Cover Teaching

I finally got the chance to teach some classes.  I was only substituting for teachers who were absent, still, it was a nice break from sitting around the office waiting to be given essays to mark, or observing other teachers, and it gave me the chance to visit another campus.

The first time I substituted or "covered", I was told about 10 minutes before the class started.  She handed me a writing book and told me I needed to introduce the argumentative essay.  Luckily, students typically don't show up for class until 20 minutes after class starts, so I had a little more time to figure out what to do.  I thought the best way to introduce the argumentative essay would be to start with a debatable topic, review the arguments and counter argument of both sides, and then discuss how we would structure the paper.  I instantly remembered a website my friend put me on to, called Intelligence Squared where they get experts in the field to debate currently relevant topics.  I figured I could easily show clips from an episode to help get them thinking about the topic, listening for the language used in academic arguments, and see how they support their opinions with facts and evidence.  I went and scrolled through the topics, and scrolled, and kept scrolling.  It seemed to me like every one of the topics being debated, were topics we were forbidden to discuss with the students, at least, all the interesting ones anyway.

The actual list of forbidden topics we were given......

..... and it continues to the next page.

I finally settled on "Don't Eat Anything with a Face", a debate about whether or not everyone should be a vegetarian.  After helping them decipher the meaning of the debate title and subject matter, we got started.  The girls seemed to enjoy the video clips, and actually did well identifying the main arguments for each side.  We outlined how each speaker presented his arguments, and what kinds of sources and evidence they used.  We talked about effective and ineffective arguments, and even practiced proper citation using quotes from the video.  The girls seemed interested, alert, intelligent, and I felt so proud to have successfully covered a class with only 10 minutes notice.  It felt different than the classes I had been observing so far, the girls still came late and some still left early, but most of them participated with an energy and even interest that had been missing in other classes.

The next day, I was asked to cover again, this time at the Khatif Community College.  My experience there couldn't have been more opposite.  I arrived and was ushered into the office to clock in using the fingerprint scanner. We have a similar one at the University, but my print hadn't been registered yet at this campus, so it wasn't working.  I went up to the teachers lounge, and was told to cover a "science" track English class, which is actually business, but no one was exactly sure what chapter they were covering (they are supposed to cover an entire unit each week, one chapter a day, which is a ridiculous amount of material to try to cover...) so we spent about 10 minutes tracking down another teacher, who in the end, didn't know either, so we finally asked one of the students who told us she wasn't sure either, but she thought maybe chapter 10 (IT and software development).  I know almost nothing about computer hardware and software terminology, and most of the words in Chapter 10 were new to me too, but I rushed off to class anyway since I was already about 15 minutes late.  When I got to the class, I was hoping to rely on the internet to pull up images of words like "motherboard" and "fiber optic cables".  Unfortunately, the technology wasn't working.  I struggled for a few minutes to get the computer to come on, but finally abandoned it after 5 minutes since there were now 7 of the 34 students in class (30 minutes after it was supposed to start), and began attempting to draw BIOS processors and card controllers on the board.  I realized I was in trouble when one girl raised her hand and said, "Miss?  Me bathroom go?"  and another, when asked to get out a paper and pencil said "Me no paper."  The students here were closer to the kinds of beginners I was used to teaching, but instead of being able to go back, and reteach them the basics they probably never got, we are stuck teaching the exact same curriculum as the girls who go to Dammam University.  They take the same tests, and are required to write the same three academic essays.  The girls in front of me now would be hard pressed to get a complete sentence down, let alone a five paragraph essay.  Instead of teaching them the basic grammar and vocab that are essential to even simple conversational exchanges between teacher and student, we had to be sure that they had memorized words like "Central Processing Unit" and "Random Access Memory".  Never mind that they couldn't use these to form a coherent sentence, even if they grasped the meaning, or that they were not likely to be in a situation that required them to spout from memory that a display is "any screen or monitor that is connected to a computational device and shows information to the user."

As I was struggling to figure out a way I could teach these words, while giving them some meaningful practice of the basic English that so many of them clearly needed, an administrator came in and told me to come with her, that they had finally got me registered in the fingerprinting system and needed me to clock in.  "Now," I asked, "In the middle of class?"  "Yes," she said, "no problem, the students will wait."  So I went. After three attempts and about thirty minutes, I finally got clocked in, and rushed back to my class, which I had yet to start more than halfway through the hour and forty-five minute class.  I was surprised to see that I now had all 34 students.  I quickly found out why.  A few minutes after I arrived, a second administrator arrived to take attendance.  A few minutes after that, several girls suddenly needed the bathroom, and several more forgot there books in their lockers, and a handful left without saying anything at all.  Only two of these girls came back to class.  So, with only about 12 students left in the class, and only about 30 minutes left to teach an entire chapter of material way above the student's level, I pressed on.  It was probably the worst I have ever felt as a teacher.  I was completely demoralized by the end of class. It all felt so hopeless.  I wanted to go outside to clear my head, but unlike the University of Dammam, there was no courtyard with trees and benches.  Instead, they had a gym area which was converted into a cafeteria.  The windows all looked down onto this indoor cafeteria.  The windows to the outside were all tinted so you couldn't see out but a little light could still come in, although most of them had bars and then blinds over them.  There was literally no where to go.  It felt like being in jail.  If it felt this restricting for me after one day, imagine how the permanent teachers and students felt.

 The college clearly did not care about the students, so the students saw little reason to care about their studies.  It was a vicious, awful, unfair, and completely fixable cycle -  If only the powers that be were willing to make the necessary changes.  The lesson was awful.  I knew it, the students knew it, we were helpless accomplices. I felt ten times worse because these were the students who needed good teachers the most, but even the best teacher can't do miracles.  To teach this curriculum at this level to these girls was impossible.  I was sure that faced with these odds, I would do what all the other teachers here had done long ago, give up.  I would show up, read the answers from the book, and go home.  I would put all my energy into something else, something less soul crushingly hard.  I would do what Chris had suggested and make my goals here all about me, finishing books and watching TV series I never used to have time for, learning the guitar, and writing this blog.  I would let go of my grandly naive ideas about changing lives for the better through engaging education.  I don't want to have to give up this idea, that even if I can't change the system, I can still reach them, some of them anyway.  But after that class... I'm not so sure.

Thankfully, a few days later I covered another class, this time back at the University of Dammam.  These girls renewed my faith.  We had another great lesson where they contributed, interacted, willingly participated, and seemed to enjoy being in class.  Word spread to the other classes and when a teacher was gone the next day, they requested me as their cover teacher.  My ego needed that little burst of confidence.  For the rest of the school year and the summer sessions, I know I will be at Dammam University.   But when the school year starts up in the fall, if I stay, they could send me to Khatif or another community college permanently.  Part of me wants the challenge.  I want to see if, given the students from day 1, I might be able to work with them, find a way to bring the curriculum to their level, to really make a difference.  But another part of me knows that I won't be able to, and that if I try and don't make it, if I give up, I'll give up completely, and that it might mean the end of teaching for me forever.