My first Arabic Presentation

Had my first Arabic presentation today. Five minutes of speaking only Arabic. I wasn't allowed to have any Arabic words in front of me, but I was allowed to have English and then i could translate it in my head as I go. It had to be about 5 minutes and I did 5 or 6 I think. I spent all day yesterday and then woke up at 530am this morning to work on it. My friend, Sheriff from grad school is here visiting from his internship in Israel and I basically ignored him all day to get this done. Yep, I'm awesome like that....but really, if you know Sheriff, then you know he probably deserves it. :)

The presentation was suppose to be about my favorite place in Jordan that i have travelled to so far. Well, I thought about it and I really haven't gone anywhere yet. I want to and I will but I spend all of my time and work and in class now, so no real time to explore yet. Mostly, I just haven't been worrying about that because I have a year here so I feel like i have plenty of time to travel around. I basically talked about that in my presentation. I explained my lack of travel and then said my favorite place so far is my work. Then I explained about my work a bit. While I do like my work, mostly I just wanted to learn how to talk about things that were relevant to me rather then pick a location and talk about it after doing research...thats not as helpful.

I studied a lot because speaking is my far my worst area and I have a lot of very fast speaker in my class, so I was attempting to not totally embarrass myself. I think I did really well though. I was slow, which my professor made it clear that I should be faster...but the grammar, vocab, sentence structure, I did really well on. Its a bit frustrating because for me, I improved a lot! This presentation was a challenging stretch for me and I improved based on my ability. Yet, instead of noticing that my professor (whom I do adore by the way) compares me to everyone else in the class (hence the slowness comment and reduced grade for it) rather then comparing me to me and noticing that I obviously pushed myself, worked hard and improved a lot.

The grade doesn't matter, but my school does this a lot. Noticing the improvement on the individual doesn't seem common. Its typically that you're compared to your peers and then told to work harder. I don't know if its like a fear tactic to push us kind of a thing or what...but it doesn't work for me. It just makes me feel frustrated and insecure in my Arabic. So, not a good tactic.

Overall, I'm happy with my presentation and some of the people in my class also told me that I improved a lot so its nice that some noticed.