My parents are a typical Tunisian couple. They have been struggling since very young to be educated in order to get any job that will guarantee them some decent living. For them any time spent outside school should be also for school. A typical answer from dad if you ask him about the way to fill in one’s leisure time is to memorize a dictionary and from mom a dictionary is a luxury that she could not afford when she was a student. A dictionary is like any holly book; it should be well-kept for the longest time.
I do take very good care of all my dictionaries but I have never been able to memorize any, not even a single page. I tried and I failed every time. Thinking over my achievements in my almost 26 year-long life, I tend to be proud of what I did with very little recourses to dictionaries and with doing any thing other than school stuff in my leisure time. I studied the way I wanted when ever and how ever I wanted. Yet, I do admit that my parents had shaped a lot of my first academic baby steps.
By the time I was growing up, the local Tunisian TV used to function in Modern Standard Arabic (different in all linguistic aspects except phonologically from colloquial Tunisian Arabic). As I spent hours and hours watching, I internalized a great bulk of the language. In primary school, I watched my friends struggling trying to memorize grammar rules while I was quietly walking to the class and answering the language exam questions so easily. If asked why I provided such answers, I would not be able to reply. My answer would be some thing like “musicality says so”. Language is a set of harmoniously organized sounds. I can listen and tell something is wrong but expecting me to rationalize or actively engage into analysis is just a waste of time for me. For this reason I loved reading my children’s books out loud.
I am not sure when exactly I started reading. Most likely, by the end of first grade, I was able to read. I would read and read non-stop. I loved it when my mother would buy me books. I hated borrowing books from the local public library. But, what I hated more was when the family budget goes tight and I would have to wait until mom gets her salary to go bookshop for me. I wished I had had a new book every day. I would have read them and be ready to present them to my classmates. However, school was not the fun I had had expected. It was not all about reading and presenting.
All classroom memories are so bitter. In my first grade, I was mocked by the teacher because I could not answer a question. Worse, she had heard me joking and laughing with my friends on the way home and took this against me. I was not playing in the street and was not saying any obscene words either. All that was I was laughing. Maybe I should have been crying or who knows what. I do not know why I was not able to answer. However, for sure that was the reason why I became more careful and more hardworking. I have always been first in class just because of and thanks to that incident with that teacher.
Today, about to be an instructor, I can never forgive that teacher. She punished me for no mistake, like many others. The teacher in the second grade laughed at me and made my “mistake” public to my classmates so that they can laugh. My “mistake” was that I colored a cat in blue while according to her, there are no blue cats. My little brain “had a method to its madness”. In real life there were no blue cats; that was why the cat in the book can be blue, some change in a way.
Today no teacher can shake me. Even when I make a mistake, I simply ask for the correct answer. A teacher once tried to laugh because I used the wrong idiomatic expression but she regretted it. I made her give the right answer by keeping a straight face and waiting on her to correct me. I could read on her face that she was shocked by my attitude.
With these basic first language classes, I did take other classes in math and science but I was so bored. As simply as I tend to think of them, I am not made for them although most of the teachers were excellent. I do not remember much of my struggle with any numerical subjects. I do not care much about them. Most of what I care about is what would give me some decent general knowledge and all statistics formulas that I can use to study languages. So, I will carry on with my experience with languages. French is next; I took it, as all Tunisian peers, at age 8.
Nobody told me I would take French and it was not something I watched on TV at an early age. It was only few words, which dad used, to shush me every now and then. I performed poorly in French. My mother would help every now and then but because I enjoyed studying on my own, I hated that I was dependent on somebody, even if that was my mother. I struggled with French: my sentences were plain, simple and humorless unlike Arabic. Until, one day in class, after some 9 years of studying the language, I was struck by the teacher asking me to speak and I could not say much, if ever I said some thing. I was so upset with myself.
Like a queen hurt in her pride, I was so disappointed. I have always considered myself as a language queen. I thought I had had always controlled language. How dare French reverse the situation? After all it was a language. I started reading and focusing more on the language. Before you know, I took control over this second language at age 15, a couple of years after I started English. English played its magic on me.
I started English at 12 years old. I think I used to hear news about Madeline Thatcher in Arabic and, of course, I knew she was speaking English. I was mad because I could not understand it. Since I started learning English, it has become every thing in my life. I would do all homework and more; I would rush to the English classroom and I pledged that I would never skip any class out of dedication. I was blessed with having really good teachers, so, it helped a great deal.
Yet, I tend to think that with English, it is a completely different story. I had never had any computer or cable TV until after I graduated. So, my main resource of learning failed me this time. Even when I caught up on French, TV was there, as in Tunisia, we have a free access to them. In order to bridge the rift in my resources, I would use dictionaries, read any English book I come cross and ask teachers any question I had. I gave my soul to studying English and wanted to be as fluent as any native speaker. Whenever I go to a friend’s or a relative’s house, I would ask to turn on any English channel for me. I could not understand much at the beginning. I was so frustrated and sometimes I had a feeling “my business was failing”. At University, for some reason I do not know, all my friends had the most developed cable TV connections and could afford the best computers and even pay themselves any of those language training or even trips to English-speaking countries. However, my English has always been better than any of them. I am not exaggerating if I say that I was their reference in a lot of issues.
Looking back over my academic experience, I tend to think that I have made the right choices as I could overcome the family tight budget and the limited academic resources of the country. No school in Tunisia has a writing center to help or free tutoring services. I have been to three countries for free just because I studied hard to qualify for scholarship. I do admit it was hard though. At times I feel weak and bored with the long days of studying. At times, there were incidents in class that would make me think twice. Sometimes meeting poorly performing teachers, I would think whether these are going to be my future colleagues. I end up concluding that it was not worth the effort to study hard. However, it is part of who I am. I do not even think of it as studying hard. I think of it as a preparation for a future.
Motivation has played an interesting role in pushing me to succeed. Every now and then, I met good, maybe I should say excellent, teachers who made things look simple and accessible. Plus, in Tunisia, one way of overcoming challenging economic situation is to study hard and get a well-paying job. I did not have much choice; so I focused on school. I had ups and down and maybe I can generalize that every success was preceded with a failure. But, here I am today and who knows maybe, I will end up in Harvard and be as cited as Stephen Kraschen is in Linguistics.
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