前途: A Year in Morocco

I just had a review session with my students in a café. Moroccans have an amusing tendency to use “coffee” in English as the word for both the drink and the place, since in French café means both. It is part of what makes their English delightfully Moroccan-flavored.

Looking back, it’s something I never would have done at the beginning of my time here. American professors are much more casual in their interaction with students than Moroccan professors, and the fact that I’m so close to my students in age also complicates the student-teacher relationship. There was an adjustment period. Now, we’re fine, and we can sit in a café for a couple hours.

I have to say that I’m impressed with them on several levels. For one thing, they’re not afraid to express their ideas, and their ability to converse in English has improved dramatically over the quarter. I suspect that they were capable of conversing before, but just were generally not in an environment where they feel comfortable expressing themselves in front of their professors, for fear of criticism about their language skills.

There’s a clear generation gap between professors and students. I think the professors teach with the expectation that students are in an English major to become career academics, do research, and write articles or books in English. To write books, you must have nearly flawless English, and that’s what they have in mind when they grade. I don’t think most of my students have the same goal in mind.

They want to be able to converse, to be able to be friends with English-speakers, and to use their English in business situations to work with the rest of the world. They want to understand America and its people and government. None of these goals requires that they have perfect grammar; it requires that they have useful and accurate vocabulary and the ability to express themselves clearly.

The other thing I was really impressed by is that they are showing more evidence of thinking critically and analytically, and understanding that a thing can be good and bad, that things are complex, that there are multiple causes and layers and sides to events. Those were my goals for the semester.

At the end of the session, they used “the American ideal of equality” to convince me to let them pay part of the bill, thereby using my teachings against me. It struck me that they were applying what we’ve been discussing all semester, even if it was in a lighthearted way. :)