On my third day at work, Leila mysteriously appeared. She also arrived by train on Saturday, on the final evening train after mine. So I guess if worst had come to worst, I would have been picked up from the train station eventually later that evening. Anyway, no one had told her when the bus left for the University, or that the work week starts on Sunday here, and no one had told any of the staff that she was coming, so no one expected her. She just hung out in her room for a few days waiting for someone to tell her something. Add communication to the list of things Saudi's aren't particularly good at. In any case, I was glad to see her again.
Also on my third day at work, the students had an English test. Which I didn't think was a big deal, but soon found out that it was, in fact, a very big deal. They have two tests and an exam each quarter. The tests and exams are written by the male teachers on the men's side, and delivered in secrecy the morning of the test in large white envelopes. These envelopes are then signed out by each teacher, who is assigned to a classroom of students they do not normally teach, along with someone from the administration (or an extra teacher) to monitor the exam. After the tests, students return the test booklets, which are counted, returned to the envelope and signed. This is a process that happens three times each quarter, or a dozen times each year. This is the 10th test this year, so I expected the process to go somewhat smoothly. As I have been told before, and am sure will be told again, I need to learn to let go of my expectations.
For once, all the students had arrived on time, early even, and were tracking down any teacher they could find to beg them to tell them what was going to be on the exam. Others were frantically skimming the pages of their books. The teacher's were no less disturbed. Everyone paced up and down the narrow corridors between the cubicles waiting for the tests to arrive. There was a schedule of what teacher was being sent to which room, that had been changed or updated at least 6 times since our arrival that morning. When the tests finally did arrive, there was pandamonium. Suddenly people were being handed packets, then packets were taken away and reassigned. Room assignments were being changed, again. Scantron score sheets were passed out, then some went missing, and runners were sent from teacher to teacher to collect any spares. I hunkered down on the couch with Leila and Sara, the other two new teachers, just trying to stay out of the way of this chaos. Eventually, I was told to go to room 309 to help proctor an exam. I waded out into the hallway, which was swarming with students trying to figure out what room they were supposed to be in and teachers looking for students that were supposed to be in their testing group.
I finally found room 309, but when I opened the door, I found nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, there were two chairs and a broken desk, but otherwise, there was no one. I began looking for the teacher I was supposed to be proctoring with instead. I tried three rooms in various stages of test preparation before I saw her herding a group of girls in the hallway toward an available room, hopefully with desks. Halfway down the hall, an administrator caught up with us and told us to go to room 318 instead, to switch with another teacher who had accidentally been assigned her own class. Abandoning our group of lost girls, we swam upstream through the hallway to the other classroom. This one had both students and desks, but now we needed to wait for a different set of test booklets, since these girls were at a different level then our original group. In the meantime, we had to convince the girls to bring their bags to the front of the room. The girls acted as if we were separating them from their first born child. "No Miss please, just let us put them under our desks, please Miss?" Ten or fifteen minutes later, we had finally got all the bags to the front (a university policy that has been in place for all 9 of their previous exams). It was now almost 9:10, and the test was supposed to start at 8:30. As I was handing out scantron sheets, an administrator came in and asked me to go to room 327 instead, so once more I shifted rooms.
