Teaching Experience:

I'm No Adriana!

Amman, Jordan

People have, naturally, been asking a lot of questions about how and why I left the Modern American School, and I've been doing a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong. I mean, I've been teaching on and off for a decade now, and I'd been told I was good at it, even had a talent for it. It wasn't just my friends and students saying I was good. It was my bosses, too, always saying they wished they had a hundred more like me. Even my supervisor and my principal here would frequently tell me I was a good teacher.

But I didn't feel like one. At the end of every class, as I graded each test, every time I read a parent's note that her child didn't have the book he needed to study for his assessment, I didn't feel like a good teacher. I didn't even feel like a mediocre teacher. Although having two jobs has been a real drain on me physically and emotionally, I'm very glad I've had the AMIDEAST job. Otherwise, by the time I was fired, I'd have felt like a complete failure as a teacher. Instead, I've come to some very different conclusions.

I can be good with second graders. I really like eight-year-olds, and in small numbers, they generally seem to like me. I had a blast teaching Arabic and the debkeh to a Bloomington Brownie Troop last March. But I don't have the skills to manage a classroom of 29 second graders. It's not just that, though. Some people, like Adriana, a slight slip of a woman who teaches the 2nd grade classroom next to mine, just walk into a classroom with the presence that is just the right mix of strength and compassion to make kids really believe that she is a teacher. It helps that she can think like a second grader. She was always telling me about brilliant ways of relating the materal to the kids' interests, and the best ones were the ones she came up with on the spot.

On the other hand, when I was in the second grade, Mrs. Herbst apparently said to my mother at the Parent Teacher Conference, "I like to stand next to Maryah when she does math. She does it aloud, under her breath. I know she has a system, because she gets the right answers, but for the life of me I can't figure out what that system is!" And I think that's exactly why I succeeded as an instructor at nerd camp; I routinely and constantly think outside of the box. But if I couldn't even think like a second grader when I WAS a second grader, how did I expect to teach the second grade? Especially second grade math!

No, I do better with slightly older kids. Students who already understand the basics of logic, who have learned how to control their bladders and stick to the point. Most importantly, however, I need to teach children who can be trusted to remember their own responsibilities, like homework, and can be penalized for their own failure to fulfill those responsibilities. Maybe the problem isn't second graders, but the factors peculiar to private schools. In any case, it wasn't a good fit.

But all this has also made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:



We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

Freelance!

Amman, Jordan

I finished my first project for Questscope today, and it occured to me that I've unexpectedly gone freelance. I mean, I'd always read about being a freelance technical writer, and I'd given it sometimes glancing, sometimes semi-serious thought. It had always kind of scared me. I mean, for starters, your income is awfully unsteady as a freelancer. I know this well, with a father who's an entrepreneur, and a mother who's become a freelance artist. It was common dinnertime conversation.

Suddenly, however, I find that I am, at least temporarily, working freelance. And immediately I thought of my father. I think this is what he means when he says, "You have to be young and stupid to go to work for yourself!" Out of a job, in a foreign country, too stubborn to retreat to the comfort of Mom's kitchen, I'm taking a leap of faith.

It's not that much of a leap of faith, it's more of a trial period before the founder of Questscope comes back to Jordan and meets me. And the way a week of upset stomachs just melted away as soon as I got started on the first project tells me that I'm not really as scared of going freelance as my conscious brain thinks.

Do we speak our own language correctly?

Amman, Jordan

I've been having an interesting series of conversations about language with my top-level adult English students. We've been doing a chapter on language registers: business vs. casual English, written vs. spoken language, the English of different age and cultural groups. There was a question in the book asking whether students believed most people spoke their own language correctly.

Now, you have to understand that asking this question in the Arab world is like asking it in Switzerland or Bavaria. The difference between the dialects of those regions and High German are so great that northern Germans swear they can't understand a word. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is like High German, the language of writing, TV news and official speeches, except that there is no population which speaks Standard Arabic as their native language. All Arabs first learn a dialect of some sort. Many say that the Levantine dialect of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon is the closest to Modern Standard, but it is still significantly different.

