Habiba is our new femme de menage (I hate the word ‘maid’). I’ve not spoken to her yet, but she scares me a lot. Mounia was friendly but quiet unless it was acceptable. Habiba strikes me as the type to command and be obeyed. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow night alone with her. Bad times.

Aside from this, I have a statement to make to all those students in my class. This is in no way personal, but I felt like I was going to burst earlier, because everyone had another mammoth complaint session.

1) If you have not attended every class this year, you have no right to say Si Zaim is teaching us too slowly. You appreciated it when you had to catch up.
2) If you did not attend every class last year, you have no right to claim you didn’t learn anything. Maybe you missed all the important lectures. That is your own fault, and no-one elses.
3) Unless you have 100% in a quiz this year, you cannot claim we are not learning anything, or that we are only covering what was covered last year. Clearly you needed to, otherwise you’d be getting full marks on every quiz.
4) If you ever ask for vocabulary, you have no right to go around saying other people don’t try hard enough to learn it.
5) If you want something to happen, go and do it rather than complaining about it. An example being today when I was the person to go find our teacher once our break was over, while everyone else sat and complained. If you have a problem, go and fix it.
6) If you act like a serious student you will be treated as one. If people always turned up, revised at home and did their homework, and didn’t abuse the breaks we are given, then we would be going a lot more quickly, and we wouldn’t be being treated like five year olds.

FINALLY

7) Independence. It is up to you. If you want to learn really good spoken Arabic, go out and find a study partner. If you want to read well, practice reading longer pieces. Read the news and translate it for translation. If you don’t get what you want out of your degree, it is no fault but your own. Lecturers are facilitators and nothing else. Stop expecting to be handed a 1st on a plate, it is a ‘higher education’ qualification for a reason, and that is that it’s harder than school and you have to want it.

Come on guys, please. It’s just painful listening to you bitch.