Harmonies, Discords, and Realizations

            After many false starts and delays my schedule of classes for the second year has gotten off the ground, and, thus far, is going rather well. Having learned a lot from last year’s mistakes I’m looking forward to a very fulfilling year. I want to tell you a few anecdotes, but to start I’ll lay out my schedule so you have a framework for these stories.

            My one big disappointment this year is that I have not yet gotten morning work off the ground; I often feel like a bump on a log until work starts around 4PM. I go every morning to a café in order to have breakfast and check my e-mails. On some days my teacher friends get off work early and we chat, but other days their schedules don’t have any openings in the morning. When the English teacher gets off we talk about how the students are doing, what topics he is working on (so I can provide follow up to our mutual students), and trade ideas about how we can approach these topics. I usually follow this breakfast time with a stroll through the surrounding mountains, or stopping to say hi at the artisanal cooperative where I taught last year.

            After lunch I finish preparing lessons and materials and head off to the Dar Chabab. Theoretically, my first real job of the day is a young kids’ English class, but we’ve changed this into a singing club since they are more interested in music than English. After that I either teach one class at the Dar Chabab and then move to the Dar Taliba (female students’ dormitory) for a second, or teach two at the Dar Taliba. Originally, I’d planned on making the Dar Chabab classes a place where I would direct all the misbehaving students and direct all the behaving ones to the Dar Taliba, but most of the misbehaving boys seem to have gotten bored with disrupting classes, so instead I offer a general basic course at the Dar Chabab for first time learners and older students who need review and grade specific classes at the Dar Taliba. I finish up around 9 PM, at which point my town is a ghost town. I do this Monday through Saturday, though on Monday the Dar Chabab is closed and on Saturday the Dar Taliba is. Sunday I have off, though we’re talking about starting a morning sports club.

            Speaking about clubs, a few members of the C.L.I.M.B. program have decided they want to try and run a version of it! “Graduates” of last year’s program will now lead their own hiking and environmental club, and though they won’t have outside funding to allow for a big trip like Toubkal they still hope to do some longer day treks by splitting transportation costs. I’m helping them design lessons and will come to their first few meetings to lend them authority as student leaders, but the goal is to make this a sustainable project without the need for a Peace Corps Volunteer.

            Now on to the anecdotes: I’ve discovered that teaching music to young Moroccan children is very difficult. So far in our music club I’ve been teaching them songs we learn as kids in America like “The Ants Go Marching,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and “Are You Sleeping, Brother John?”. Surprisingly, the biggest challenge hasn’t been with the pronunciation of English words but rather with the concept of pitch in general. Since students haven’t been exposed to learning music before they don’t really get the idea of singing together on one pitch to sound nice, or, in some extreme cases, the difference between singing on pitch and yelling rhythmically. One big surprise was the first time I taught them a melody they tried to sing in my register rather than up the octave as I’d assumed they’d naturally do, though honestly I don’t know if this would be a natural reaction as my music teachers up through my voice changing were all women. After a lot of repetition the students did get pretty good at “Brother John,” so I tried to introduce the round. They looked at me like I was crazy, and the resulting train wreck only confirmed their suspicions. Going to have to go back to the drawing board on teaching singing, but at least I’m getting to teach some music!

            On the opposite musical extreme, I had some students get really excited over the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” the other day in class. I’d given them lyrics with all the verbs and verb contractions omitted as listening practice, and they got so excited by the song that they insisted we listen to it again multiple times after the class was done, with them singing and air guitaring along.

            In my highest-level class I learned something about English grammar myself the other day. My students explained that they understood how and when to use the Present Perfect tense in a complicated sentence with multiple verbs, but wanted to know how to know when to use it as opposed to the simple past in a simple sentence with just one verb. It wasn’t until they asked that I discovered I had no idea how to answer it. By thinking of examples I quickly realized what the rule I’ve unwittingly followed all my life is, but it was a pretty humbling moment.

            Which brings me to another realization I had about language the other day while talking with some teachers in the café. They were defending the Moroccan practices of writing all books in standard Arabic as opposed to the local dialect, and to teaching math and science at the university levels in French rather than Arabic. They explained that those students who wanted to reach the very highest rungs of modern mathematical and scientific study would need French (and, they added, English too), to follow modern research at the highest level, it is best they be forced to grapple with it at the undergraduate level to prepare them for the future.

I’d never really thought about the fortune of having my native language be the language from which higher-level academia is usually translated. At the highest levels of academia even a major world language like Arabic is limited. As Americans, I think we tend to think of foreign languages as a very useful luxury; even in fields where they’re necessary we only use them as a tool to access information, not as the language in which we must conduct all our work. To most of the rest of the world foreign languages, particularly my native language, are necessary tools to learning, and the expectation that students be able to learn in another language, rather than from it, is not so far-fetched as I’d first supposed.

Of all the privileges I never realized I had growing up in America this might be the most important.