Something happened at work today that rarely happens in a middle school: I, the teacher, was bored. This is dangerous. I’d finished my grades, my kids were all quietly working on something or another, and other than randomly wandering around and talking to people, I didn’t have anything in particular that needed doing. Somehow I got thinking about Arabic again, and that led to me downloading a book called All The Arabic You Never Learned The First Time Around. This book is by James Price, but you’ll never know that from looking at the .pdf I downloaded, which never mentions the author’s name.

Y’all.

I need a print copy of this book, and I think I’m probably going to have to make one by going to Kinko’s (does Kinko’s still exist?) and printing all 564 pages and then binding the damned thing myself. Amazon wants over seven hundred dollars for the sole used copy they have, which also looks home-printed, and if there’s another copy out there on a legit site I can’t find it.

I have never encountered a bitchier textbook in my life, and I love it.

There will be a lot of images in the rest of this post. They are all from the first two chapters of, again, a .pdf that is five hundred and sixty-four pages long.

In general, this man despises all human life. It’s glorious.

Who does he despise the most? American journalists. Oh my God does James Price hate journalists.

You know how most language textbooks pick a few basic words and use them for examples over and over? And how lots of times those are simple, easy words that everyone uses all the time? You will never guess the first three sample words this guy picks. Not if you try for a thousand years.

I’m not kidding. This is going to happen over and over again:

Any hint of confusion is met with immediate scorn, which is something all good teachers do:

This is the last paragraph of the first chapter:

Chapter Two starts getting into case endings and something called “Idaafa,” which I cannot explain just yet. I can tell you that James Price thinks idaafa is very simple and easy and does not have a whole lot of patience for people who do not understand it, to the point where this chapter starts using typesetting for emphasis along with the usual heavy doses of sarcasm:

I am going to start modeling all of my teaching after the last two sentences in this paragraph, including the use of all-caps, underlined bold text:

Shit, is that what it means? I understand now!

Toward the end of the chapter, we get this gem, where he makes fun of the reader for studying the text he wrote:

I’ve only read two chapters, remember, and I haven’t really thoroughly studied them, but I think I’m starting to detect a theme here, as this is how he ends chapter two:

This is the best textbook I have ever seen, and James Price is my new educational idol. Please, please, let someone find me a print copy of this, or I swear to God I’m making a leather-bound copy myself.