I looked on every door and found 300 to 335, but no 327. I was so confused. Finally, I asked one of the Filipino janitors, who by now was the only one left in the hallway. She told me it was downstairs. Downstairs? Why on earth would 327 be downstairs when 326, 328, and all the other 300 numbers were upstairs? I wondered if maybe she hadn't understood the room number I had asked for, or that I had misunderstood her. But I went downstairs anyway, and sure enough, nestled between 225 and 257 was 327. Bizarre. The testing in this room was already in full swing. One of the other teachers was pacing the room, reading an extra test. When she saw me she came over and whispered that I should just walk around and keep my eyes open for any cheating or anything. I put my own bag at the front and started toward the back of the room when she called me back to look at a question. The test wasn't particularly well written, and she was pointing out a particularly tricky question in which the question reversed the wording of the original passage. I nodded my agreement that it wasn't a good question, and started walking back through the rows of desks. I didn't get very far before she called me back to look at another question, in which every one of the multiple choice answers could have been correct, if not for the word "recent" which tipped the scales to the answer referenced in the passage as "now". Again I commiserated that it was a very tricky tactic, and started back toward the rows. This time she waited until I got all the way to the back before calling me forward to look at an "odd one out" question. It's kind of like that segment of sesame street, where they show you four things and sing that song "one of these things is not like the other....". Anyway, none of them seemed related in any way at all, and every connection I could think of, left two out. I'm still not sure what they intended the answer to be for that one. She and I whispered our outrage conspiratorially, while the students bubbled away at their scantrons. There was nothing we could do.
About three quarters of the way through the test, my fellow proctor finally got so frustrated with one of the questions that she made an announcement to the class to "clarify the instructions" in a section of the test. Not long after that, hands began to shoot up. "Miss, what's this word?" "Miss, I don't understand this question?" "Miss is this right?" There was a barrage of questions. She answered a few of the more obscure vocabulary questions, even going so far as to translate a few words in Arabic on the board before swiftly erasing it. "They will kill me," she said, "if they find out I helped them." Before saying sternly, no more. So they moved on to me, trying to get me to crack and help them out. There were times I wanted to, but I saw what had happened when she helped just one. I relied on the clock to get me out of it. There was only five minutes left in the test. My fellow proctor added 5 minutes to the clock - ostensibly so they could bubble in their names and ID numbers on the scantron. When those five minutes were over, there were suddenly two minutes left in the test. Finally, those two minutes came and went, and there was one minute left, and then "Miss Jennie is going to take your papers." I like how she threw me under the bus to be the mean one to take their papers away. Most had already turned theirs in and gone, but about four students still clung to their papers. This was no small job. Those ladies used there whole upper bodies to cover the paper while they wrote one last thing so I couldn't take them away. One girl was so intent, I had to enlist her friend in a small skirmish to get the test and her answer sheet back.
When all the students were gone, we counted the tests, and luckily, had the correct amount. She put them in the envelope, sealed it, signed it, had me sign it, and then we were on our way back upstairs. I asked her how long it usually took for the students to get their results. "Oh, this one is scantron," she said, "So it should go pretty quick. I would think in a month or two." I looked at her to see if she was being sarcastic, but it was frustration I saw in her eyes, not humor. "You see, the scantron machine is at the men's campus, and they are the one's who record all the grades. But they always do the men's tests first, and just get around to the women's whenever they get around to it. Last time, the men had their results within two weeks, and the women waited six months." She just shook her head and shrugged. It is what it is.
The English classes for the rest of the day were cancelled, as they are after every test, just to give students and teachers a break after the big event. But we aren't allowed to leave, even though there are no classes. We have to sit and wait for 4:00pm to roll around. Since the test was only an hour, we had a lot of time to kill. Most of the teachers crowded around the couches and talked. Some took naps, others were watching youtube videos or surfing the web. A few were grading papers. I did a little of all four. Then around 2:30, someone announced; "A male is coming! Quick everyone put on your abayas!" Everyone scrambled to throw on their abayas and head scarves. It was the vice dean from the men's side coming to collect the tests. We all stood around in our abayas for about 30 or 40 minutes before someone finally asked if he had gone. "Oh, yeah, he's been gone for ages. He wasn't here more than five minutes. He just came in, got the tests and left." I had been in the back with most of the other teachers and hadn't even seen him. A sigh of relief spread through the group of teachers who shrugged off their abayas the instant they got the all clear. Strange how sometimes you forget where you are when you're sitting around in what seems like a very normal office setting with all the outward appearances of any developed country. Then suddenly, you get an unsettling reminder of where you are, and just how different it really is.
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