Classes

I feel that the quality of the last two posts wasn’t that great, since I had written them almost a week before I posted them and then retroactively tried to update them. I’ll be sure to do better in the future.

Anyway…today marks the end of the first week of classes. Everyday I have at least an hour and a half of Arabic, and four on Sundays and Tuesdays (on those days there’s an hour of lab, and on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday we have a one hour colloquial Jordanian lesson). It can be intense and a bit overwhelming at times, and it’s hard to keep up with the huge amount of new vocabulary, but our teacher is really good and keeps the class engaged.

In addition to Arabic, I’m also taking two area studies classes. One is Intro to Islamic Civilization, a history class. The other is titled “Archaeological and Historical Survey of Jordan and Palestine”. So far we’ve only really been going over background stuff and introductions, but both have been really interesting and have good professors.

The University of Jordan is where we’re taking classes. I’m definitely surprised by how big it is. There are about 30,000 students there, so it’s a bit smaller than Penn State. It seems really big in terms of acreage, but that may be because there aren’t a lot of good sight lines. The university is built on the side of a hill in an old forest, so there are lots of trees everywhere. The buildings are also a lot more spread out than in University Park.

My classes are in the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Engineering, which are pretty much on opposite ends of the campus. Both buildings are labyrinthine and difficult to get around. They’re also not in the best shape. There are roof tiles missing, stickers and graffiti on the walls and the chairs, chunks of stuff missing, lockers with no doors on them, etc. They’re basically reminiscent of a stereotypical ghetto high school. The bathrooms are really bad, too. I’m not really sure how often they clean them, if ever, and there’s no soap or toilets available, just holes in the floor. I made the mistake of using one a couple days ago, one that I’ll be sure not to repeat.

That being said, the students there are known to really take pride in the university. At first, this seemed kind of surprising, but then I thought about what aspects of Penn State I’m proud of. It’s not the impressive new construction, the sleek landscaping, or the bridge in the IT building; it’s things like Schreyer’s, the graduation rate of our athletes, and the high quality of my professors. The University of Jordan is one of the best universities in the Middle East, and even though there’s not a smart board or a computer in every room, the facilities get the job done. It would be nice to have toilets and soap in the bathrooms, though.