Quarter Mil

Every time I have a class, there is, without fail, a student (though seldom just one) who hasn't brought their books or anything to write with. This type of student will slump in their chair and look surprised when you point out why that causes a problem. To counteract this extreme laziness, I recently started to mark those without their stuff as absent. They shit themselves when they get marked absent as they aren't allowed to sit exams if the percentage gets too high. Most of them have cottoned on now, and will, if they have forgotten their own, diligently photocopy a classmate's book prior to a lesson. Today, four students didn't bring their books, but as only nine students turned up in the first place (exam week), I made an offer that they could buy their attendance for five pounds (a picture really does tell a thousand words in the world of English teaching). In the end though neither Eslam (left), Mohanad, Samer or Marize took the bait.

I had a rather worrying conversation with an Egyptian colleague after lunch that started off discussing the origin of languages and why there are so many. I began by admitting little knowledge of the subject but guessed it probably had something to do with the evolution of our larynx coupled with associating sounds with objects. I was quickly stopped and corrected. As it turns out, Adam, the first human (who also appears in the Qur'an (unsurprisingly seeing as its a copy and paste of The Old Testament)), could speak every language when he appeared, because God made him that way. That's why there are so many languages.

What followed was an eye-opening insight into the primary school beliefs of an otherwise extremely intelligent woman. I must get round to reading The Greatest Show On Earth to arm myself with the necessary counter-arguments for such nonsense as "Dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans", "I'd rather believe my Great Great Great Grandmother was a human, not a monkey" and everyone's favourite, "If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes around?" I tried my best to talk about timelines we can't comprehend, knowledge that we have yet to discover, and Dawkins' analogy about believing Australia is where it is (without having seen or been there) being a perfectly good way to justify believing in evolution despite its 'theory' status.

It's incredible...if you are questioned about why you are an atheist, you need to be armed to the bloody teeth with complex information and plausible arguments with which to defend yourself, but question why somebody believes in God, and all you get back is a whole load of ill-informed nonsense.


---> Video - Quite a lot