This Week's Project: Summer Courses!

Summer School's in Session!

Summer crept up on me, and I'm a little late preparing my summer course syllabi, but it's something I try to do for every summer. This year, I want to focus on: Islamic History, Human Nutrition, and French. 

Islamic History

Growing up in different countries around the world, I never got the chance to study Islamic history - or Islam in general - apart from what I learned at home. As a result, I'm taking steps to teach myself whatever I can. This time around, I found a set of Islamic history textbooks in three volumes, completely free online. (These ones, in case you're interested. I've yet to delve into them, but a cursory glance and the heavy peer-reviewing has me hopeful.) 

I created an 80-day syllabus based around these books, working at a pace of, on average, 25 pages per day, which should give me just enough time to get through them all by end of August. I'll probably be starting on the 9th.

Human Nutrition

This one is a highly personal interest of mine, because lately I've been trying to get better about what I'm putting into my body and applying to my body. I generally prefer to keep things natural, but in order to be more effective in my skincare, hair care, and internal care, I need to have a better understanding of what will work best. 

There's a textbook in my home that's been collecting dust on the shelves for far too long: Essentials of Human Nutrition, 3rd edition, from the Oxford University Press. It's one that I've pulled out a few times over the years, determined for a split-second to actually read it, and which I've then ultimately pushed back into its snug place on the shelf.

Not this time, friends. This time, we're reading it. Cover to cover. I've set up a 30-day syllabus that focuses on working almost a chapter per day. Just to keep things organized, I'll start it on the 9th, too.

Good thing we keep old textbooks and collect those people are throwing away...

French

Last but definitely not least: French. Oh, God. French. My love-hate relationship with French stems from my less-than-nice experience with it all the way back in school. Studying in a bilingual school, I was learning the usual core lessons (math, reading, writing, science, etc.) in both French and Arabic. I actually think this is awesome in theory; in practice, the pedagogical approach was horrible, and I cried doing my homework. So... there's some baggage with French. (And Arabic.)

But I've since separated my feelings about the language from my feelings about the teachers in that particular school, and I've accepted the importance of French (and Arabic) in my life for professional and personal reasons. 

So, I grabbed some old textbooks called Bled (ominous title when read in English, but it just means 'country' in Darija). I've already been working through the first book (meant, I believe, for 6-year olds), and have three more lined up. I'm matching them with some French readers that I found at their levels, and podcasts, and I hope to get through all of them in an intensive French course this summer. 

I hope I can get fluent and put it all behind me, once and for all. And once that's done, there's the much more important task of doing the same thing for Arabic. 

Summer Syllabus Creation

Making course programs for self-study over the summer is something that I started doing more recently. Last year, for example, I made myself a pixel art syllabus and a Games for Education syllabus. If I remember correctly, I also created a syllabus for learning how to create games in the Solarus game engine. 

All of those sound fun - and they were! But I was also enrolled in a TEFL diploma programme, and pretty soon that took over everything for me, since it was a lot more time-intensive than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I managed to finish that in time and earn my diploma, but I'm still hoping to get back to all of these courses. (I mean, come on - pixel art and games for education? Let's go!)

And that's my project for this week! Eid is here, and I'm going to be focusing on that over the next handful of days, but I'm excited to push forward. Now that this little syllabus creation project is done, I'm going to go ahead and chill out of the rest of the week. (Just kidding; it's Eid. Time to roll up my sleeves!!)

Eid mubarak saeed to all, and may Allah bring us all peace, joy, prosperity, and that which is good for us.

 

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