Moving to Cairo

We’re shaking things up a bit, Egypt-style.

After nearly a semester here in Alexandria, I feel as though I haven’t accomplished nearly as much as I might have liked to. This is not for lack of trying. I have been met at every turn by roadblocks, bureaucracy, and—frankly—bullshit. I have had endless trouble getting an internet connection, upon which I depend for doing research, communicating, and more.

The library here, though a great resource, takes me a half-hour to get into every time I go, because I must check my bag, carry only what I predict that I will need, register my laptop with security, wait for lines of tourists through three stages of security, reserve a study room, and so on. Once inside, the books are there, and I can find the articles that I need from the JSTOR and Wilson archives online or in the stacks, but I can’t download them, or print them unless I use my laptop, which sometimes has trouble with the internet in the Library.

On top of that, the collection is still not fully processed, so they do not allow circulation yet, so the books stay in-house. You can copy anything you want, which the staff will do for you. This is very convenient, but you have to get your requests in early or you are SOL at the end of the day without the copies that you need.

My classes at the University in Arabic have been an utter joke. I learn more Arabic in the street than I do in class—of course, which is why I am here. The teachers are quite good and there is the odd session in which I learn something new. However, for the most part, the classes are mostly a rehashing of things that I learned years ago, none of which actually help you to read or speak any better. Rather than reading novels or newspapers in most of the classes, we sit for hours and go over lists of new vocabulary or undertake silly, fill-in-the-blank exercises on prepositions, adverbs, and verb conjugation.

Initially I thought that we were just doing a quick review session to get us ready to get to work. The quick review has drawn out over months, and this “intensive” course lacks any measure of intensity. I have one instructor who does make us do the things that I am looking for. For Dina’s media Arabic class, every week, we look at media pieces and then bring them to class and go over them as a group so that she can explain things that we may not have understood. We can listen to the news on the radio or television, read magazines and newspapers, or whatever we like.

This is the method by which I would prefer to be studying at this point. You can only learn so much grammar before it will simply not be of any use to you. You can know all of the grammar in the world and still not be able to read. This is a problem.

Again, the problem here has not been with the instructors, it is that they are not operating using any pedagogical model whatsoever, and the control over what they do teach us is coming from some sort of central authority, the pedagogical understanding of whom is entirely outdated.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I am going to finish out this semester in Alex and then move to Cairo and take classes at a little language school. I will not get credit for this, but will likely learn more. At the same time, I will be more able to get books that I need and be able to use the AUC (American University in Cairo) library for research. I think that it will all work out in the end, allowing me to take what is actually an intensive course in Arabic and thus giving me more time to work on other very important things like, say, my thesis. I have several chapters partially written right now, which I will finish over the coming holiday when I no longer have to spend 4+ hours a day wasting time sitting in useless classes.

It also will work to my advantage because I have a few good friends who live in Cairo who can show me the ropes that I don’t already know. It will also put me in closer proximity to tourist-type things that my friends want to see when the come to visit.

This move will likely occur in the first week in January. Wish me luck.

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