The Blog and the Shower

I’m currently in Boston, living in an area that more closely resembles suburbia than anywhere I’ve resided in a long time.  There are no cul-de-sacs, which where the feature of suburban planning that most tortured me when I spent a summer walking door-to-door registering voters when I was eighteen–what’s apparently efficient for cars is quite the opposite for walkers–but here I’m still forced to traverse on foot distances that were scaled for motorized vehicles, walking twenty minutes to buy vegetables that I could have found by walking two minutes in any direction from my dwellings in Damascus and New York.  It’s a residential neighborhood, so also in contrast to Damascus and New York (two very different cities in other respects) the small houses are set a little ways apart from each other, and also from the street; there are trees in between the sidewalks and the asphalt, and everything is very neat and clean, probably because no one walks, very few people take the bus, and there is only a small pocket of time between leaving one’s house and climbing into one’s car in which everybody else could damage the area in any way.  The houses are pretty, though, in the rather New England way of pale-colored clapboards, and from mine I can walk to several small malls filled with the chain restaurants I associate mostly with airport layovers, one moderately fancy chain hotel, several liquor stores, many hair salons, a few humdrum “ethnic” restaurants, at least as many Dunkin’ Donuts as there are Starbucks in my own hometown, and the Mystic River of Hollywood infamy, though I haven’t discovered any bodies dumped into it.  I take two buses to get anywhere in Boston, and two buses home, and I come back to an apartment of white walls and polished hardwood floors in which the only furniture is the table, chair, and futon in my bedroom.  I have a roommate, but I haven’t met him, only seen traces of his presence in the apartment while I’ve been out: three days ago there was only my food in the fridge, and two days ago he left a bowl of peaches, and today they’re gone.

If near-suburbia is slightly depressing, however, at least it’s easy to escape it through my job at an “inner-city” school, in an area of Boston that was described as a “ghetto” by friends who grew up in the city (although all the word showed me was that they’d never visited this neighborhood, since that turned out to be a gross exaggeration).  I teach Arabic to high school students at a summer program led by a crusading public high school teacher with three Masters degrees who’s out to change who, exactly, can study this language.  It is, in fact, pretty difficult to get very far with Arabic if you’re not from a certain socio-economic class, as a list of my CASA classmates’ alma maters’ suggets: Harvard, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, University of Chicago, Georgetown, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania… In short, it’s difficult to get into Arabic, much less continue with it, outside of only a handful of higher-education institutions–and the few high schools that are beginning to teach Arabic are overwhelmingly private and expensive prep schools.  The program I teach with, however, is free to all students, who recieve a $500 scholarship if they pass the course; in addition, students whose families make less than a certain amount each year are also paid $8.00 for each hour they spend in class, in order to enable them to study rather than work in the summer.  So a majority of the students are from racial or ethnic “minorities”; about half are from public high schools; and just under half don’t speak English as their first language.  The mixed relationships these students have with educational institutions can make teaching a challenge, mainly because it isn’t always clear whether we should prioritize teaching Arabic for those who will continue to study it in college, or making Arabic “fun”–which is one way, but perhaps the slowest way, to  teach it–in order to try to spark an interest in Middle Eastern issues for those who aren’t already, or simply giving kids who have very few opportunities to travel a wider perspective on the world.  Ideally, of course, we’d do all three, but the press of time usually means we have to pick and choose–something I’ll write a little more about later.