You don’t even want to be here!
So, my first story is going to take place back when I was in 6th grade. The teacher, who I’m going to refer to as Mrs. S, was our Arabic teacher.
So, for future reference, there are two Arabic classes, heritage and non-heritage. Basically those who came from Arabic speaking families were in heritage and their work was hard.
I, for some odd reason, was placed in Heritage. This was due to my parents being from Northern Africa. The issue, of course, is that when listening to Arabic from any North African country, you will find it so different, to the point were many Native Arabic speakers can’t understand!
And I made it very well known that I couldn’t understand a lot of the things, matter of fact (funny side story, another Arabic teacher (we will discuss her another time) was in absolute shock when she found out that, I, an Arabic speaker didn’t know the proper word for black. See where I’m from, we call it Khal, but in Arabic it was Aswad!) I had spoken to the school “Counselor” (another story) about how awful the class was.
So of course, as it was, Mrs. S finds out that people were not happy with her. So one day, we were suppose to have Physical Ed. instead of Arabic (the scheduling in this school is a whole other story), but the P.E teacher was unable to attend, so while non-heritage had their teacher taken outside, we were forced to have Arabic.
This is the part when all hell breaks loose. We had told Mrs. S about the fact that we were suppose to have P.E. Thats when she broke.
She began yelling at us, telling us that she knew that we were complaining about her and that if we had a problem we should have gone to her! Then she went down the line and pointed at each of us saying something or another.
This was a while back, so forgive me because I can’t remember what she said to everyone. But I remember her distinctly pointing at me and saying
“I don’t even know if you want to be in this class!”
Ok, wow.
But in all seriousness, she went out of line, she yelled at us the entire class, and when class was over we were all too scared to move from our seats.
The best part of all this was that she was yelling in Arabic, and I understood basically nothing. Yet she made it a point to speak English when she went down the line and pointed at us each.
If memory serves me correctly, she pointed at one student and said that they spoke too much and that they were annoying, or something to that extent.
No, but for real, if you’ve never been yelled at in Arabic, you wouldn’t understand. It’s like terrifying. See even though I couldn’t understand 90% of what came out her mouth, it was still scary!
But, yeah we ended up leaving the class slightly traumatized, slightly laughing!
