Book Addict's Blog

Well, in less than 12 hours, we'll be on a plane heading back home from Morocco. These two weeks have just flown by! And of course, my daily posts stopped after only three days...

I have mixed feelings about leaving. On the one hand, it'll be good to get away from all these bugs. I have over 50 bug bites, some of which are quite big. It's almost like having chicken pox! Also, I'm glad not to have to deal with my unruly class anymore.  You know how I said they weren't a bad class? Well, starting Thursday, they just got out of hand.  Individually, I still think they're great kids, but all together, they're very...difficult.  We had little control over the class, and the fact that we had no way to punish them except by withholding their break made it worse. It got VERY frustrating, especially today. It was the last day, and everything we had planned was not too hard and pretty fun, but they still couldn't contain themselves. I'm going to miss some of the individual kids, but not teaching the class.

On the other hand, I feel like I was still getting to know Morocco and the kids, and I would love to stay to get to know it all better. Plus, I really like being here, especially in Casablanca near the beach where it's not very hot.  I'm also going to miss the members of my team. A couple of the other members were book geeks like me (with a lot of the same reading tastes), so I'll miss especially miss our book conversations. Oh, and the dozens of Speed Scrabble games our team played! Still, at least I'll be able to see them at least occasionally once we get home, and there's always Facebook.

Anyway, I should probably get packing now. Thankfully, we're not leaving at 4 AM like we did on the way here!

Summer school went quickly again today. We had a new student today, Youssef, which brings our total up to 12, a nice, even number that makes splitting into pairs or groups easy. Some of the activities we had them do today, such as looking up dictionary definitions and writing a description of their own fantasy world took a bit longer than we expected. Also, the CD player we were using to have them listen to the next chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe kept losing it's place (esp. after we had it on pause for a discussion). So we didn't get everything done that we had planned.  Overall, though, I still think it went really well, and it should only get better as we learn what works and what doesn't and how long it will take the students to do certain tasks. The students really are well-behaved, especially since they aren't getting graded for this course. We had some problems with talking and laziness, but no real attitude problems. We'll be assigning the students seats tomorrow, so hopefully the students will stay even more on task.


After class was over, we visited a mosque.  It's the only mosque in Morocco that non-Muslims can visit (for a fee, of course). It's the third largest mosque in the world, and has the tallest minaret.  It was absolutely beautiful! I took a ton of pictures (though not all of them turned out, as it was kind of dark inside), and I was going to post them here for you, but I don't have time since my mom wants to use my computer soon. Maybe I will later...