So I asked my students what they considered to be their native language. Was it dialect, or MSA? About half the class said of course dialect was their native language! They never spoke a word of MSA till some time in elementary school. MSA, which they simply call "Arabic," was a foreign language to them. The rest of the class said that Levantine was not a language, that it was just a corruption of real Arabic. (As a hobby linguist who believes languages are organic, evolving systems, this answer always irks me, but I held my tongue.)

So then we asked the book's question, Do most people speak their native language correctly? Their answers fell predictably along the same lines. Those who considered Levantine their first language said yes, of course we speak our first language correctly. Those who considered MSA their only language claimed that it took years of study to speak even one's native language properly.

The whole conversation reminded me of a conversation I had with my adult class last session. I showed them my resume, which says I speak Standard, Levantine and some Iraqi Arabic. My students considered it completely illogical that Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian dialects should be considered worth mentioning separately. For an Arab, they're all Arabic. They grow up watching Egyptian films, news from al-Jazeera in the Persian Gulf, and call-in shows with dialects from Morocco to Oman.

But for me, the differences are huge. Egyptian is unintelligible to me. I was listening to Yemenis on al-Jazeera talk about the recent flood in Hadramawt, and barely understood one word in three. Just listening to the newscasters on al-Jazeera with their fully-inflected MSA is a frustration to me. But put on the Syrian mini-series Baab al-Haara or any other miniseries in Levantine dialect, and I feel very much at home.

This is, of course, opposite to most non-native speakers of Arabic. Unless you learned your Arabic by marrying an Arab, chances are that you learned MSA first and best, and the dialects are just so much grammarless jibberish to you. This is why, when I gave directions home from Club Nai for my American and German friends the other night, the cab driver said, "Are you Jordanian? No? But your Arabic...!"

My standard reponse has become, "I learned my Arabic by living near Gafgafa for two years." Everyone laughs, because everyone knows Gafgafa as the site of one of Jordan's most infamous prisons.

Goodbye

Amman, Jordan

Today was my last day at the Modern American School. It was an odd day, because I'd been asked not to tell the students I was leaving, which in retrospect was the right decision, as you will see. This meant, however, that every time the kids said something about next week, I had to either lie or, whenever possible, evade.

I had forgotten, until the end of the day, that Ranjith's parents will not be able to come to Parent-Teacher Conferences on Saturday, and had asked to meet with me after school today instead. When he and his wife and both children showed up at the classroom door, I invited them in and we all sat down at a classroom table, and we had our PT Conference. Because I had been asked not to tell the kids I was leaving, and Ranjith and some of the other kids were running about the room, I didn't mention it. Ranjith is a joy to have in class, and a model student, and that was pretty much all I had to say, over and over. In return, his parents said that Ranjith absolutely adores me, and talks about me all the time, and argues constantly with his little sister about whose teacher is better. Ranjith's father said with a grin, "He used to be really proud that I speak 5 languages, but now he says, 'You only speak Indian languages, and Miss Maryah speaks 5 international languages!'"

Then they wanted to meet with my supervisor, so I set up that meeting and sent them off.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, they were back, and Ranjith and his mother were both in tears. And all I could say, over and over, was, "You'll get an even better teacher and this is the best thing for everyone," and hope that this will prove true.

Fired! =D

Amman, Jordan

The personnel manager called me into his office this afternoon. No one knew why he was calling me into his office. When I came in, he got up and closed the door behind me, and I knew what he would say.

He sat down and explained that the 3 month "trial period" in my contract was almost up, during which time the school could terminate the contract if it didn't look like I was really suited to the job. Then he explained that the director had told him to fire me, but hadn't said why. The poor personnel manager (new to his job) was clearly very worried about having to give me this news, but I was thinking, "Yes! That means I don't have to pay the 2,000 dinar penalty in my contract for quitting!" so I said that I thought I knew what the reasons were, and it was probably the best thing for everyone, yadda yadda.

