Because kids are sad sad sad. Haha. I also work in an educational institution doing IT. This, as you get from my anecdote above, was not my educational backg

Because kids are sad sad sad. Haha. I also work in an educational institution doing IT. This, as you get from my anecdote above, was not my educational background. It is funny people laugh when they hear me bust out into Arabic in front of them. I told them I am a language major by trade, and did IT in college to make money. Many people congratulate on mastering these "magical bodies of knowledge that are witchcraft, because surely I (the person I am helping) could never get it." If you want scary, these are other people married to Arab men and women, as am I. Decades of exposure mean nothing. Now why is that? Grades breed mediocrity. Good students stroke their ego, and most students give up when they cannot compete with good students. So we encourage people to believe "I am a magician that speaks computer" and "Arabic is impossible" (if you beleive that, try teaching and explaining inconsistent English grammar; Arabic has encoded in the morphology a lot of syntax that would scare you into seeing what is like a human programming language) and accept mediocrity because evaluation and rank is more important than effort. I see it so often, even from students, I mess with them when they come to my office. I never bitched to change my grades. Why? I was busy reading. Who cares! Please keep being that professor, I hope you save some of them. What is the most cautionary part of that tale is the people in my story all end working for government, some as counter-terrorism and intel guys. They cannot string a sentence together in Arabic, despite the A, and dictate USG policy "on dem terrorist A-rabs" so this culture will get us a real far.