ABCs and 123s

I failed my first exam last week.

Okay, that's not true. There was that one mishap with Calculus for Engineering majors back in 2006, but that's beside the point.

Before those of you who know how anal retentive I am about my grades start freaking out about me going off the deep end though, you should know it wasn't a real exam. It still upset me a bit, but this story has a happy ending. Let us start from the beginning.

The academic portion of the Flagship program is made up of three major components: three language classes at the center in Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, and either Arabic Literature or Arabic Media (I'm taking media), the internship which I have explained and for which we have to write a weekly report detailing what we've learned, and a direct enrollment course within Alexandria University itself.

This direct enrollment course is a unique experience. We can choose any course in any department as long as it's taught in Arabic and then we attend the course like a regular Egyptian student. As you can imagine, this course is quite a challenge, both because of the advanced language necessary to comprehend the lectures and because of the differences between the American and the Egyptian education systems. To help us out, the program hires an academic partner for each of us, selected from the Egyptian students in the class, to meet with us two hours a week and go over the course material. My academic partners name is Dalia, and I'm lucky to have her because she goes above and beyond.

We're both enrolled in second year 3ilm al-lugha, or the science of language. More loosely translated, it's a linguistics class. I chose it because of my linguistics major at UT. I hoped that if I chose a class where I was already comfortable with the material, I could focus on the language. My background in the field is certainly helpful, however the class approaches the topic from the standpoint of Arabic rather than Language as a whole so I'm still learning a lot.

The real challenge I'm facing in the class is the methodology. Since before the time of the Prophet and the foundation of Islam, Arabic culture has put a heavy stress on memorization. Despite the veneration of language, most were illiterate and literature was passed down through oral tradition. Even the Qur'an wasn't written down until after the Prophet's death, hence the importance put on memorizing the verses that continues to this day. I assume, though I have only my own experiences to back up my assumption, that the influence of this custom has directly led to the importance of memorization in the various Arabic education systems.

To give you a better picture, we sit down in class every Tuesday, the professor comes in, we get out our notebooks, and then we begin to copy down her lecture verbatim. She'll usually read out a bunch of definitions, and then give some examples on the board for clarification. Class ends, and we're sent home to study. I was at a loss. Was I supposed to memorize every word that had come out of her mouth?

This is where Dalia's help was invaluable.

We spent our first few meetings basically recopying the lectures with more detailed explanations from Dalia. I expressed my worry, however, about the upcoming exams and what they would consist of. Was I just supposed to recopy everything I'd heard from memory? Not quite.

To assuage my fears, Dalia volunteered to write me a practice exam as long as I promised to study. And I did study, a lot, just not the night before our meeting. (I had other homework.) When she gave me the exam I thought it looked easy enough - a long list of terms to define and then two longer questions, the answers to which were contained in neat lists in my notes. Without the information fresh in my head, however, I wrote most of the definitions in my own words and was rewarded with a paper full of red marks and exes.

"You didn't study," Dalia told me. "But I did!" I insisted. It was no use.

She sent me home with my corrected paper, an order to study more, and an appointment to meet again for another test two days later. I probably spent more time studying than I should have. I do have other assignments to complete after all. But I was chagrined by my failure.

When we met again she gave me a similar test to which I churned out the answers verbatim complete with the same examples we'd been given in class. As she began to look over my paper, her smile got bigger and bigger. There were a few tiny mistakes, I forgot a dot on a letter or the appropriate preposition for a specific verb, but when she'd finished marking every answer correct she looked at me and gave me the best compliment I have received in Egypt so far.

"If I didn't know you were foreign I would have thought this was an Egyptian's paper."

So I can do this. If I put in the time.

Now that I have the system down, we've started studying in earnest. Despite only being paid to meet with me two hours a week, Dalia has set up an hour a day, every day leading up to the Christmas break, to study. "Isn't that a lot?" I asked her. "But the exams are in January!" she responded. She began studying for some of her exams months ago.

So, it will be a stress on my time, but I'm glad to have her help, and I always enjoy our meetings. There might be some personal differences, just like I have with many of the Egyptian girls, but our love for linguistics unites us. Even if we don't have a lot in common personally, we can always discuss Language theory and the differences between Arabic linguistics and its Western counterpart.

So I'm going in to meet with her tomorrow bright and early, 9:00AM on a Saturday. They told us when we enrolled not to expect higher than a C (or rather the Egyptian equivalent), but I'm hoping with Dalia's help to do much better than that. Only time and my study habits will tell.