2020 September 20 – MZ – male age 15 – Class Notes
This week, I came to class with everything I learned in Level 1 memorized again. I had forgotten most of the translations last week due to lack of practice, but this week I managed to test out successfully. This week’s class consisted of Practice Prayer, Meditation, Book Talk, Badminton, and a couple of discussions near the end.
I arrived to class at around 9:00 in the morning and immediately went to do my practice prayers, having time to practice before class is very beneficial, especially when you need to go over your homework and/or memorizations again. I noticed myself getting stuck at certain points, and getting the chance to go over it one last time prepared me for the test. This also helped me realize how important it is to practice things you learn, because you can forget just as fast as you learned.
After the prayers, I sat down to start meditating as usual. I haven’t meditated since the last class I was in, so it was good to experience it again. However, I found it much harder to concentrate and struggled to fully connect with god. I wasn’t able to relax or focus, which ended up resulting in me not taking full advantage of the meditation session. This made me want to meditate more often, especially at home.
Then, all level two students were pulled aside to start talking about the book we were assigned to read. The book is named “Reading The Quran” and is written by Ziauddin Sardar, The main purpose of the book is to share his experience with learning the Quran when he was younger, and he also explains how the Quran seems different depending on the person reading it. For example, a non-arabic speaker will have a different experience than someone who knows how to read, write, and speak arabic. We also discussed how the Quran’s Juz are not chapters, since the Quran is not a story. This made me realize how everyone has a different perspective of the Quran.
Following the book talk, the level two students were sent out to play badminton. This was a good way to take a break from learning, and also a good way to get some exercise. This is a good example of how green stairs academy is much different from other Sunday schools, it helps students with things other than just memorizing and reciting the Quran. And the requirements of class don’t only help you with things involving Islam.
Lastly, students from both level one and two were brought back into the class to discuss some concepts and topics. This week’s topics were Discipline and Procrastination. Firstly, we went over what discipline was. An example used was turning in homework on time, if a student is disciplined, they will do their essay and turn it in 3 hours before its due, but if the student isn’t disciplined, they will most likely turn it in late. The main teacher used this example to explain, and tell us to be disciplined when doing things. Then, we discussed procrastination. Procrastination is when someone has something to do, but decides to say “I’ll do it later” everytime they are reminded of it. This can lead to bad habits, and also turn into possibly not doing things on time. The teacher explained how instead of analyzing what we have to do, we should just do it.