End of an Era!

Amman, Jordan


"This is the downside of our job," said Melanie after the taxi had departed. "You're always saying goodbye."
"Yes," I said, "but usually you have a couple months to get used to the idea!"

I've had many roommates over the past two years: Keri, Megan, Kitty, Hannah, Claire, Martha and Melanie. One person, though, has always been constant: Ryan. And I thought I would have two or three more months to enjoy his company before his contract was up with the Modern American School and he went back to the friends and family he so adores back in Detroit. Just now, with the weather warming up, I was looking forward to more rental car adventures, more Marxist house parties, and more trips with Tareef.

I've said again and again that one of Ryan's most endearing qualities, one of the many qualities that made him such an excellent roommate, is that he never takes anything personally. I should know better than to say "never." As my friends followed my example and left the Modern American School one after another, we always figured that Ryan would stay. The kids loved him and he loved them, which made the parents love him, which kept the administration pretty much out of his way. Though he was repeatedly promised and then denied his residency permit and work permit, both of which an employer is obligated by Jordanian labor law to provide, Ryan persisted. Even though he had the same spoiled, unruly, disrespectful kids that the rest of us taught and the same lack of disciplinary support from the school's administration, Ryan persisted. He's helped three people get job offers there, three damned good teachers, two of whom were worn away by the administration's abuses much faster than Ryan. His friends and coworkers fled the company, even fled the country, one after another, and still Ryan persisted.

It was when the administration insisted on a much harder midterm than in previous years, and then when too many students failed it, fixed their grades in such a clumsy manner that the worst students came away with better grades than the most competent and diligent. That was when the first cracks started to show. It wasn't just the grade fixing. Because it was so clumsy and blatant, and after the students had already been shown their actual grades, teachers lost all credibility in the classroom. Student discipline and even attendance completely disintegrated. Then Ryan's paychecks from last summer, which the school makes a policy (an illegal one) of withholding for 6 months for first time teachers, were delayed another 2 months.

Quite suddenly it was personal. He started talking about leaving a week ago, decided on Friday, and bought his plane ticket on Saturday. Now it's Tuesday, and he's gone. I am really gonna miss that guy. This old apartment just won't be the same!

Longest Work Day Ever!

Amman & Aqaba, Jordan

We started before 6am, didn't get home till half past 11 at night, and spent 10 of those hours on a very uncomfortable bus!

Somewhere in the middle we gave placement tests to about 90 bank employees. I'll be heading back to Aqaba in a couple weeks to spend a month or two teaching about 60 of those bankers, so stay tuned for posts from the beach!

I'm really looking forward to these classes, and the opportunity to strut myself as something of a free agent. I've learned a lot in the last year at Bell Amman. As I kept saying during our inspection last week by Bell Cambridge, I'm a completely different teacher than when I started a year ago.

Without Nina and Rula's belief in me after the professional and psychological abuse I suffered at the Modern American School (more on this to come), I might never have had the confidence to teach again.
Without the CELTA that Nina, Rula and Rebecca fought tooth and nail to get the Luminus Group to pay for, I wouldn't have recognized how good my instincts as a teacher already were, or be putting nearly as much thought into lesson frameworks and unifying lesson objectives.
Without Peter and Rebecca's teacher training and phenomenal support, I wouldn't have known about task-based teaching, or have had the guts or imagination to try it in an ESL setting, and this methodology has completely transformed my classroom in the best ways.
I've learned a great deal from full-time and part-time teachers, and others at Bell.
My extensive involvement in the months of preparation for inspection also taught me a lot about the big picture elements of education and curriculum design.

In the next two months, I'll be putting the new "Teacher Maryah" to the test in Aqaba, and I can hardly wait to begin!

She Puts the 'ifer in Joshifer!

