Teaching With Skype

I am currently in the middle of a ten-day summer intensive session. Rather than sessions once or twice a week for ten weeks, an entire course is crammed into ten straight days.

It's a quick turnaround. If the students are bad, I needn't worry. They'll soon be gone. But it's also difficult to stay on top of preparation and keep the students' interest when they're spending so much time with me.

Yesterday to mix things up a bit, I had them prepare some questions and then led them in a 20-minute Skype conversation with my sister. She lives in Alaska and has never visited Morocco. Nor does she speak Arabic or French. So my students and my sister were about as culturally isolated from each other as possible, connected only by the English language, imperfectly mastered by my students as it was.

But that made the conversation all the more interesting.

One of the first things my students asked her aboutwas about the time difference. It was around 5 PM for us, and 8 AM for her. She had been up since 6:30 AM, which absolutely astounded by late-rising students.

They asked her what she thought about Morocco and what Alaska was like. They asked her if she had ever eaten Moroccan food. At one point there was some confusion because she said the temperature was in the 50's. The students thought in terms of the Celsius scale and imagined temperatures Morocco rarely reaches, when in reality it was just a typically chill Alaskan morning.

As a speaker of Arabic and French and as someone familiar with Moroccan culture practices, I often understand what Moroccans are trying to say in English where a typical American wouldn't. So, one of the challenges for any non-native speaker is moving beyond that crutch to communicating with a native speaker who is culturally and linguistically separate. Trying to do it with a temperamental technology like Skype makes it even more difficult.

But my students did excellently. I'm proud of them. I might even have to try the activity again during the longer courses.