Since 80% of my awake time is spent on academics, I'll talk about that today. I am in class approximately 17 hours per week. Four days a week, I have Modern Standard Arabic, or fusHa class for an hour and a quarter. This is by far my favourite class. After spending the summer at Middlebury immersed in Arabic, this class feels the most comfortable for me, and it's also the most exciting in some ways. In terms of grammar, we are reaching the upper levels of intermediate learning. But since language learning is very gradual, retrospect is the best lens for measuring progress. I love everything about MSA. My professor for this class is a young woman (my guess is that she's about 24) who speaks fluent, nearly accent-less English.
Three days a week, I have an hour long course on Jordanian dialect, or al-'amiyyeh al-ordunieh. Even though I'd never studied any dialects of Arabic before coming to Jordan, I was placed in the Intermediate level because of my more advanced MSA level. This class is centered on vocabulary building and most of the grammar is taught by comparison to MSA. Luckily, Jordanian dialect is closer than some dialects to Classical Arabic. My professor for this class looks strikingly similar to Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, but that's where the similarity ends. He has the most incredibly infectious laugh, and will laugh uproariously at even the most remotely funny thing. Also, if anytime we guess the correct meaning of a new word or expression, he claps his hands and yells "ya salaam 'aleiki!" which literally means peace be upon you. Positive reinforcement at its best.
Anyway, all the things I could say I love about Arabic classes would bore the hell out of anyone who reads this blog (if anyone does) so I'll keep my love to myself and move on.
I am also taking three "content" courses in English. Each of these happens only once per week, but in a 3 hour block. On Sundays, I have a course about ethnic and minority groups in the Middle East and North Africa. Compared to the rest of my courses, the reading for this course is quite light, but part of understanding the region is understanding the complexity of the social make up. It has been my general impression while being here that most Americans have absolutely no grasp of how deeply rooted these differences are.
My favourite content course, which is called Contemporary Issues in the Arab World happens on Tuesday afternoons. The class is a political science course, and we read about 100-150 pages per week for it. It's very challenging, and the professor is a political advisor to the King Abdullah II, as well as a professor at the University of Jordan as well as a freelance academic. He's very discerning and detail-oriented, but encouraging as well (and he's taken a liking to me, which I find very likable in a person) . For his course, I am working on a large research paper on how water issues effect the political relationships and economic development of the area (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, and Lebanon). Having spent my entire academic career before coming here between the pages of books, it is refreshing to be able to touch the subjects of my writing. For example, this weekend, I will touch the Jordan river, which is one of the superstars of my research, and in a few weeks, I may have the opportunity to visit a few farms in the area to observe their irrigation systems. Neither of these trips effects my real research, but it makes the project tangible.
My last course of the week is about radical Islamic political movements, and is taught by a senile ex-diplomat. Though he was surely once brilliant, he is now quite old and his class is unpredictable and stressful. He took an immediate dislike to me on the first day of class, and has never given me a chance to change his mind. In spite of this, I have learned in his course. I won't regret it, I'm sure. My project for him is about Ruhollah Khomeini and the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. I did a big research project on the doctrine of the movement about a year ago, so I am looking forward to deepening my knowledge of the topic.
It's challenging to find the enough time and energy to complete the necessary work for my courses, but coffee is everywhere, and falafel is cheap (about thirty American cents for a sandwich) so there's fuel enough to sustain me.
In any case, it's now time for me to return to essay writing. Today, I'm writing about the fall of the Maronites in Lebanon, and the rise of the 'Alawis in Syria.
Unrelated to academics, here is a picture of laundry drying on the roof of a house I see every morning during my walk to school:
Unrelated to academics, here is a picture of laundry drying on the roof of a house I see every morning during my walk to school:
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