Amman, Jordan

My first Arabic teacher is back in Jordan for a brief visit to her family, and we went out to dinner tonight. When I came to Jordan with Peace Corps, Jennifer was my Language and Culture Coordinator (LCF). She spent 5 hours 4 days a week teaching Arabic to me, Naureen, Audra and Jeremy (and a couple other trainees who left early). She also lived with us in the village of Ma'in, right next door to me. It was the first time she'd lived outside of Amman, and it was as much a culture shock for her as it was for us. Even though she, a Jordanian Christian, was living with Jordanian Christians in a village that had traditionally always been Christian, it was like another country. (I've always said that Amman isn't Jordan, it may as well be Eastern Europe minus the vodka!) Jennifer and I spent many evenings working through our culture shock together, and we stayed in touch throughout the rest of my Peace Corps Volunteer service.

Little did any of us know at the time, but Peace Corps Trainee Josh had a serious case of love at first sight of Jennifer, and not long after we became full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers, he started getting to know Jennifer a little better. He was very discreet, and it was months before anyone but Josie knew anything about it! But once the secret was out, things moved fast. They were together as much as possible, and we started referring to them by just one name: Joshifer. By the end of my Peace Corps service, they were married, and on their way to a new life in Kansas City, Missouri.I kept telling Jennifer she was the bravest person I knew. Not only was she getting married and embarking on a new life a deux, but she was leaving all her family and friends behind and moving to America, too! She knew it would be hard, she told me tonight, and she'd thought she was prepared. But when I went to their American wedding reception in Missouri later that summer, it was clear that it was harder than expected. The sounds at night were different, she was struggling to find a job, she didn't have any friends except her sister-in-law to keep her company while Josh was at work.... Having grown up with bars on her windows like everyone in Jordan, she didn't feel safe in her home in America. It was a much greater challenge than she expected.

Three years later, she's quite well acclimated to the States. She and Josh are now living in Washington, DC, which is a city full of Arabs and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, including many of our fellow Volunteers from Jordan. Jennifer has old friends and new ones, a fascinating job as a media analyst, and a husband she adores and who adores her. But it's been 3 years since she's seen her family and friends, longer than she expected, and that has started to take it's toll on her now.

It was fun, too, to compare notes on how Jordan had changed since we left it three years ago. She confirmed what I had only suspected (not being particularly familiar with Amman in my Peace Corps days), that women were generally far more conservatively dressed - more hijab and niqab than ever. She had noticed in Cozmo grocery store a phenomenon I became very familiar with at the Modern American School, children who spoke English with a heavy Arab accent, but hardly spoke Arabic at all, most likely because they'd been raised, not by their parents, but by their Filipina or Indonesian or Sri Lankan maids (of which Jennifer says there are a lot more than she's used to seeing). We compared our impressions of Jebel Webdeh, too. I know that neighborhood as the trendy place for young expats - students and young professionals - to live and hang out, but Jennifer knows it as the very Arab neighborhood where she grew up.

It's so nice to see her back in Jordan! I only wish she could stay longer....

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.

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.

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!

Sometimes They're So Sweet!

Amman, Jordan

I've told my student Nadine over and over that she doesn't have to buy me things at lunch break, but should spend her money on herself. I thought I had finally gotten through to her, so I was surprised today when she offered me a bottle of water. When I started to protest, she launched into a story about how, once, when she was three, she choked on some food, and then got food poisoning, and had to have an injection and all this stuff, and that her mother had said it was important for her to drink a lot of water, so she wanted me to have some water for my food poisoning.

It was so sweet, how could I turn her down? (And it sure hit the spot!)

Bribery and Extortion

Amman, Jordan

I decided that honey catches more flies, and perhaps sugar would tempt my students to behave more than rules and consequences. So last night I went out and bought pens and erasers and tofees and little note cards and wrote something for each student about why they deserved to have a present for Eid. I handed them out today, and I have never seen my class so quiet, as they sucked on their toffees and puzzled out what I had written for them.

And then I sent them off to Art class with their sugar highs, and was done for the week!

Ramadan's Children

Kids say the darnedest things!

Amman, Jordan

My second graders get a mid-morning break upstairs in the cafeteria, where they can get all sugared up for the rest of their classes :-S and yesterday, one student looked up at me and asked, "Miss Maryah? Are you fasting for Ramadan?"
I waved the Coke in my hand. "What do you think?" (Fortunately, caffeine IS forbidden for my Junior School students, but teachers can still get it.)

