Because I was growing up in Cairo, in the Egyptian educational system, my mother feared that my English would not advance past the 5 year-old's English that I went there with. She had already made an avid reader out of me, and I was an active member of the All Saint's Cathedral/British International School Library, but she still feared that I was not getting enough out of the many books I read (I was such an avid reader that, when I was thirteen, I read the entire Sherlock Holmes short stories [1,167 pages, if my memory serves me] and the four novels in the same week), so she devised what I then considered a cruel and unusual torture: I had to find ten new words that I did not know, every single day. I then had to look them up in Webster's New World Dictionary, and copy the entire definition, including etymology and phonetic transliteration, into the Dread Vocabulary Book.
It gets worse: I was subjected to random inspections and quizzes and, when I slipped, I had to make up for lost time before I could go out on any special jaunt or trip. Considering that I was sometimes three weeks in arrears, I was up against a daunting challenge if I had a date that evening!
The end result? Why, I learned my mother tongue! I discovered, to my surprise, that I have a better command of English than most college graduates who received their educations in the United States.
Bless you, mom.
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