I'm relieved. And when I went to tell my supervisor (who had no idea that firing me was even in consideration), the first thing she said was, "It's probably the best thing for your health. You'll be much happier." (It's fortunate she's taken it so well, as she's also my landlady! Then again, her husband was laid off on Wednesday, too, and she's hardly gonna kick me out of the apartment now!)

I never found out why I was fired, and frankly, I don't care. It was probably because too many parents complained about their students' grades or my lack of classroom discipline. Really, it was the classroom discipline that was doing me in the worst, and I've been saying this to my supervisor and my boss since the beginning of the year, but they either tell me that my classroom management is great, or that I'm a good teacher and I'll figure it out. But then every time I tried something new in classroom management, the principal would come into my classroom and tell me that I was too harsh and expected too much of my students.

(I knew I needed to leave when I found myself walking home from school saying to myself, "Mom expected a much higher level of respect and responsibility from all of us in the second grade, and she wasn't a bad parent, was she?")

It could also, as my roomate Ryan suggested, be concern about liability after a mother walked into my Math class Tuesday, demanded that I rearrange my classroom seating to give preference to her child, and I walked out of the classroom and had an anxiety attack on the floor of the teachers' room....

Anyway, it's all for the best. There are lots of jobs I can do in Amman that would pay lots more money and be much less stressful. And it is time to do what I've been wanting to do for a decade now, which is to get into the humanitarian field for real.

Obama-mania, Arab style!

Amman, Jordan

First, let me say that my faith in American democracy has been restored. Regardless of who won this election, I was hoping that we wouldn't have the same quagmire we had in the last two elections, with no one quite sure who really deserved to win, even four and eight years later. I'm glad that McCain and the xenophobic, bellicose GOP right and especially Sarah Palin didn't win, but I'm mostly glad that the election was an unambiguous one.

Those Jordanians who had a preference in the recent election are also mostly pleased by the result. I can't tell you how many people, upon seeing me for the first time after the election, have said "Mabrouk! [Congratulations!]" So tonight in my adult English class at AMIDEAST, I decided to ask my students for their thoughts on the election. Most Jordanians I've spoken to tend to agree that as far as the Middle East is concerned, the two candidates are basically the same. On Palestine, the same. On Afghanistan, the same. On Iran, Obama is calling for more dialogue, but is not significantly less belligerent.

Wait a minute, I said. All of that I can agree with. But what about Iraq? Don't you see a difference there?

No, said Ghassan. Whether it's a few hundred troops, or thousands, both candidates want to leave a troop presence in Iraq. They came for the oil, he said, and that hasn't changed.

However, everyone here seems to recognize that, while there isn't a difference where Arabs are concerned, for Americans there is a huge difference between McCain and Obama on domestic issues. All the Jordanians I've spoken to here know that Obama is calling for national health care, and they will all tell you that he has the better plan to help ordinary Americans in their current financial crisis. On domestic issues, all the Jordanians I've met would say that Obama is clearly the best choice.

And, of course, all the Muslims I know here are delighted that America has elected the son of a Muslim. I haven't actually asked anyone why yet. I can think of two likely reasons, though. First, under Islamic law and tradition, any son or daughter of a Muslim is and always will be a Muslim, so although he's been a practicing Christian for years, many Muslims may be telling themselves that America has a Muslim president. The other, probably more likely reason that comes to mind is that, whether Obama is Muslim or Christian, Muslims in America have come under an awful lot of not-so-flattering scrutiny in America in the last seven years, and at the very least, Obama knows something about Muslims. I think that Muslims may well be hoping, as I am hoping, that an Obama administration will be sympathetic to the troubles of both Muslims and Muslim Americans, or at the very least, will be more rational.

Kids Are So Caring!

Amman, Jordan

I've been very sick this week, so much so that I stayed home from school on Wednesday, but my supervisor said that she was going to postpone all my scheduled assessments till I had come back to give my students their review for those assessments, so I decided I had to be back in school today no matter how miserable I felt (which was pretty miserable!). Anyway, I only had 3 classes to teach, and I'm not scheduled for cafeteria or playground duty on Thursdays. Or so I thought.

