July 12-15

Here's a picture of me wearing purple, a color I don't usually wear, and hence the need to take a picture. Luke's mom sent it to me as a present when he came to visit me, and I got a ton of compliments from people!

Also, this week was the toughest yet for me. Last Friday, they switched our professor Halima for Sanae (from the Advanced 2 class). I was really upset because I really liked the dynamic we had going with Halima and Azeez. I also had been hearing awful things about Sanae as a teacher, so when I found out about the switch, I wasn't too excited. On Friday, we had our first class with Sanae, and she's a wonderful professor, but her energy level is not the same as Halima's. Class wasn't bad on Friday and I was just so excited Luke was coming, I was in a good mood no matter what.

On Monday, I realized that Sanae and Azeez are both very mellow in their teaching style, so class got a little boring. Tuesday and Wednesday were tough because our class and our professors were still adapting to each other. In addition to this, I was sick, so that didn't help at all. However, things started to change Wednesday night, when, after having slept a lot during the past couple of days, I started feeling better.

Thursday I was finally feeling better and I went into class with a very positive attitude and it totally paid off! In my opinion it was one of the best classes we've ever had. Sanae taught the grammar section in review for the midterm and all of the grammar concepts we had studied up until then became clearer. Azeez led the section of the class relating to our literature reading, and he is just amazing. He knows a ton and is really interested in literature so he helped us understand a short story written by a Moroccan author. We talked about the symbolism in the story and the author's intention to criticize the power system in Morocco that represses the impoverished people of the country. It was awesome!

Then we had the midterm, and I didn't do so great, but oh well, we're here to learn!