Slave labor. I mean 'tutoring'.

Doing their homework
I friend of ours referred a moroccan family in need of a tutor to me. I followed up and after couscous on Friday I met up with them at their home. WHich is massive and more ornately decorated than necessary. There are three children, all enrolled at the American School (private american-style gradeschool in the burbs)grades 6, 8, and 10. They seemed nice enough, but after only two days of 'tutoring' I am worn out, used up, fearful, avoidant, and I must now find a way to escape their grasp and love. You see, basically, they want me to come over every night and help each child individually do their homework. They would like to pay me about $2 an hour to do this. I managed to escape last night after two hours, but have to go back today to cover politics with Hind, who has a test on monday.
The thing is that they'd like to pay me , oh , i dont know, 400 dirhams a week when they should be paying me over a thousand. The kids are really great, so I'd like to continue helping them maybe FOUR hours a week, but they're gonna protest. Shit.
I've seen five different servants at their house so far, so I'm starting to think they expect the same type of feudal loyalty from me as from the 9yo girl who dotes on them instead of going to school.
Honestly, I'd tutor the servants for free. Shit.
The upside of this is that in the last two days I've reviewed adverbs, the russian revolution, early american political parties, the first 50 pages of a Tale of Two Cities and the first few chapters of Oliver Twist. Two days. What have you been doing.

Advanced Topics
Saturday marked the second installment of the discussion series. I stayed up till 3am friday night preparing my "History of Old and Middle English" and bragging about it to Erick on gmailchat. The meeting went FANTASTICALLY! AMAZINGLY! BEAUTIFULLY! STRANGELY! FUNLY! GOOD!
It was all Advanced and Intermediate students save for one twelve year old who is a devout fan of Vanessa. Someone else had even prepared a presentation on the subject of integration of the berber language into Moroccan schools. So after translating a few passages from old and middle english into modern english, at the end of the class, the students collectively said
"so, what should we call our club?" Which was absolutely wonderful that they had already identified and possessed the idea. Wow! Anyway, we had to cut them off and remind them that it HAS a name; Advanced Topics. But we opened the forum aabout what we might discuss next week, and after much deliberation, it was decided: Racism.
Specifically, racism in Morocco, Europe, and North America.
A bit broad but I think we can hack it. And in the future they'd like to discuss some stage plays and poetry. Amazing.
The really hilarious part is that our school provides both a "Discussion Club" and "Book Club", even a "Debate Club". But we've undermined them all! And stolen their students! Yay!

We left recharged and inconquerable.