However, when it came time to take the kids to the cafeteria for lunch, my TA refused to go, because she'd had to do my duty for me the day before. I was in great pain at the time, just counting down the seconds till I could see the school doctor, but this made no difference to my TA, and I had to take my students to the cafeteria anyway.

So there I am, sick, exhausted, clutching my stomach in pain, trying to keep my kids from running amock in the cafeteria. And eventually I can't keep the tears out of my eyes.
Much to my embarrassment, the students start to notice. "What's wrong, Miss Maryah?"
"I'm sick."
This gets me several hugs, which was sweet. Now I've got a small crowd gathered around me.
"Why don't you go to the doctor, Miss Maryah?" someone asks.
"I have to stay here with you now." Maybe this is unprofessional, but I'm beyond caring at this point.
So then the kids do the sweetest thing. Four or five of them march off together to the principal at the other end of the cafeteria, and a minute later, there she is, offering to take my cafeteria duty so I can go see the school doctor.

They can be real rascals, but I sure do love those kids of mine!

Options!

Amman, Jordan

On the recommendation of a new friend, I sent a blind query to Questscope, without knowing if they were looking for people or what kinds of positions they'd have to fill, but I found the work they were doing so exciting that I just had to get in touch. So Bob and I tweaked and tweaked the email last night over IM and email, and I sent it off last thing before I went to bed. I fully expected to be round-filed.

So this morning in my free period, my phone rings, unknown number. It's Questscope. The guy says, he'd love to know more about what my skills are. Well, if that's not a vague, hard to answer question, especially considering that he'd already seen my resume and email, and I thought I'd been pretty clear about what my skills were.... So then he asked what kind of job I was looking for, and I said I didn't know anything about the development sector, and was looking for some introductory admin kind of job that would help me learn the system. So he says he couldn't justify to his donors offering that kind of position to an American. But he said he'd let me in on a secret: the real money in the development sector is in writing. Well, I said, that's my best skill! So he said he's been working with Questscope since it was founded; the founder finds the donors and grants, and this guy manages and spends that money. He said they would have about 16 mos of work for someone who could write grant proposals, project proposals, project reports, etc. And he said he might be able to offer me more than I'm making at both of my jobs at once! And then he asked me if I could come and meet some project coordinators today!

I told him I couldn't make it today (I'm too sick and drugged up for it to be coherent at the moment, anyway), but have agreed to come Sunday or Monday after school.

He also said he's gotten lots of unsolicited resumes over email like mine, and occasionally he asks his secretary to write them a nice rejection note, but this is the first time he's actually gotten in touch with one of these hopefuls. I guess Bob wasn't just being a nice ex-boyfriend last night when he said he wished he had a job to offer me with such credentials, and that it was a pity it was so hard to fit all my great qualities into a readable cover letter! But I guess we managed to do just that between the two of us!

So, I'm not giving the American school my notice just yet, but it's so nice to know that I've got some options!

Peace Corps Wasta, Still

Amman, Jordan

I love it when being a former Peace Corps Volunteer still gets me stuff, like a free ride home, all the way from the village!

This weekend in the village, I stayed longer than intended, and missed the bus. So a couple of the boys got me a ride down the hill to Bleela with a carpenter going home to Bleela, and even though it was on his way, I gave him the last few coins in my wallet. He tried to protest, but I know how much everyone needs the money here, especially in the villages, and I insisted.

So I'm standing on the side of the highway, trying to flag down a bus to Amman, which is much harder than it used to be, now that they've established at the Irbid bus station a ticket system, instead of paying the driver directly. Another man with his wife and infant son were also trying to flag down a ride to Amman, and I heard his voice behind me: 'Isma3i! [Hey, girl!]. I turn around and he's flagged down a car. He asks me where I'm going. When he ascertains that we're going the same way, he tells me to get in. Normally, I wouldn't do such a thing, but he had his wife and baby with him, so I decided it was probably safe, and got in.

