In their shoes!

I regard teaching as a very influential profession. I’ve always liked it and think a lot that if I wasn’t an engineer; I’d like to be a teacher. Or may be when I finally retire, I shall go to some rural area, build a school there and start changing the world :). I may be thinking in this way because I had some teachers who have really changed my life and I’d like now to mention them by name to show my gratitude to what they’ve done to me or just to the kind of teachers they have been. They were both my teachers during the preparatory stage; my Arabic teacher Mr. Ahmad Suleiman, and my English teacher Miss Hayam.

Beside the great message that teaching can deliver and all the nice things such process may involve, it can be really hard and frustrating. I’m not going to talk about the situation of our educational system, because it’s really bad and just talking about it is depressing, I’d rather talk about a personal experience that I’m having. For about a month now, I’ve been teaching Arabic (Egyptian Colloquial) to foreigners (actually they’re just two) as a volunteer in a non-governmental organization that offers free course to students, mainly by other students. Such courses include language courses that are preferably taught by foreign students who happen to be in Egypt. In return, such students need to learn Arabic in order to be able to communicate more easily in their daily lives. When I volunteered I was planning to teach computer but it somehow ended up with me teaching Arabic. This is almost my first experience in teaching and though it may seem easy, because after all it’s 3amaya! It isn’t that easy at all. This is because 1st 3amaya has no rules, 2nd many rules in Arabic hasn’t a match in English, 3rd the last time I studied the rules of Arabic (grammar and such stuff) was back in high school and now I don't remember most of the rules. I’m trying to do my best but I really feel bad and become frustrated when I find my students not paying attention, making gestures that show that they’re waiting impatiently for the lecture to end or at least don’t get what I’m saying. I feel that I must be interesting all the time and that my students should understand each and every word of what I’m saying.

After this experience I really became more compassionate with all the teachers I’ve ever had, because I simply stood in their shoes! I felt that I should have paid more attention and should have never fallen asleep during the lectures, even the boring ones :).