From a Coin Flip to the Classroom: Dana’s Arabic Journey of Joy

She was a high school student at a magnet school for languages, required to choose a second language. The choice came down to Russian or Arabic. Dana flipped a coin. It landed on Arabic.

At the time, she had never met an Arabic speaker. She did not know that the choice would lead her into a lifelong relationship with the language, shape how she understood herself, and eventually bring her into the classroom as an Arabic educator.

What began as chance became, over time, something she could not imagine living without.

“The fact that joy has defined my experience with the Arabic language helps me to make joy the defining aspect of my students’ experience of it, which I hope they see every day,” Dana says.

Dana is part of a distinctive group of Arabic educators: those who first came to Arabic as students, fell in love with it as learners, and then chose to dedicate their careers to helping others discover it too. She once stood where many of her students now stand, at the beginning of a language journey, wondering whether the unfamiliar letters and sounds would ever feel like something that belonged to her.

Dana, an Arabic teacher at the Arabic Immersion Magnet School (AIMS) in Texas, is featured as part of QFI’s Journey of an Arabic Educator series, which celebrates the career paths of Arabic educators and the experiences that brought them to the classroom. Through stories like Dana’s, QFI highlights educators not only as teachers, but as people whose journeys help shape the future of Arabic learning.

When Arabic Became a Relationship

At first, Arabic was unfamiliar and exciting. Dana was drawn to the script, which she found beautiful, and to the feeling of entering a world she did not yet know. As she continued learning, Arabic became more than a school requirement. It became a joyful challenge.

She remembers being moved by the language’s beauty and internal logic. But what kept her going was not only the structure of Arabic. It was people.

“Any time you learn a new language, there is a point where you feel like you stagnate,” she says, “and that certainly happened for me, but what kept me going was the people who encouraged me.”

Pronunciation was one of the first real tests. Dana spent hours in front of a mirror working on sounds that English had never asked her mouth to make. It was tedious, a little absurd, and occasionally funny, but she kept going. The joy did not come because Arabic was easy. It came because difficulty became part of the relationship rather than the end of it.

That relationship deepened during her time in Tangier, Morocco, where she spent a day walking the city for eight hours through its medina, past centuries-old mosques, and up the hill from the Mediterranean shore. She got lost more than once, deviated from her careful plans, and found her way back. She spoke with a ninety-year-old woman in a fabric shop whose eyes told her more history than words could carry. She drank café con leche and then mint tea ten minutes later. Arabic was no longer something she was studying; it was something she was living. She left Tangier “listening, quiet, and thankful for all the words I call my own.”

Tangier changed what Arabic meant to her: not only a language she was learning, but one that welcomed her while she was still learning it.

From Learning Arabic to Giving Back

Dana did not initially imagine herself becoming a teacher. She loved school and learning, but she did not feel like a natural explainer. Sitting with an idea herself was one thing, but breaking it open for someone else felt harder.

“What kept striking me was that I really wanted to do something with Arabic where I was actively giving back the whole time,” she says. “I felt I had gained and learned so much from the educators that worked with me and the communities that I had been a part of. I didn’t want to just continue taking but wanted to give back.”

Arabic had given Dana something real. Teaching became the way she gave it back.

Her path into teaching grew through learning, encouragement, travel, mentorship, and the realization that Arabic had become work she wanted to do with care.

“Teaching is something that is both really challenging, which was important to me, and requires a lot of thinking on your feet, being creative, and making ideas into reality quickly,” she says.

For Dana, Arabic did not become a subject she happened to teach. It became something she felt responsible for passing on. She teaches from the memory of what it felt like to begin, to struggle, and to be encouraged forward.

Making Joy Practical

Dana’s own Arabic journey was defined by joy, and she tries to make that joy visible to her students every day. For her, Arabic has never been static or fixed. It is vibrant, living, and connected to how she came to know herself.

That shapes everything about her classroom. Arabic is not the search for a single correct answer. It is a relationship students build through sound, risk, repetition, laughter, and the courage to keep trying, and then try again.

Her students often tell her that she brings energy into the classroom, and she thinks that is probably true. It is hard to hide that you love something.

In her classroom, joy has a shape. A reading text gets cut up and scattered around the room so students move, collaborate, and rebuild meaning together. Choral repetition lets quieter students hear themselves in Arabic before speaking alone. A game becomes a way to think hard while laughing. These methods give students different ways to access the language.

That same belief shaped her involvement in the QFI 2025 Arabic Short Story Contest. During the pressure of end-of-year testing, Dana wanted her students to have a creative outlet in Arabic. The contest gave her exactly that opening. One of her middle school students, Eythar, became a winner for her story “A City Without Fun.” Dana once found her own voice through Arabic, and now Eythar is finding hers.

The Community Behind the Classroom

Dana believes Arabic educators benefit from staying connected to research and to one another. Because Arabic is a less commonly taught language in the United States, she encourages teachers not to assume that strategies used in other language classrooms cannot apply to Arabic.

“Having a genuine interest in and appreciation for language learning and second language acquisition research has been really important to me because it informs the way I think about structure and the learning process,” she says.

She also values Arabic Teacher Councils supported by QFI, where teachers exchange ideas, share challenges, and remind one another they are not working alone. For Dana, those networks matter because Arabic teaching in the US can sometimes feel isolating, and community changes what is possible in individual classrooms.

For educators like Dana, that kind of community does not happen by accident. It is where QFI’s support matters most, helping Arabic educators keep learning from one another so they can keep building stronger classrooms for their students.

The Confidence to Be Wrong

For Dana, one of the greatest gifts of language learning is self-confidence.

“Your success is entirely dependent on your own willingness to fail, laugh about it, get up again, and keep trying,” she says. “It is not dependent on your ability to get the single correct answer.”

That idea sits at the center of everything she teaches. Arabic is not a subject you master. It is a practice you return to. The willingness to be wrong, to sound strange, and to try again is not a weakness in a language learner. It is exactly the skill.

“By learning Arabic, you gain access to the lives and worldviews of people in a massive swath of the world,” she says. “There are very few other languages with that kind of geographical reach with a single language.”

For Dana, that is not an abstract benefit. It is what happened to her on the streets of Tangier and in every classroom since.

The Joy That Gets Passed Forward

Dana’s message to other Arabic educators is simple: your joy matters.

“The passion and relationship you have with the language that you are considering teaching will have more of an impact in education than it will in virtually any other field,” she asserts, “because it is only in this field that you have the opportunity to have that enthusiasm transfer to the next generation of leaders.”

Language teaching, she believes, is not really about grammar or vocabulary. It is about helping someone build a relationship with something they could not yet imagine loving.

Years after that coin flip, Dana still teaches from the same place her Arabic journey began: curiosity, effort, encouragement, and the stubborn insistence that joy is not a bonus in a language classroom. It is the point. She knows what it is to stand at the beginning of the language, unsure and listening. She stood there for a long time before the sounds came right. Now she stands at the front of a room full of students doing the same thing, and she recognizes every one of them.