Second Day on the Job

The second day on the job we started getting down to brass tacs. In the morning we talked about class schedules and what our actual day would look like. Not great as it turns out. I remember in the interview that Chris, the Principal had explained a team system where we would all be responsible for one specific group of students, but also help with 2 other groups, so that between us in our teams we would have 5 or 6 groups to look after. She explained that we would teach 3 classes a day and spend the rest of the day planning. This turned out to be slightly different from what was actually going to happen. As it turns out, we are going to have six different class to teach each day, and about 45 minutes of planning time, plus 30 minutes for lunch. I think all of us teachers were pretty concerned about the teaching hours to planning hours ratio. Not only would we be teaching six different groups of students, we would also be teaching 6 different subjects, meaning 6 unique lesson plans each day. I don't care how good you are, 45 minutes چis no where near enough time to plan 6 quality lessons, never mind the other things that will likely crowd out that time like the mandatory 15 minutes of one on one time per week with every student in your group, general student queries, and marking the ten minute tests they are going to require at the start of each class and the mandatory end of week tests we will have to give, none of which have been written yet.

In fact, the curriculum itself has not yet been written. Our job this week is going to be to write the curriculum for the trimester. This is potentially doable task, however, there are several obstacles in the way. First, the text books that were ordered (and still haven't arrived) do not align with the standardized test all Colleges of Excellence will be giving their students at the end of the year. Second, a non- ESL teacher developed a rough SOW (scheme of work) that doesn't align with either the texts or the test. Third, we are supposed to do this as a whole team of 28 teachers. Can you imagine trying to hammer out a curriculum with the input of 28 teachers at the same time? 28 people would never be able to agree on where to go for lunch, let alone a schema of work for an entire semester. Finally, we don't even know yet what the level of our students will be, so we are actually going to be developing curriculums for all the levels, that somehow still has to cover the same information in the same order as all the other levels. So, our job is to somehow bring all three of these things and people together to make a coherent plan for teaching which will start in less than 2 weeks. Worried yet? I am.

Luiza, who left our old company to join me here decided today that it just wasn't for her. She is trying to do her Masters Degree through an American shoot off University in Bahrain and needs to be able to go there two nights a week, one of them being a work week day, and the new company wasn't willing to let her leave early to make it there on time that one day a week. But she was also really concerned about the number of teaching hours and not enough planning. She decided it wasn't really worth all the extra time she would need to put in in order to do the job well. 'It's more money, true, but it's a lot more work.' she said. 'I would rather do almost no work at Dammam and get paid less.' I was devastated to see her go, but I completely understood how she felt. On the one hand, at the University, we only taught about 3 hours a day, but the students, administration, and even most of the teachers didn't take it seriously. It was glorified baby sitting. At the Khobar Female College, we were being asked to do a lot more, but we were also asking a lot of our students. This new company was trying to raise the bar, and of course, to do that, you have to work hard. I appreciated that they were taking the standards seriously. But I also wished they would take the need for planning time seriously. To develop the kind of engaging and effective lessons they needed to get the students where they needed to be by the end of the year, we would need the time and resources to do it right. It's clear that whoever designed the time tables was never a teacher and didn't understand the relationship between good planning and good lessons.

Perhaps I've been naive in thinking that because this is a British company, things will be more organized and well managed. After all, we are still in Saudi. I'm skeptical that this year will be successful for the school if things remain this ambiguous and quasi complete. I think the company has bitten off more than it is prepared to chew at the moment. A lot of what we are doing now should have been carefully thought out and planned way in advance, not a week before the students arrive. But the show must go on. So I will do my best, which at the moment seems to be trying to stay out of the shouting match as 28 teachers hash out a plan that will no doubt be scrapped and re-worked when the books finally come in.