This morning, I was riding herd on one of my students to get him to keep writing in his copybook instead of talking to his friends when he looked up and asked, "Miss Maryah, are you fasting?"
"Nope," I said (a bit gleefully, I must admit, but I knew he wasn't fasting either).
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because I'm not a Muslim."
"Oh, right," says my student. "You're an American."
And this from one of my students who has lived in Canada!

Ramadan Kareem!

Amman, Jordan

Yesterday was the first day of Ramadan, the month of fasting and abstention for Muslims. This includes not only physical abstention, but also the practice of restraining oneself from speaking or thinking ill of others, day and night for a whole month. Those who choose to fast will not eat, drink or smoke from first light till sunset, and then will probably stay up most of the night partying and stuffing their faces with delicious food and a whole array of special Ramadan sweets.

Fasting for Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, one of the 5 things which Mohammad said were the most important religious duties of a Muslim, in a test by the Angel Gabriel related in what is known as The Hadith of Gabriel.

Technically, second graders are not required to fast. They're too young. However, they are encouraged to try it for part of the day on some days, and perhaps especially in majority Muslim countries, many second graders do fast because it's perceived as a sign of being grown up, something second graders everywhere are desperate to be! (I don't know why! Being grown up and responsible is over-rated!)

I'm noticing something this year that I didn't notice when I taught in the village, perhaps because the village students are so habitually over-caffeinated and hyperactive generally. Yesterday I was really frustrated with students who couldn't concentrate on copying notes from the board into their copybooks for more than five or six letters at a time. They almost had to be prompted word by word through the whole day, until I began to worry that we had some serious learning disabilities in the classroom. Today I figured it out. My least "on task" students yesterday and today are the ones who are fasting. No wonder they can't concentrate!

Actually, I'm feeling really disconnected from Ramadan this year. I think it's probably living in Amman, which in Peace Corps always seemed like it may as well be America compared to village, and working at the American School. I don't often feel like I'm really connected to Jordan. (Then again, I suppose I haven't really been here all that long yet, either.) After reminding my students yesterday morning to be extra patient with each other in this time of fasting, I went yesterday afternoon to Starbucks to use the Internet, walked right in, and ordered a frappuccino. "Sure," said the barista, "but only to go."
"Oh, right!" I exclaimed, feeling stupid. "It's Ramadan." In Jordan and many majority Muslim countries, it is not just inconsiderate but illegal to eat in public in Ramadan. "But I came all this way to use the Internet!"
He just shrugged. So I guess I'm stuck with my stolen wireless connection, slow and frustrating as it may be.

All My Children

Amman, Jordan

Well, I never thought of myself as an elementary school teacher, but I was right when I told everyone I would feel much better about myself as a teacher once I met my students.

I've got a lot of boys, most of them just bursting at the seams with energy, and several of them prodigious talkers, but so long as I'm interesting enough to keep their attention (which I should be moreso once we start teaching actual curriculum next week), they're really quite well-behaved. I have several girls who demand a great deal of affection, but it's nothing compared to having the whole village school trying to touch me all at once every time I went on break as a Peace Corps Volunteer! And despite a couple new international students with very limited English, I have a very quick, capable classroom (and I know from experience that the new international students will come up to speed very quickly!).

I feel confident that it will be a good year.

Culture Shock At Home

Amman, Jordan

I'd been having trouble getting along with my TA this week, and finally figured out why. In part, of course, it's because I've been really nervous about getting everything done in time and feeling like I might be in over my head, both of which make me mean (just ask my mother!). So some serious apologizing was needed.

The main thing, though, was a cultural misunderstanding. Neither she nor I has studied education, but in addition, Diala has none of my teaching experience. Perhaps more to the point, she's never been in an American elementary school before, so she has no conception of what I'm picturing in my head as my classroom. Added to that, with so many native speakers and fluent speakers of English on staff, I forget that Diala is very advanced but still very much an English learner, and I often talk too fast for her, she tells me.