I had a nice chat with the wife, who is originally from Bleela but married an Ammani. She told me that she had once met the Peace Corps Volunteer in Bleela. I pointed out that Bleela requested a Peace Corps Volunteer after I worked in Mshairfeh with teachers who were mostly from Bleela.

The family paid 2 dinar and got off about ten miles before the edge of Amman. I asked the driver where exactly he was going, and it turned out he was going to the Eighth Circle, just a hop, skip and a jump from home, so I told him I'd get out there. So then he wanted to know if I was Jordanian, and since I wasn't, how had I learned such excellent Arabic? so I told him I'd lived in Mshairfeh, and he told me he was from a town just a few miles further north, al-Na'eemah, and that I should visit sometime. I pointed out that the mother of one of my 8th graders was from Na'eemah and I had gone there once to meet some of her 11 brothers who had all studied in the States.
"Really? Was she from the X clan?"
"Maybe.... The name sounds familiar...."
"Or from Al-Akaleeq?"
"Yes! That was it! Her name is Rihan."
"I wouldn't know who she is. It's hard to meet women in the village. But I probably know all her brothers."
I mentioned that all her brothers were named Abed (Abdullah, Abdassalaam, Abdarrahman, Abdalmalik, Abdalmajeed, etc.).
"She has an uncle who's a dean at the Jordan University for Science and Technology, and his hand's all curled up." My guess is, the uncle has had a stroke.
"Yes! I met him at a welcome home party at her house for one of her brothers!" We had, in fact, a fascinating conversation about Jordanian women in universities.
And so the conversation went on.

When we got to the Eighth Circle, he wouldn't hear of dropping me there. I was now his guest, and he was determined to deliver me all the way home. We compromised on his dropping me at Safeway, where I needed to pick up a phone card and some groceries anyway. When I tried to give him a couple dinar for his effort, he refused to take it. I insisted, but he was adamant that I was his guest and he wouldn't accept money. So I did what I had seen my headmistress do dozens of times in the village: I dropped the money on the seat beside him. Well, then he was almost angry, and threw the money back over the seat at me. So finally I thanked him and accepted my free ride. And I didn't even have to give out my phone number!

Olive Season

al-Mshairfeh, Jerash, Jordan

This morning I'm back in Mshairfeh, and I can't help but wish that Megan had been able to come this weekend, while everyone across the north of the country is picking olives. I know I had fun helping when I was here before, and learning all about how it's done, and I know my brother Ben had just as much fun helping his family pick olives in Croatia.

People call olive trees their children, because like children, they can take up to a dozen years to yield fruit, but thereafter, they offer substantial support to a family in many ways. That is why it is always so heartbreaking for me to see footage of Israelis uprooting olive trees with bulldozers in Palestine. There are the olives themselves, which yield all kinds of foodstuffs I'll get to in a moment. Then, after the harvest, the trees are pruned, and the pruned branches are given to the goats to be stripped of their leaves. Then the wood is chopped and used to heat the house in the winter. In addition, the "jiffet," or what is left over of olives after the oil has been pressed out of them, is mixed with water, made into balls and left to dry in the sun. These balls of jiffet are used as fuel all winter, each one burning for about 15 minutes, at temperatures higher than wood because of the residual oil left after pressing.

In addition to olive oil, there are several ways to preserve olives. The whole olives can be put in water with some hot peppers and halved lemons, but they take several months to cure this way. I helped to crack olives this morning, by pounding on them with the bottom of an empty glass soda bottle. These cracked olives can be put in water with peppers and lemons, and will cure and be ready to eat in a matter of weeks. I'm not a big fan of whole olives, myself, but there is one way of preserving olives that I do love: The olives are chopped, added to chopped hot peppers, onions and carrots, and canned. Within a couple weeks, this relish-like topping is ready to be scooped up with pita bread for a light lunch at school.

And of course there is the olive oil. I am looking forward to sampling the bottle of olive oil sent home with me by the headmistress, Umm Alaa. Not to be outdone, her sister Umm Anis has promised to send me home with a bottle of her olive oil next time I visit!