Moving Classes and Media Overload

Today began a new experience for me in the Arabic course here. For the past seven months that Susan and I have been navigating the world of DLI Arabic, we have done so from separate classrooms. She was always in the section next door, and I'd only see her during our ten minute breaks between class hours. Yesterday, however, our teaching team leader approached me to ask if I could switch into the other section, thus putting the top four students in our class into one room all day. From an academic perspective I was really excited by this opportunity. The students in the other section would be able to challenge me, forcing me to improve my Arabic at a faster rate (granted, that faster pace scared me at the same time). I was also very leery of being in the same room as my wife all day long. I love her completely, but with both of us being very competitive, I was apprehensive about the constant proximity.

Well, it didn't take long for us to realize the difficulties of this new arrangement: just one day together. We recently began using the first hour of each morning to listen to media Arabic - usually the Al-Jazeera evening broadcast. While this practice certainly necessary, it also tiring! Twenty minutes of Arabic news doesn't sound like much, but the mental concentration that it requires is staggering. In that amount of time we get 6 to 7 different stories, but I have the mental stamina for about three. There's a definite difference in the quantity and quality of the notes that I take during the first three stories as opposed to the later ones.

So, after a tough hour of trying to listen to lots of media Arabic, my brain and motivation were both shot. The next hour, my attitude got the better of me and I shut down. Of course, my wife, for all her protests to the contrary, was still plugging along, dutifully understanding her Arabic. In the past, while I knew her skill to be superior to mine, the knowledge was very conceptual; she was in the other room. Now that I'm sitting just a few feet away from her, it has a much different feel to it. I'm extremely proud of her, but intimidated at the same time. At the break, I ignored her, rather than rushing to see her, as was my norm. Suffice it to say, being in the same classroom as my wife all day, then seeing her at home all night, has added a new wrinkle to both learning Arabic and our relationship.