Waking up at 8:00 on a Saturday morning for a tutoring session is not how I wanted to spend my vacation. It is only by reminding myself that this was never meant to be a vacation that I can drag myself out of bed. Vacation. As if I have anything in my life from which I need to take a break.
As of last week, I'm doing five hours of one-on-one Arabic study every day, seven days a week. When combined with another five or six hours of review at home, the routine has quickly become monotonous, but even in the two-meter by three-meter room where I meet with my tutor, routine sometimes gets disrupted.
Today provides a good example. Ten minutes into the lesson, my attention had already begun to wander. I glanced over Fatima's shoulder at the computer monitor just behind her. There on the monitor, in front of a word.doc listing the object pronouns, was a pop-up window showing a live-stream of a scene that started out innocent enough (don't they always?) but was quickly turning into remarkably graphic amateur porn.
So what is the tactful thing to do in a situation like this? I couldn't just ignore it (who ever can?), but I also didn't want to embarass Fatima by drawing her attention to the seriously nasty business taking place behind her. I was sure that it was most definitely not hers, if there's one thing I've gathered from working with her, it's that she is a sheltered young thing. She still lives at home, says she doesn't understand the kids these days and tells me she likes most of the same things as her parents. She is an innocent.
Drawing on the skills that have carried me this far in the Foreign Service Officer process, I decided that the best approach would be to discreetly warn her about the now competely implausible acts happening onscreen while I modestly look away. I carried out this plan by gazing at my shoes and saying "Ya Aisha! kombutooruki mumtann!" She looked at the computer, nearly fainted, shut it off and ran out of the room.
While I waited for her to compose herself, I reviewed my vocab lists and saw that I had just said "Oh Aisha! Your computer is very thankful!" The word I was looking for was "maksoor" meaning "broken" though that might actually be incorrect in this context too. I was embarassed, but had already prepared a defense based on the premises that 1) Arabic is hard; 2) both words were on the same page so it was an easy mistake to make; and 3) it wasn't my porn to begin with, so why am I the bad guy here?
She returned a few minutes later and I didn't need to mount any defense at all. The poor thing was so embarassed. She kept saying "it is not mine! It is not mine!" I told her that I believed her and made up a story about how in law school, everyone had laptops and the same thing happened to all of us almost every single day. That helped, but now she must believe that American law schools are awash with sin.
Poor Fatima. It took an hour for her to pull herself back together. It was a nice break for me though. These five-hour tutoring sessions are killing me.
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