that I learned English as a native lanugage. Tonight I had to correct the essays written by my esl class that I teach and I must say that being a native speaker of English is a god-send. I mean these kids really struggle to construct sentences that are clear and grammatically correct. I also bet these papers take a good amount of time to write and still they come out way worse then these rapidly made blogs. This is why I try to take a good amount of time to really go over their papers and rewrite as improve it as much as possible. I would like to consider myself an aspiring Ms. Franke or Prof. Lindley with my critiques, but I don't know if they are getting through to them. It's so frustating to not be able to help them more and to be limited by time and space. By the way, have I mentioned just how difficult teaching is? I know have much more respect for all my teachers and professors and way more respect for those teachers who are truly good. I don't know how they do it.

Second, I want to comment on the mentality of our hallmates. I call the 4th floor I live on the zoo. It's not out of affection, as the key differnce between the zoo that was any section in Keenan, minus 2North and the zoo that is Zamalek Dorms is that at 11:00 the noise stops in Keenan. People study in Keenan or they know that other people are sleeping or studying so they don't blare the music or hold dance parties at the early hours of the morning. Keep in mind that these dance parties are just guys. If there were girls at these parties I might be more tolerable, but as such their simply lack of respect and awareness is tiresome. I think every night a different person from the floor has gone out and told them to pipe down. Either they are malicious jerks who want to mess with us, or they are just clueless and don't realize that they are not the center of the world. I mean granted this is a hard jump to make and it actually occurs in many steps but these guys are still on the first pad. I don't know how to get through to them, and at a certain point I don't really care to try and make ammends with them. This is because they are unwilling to make any steps, so why even bother.

Okay, enough of my rant about English and respect. Hopefully next time I will talk about something interesting in regards to Egypt.