On Teaching and Teacher Evaluations

Note: This blog entry was written in June (note the use of present tense while I am sitting here in the US), it is being posted late due to the fact that I am not returning as an ADEC teacher though I am returning. I have gone private.

On a good day, school is chaos. We start out the morning at Tabour. Any teacher who has a first period class must attend. Tabour consists of the pledge, Quran, Hadith, and the ever present nail inspection. The girl’s nails cannot be longer than her fingers and cannot be painted. If a girl is in violation, she has to go to the nurse to have her nails cut and the color removed. The girl will often argue that she is allowed to have her nails painted because she has her period. I don’t even want to explain what happens in this case….just ugh! First period is a waste if your class was chosen for inspection. Most of the girls end up at the nurse, and since no pass is given to return to class, they don’t ever come back to class. 

There is no security in the school, as that would mean men in the school. We have one security guard and his job is to open the gate to let in the teachers and the buses, close them, open them at dismissal, and close them again. For the most part, he sits in his little shack and stares at the walls. For all I know, he could be reading my blog update right now. He sometimes ends up performing random maintenance activities. This creates a major uproar as girls are running back to their classrooms to don their abayas and shaylas. Since there is no security, when a girl walks out of class…she is gone!

There are also no phones in the classroom. The aforementioned girl is wandering the halls, opening doors and disturbing other classes, and randomly being pests. There is no way to alert administration that you have “runners”. We have been told to send a “good girl” with a note. Said note gets hijacked by the “runners” and nothing ever gets done. UNLESS, however, the “runner” is caught by administration, in which case someone shows up in your classroom to yell at you for letting the girls out. 

The girls do not change classes, the teachers do. After being here for almost a year, I can see the logic in this. Even though many girls do wander off while the teacher is en route between classes, it would be much worse if ALL of the girls left their classrooms at the same time. There are two breaks during the day, one for 30 minutes and one for 20 minutes. Pretty much those breaks last until someone from administration walks out into the courtyard and starts screaming at the girls. Teaching 4^th or 6^th period is therefore, a joke. On a GOOD day, most of them show up 10-15 minutes late. 

The school year is divided into Trimesters and at the end of each Trimester there are 2 weeks of exams, followed by a break. This past year our winter break was 3 weeks and our spring break was 2 weeks. Many of the girls do not show up the first week of the term,  and since the last week of the term is set aside for Exam Revision (review for those of us who speak American English), they do not show up for that either. Exam Revision consists of handing out a packet with practice materials. The girls still have a problem with the fact that English Exams are skills based and not something they can memorize the night before, so most never even look at the packet. The week before spring break, the principal finally gave up and told the girls not to come to school the Wednesday and Thursday before exams. Leaving these weeks off, we have to cram a “Continuous Assessment” which is required to contain specific items including a project and 2 “Integrated Tasks” which are essentially extended writing and/or grammar assessments, into a 5 week period of time. Good Luck with that. 

The girls will be finished will final exams a month before the teachers are done for the summer. Some of the teachers that were here last year spent the month on Facebook answering OUR questions. Since it is blocked in schools here just as it is in the U.S., I will be taking my phone charger to work every day!! We have that time set aside to plan for the following year. This is not exactly possible since we will NOT know what school we are assigned to until September 2^nd when we go to THE ZONE (see my post from September 2011 for details on this CF). Even if we are assigned to the same school, we may not be teaching the same grade level. Basically we plan to spend the month copying crap from each other’s flash drives. This way we have resources for whatever next year brings.  I bought a monster sized Portable Hard Drive for just this purpose. We are also expecting meetings ad infinitum. 

BUT on those rare days that I can and do teach material…….the girls do learn!! I have girls whose English skills have improved so much that they are translating for the other girls instead of just staring at me like they did at the beginning of the year. I have one 10^th Grader who passed the IELTs, an exam that tests English speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. Many of our College-Bound 12^th Graders did not pass and therefore cannot attend college until taking remediation courses. I wish I could take full credit for her score…..but all I did was polish what she already brought to my class. I regularly tell her mother that I wish I had 70 of her!!

My principal has been in my classroom twice to observe. Both times she felt my lessons were phenomenal and she loved my questioning techniques. Unfortunately this is not what we are evaluated on for our Performance Review. I have had to create a massive binder documenting everything that I have done to meet each of the 654 sections of the rubric. This means copying lesson plans, keeping copies of minutes, taking pictures of projects and displays, and pictures of me performing bus duty and setting up for exams. There is also a picture of me at the Camel Races in December. Since the track is in the area where I teach, this proves I was reaching out to understand the community. To me, this is a ginormous waste of my time and resources.  It is also a waste of administration’s time, since they have to sit with each teacher and individually review her binder. I can only compare it to the “Portfolio” that all student teachers in the U.S. are required by their colleges to create. I had ONLY one assistant principal look at mine when I was interviewing. Since I went to High School with her, I think she just did it because she felt sorry for my having wasted my time. It was really pretty and pink. Thinking it is not what got me the job though. 

This is only the third year of a massive educational reform, there are bound to be some bumps along the way. As my first year comes to a close, I would definitely do it again. There are many days when I feel like banging my head against a wall and I had one night when I had WAY TOO long of a conversation with Jack and Jim with some pretty nasty results, but I feel I have learned so much about the culture, the religion, and the people……teaching is, after all, about learning.