Duly humbled
The heat these past few days has been stifling, and even on my balcony I’ve had to resort to sitting in damp clothing in order to keep cool for lack of a breeze. But at the very least, for now I’m no longer being stifled by my homework: today was our final exam for CASA’s summer semester, and it was very, very difficult–even more difficult than the CASA entrance exam, although mercifully much shorter. The listening section, in which we heard a clip from al-Jazeera describing the ruckus caused by an Iranian film describing Anwar as-Sadat as a “traitor” and his assassin as a “martryr,” as well as the essay question asking us to analyze a quote from the novel we’ve been reading, were of average difficulty. The reading section on which I spent the bulk of my time, however, consisted of a very long, very dense article on the Iranian media, which most disappointingly contained almost none of the semester’s vocabulary words that I’d spent part of my weekend reviewing, but did contain a large number of words I certainly didn’t know, along with tortuous sentence structures that ensured that I still don’t have a clear idea what it was trying to say. When the CASA students and faculty went out to lunch afterwards as a capstone to our summer, my teacher asked me how I was.
“I’m spent,” I admitted. “That was an extremely difficult article.”
“Yes,” she said good-naturedly, and appeared to consider the matter. “I think what I really wanted to show you guys with the test was how much Arabic you still have to learn. I found during the semester that there was some arrogance among the students this year in their dealings with the readings and other material.”
I admitted that there was a certain sense among my classmates and myself that, having been accepted to CASA, we were the best Arabic students around, and that some of the readings (which yes, I occasionally found idiotic) were beneath us or didn’t deserve our time.
“We can learn something from every article,” my teacher reminded me. “That was what I wanted you guys to think about after the test.”
Well, she succeeded; after an exam like that, I don’t feel I have much to boast about.