So we sat down and I explained the major difference, as I see it, between Jordanian and American educational culture: In Jordan, the emphasis in the classroom is put on the information being transmitted; rote memorization is de rigeur here, and the classroom environment is more or less irrelevant, or at best, haphazard. American educators, on the other hand, tend to feel that the learning environment is at least as important as the material; if a student is comfortable and happy in his classroom and stimulated by bright colors and lots of informational input around the room, he will want to come to school and be more engaged in his learning.

I can't say I find either system ideal. I admitted to Diala that I often think American educators, and perhaps especially administrators, sometimes put too much emphasis on the environment and not enough on the curriculum, but I also recognize that the Jordanian philosophy is also flawed, and fails many of its students. In any case, we're in the American system here, and thus it's American educational culture we have to respect.

And when she told me that I often talk too fast for her to understand, I realized that we needed to go back over much of the material that was covered in lectures given to the faculty as a whole, in which native speakers of English had spoken too quickly for Diala to take in all the important information.

However, once we'd had a couple little pow-wows about the American teaching philosophy, once we acknowledged and began to bridge that cultural gap, things have been so much smoother in our working relationship!

It's a Small Country!

Amman, Jordan

Jordan is such a small country! Geographically it's the size of Indiana, but sometimes it can seem like the whole country is more closely related than merely the population of Bedford, IN! (No offense, Michael!)

Three years ago, almost exactly, the U.S. Embassy and the Jordanian Ministry of Education ran a workshop series for English supervisors in the Directorates of Education. The plan was for these supervisors to learn about the Progessive Theory of education followed in most American schools, and then retrain English teachers in their Directorates of Education to teach the new Progressivist curriculum. An English teacher in my village, Emad (who was by then madly in love with me, but that's another crazy story for my other blog), was assigned by the northern directorates to be the go-to guy for the two women facilitating the Irbid workshop. Apparently Emad told them wonderful things about this fabulous teacher who was volunteering in his village, and the facilitators suggested that he bring me along to their next session. He did, and I really enjoyed myself, even though my dirty-old-man supervisor Ali was there, too. (Ali must have been glad I was there, too, because when he was supposed to teach the same material in Jerash, in the middle of the second of three Saturday workshops, he handed me his notes and said, "Here. You finish" ... yet another crazy story for my other blog!)

Now, when I met my supervisor Angela at the Modern American School on Thursday, she said, "Do I know you from somewhere?" But we couldn't determine where. Today, however, she mentioned in a workshop that she had taught a seminar for English teachers in Irbid for the U.S. Embassy, and I realized where we knew each other from.

She's still in touch with the co-facilitator of the Irbid workshop, too!

Moral Dilemma Solved

Amman, Jordan

After much equivocating over whether to teach needy Jordanians at the Greek Orthodox School in Madaba and pay only the minimum on my student loans, or to teach rich kids and expats at the Modern American School in Amman at a more generous wage, I have made my decision. A phone call home last night helped me feel more like I'm making the best decision in the long run. I intend to sign a contract with the Modern American School tomorrow. There may still be an opportunity for me to teach the Orthodox Patriarchy at the new location they hope to open in suburban Amman in September, and I will be interviewing with the Director of AMIDEAST/Amman on Monday to talk about moonlighting there as a test-prep or English teacher.

I'm also really looking forward to seeing Arwen in the next couple weeks and helping her translate while she's in Jordan distributing wheelchairs and interviewing potential recipients for the charity she runs in honor of her late sister.

I discovered in grad school that it's important for me to be involved in at least some work that benefits people in need, and I suspect there will be plenty of opportunities for me to do that here in Amman, I need only find them. Among other things, by staying in Amman, and particularly by moonlighting at AMIDEAST, I hope to make contacts in the embassy and NGO communities that will help me move on to really exciting things when I'm ready to take my next step into the future.

For now, you will find me in Amman, Jordan, for at least the coming academic year, if not longer. Family and friends are welcome to come and visit any time; ahlan wa sahlan, as they say in Arabic: Be like family and be at ease.