The Second Week

To further continue the chaos and disorganization of our teaching situation here, the powers that be decided to pull me out of a class I had been teaching for over a week and give me a brand new class of students to work with. I was disheartened when I walked up to one of the new students and said "how are you doing?" only to have him stare back at me in complete confusion. So with them, I started from scratch - which is fine because I've actually really warmed up to this new class. But what really lifted my spirits is when I discovered my old class got together and had written a letter to my "academic coordinator" to try and get me back. This is the letter they wrote, and I include all the spelling and grammatical errors they made:

Tus 19/10/2010
To M.r ******
We hope the rturn of happiness to back Mr. Mark to tech English grammar; Mr Mark started with us and we want to complet with us, M.r Roony is good but prefer M.r Mark
Thank you
students class 30

I hate using this word, but isn't that completely adorable!? I laughed when I read it, but really it made my day and made me feel like maybe I'm doing, at the very least, an adequate job at teaching. Also, remember that my students are 20-25. It is a funny thing when you teach adults a language completely foreign to them. Because they are only able to communicate on a very basic level it makes them seem like they are children. In fact, many teachers have referred to them as kids and then corrected themselves remembering that they are actually adults (I myself have done the same thing a few times). I remember taking French classes in college and feeling like a little kid when all I knew was a few adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Oh, and by the way, that letter was actually pretty good considering their current knowledge of the language.

Saudis are a fascinating people. Judging by how things are at my school nobody seems in a rush to get anything done. There is not a lot of organization and the college we work in is so dirty its pretty horrendous. The reason being that the contract they had with the old cleaning crew ran out but they don't seem to be in a rush to hire a new crew. It literally took a week and a half to find a key to open the door to what is now our office, but they have yet to supply a badly needed printer, copier, etc. They say things will be done in a few minutes, but I have learned that could be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour....possibly more.

It is easy to tell who is really commited to learning English in our classes. They are the students asking questions and seem very excited about learning. They come on time and stay through all 6 hours of classes. A very large number of students are frequently late to class, but like I said, I think that is more because of the way their culture works than anything else. Also, many students do not show up on the last day of the week, which is Wednesday for them. They always go places with their families, or go to the football match (or at least that is what they tell us). We literally lost almost half of our student body yesterday because of a football match between the KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and Iran. One thing that I discovered only two days ago was that our students are getting paid to go to school! I had no idea. I thought they had all scrimped and saved to have this opportunity. That also explains the attitudes of a smaller portion of our students. The other day I asked one of my students who speaks really well "Abduraman, are all of the students understanding me? there seems to be three or four who just don't understand a word I say" Then he tells me "yes, some students only come here to get a certificate" So basically, show up, get paid, and get a certificate. But really, I feel that is a smaller number of students. Many have genuine interest in learning English so they can qualify to come study in America. I truly hope they are successful. I wish you all could meet them. Many of them are very nice and seem like they would be a lot of fun to hang out with outside of class.

My second week was very smooth compared to my first week. I am able to prepare my lessons a little faster than before and most of the nerves have left. Again, there is still much that I and the rest of the teachers hope to change soon, and I'm hopeful we will be able to do so (for our sakes and the students) That is all for now.