Few suns and moons after announcing my English workshop that was the product of months of travail and a big energy-investment on the marketing plan. I by the law of attraction vibrated in the frequency of an English Teacher again and was proposed a very challenging task that is to teach the researchers, doctors and teachers of the USTHB English for Academic purposes. The main task was to make them amply equipped by the essential tools in order for them to teach in English by September.
Logically, since they were in the B1 level teaching would require a C1 level, and if we calculate the teaching hours it would be possible. But I had to develop a curriculum from my own imagination, and I was well-versed in this after reading Creative Imagination in the Sufism of ibn Arabi. In which the intuition brings up the adequate pathway for a specific purpose as long as it is conducted heartedly and not professionally. In this view, the planning that drew itself in my head was as it follows:
· An Initiation to Academic English.
· Types of Words and Academic Essay Writing.
· Pathos, Logos and Ethos.
· Received Pronunciation
· Idiomatic
On the first day, as I walked in the classroom. I was faced by an expression of Judgement and shock that I deducted it to be the effect of my eccentric apparel and rigid undecipherable aura or perhaps my young age. Thankfully, I was very fluent in French and I let the words take the lead as in my performances without losing the flow in the ephermal. I noticed that most of them had a fear of judgement from the students that they were supposed to teach, contrastly they too were judgers and were unconsciously projecting their judgements on others. I endeavored to explain to them that the problem was not linguistic but more philosophic since the French way of thinking is heavily subjective and always start by an Anti-these. Nevertheless, as time was passing by and their ego started gaining trust in my experience as a writer, performer and teacher, we became ready to embark on our journey.
What was perhaps special and unique about this opportunity was that I worked in a vast natural milieu that gave me a pause from the harsh and dark vibes of Bouz in which delinquency and corruption takes a mixture with Literature and western-thinking that I found very interesting as I described it in “Behind the B” poem or “Son of Algiers”. However, the USTHB had a more naturally-inspired vibes and I switched from Dark Romanticism to Naturalism with no initiation whatsoever. There was a gateway for the esoteric and the spiritual and an opportunity to learn from nature and observation.
The USTHB had a very polite and more down-on earth populace. The agents were manly but not too corruptive. Some departments matched their specialty, the electrical engineering department was cold and forsaken but had a genius-like energy flowing between the classrooms. The biological department had a cleaner atmosphere, crowded and fast-paced, it was as Biology very vivid. As for the strolls within the campus, they were long and inspiring under the right weather it was very possible to have a mystical experience.
Within a long journey of observation and transcendence. Algerian society will always endeavor to lower one’s level of thinking and to bring him down to their levels in which he will seem incapable. I don’t know what yet is about to become afflicting but I doubt that a natural plateau will permit such sins in its academic atmosphere. I will continue walking aimlessly for long moments of epiphanies and transcendence, student that I was, curious and delirious. Nostalgia is in the making and will be shaped out of these fresh natural strolls in an academic milieu.
Comments