A Painful Week

Tuesday, May 4

The theme for this week is pain. I don’t mean physical pain—I mean mental. And possibly emotional, too. To start off Tuesday’s class, no one wanted to participate. Also, a good half of the class has a chronic condition called I-don’t-do-the-homework. So not only does anyone participate—or if they do, it’s like pulling teeth—barely anyone has the correct answer. This put my professor in a nasty mood, and I don’t blame her. 

The homework took us an hour to go over. It truly felt painful. And I felt inadequate, because I thought I did a good job of completing it. Spoiler alert: I did not. Zero points for Lex, one point for the Arabic homework. Again and again, my professor got after us to learn our vocab. (I really need to study my vocab.) She assigned us homework, but I had no clue what she wanted. The instructions were not clear in the textbook, and she just said “do this exercise.” I’m so ready for this semester to be over. 

Thursday, May 6

I really didn’t think Thursday would be much better, and unfortunately I was right. While I hadn’t done the homework that was assigned, I quickly caught on to what my professor wanted when it came to that particular assignment. Personally, I know the concepts; it just takes me forever to put things together because 1) I don’t know my vocab like I should, and 2) my pronunciation is so atrocious that I stutter and freeze up whenever I attempt to speak in class. I will say that knowing how to properly use possessive pronouns and knowing how to correctly conjugate a verb has saved my ass multiple times. There’s a guy in my class who I swear doesn’t know his right from his left. My professor has gone over certain concepts all semester long. It truly puzzles me how some of these people still haven’t caught on. 

Also, it baffles me how some of my other classmates are so disrespectful to our professor. There are many times where I am frustrated, but it’s really frustration at myself because I don’t study like I should. My professor is just doing her job—and being pretty damn good at it, especially for Zoom University. Some of my classmates skip class, don’t study, don’t do their homework, and then act confused as to why our professor rips them a new one when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do! Honestly, some people are just rude. 

It’s crazy to think that I only have two more classes (I think) and then an exam. This semester has flown by. 

Arabic Word of the Week

salad / sulta / سلطة