Hellos! (This is how the Teaching Assistants and I greet each other, it always makes me laugh but maybe you have to be there)
I start this blog near the beginning of the second semester, a month and a bit in and still haven't worked a full week. This is due to many many strikes, by both students and employees of the good ol' Arab American University.
The reasons for such strikes are always murky to a foriegner like me, (I have never begun to think about trying to learn how to read Arabic, and am learning the spoken lang. very slowly) but the most recent one was due to the troubles in occupied East Jerusalem where the Israelis have re-opened a 17th Century synagogue very near the sight of a holy Muslim site, Haram al-Sharif. Palestinians fear that this is part of a continuing process to push out or destroy them and their holy sites, and along with settlement expansion and general stresses of the occupation there were clashes in Jerusalem and so the student union kicked off.
The funny thing during such so - called student strikes is that the students come and ask you, the teacher, if there is a strike! So I just tell them no now to make things easier for the poor dears. Another silly thing is that we still have to go to work on the strike days but not teach (not too much of a problem for me as I live above the classrooms) and the strike days have to be made up by extending the semester. This makes it not so much a strike as a day off which has to be paid for, kind of defeating the notion of refusing to work to protest your beliefs!
Oh dear. At least I get another day of sitting around with my beloved, aka a portable DVD player which has saved my life on many occasions. Hooray!
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