doctor nezar

doctor nezar is my arabic teacher here, the man i see in class ten hours per week as he tries to help us master this crazily beautiful language. as you might suspect, ten hours per week (not including 3 more hours of dialect) of classroom arabic can easily feel like A LOT, thus it takes a special individual to make those long hours even mildly enjoyable. doctor nezar definitely qualifies, for a number of reasons. first, he enjoys singing (and his voice is not too shabby) and breaking out into random song is a common class occurrence. song choices have ranged from solo acts of arabic songs we've never heard to group sing-alongs of classics such as "i believe i can fly" and "umbrella" (on the day it rained). sometimes if the general mood hits a noticeable low, we will have a class singing break, and of course it always lifts our spirits :) secondly, doctor nezar has slowly but surely given arabic nicknames to the majority of the class. it started with his inability to remember the american names of two somewhat similar-looking boys, matt and danny, so he decided to solve his memory issues by giving them easier-to-remember arabic names: sindibad (=famous arab fictional character) and dandoon. rohit was soon nicknamed melek (=king), and brian received ali-baba. then, as darren was the only boy left with no name he became al-batl (=the hero). however the girls were not to be excluded for long; alisha is now a'isha, mira is maryam, elisabeth is named after a lebanese singer that i can't remember, and i, for reasons unknown, am shahrazad. the best part is that doctor nezar continues to mess up and call matt and danny by the wrong name even in arabic, and also that he laughs to himself every time he uses one of our nicknames (which is every 20 seconds). doctor nezar's other amusing habit is illustrations. if a new vocab word is draw-able, he will draw it. and then if he likes his drawing especially well, he will circle it in a protective bubble and leave it un-erased on the board for the remainder of the class. the most entertaining day of illustrations was by far the day we were naming animals. the board was covered in pictures, including three different attempts to draw a tiger (the first had spots, the second resembled a caterpillar, and the third finally got the point across). for spending so many hours in class, we do manage to have a good amount of laughs :)