.. A number of educational guidance courses are meeting in Beirut this summer, perhaps the most important of them being the one organized every year by the University, with the participation of the education-division technicians of Point Four, to raise the level of the Arab teacher..
... Miss Samira Azzam listened to one group of this course, and here she comments on what she heard, saying:
I was visiting a professor of education, one of those charged with giving lectures on the teaching of languages according to modern applied concepts, in the course held at the American University of Beirut and attended by a number of men and women teachers of the government schools in the Arab countries,
delegated by their governments for this purpose.
I was not alone in visiting my friend; visiting her also were some of the women teachers who had been listening to the lectures on the subject of language teaching. It was natural for the talk to move by degrees from mention of Beirut's heat and the magic of the mountain — which the newly arrived ladies were seeing for the first time, marveling at all this splendor embodied in the peaks, in the glens, and in the pine trees standing erect in the vigor of a green youth — until it settled upon the subject of the course, when the teachers followed their nature and would not be kept from talk of study and teaching. So our hostess, a specialist in the subject as I have said, set about attacking the antiquated methods of teaching the Arabic language in our schools, in point of technique, of means, and of teaching apparatus, saying that these causes together have so complicated the matter for teachers that the Arabic lesson has become harder for the Arab pupil than the study of any foreign language, whose teaching is aided by adroitness of presentation, ease of technique, and abundance of the means of illustration.
The Arabic reading book wears the pupil out when it