2023 Sep Week F 17
Week #3, by Al-16, female, Sunday, August 03
(1559)
As my third week in the greenstairs program, today was actually weird for the particular reason that it would have been labor day Monday so when we came and the classroom door was close my family and I were like do we have class today; but someone eventually answered and he said that it was labor day but as just as he was waking out we saw S getting out of the car. I figure out that S was going to be the teacher today because the usual teacher wasn’t there. Today’s plan was to start by remembering what we did last week, news and metaphors and finally testing. That is how we will start this journey today.
Eventually we started class with some meditation like the usual teacher said we would. This time the meditation was a little bit different because we did it in the masjid, with the position we felt comfortable with, without the song and I would say that it was for the best because meditating with an uncomfortable position is very hard, you won’t be able to focus. I was very proud of my meditation for today, I was so focus that If I could see myself, I would say that I was sleeping. After 15 minutes of meditating, which paid off; we went back to the classroom, and we started by remembering what we did last class. As always, we started with the pledges, which are: the pledge of allegiance that means a promise of loyalty to the United States of America, the pledge of faith which is the first pillar of Islam where Muslims bear witness that there is no God but One God and Mohamed SAW is the messenger of god by saying “I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah. He is One and has no partner, I bear witness that Muhammed is his servant and his messenger”; and last, we have the pledge of knowledge, which is basically the pledge to our teacher, the one who teaches us knowledge: the rights things to learn hopefully. During the questioning of our retentiveness, one student was asked to articulate, which was a word we ran into last week too, C and S explained the words: articulate, pledges. The student was asked if he wanted to be a goat or a sheep which brought us back to last week’s metaphors. The difference between goat and sheep in this context is that goats are smart and leaders while sheep are the contrary. C gave us an example of wolves, how alphas are leaders, but they stay behind and not in front to make sure that the other wolves are doing the right things.
We change the subject of retentiveness and start with the news like every week until we finish this program and hopefully continue watching the news even without being asked to. We talked about many things that happened this week, like the ones that I said which was about Hurricane Idalia, the 4 countries that has the closest astronaut into the moon which are U.S, Denmark (which was a surprise), Japan and Russia and I also talked about South Korean having protest for the particular reason that its population wants protection against Japan radioactive seawater. Some others student talked about iPhone, cars, sport, Gabon, economic of the us, the new currency and all. S said that all those news had one thing in common and that it was the negativity, because almost all of us talked about negative news; he said that the same way we checked for negative news we should also check for the positive ones. In my mind I was like well you got it I have one but only one, so I realize that he was actually right. After going over the news, S asked us if we knew the words that were on the board, and we said that we only went over a couple of them not even half of it, we knew that they were metaphors used in this class. S started explaining what the pledges were, what B. S meant which was belief in sincerity, k.wisdom which was Knowledge of wisdom, The difference between goats and sheep, eyes which meant the third eye or sense in this context, we learn that survive in this class meant that we survive in this world and the hereafter; we came to a weird metaphor and S asked us how to spell Go(o)d meant and the level 1 student said that it was G-o-d, he is the weird part: level 2 student said that it was spell G-0-(o) -D. S asked us if we knew why level 1 and 2 student spelling of the word was different and I said it was because they learn new definition and stuff in that class, they just use term that they created in the class but S said that it was because Go(o)d meant God is good so it is actually read good. It became understandable after that, so we got to the next terms which was meditation which was something we did for the second times to clear our mind, put a side all of our thoughts to only think of God. Our next term was in Arabic which was confusing because I don’t speak Arabic. It was Amana, I didn’t understand what It was until S told us that Amana meant trust. After the term Amana, S had the “greatest “idea of giving us homework about those metaphors and more that was on the board, we were told that for next week we needing to come up with 2 sentences for each of them and that for next week we would have to stand in front of the class each and explained them in two sentence or more. After S told us our homework for next week; f, one of the level 1 students said that L.J gave us a homework about the importance of numbers from 1 to 11 but we had a bit of an misunderstanding because when we did our research we had different result and we didn’t know what was the correct answer so we asked, S told us to give him our answers so me and M said that the numbers from 1 to 6 meant the 6 beliefs which were beliefs in: one God, the angels, the book, the prophets and belief in the day of judgement; added the % pillars which were : shahada, 5 prayers, fasting, Zakat and haji. But My sister came up with different answers and we were hoping that S would give us the answers, but he didn’t know he only knew the importance of 1,2,3,4,8,11 so he said that he would ask to L.J or we can just ask L.J when he come back or sent him a text. Moving on, the next question S asked was why God trusted us human with this earth, not the angels or else but us, he said there was 2 answers to that question, and they were: because he wants us to keep this earth safe and to worship him. Did you know that a sandbox actually means a test environment? I didn’t know until today. S said something very important today, something my father always tell us, and it is “our parents want us to be better than them” and that “we ask question because we want to please God, we don’t want God to be angry at us”.
After those very important lesson about metaphors and reminding of the homework, we started testing, so S started parents each of us with a parent of level 2 students but they weren’t enough, and he couldn’t pair a parent and his/her child, so we had to be 2 to go to one tester. I got with mine and we started with the prayers in Arabic, and we got it all done except for the tahajud because they didn’t know the one that me and my family say. After the Arabic we had to start with the English I since I already learned Surat Fatiha in English, I had to learn the beginning of the prayers in English which I did. I got through Surat Fatiha and the beginning of prayer in English, but it was very difficult trying to get the Arabic with the English altogether, so I abandoned for me to do it after. When it was almost time to go S called us each to come test out with him which we almost all did. When my turn was up, I did the prayer in Arabic except the tahajud, so we had the great idea of making it a presentation for next week, a presentation where I am supposed to talk about the tahajud that I do, where it came from, who does it and all.
We ended this class at the time of Dhur with reminders of what should we get done for next week. Today’s class was particularly special because we got to do the class with another teacher than our usual one. Even if we didn’t learn many things new as we were memorizing in class, which ia not the best practice, it is good to go over things so that we don’t forget and we had a little time to learn our prayers in Arabic and English.