Friday, February 22, 2013

Back to School!

I started school 2 weeks ago. I was a week late joining due to my greatness at procrastination, but anyone who's been to Hawza anywhere in the world knows that week 1 is really disorganised as most of the teachers are double booked and/or not prepared to teach, plus the queues in the bookshop were so long that the teachers were a bit half hearted in the first week. (Its hard to say - do exercise 3&4 from page 25 when no one has the book! lol)

My timetable isn't so bad. I have 5 days a week, 4 hours a day. (Plus about 8 hours at home trying to memorise and translate!)


I have sarf 1 every day (which I've done in Syria), Fiqh 2 (which I did in Iran when I was last living here), Tajweed (which I also did in Syria), the history of civilisation (sounds a bit weird, but its actually quite interesting and plus I have a really good teacher), Akhlaq (which I am struggling with), History of the first 5 Imams and Uloomul Quran (which I also did in Syria, but am sitting the class mainly to improve my Farsi)

Most of my teachers are really good except the sarf one who constantly mixes up the past and present tense in Arabic. Not so helpful for the girls who are new to the subject.

Because I left Jamiatuz Zahra 3 years ago (I only took a one year permission to leave), they made me sit 2 exams and go through the interview process again. One wasn't so bad, but the other was really really hard and so I'm too scared to find out the results. OK so it would have been easier had I actually studied, but it was a little optimistic on the part of the head of department who expected me to study  cram 50 lessons in one week.

The interview was half an hour or so... a bit rushed at the end as it was nearly time for the bus to go home! The lady asked me what I like to do in my spare time - so like any wannabe hawza student - I replied 'reading'. I should have known this would lead to further questions, and I couldn't really tell her that reading to me is 'the shopaholic series' so I told her I love reading books about self building. (Not really a lie as I had just read 'Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus'). I then had to summarise 'Who moved my cheese' for her in Farsi! I think she thought I was mad. Oh well.