culture

finished my last day of classes for the week and am now on a eid al-fitr break that will extend through sunday. this past week was a review week. each day, students taught/reviewed the chapters that we had covered this past quarter. today, the student teaching the class lead a pictionary-charades activity to practice and review vocabulary from chapter 10. there were only 4 of us in class today. with one of the students at the front of the room leading the class, we were 3 students and one teacher. so my teacher, osama, and a girl in my class formed a team and i was paired with one student. the game is like this: there were a stack of slips of paper at the front of the room, each with vocabulary words and either “act” or “draw” written on them. a piece of paper is pulled from the pile and members from both team race to get their team member to guess the word before the other team. there were some interesting cultural differences that emerged whenever instructor osama was at the front of the room. it’s cool to think that depending on what culture you grew up in, the images that come to mind for certain concepts may differ from person to person. while it may seem like common sense, it's something that we so easily forget. it's easy to become ethnocentric, even in simple, everyday concepts. it's nice to be reminded of the richness and diversity in thinking and understand that culture brings and to appreciate the differences.

word: battle



note the straight sword versus the curved, single-edged saif.

word: emergency



in addition to my modern standard arabic, i am also taking a colloquial jordanian class, which meets for an hour two times a week. a couple weeks ago, we had a lesson on the family unit and learned the terms for family members as used in the jordanian dialect. in teaching us these words, our instructor drew a picture of her family on the board. it is interesting to note the hijabs on all the women in the picture, except for the little girls. the family picture looked something like this: