Al-Tareeq - The Path

The beginning of Ramadan brought with it a few road bumps. At the start of Lesson Six, students were the most unengaged that they had been throughout the entire course as many of them complained about a lack of sleep due to waking up early for the iftar. Moreover, a few of our students didn’t even show up. Though we did not anticipate what was ahead of us, we were able to revitalize students by starting off with some activities that got them moving around the classroom. We moved the chairs and the desks and sat ourselves and the students on the floor in a circle in hope of bolstering a more balanced conversation. Lesson Six was a conceptual lesson, and we wanted Lesson Seven to be more of an active learning experience.

We began Tuesday’s class with an English vocabulary quiz, as we’d been introducing them keywords throughout the previous classes. However instead of passing out quiz papers we simply put English words on the board, one by one, and called on students to translate them into Arabic. This ended up being an effective way of energizing our students, as we made sure to call on everybody and create some sort of a competitive environment.

We adopted the same seating arrangement as the previous class and split the students into teams that they will work with for the remainder of our program. They had previously identified business ideas that they wanted to pursue, so the next thirty minutes of class focused on brainstorming. Again, students were a bit baffled by the concept and adopted more of a “note-taking” mentality as opposed to the team-oriented approach we wanted them to take, so we did our own example of brainstorming to help ease the process.

While many of the students really buy into what we’re trying to teach and believe that they can make a difference, a few of the male students are less engaged. They often distract their peers and make inappropriate comments and we constantly have to remind them to focus. While it is important to remember the circumstances, and that each student requires different attention when learning, it is stressful to have a majority of our class display an eagerness to learn only to be tainted a few students. It almost seems as though they are going out of their way to make the class difficult on us—but perhaps this is a defense mechanism and we need to work harder to allow these students to trust us.

 What is more encouraging, however, is while there are some students who take this opportunity for granted, we have students on the other side of the scale. One teenager, a 17 year-old boy who volunteers at the center for no pay, is an extremely talented video game designer. However, he has no intention of making money from it- despite getting interest from large companies who want to hire him- because he simply does it for fun and wants to give back to his community. It really is eye opening.

It is helpful for us to experience these problems because we are able to take note and approach future programs with more of an open mentality. We are growing every day and with your support we can continue to provide interested students with opportunities to make a difference in their communities.