My First Week of Teaching

It has been a long exhaustive week. This is our company's first year in Saudi Arabia and due to that and many other reasons there is a great deal of disorganization. The teachers have been left to struggle their way through the process to make all of this work and I have to say that considering our circumstances things have gone quite well. Things could definitely be better, a million things need to be improved, and we hope that we can make that happen throughout the year (If not then heaven help us)

Naturally I was a bit nervous to start teaching this week. Many of our teachers have quite the resume teaching English and other subjects throughout the world. I am most likely the least experienced one here. Most of the teachers are very supportive of me, with the exception of a few (who we lovingly compare to Michael Scott, and Dwight Schrute for all you office fans).

In the past our students have studied English under other Saudi teachers. That has not worked very well for them and so they called us in to continue their studies under a native speaker's guidance. The problem with this is that all of our classes are filled with students from such a wide range of English speaking ability that it makes it difficult to teach some of them. But we do our best and like I said, so far so good.

Let me say that Saudi students are extremely polite and many of them very eager to learn. I am amazed at their ability so far to keep up the pace. We teach these students 6 hours a day 5 days a week from 4:00pm-11:00pm. That is so much English I don't know if I could handle it if I was in their shoes (time will tell if they will be able to continue this pace) I was impressed with one student in particular, he always has a smile on his face and he speaks very well compared to most of the others. He told me that he wakes up early in the morning to go work and then comes to English classes which end at 11:00pm. Then he drives 1.5 hours to get home around 12:30am. Many of my students tell me they want to study English so that they can go and study at a University in England, Canada, or the U.S. They tell me English is so crucial (although they use much simpler words) for many of the different jobs that they want.

One of the most interesting mini conversations I had with a student this week goes as follows:
Student: Teacher, do many people in America think we are terrorists?
Me: Sadly, some of them do.
Student: Why is this?
Me: I think it is because of September 11th. When that happened many people became afraid, and when they watch the news on TV they only see the bad, not the good.
Student: That is not right, there are many good people here, I hate CNN.
Me: Yes, many people don't know of the good in this area because they are only shown the bad.

Anyway, the conversation went a little longer than that, but that was the gist of it. I have a feeling I will learn a lot from my students here. There are many interesting things about them and the way school works. They are often late to class which I think is more cultural than being rude. The students who know English the best learned it from playing video games and watching American movies. I get the feeling they play ALOT of video games.

That is all for now but I get the feeling I will have many more stories for you as the weeks go by. Oh, and don't judge me when I make spelling errors in these posts. I know I'm an English teacher but I'm not perfect!