School

Every morning, I attend Farsi classes at Jamiatuz Zahra. Jamia means university and Zahra is the name of the daughter of the Holy Prophet of Islam. The campus is HUGE! There are dormitories, classes, day care facilites for the children of staff and students, library, a high school, bookshops, tuck shops....... the list is endless! The campus is still being developed, with a sports centre (with swimming pool) next on the list! The campus is about 5 years old. Apparently, the spot where the university is used to be a park, so the inhabitants of Qum were not too pleased when the park was flattened to make way for the university!

Every morning, the school bus comes to the main road near our house to pick me up. The driver is a little grumpy and he constantly whinges about me - I didn't know that shutting doors with a tiny bit of force is considered extremely rude here. Luckily I have a group of friends who make sure I am not the last one on or off the bus!

The bus arrives at school at 8am and the day starts with a recitation of Dua Ahad on the loud speakers. Each lesson starts at ten past the hour (e.g. 8:10, 9:10, 10:10) and ends on the hour, giving a 10min break between classes. My classes run from 8:10 to 12 noon.

The farsi course is split into 7 books - the introductory book (which contains about 300 nouns to learn!) which is followed by Books 1 to 6. I'm currently on Book 2, which is the grammer book.

Each book has a mid book test and an end of book test, and those who fail the end of book test are asked to repeat the book, or join a less advanced class. The tests are also accompanied by dictation tests. All tests here are marked out of 20.

The teaching session is split into 2: The first 2 hours are devoted to the Books (called Katbi lessons) and the last 2 hours are conversation classes (called Shafahi lessons). The reason for this is that spoken Farsi is quite different from written Farsi - for example, if you think of Katbi Farsi as being a bit like Shakespeare's English - if you go into a shop and use words like 'thee', 'where art thou?' people would laugh at you, but they would still understand you. Some of the conversation classes take place in the "labratoire" which is a really basic language lab! Shelves and cupboards surround the classes and are filled with some of the tackiest toys and props that I have ever seen. However, the Farsi Dept is quite proud of this room and they keep it locked between lessons! The room is quite useful in some ways as it gives the teacher something to focus on. The other day, we looked at the tools shelf (spanners, hammers, screw drivers etc) and before that, the animals and sea life shelves!

One of the hardest things about learning Farsi in Iran is that the teacher does not speak a word of any English, Arabic, French..... nothing! only Farsi! Sometimes its hard to understand what the teacher wants you to do, but luckily, I have a few English speaking classmates who help each other out.

Our class is a bit like the United Nations - there's students from India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, UK, Indonesia and even Uroguy! Farsi is really the only language most of us have in common.

We have 2 teachers, one for the book and one for the conversation classes. Our book teacher is a gem. She is a Farsi teacher by profession. Her teaching methods are good and she helps out the weaker members of the class with extra tutorials. The conversation teacher on the other hand is a public speaking and Qur'an teacher. Her expectations of us are a little too high sometimes and sometimes she picks on me a little too much. I am ALWAYS called to the front to read out my work and she has actually told me to my face that sometimes I don't try hard enough in class! :-( Although its probably good for us in the long run. Some of our friends in other classes told us that when they were at our stage, they could barely put a sentence together and here we are conjugating verbs and writing full page matans (passages) and role playing simple situations (directions, buying clothes etc)

Class finishes at 12, after which its a quick dash to say the afternoon prayers, then jumping on the bus to go home.

Coming from the West, I find the standard of teaching very different to what I am used to. The Iranian way is to 'finish the book' and do the test. There is also a lot of emphasis on 'jumle saazis' or making sentences. Almost every lesson we are expected to make sentences from the 30-40+ new words that we have come across that lesson.