Enrollment

Every day so far, we had been getting new students.  I'm not sure if it was because the college had delayed openings so many times that the students were confused about when it actually started, and enrolled students were just now hearing from friends that is was now open, or if they were just adding  new students who wondered it, or what.  Initially we were told there would be no more than 25 girls in each class, but each day I took attendance, my rolls grew, and by the end of the first week I had 32 girls in one class, 38 in another, and 42 in my project based learning class.

The most obvious problem with this was chairs.  I was one of the lucky ones and had 30 chairs in my room (31 if you counted my own).  Most teachers had only 25.  There were no extra chairs anywhere in the college because they hadn't been ordered or hadn't cleared customs, or something.  So everyday, there was a scramble for any available chairs, and inevitably, students would still end up standing, sitting in each other's laps (literally) or on the floor.  On the up side, students were better at being on time.  The later they arrived the less likely they were to have a chair.

If sheer numbers weren't daunting enough, the new students were added haphazardly, with no regard to level of English.  In my advanced class, three of the new students couldn't answer the question "What is your name?" without a translation.  As you can imagine, this presented a pretty big challenge for us teachers.  Suddenly we had to teach multi-level classes in refrigerators, without enough chairs.  I was one of the luckier teachers.  At least I had a white board.  Some teachers still didn't even have that and were using windows and flip chart paper in the meantime.

Something had to be done.  Part of the problem was that no one in administration seemed to be sure of who was registered and who wasn't, or even who was in each class.  I was glad I had decided from the beginning to keep track of my own attendance because each day, if we were lucky enough to get a register at all, it was almost completely different than the day before.  Part of the problem was that we weren't able to take attendance online as originally planned, since the college still didn't have internet.  Another problem was that none of the admin staff had been trained to use the software they chose to track attendance, or even excel for that matter.

While admin struggled with those problems, one of the teachers was put in charge of assessment.  She had been hired with the idea in mind that all she would be doing was assessment and resource development and she had come prepared.  She had developed a quick 5 minute assessment tool for placement and had requested permission to give this assessment during student orientation week so that students could be placed in classes based on levels from the beginning. They rejected her assessment and decided to use a standardized one from Cambridge that had four parts, listening, speaking, grammar, and writing.  While the cambridge assessment would give us a better idea of where they were, and was better in the sense that the same assessment could be given at the end of the year to measure improvement, it would also require roughly 3 hours of testing from every student, and then would require a lot of time for grading, input, and then arrangement into classes.  So basically, we would end up having to shuffle students around after the Eid break to get them into the correct levels.  Obviously this wasn't the best case scenario, but it was what we had.

The first week we stole time during group work, or writing assignments to take the students into the hallway one by one to administer the speaking test.  I managed to get through all of my homeroom students in just two class periods, but a few teachers still hadn't finished by the end of the week.  We also gave a writing test on Wednesday morning.  The instructions were to write between 150-200 words about your friends, family, school, the future, or anything you want.  One of my girls was confused by this wording and wrote a list of words that had to do with school.  She wasn't the only one, at least three girls in other classes did the same.  Most managed to write some semblance of a paragraph, or at least a sentence or two.    Luckily, we didn't have to grade the writing ourselves, the assessment teacher did that for us.

Each time we felt like we had finished the assessments, a new student arrived and we would have to catch them up and add them to the register.  It wasn't complete chaos, but it was pretty close.  Strange how quickly even ridiculous situations begin to feel normal isn't it?  I got to the point where I was surprised if we didn't have new students.  We were all sure that at some point it would all settle down and things would work out, it just seemed so far in the future that it wasn't worth thinking about. We all needed all our brainpower just to get through the here and now.