#arabic flagship

[mayainmena]

برنامج الربيع

So things have finally settled down a bit here in Meknes - Diana returned to America on Monday and the schedule of classes is (almost) finalized, so I’m starting to get used to my new routine. My new schedule until March, when direct-enrollment university classes start up again, looks basically like this:

Mondays: Moroccan Arabic and Contemporary Issues in the Arab World

Tuesdays: Egyptian Arabic and Translation, then Internship

Wednesdays: Modern Standard Arabic Club (and I’ll probably be meeting with my new language partner these days once we work out our scheduling conflicts)

Thursdays: Moroccan Arabic and Contemporary Issues in the Arab World, then Internship

Fridays: Egyptian Arabic and Translation

The great thing about not having any official classes on Wednesday is that all of our classes that assign homework are always at least three days apart, giving us a lot of flexibility to handle the workload. 

One major change that’s hopefully coming up this semester involves my internship - although I’ve really been enjoying my time at the traditional music club, I’ve been feeling like I haven’t been gaining as many concrete skills as I’d like to while there, so while I continue waiting to hear back about prices for Oud lessons, I’m also going to visit the local music conservatory to talk about the possibility of my teaching there (I’d likely go there once a week and continue going to my current internship location, just less often). Everything’s still a bit up in the air on that front but hopefully I’ll have it all figured out within the next few weeks!

In other news, my friends and I have finally solidified our spring break plans - I’ll be spending a week in Italy and then four days in London! I loved Italy when I saw Florence with my sister in May, so I’m really excited to see more of the country. Then in London, as the major Harry Potter nerd I am, I’m most excited to go on a tour of the Warner Brothers studio where they’ve kept many of the sets and props from the movies that I loved as a kid and still watch to cheer me up when I’m sad. Being able to look forward to this trip, as well as my parents’ visit in a few weeks, is really helping me get through the stressful moments at school since I have so much to look forward to in the next two months (even though I sometimes find myself planning for Europe instead of doing homework...)! 

During these next few weeks, I’m planning on staying in Meknes since I’ve been traveling a lot while Diana’s been visiting - I’ve had an amazing time exploring the country with her but I’m also excited to chill at home for a few weekends, especially because after the next two weekends my life’s going to get really hectic (in a good way) again - my weekends for the next month and a half look like this:

1/28-1/29 and 2/4-2/5: relaxing in Meknes, getting caught up on homework and starting my job search

2/11-2/12: program trip to Rabat and Casablanca 

2/18-2/19 and 2/25-2/26: traveling with my parents around Morocco

3/4-3/5 to 3/11-3/12: spring break in Europe

3/18-3/19: finally another weekend of rest, only 5 weeks later!

In the next day or two I’m planning on posting about my trip to Assilah with Diana and Federico and about today’s program trip to Ifrane - after that my blog may go quiet for a few weeks until the travel starts up again but I’ll try to post some random updates!

1/26/2017

[mayainmena]

الجدول ديالي

So today was my last day of summer classes! Since things are about to change a lot I figured that I’d write a short post about all of the different components of the program and how things are going to change in a few weeks.

This summer, our work has consisted of:

10 hours/week of Modern Standard Arabic (“fusHa”) classes

5 hours/week of Moroccan Colloquial Arabic (“darija”) and 5 hours/week of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (“masri” or “amaya”)

1 hour/week of Masri Club (where 3 students meet with 1 teacher to practice our speaking skills) and 1/2 hour/week of Pronunciation Class (where we work one on one with a professor), plus optional office hours for all of our classes

4 hours/week with Language Partners

This amounts to about 25 hours of classes and meetings per week plus about 2 hours of homework a night. Things have occasionally gotten stressful but overall it’s left us with plenty of time to relax and travel on weekends, which I’ve really appreciated. However, things are going to change a lot in the fall, so we’ll see if I end up still having enough time for weekend trips and weekly blog posts...

Our fall program consists of:

3 hours/week of FusHa class, 3 hours/week of Darija Class, 3 hours/week of Arabic Literature Class, and 4 hours/week of Masri Class

2 hours/week of FusHa Club, 1 hour/week of Masri Club, 1/2 hour/week of Pronunciation Class

2 hours/week with Language Partners

8 hours/week at an internship

Starting in October: 2-3 hours/week of a direct enrollment class at a Moroccan university plus 2 hours a week with an Academic Partner to help us with our direct enrollment

It’s going to be a big change handling so many more program components, but I’m looking forward to having more diversity in my schedule. I’m particularly excited about my internship - it’s looking like I’ll be working at the Agency for Social Development, where I can help work on projects such as investing in rural infrastructure, providing information and support to local charity organizations, and helping youth get connected with jobs. The place seems really well organized and the man we met there was super nice - he explained all of the agency’s projects to us in slow, simple Arabic that we could understand and then tested us at the end to see what we understood of his explanations! I got a really good feeling about the internship from our site visit, and through this internship I might even be able to go on occasional trips to other parts of Morocco to see their work throughout the country!

All of these changes won’t start until September though - we have meetings and tests scheduled throughout the next week and then we have a week off for our summer break. This Sunday I’m planning on taking a day trip to Ifrane to see a cultural festival taking place there, then I’ll be in Meknes until I head to Northern Morocco and Spain for the last week of August! I’m hoping to post soon both about my upcoming Ifrane visit and about general reflections on the program so far.

8/12/2016

[mayainmena]

نهاية البرنامج

So after a shockingly short 3 1/2 months, I'm now mostly packed to head home in just a little over two days! The last two months in particular seem to have gone by extremely quickly, and it's super weird that the semester is pretty much done. One good thing about time moving so quickly is that it lets me know that studying abroad for a longer amount of time will be totally doable, which is great to know since I'm now officially in the Arabic Flagship program. So while I may be spending the next year and a half in the US (though I definitely might intern abroad this summer), I'll be spending a full year in Meknes, Morocco starting June 2016!

Anyway, these last few weeks in Amman have been somewhat stressful with end-of-semester assignments but altogether really great. The language pledge has somewhat broken down - most of us kept to it for a good 95% of the semester, but starting a week or so ago about half the program started just speaking English again, and the rest of us followed pretty quickly. I think I've gotten a lot out of the language pledge and I'm glad that I stuck with it for a good three months, but I'm also really relieved to be speaking English again. 

In other news, the other day my friend from CLS organized an event for CLS alumni currently living in Amman, which turned out to be super cool. It was unfortunate that I met so many cool people only within a week of leaving the country, but we had some really interesting discussions about our various study abroad experiences. One particularly interesting pattern that we found came up when we talked about sexual harassment; the girls with darker skin thought that the harassment here in Jordan was worse that what they experienced in Morocco, while those of us with lighter skin thought that the situation here was better. I'm not entirely sure what that means (we considered the fact that there are more foreign workers here so darker skin might be seen as low-class, but I feel like that would be true as well in Morocco so I don't really know), but it was definitely an interesting difference in our experiences. 

Within the next week, I'm hoping to post about our group trip to Petra as well as a smaller trip to Jerash, and then hopefully some reflections on my time abroad, both in Jordan and in general.

12/16/2014

[aleatoriccomposition]

I got accepted into the UT Arabic Flagship Summer Institute!

Whooooo!  Al Hamdulilah!