CP #2

Since I wasn’t sure if Ahmed had a car or not (as it turns out, he does) I asked him if he would meet me in front of Strozier.   We ended up sitting on Landis and talked mostly about what school was like for us when we were younger and he asked me what I thought of the changes made in Tallahassee since I moved here in 1994.  He was really interested in how I felt about school and whether or not I actually liked it.  I told him that I was one of those unfortunate weirdo’s that actually liked school because it meant I didn’t have to be around my family all the time, which sounds harsh, but I explained to him that my family relationship hasn’t always been as good as it is now.  He thought that the fact that I liked school was strange and I explained that my teachers (usually) tried to keep class interesting and really worked hard to make sure the students were participating in class.  He told me that in Saudi Arabia, sometimes school can be overly serious, which was something that makes it boring for a lot of the kids there and that he didn’t really like going to school as a kid.  Everyone takes the same classes in the same school, so you can go to all of your schools knowing the exact same people who always did the exact same things.  He also mentioned that teachers always know the students who will be the best because of where they position themselves in the class and that students who typically sit in the back are seen as a "lost cause" for a lot of teachers because their seating placement means they are lazy.  Ahmed told me that he was planning on going back to Saudi Arabia to teach, but that he wanted to bring over some American teaching methods to add to the Saudi school system, which I thought was very interesting because I always imagine the American school system to be kind of lazy instead of how he sees it, which is a fun and somewhat more motivational system than the one he is used to.  Ahmed was also interested as to why we weren’t going to have school on Monday (1/21), so I told him that it was Martin Luther King Jr. day and he wasn’t sure who MLK was, so we had a talk about who he was, what he did, and why it’s important to remember that.    Ahmed is curious about different aspects of American culture and tries so hard to get words right (both in use and pronunciation) and I have a lot of respect for the amount of effort he puts into conversing with me.