Arabic Bonding
Since the beginning of the semester, there has been one courtyard in particular that I essentially make my home during the day. There is a nice fountain, providing calming background noise, plenty of seating if you get there before the lunch crowd, a few massive trees for shade when its warm, and a nice balcony that gets direct sunlight all day to warm you up if its cold I go there every morning and do homework or meet people for coffee or catch up on e-mail and after weeks of doing this I have noticed that it also has a very high concentration of middle eastern language students and what an insane group we are. Most of these are in the Arabic department, and at any given point in time you can usually find at least one professor, a few TAs and several students mixed in here and there. We have Connie, from the Persian department, that actually got kicked out of the PhD program but still comes here every morning and works on her Persian website, pulling a table about 20 feet every day so that it is under the awning and she doesn't have to leave rain or shine until the end of the day. Apparently the Persian department has had a bunch of scandal and corruption lately, and that there is a book floating around with the inside story and Connie got on the bad side of the entire department and they just refused to mentor her. When we get closer to lunch the people scattered around the courtyard all pick up other people as seats get scarce and the population increases. This is what I find the most interesting, because of all of the departments at UT and all of the languages, I don't think any of them band together like Arabic. TAs students and professors all sit together and just hang out, usually doing some kind of Arabic related activity but completely of their own will. We still have the formal office hours, but outside of class and outside of the formal meetings we are all just people learning the language. A great example of this happened last night. I met up with Noor to study. She was sitting with Connie so I joined them. Connie left, and our dardasha (conversation sections) TA Steve came and joined us, sitting down to grade homework while we reviewed vocabulary and slowly we grew as people walked by, pulling in another table to give everyone more space and we ended up studying for seven hours and having a blast. Steve stayed most of the time, answering questions while he did his own work, and we had some native speakers join the group and a think an upper level student as well and we just had fun. As a bonus, I am fully prepared for an arabic test for the first time, with no nerves or doubt.