Student Projects

Summer school is the best time of year to teach.  The students are there because they want to be, or at least, their parents want them to be. There is no pressure of tests or quizes or grades or attendance or official marks.  Perhaps counterintuitively, that means that most of the real learning that happens at our university, takes place during summer school.  Teachers aren't forced to teach a curriculum that is beyond the level or interests of the students, and students forget to worry about what is generally considered evidence of learning and get down to the actual learning instead.

This isn't to say that the student's weren't still concerned with being the best.  The first week of summer school, the question I got most often was; "Teacher, what level is this?  Are we the highest level?" Which, was a really hard question to answer given that almost everyone in the class was at very different levels from each other, and then were switched.  So my frustrating, but very honest answer to them was always "I don't know."  Call it teacherly pride, but by the end of our short three weeks together, I was convinced that all of my students were the best.

Since we only had 3 weeks, I let the students choose the topics they wanted to focus on they chose food, fun, and milestones.    The first week, we talked about food and memories and favorite recipes and I had them all write out a recipe, and then a paragraph or story, depending on their level about why that food was important to them.  It's something I have done before with adult learners, and every time, I get surprising, and often moving results.  This time was no exception.  The girls wrote about everything from family members, to declaring independence, to possible futures in other countries, and attachments to their own traditions.  I was really pleased that so many of them turned in the assignment, knowing there would be no consequences for not doing it, but I was even more pleased with how many of them decided to do the extra credit and actually make their recipe.  It was wonderful.  You can check out the recipe book and stories for yourself by following this link.

The same week we did our recipes, the younger girls in another class did presentations on different countries.  Each group of 3-5 girls was responsible for a "booth" at the culture fair during the break between classes.  They had to tell us about the country they researched including food, population, government, tourist sites, traditional clothing a weather.  Even though most of the girls read word for word something they printed from Wikipedia when you asked them to tell you about their country, it was still a lot of fun.  Some of them even had music for each country and gave mini dancing lessons.  My favorite booth was the USA stand.  I was interested to hear their opinions of our country, but unfortunately got mostly facts retrieved from Google.  They told me about the president, and that I should visit the Grand Canyon and New York City, and Deer Park Michigan (because it has the largest population of Saudis living together in the US) and that we really liked apple pie and hot dogs.  The girls covering India were showing people how to wrap saris which was shocking because they would unwrap themselves to do it.  That is the most skin I have seen exposed on any Saudi woman since coming here, and even though it was just arms and a midriff, it felt scandalous.  The UK table was giving away "Keep Calm and Speak British English" bookmarks, and the Egyptian booth had little pyramids with information on them, very cute.  My favorite was the Lebanese booth because they had an array of delicious Lebanese food to try.

The following week our theme was "fun" which I was particularly excited about.  I was interested to know what my Saudi students did for fun, and how they spent their time given the limited options available to them. I decided that our project for the week would be developing a website full of fun activities to do in Saudi Arabia.  On the first day, we started by brainstorming.  All the girls shouted out "shopping" and "going to malls" and I wrote that on the board.  Then I turned around to wait for more suggestions and for one incredibly long minute, none came. I started to think that maybe the girls chose the topic of fun because they just never had any, and I was beginning to worry that we would have to scrap the whole project if going to malls was really the only form of entertainment, but then someone shouted out, "Go to Bahrain!" and slowly, the girls started to come up with more ideas.  They talked about going to Bahrain to watch movies, or eat in fancy restaurants.  I encouraged them to try to think about things they could do in Saudi, and the room was silent again.  Eventually, they mentioned trips to Mecca, visiting famous mosques, private parties for women in their homes, listening to music and watching TV, and a few museums and local tourist sites.  Finally, we had enough categories of fun to break off into small groups and start writing about what there was to do.

By the middle of the week, the girls were ready to type up the paragraphs and add them to the computers.  I tested the website first, and I made sure that multiple people could edit at once, and that you could access the website from the University (they block everything, even yahoo and gmail, but strangely, not facebook?!) before I booked the lab.  So I wasn't anticipating any problems until the girls sat down and started having problems immediately.  It hadn't occurred to me that as summer school students, they weren't given usernames or passwords, so none of them could log in.  I spent a frantic 5 minutes rushing around logging in as me to one computer after another.  But even this didn't work out.  While the students could now access the computer, no one could log on to the internet since IT had set it up to prevent multiple internet log ins with one ID.  I gave up and had everyone type them in word and then, because all email providers are blocked by the University, I saved them all to my flashdrive and promised to email the students their saved work once I got home, so they could edit the website on their own from home.

Technology was only the beginning of our problems.  Once the students were able to access the website from home and make changes... things went rather well.  I asked them to include at least one picture, one link, and one paragraph of information about their topic. Again, most of them completed the assignment even though it was voluntary, and by Thursday, the website was looking pretty good, minus a few mistakes with the English.    But before making the website live, I wanted to make sure I could get approval for the website from the University Administration.  They had given me the initial green light, but I think they only did that because they figured there was no way the students would actually manage to do the project.  When I presented them with the final version of the website, there was a good amount of surprise.  Most of the pages were approved without incident, but when they reached the movies and music tab, they wanted me to delete it.  After all, listening to music in public is illegal, and movie theaters don't exist in Saudi.  Therefor, they shouldn't exist in any official capacity as far as the University is concerned.  I argued that the girls had worked so hard to write about the music and the movies, and that it wouldn't be fair to let the other girls work stay on the webpage while theirs got deleted, and after a lot of negotiation, I got them to agree to letting me delete the links to the racier music and videos, but leave all of the information there.  Here is a hint, if you really want to see the videos / listen to the music they recommend, just do a google search for the artists they mention.  In the end, we managed to have a half-way decent website of things to do for fun in Saudi.  There isn't much to it, for obvious reasons (lack of content + lack of English), but I encourage you to take a look at what my students came up with by clicking here.

The final week, I was planning on having them record themselves reading a personal essay in the style of "This I believe".  This would have been a hard final project anyway, but when I learned we would only have class 4 days instead of 5 the final week, and when I realized the last day would be a party, so it really was only 3 days, I decided to give them a break and not give them a project in the final week.  Which was fortunate because on the second day they told us we would have only one more day of classes.  So the week ended on Tuesday instead of Thursday, and so Tuesday became our party day, and so in the end, it was really only a 2 day week.  So, I guess it turned out to be a really good thing that I didn't try to have them do a final project.  So the four week summer school ended up being a three week adventure in chaos.  But it was worth it.  It was nice to be working for once, and I really felt like I learned a lot about my students in a really short time.  I can only hope that they can say the same about learning English from me.