Teaching and Learning in Egypt
I hadn’t opened my eyes to the world when I joined the English department at university. However, I was lucky to find some of the hard-nosed academics who somehow passed on to us a sense of excellence that was, and perhaps still is, hard to find in our schools and universities. Circumstances always put me in closer contact with the academic staff to the extent that I was called a teacher’s pet behind my back. Although I had a chance to be trained by some of Egypt’s best and brightest academics, I still had a greater aspiration for a better education that, sadly, I can’t yet find in Egyptian schools. For two years I attempted graduate studies in one of Egypt’s top universities. Some courses really satisfied my thirst for linguistic knowledge, yet something was lacking to make me the kind of teacher I wanted to be. The part of graduate work I did didn’t include the kind of learner training I wished to receive. I wanted to be able to stand on my own feet in academia, not ju...