Taking Care of Business

In the last two weeks, my job has gone from a means to an ends to the highlight of being here. After five schedule changes (a personal record), I now only teach one and a half undergraduate classes. Because of my low course load, I got assigned to observe my students teaching in the local primary school, as well as developing a professional development class on Globalization and the Classroom.

Getting off campus has been great. The university is very comfortable for me, since it's officially bilingual English- Arabic. This helps since my department has faculty from Turkey, Eritrea, Singapore, Egypt, Bahrain, and your lonely American. The elementary school is in a town fifteen minutes away, but is a completely Arabic environment, although they begin to take English classes in fourth grade.

The schools are strictly separated by sex, so they needed a male professor to supervise in the boys school. I've been very impressed by my student teachers- much better than my first year at Mission High! They can all do classic lecture- worksheet style classes very well, but it's harder to do group work or introduce technology, because the students aren't as familiar with it. In any case, there are far fewer discipline issues, and the elementary students seem to be interested in math at a level I have never seen in the US.

I'd like to claim I got to teach about globalization because of my experience with Thinking Beyond Borders. Actually, I needed to teach two more classes to be full time, and my supervisor said that this class was the only one with two unclaimed sections. The students are all full time teachers taking extra courses at the Ministry of Education to become master teachers. They could potentially be a tough audience, but so far they seem very interested and pretty energetic considering the time slot. The major issue is that I need to teach in English and their professional life is almost completely in Arabic. Sometimes the English teachers translate, and I try to use a lot of visuals and activities, but it's not always smooth. The other issue is that they teach all different grades and subjects, so my class is not always applicable to their job.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the level of responsibility and discretion I've been given. There are, of course, the usual weird things, like we need to use Power point in all classes, but mostly they trust my opinion. I suppose the years of adjunct work at three or four jobs was a good preparation. I'm physically in three locations for the next six weeks, spending a lot of time in my rental car listening to the BBC, but getting lost on the backstreets less and less frequently.