I have been doing some thinking...I know...super dangerous. Essentially it has been two months since I arrived in Saudi (has it been that long??) and I have not been keeping up with the day to day update thing on this blog. I'm not going to lie...no real surprises there. I have been a tad bit busy. Who would have thought that teaching English, Drama and Social Studies to Grades 4-8 at varying levels of English comprehension would be so difficult!
What I aim to do in this entry is just to sum up my impressions of Saudi and of the school and people I have met and work with here. I might do some stand alone stuff regarding specific aspects of Saudi afterwards but I want to paint a general stroke now.
One thing that I read over and over again in travel books and blogs was the overwhelming feeling of entering the humidity and heat in this part of the world for the first time. Boy, were they not kidding. When I took that first step off of the airplane upon my arrival in Saudi it hits you like a sack of bricks...almost chokes you before you acclimatize to it. I didn't think it was possible for my body to produce sweat so rapidly...the things you learn I suppose.
Mark, the Head of School, picked me up at the airport upon my arrival to bring me to King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC...pronounced "cake"). I got all of my stuff up to my brand new apartment and it all suddenly became very real. I have never...ever...lived on my own before. I have lived at home with family, I have lived with many epic people in university, even in London I was living in a house of five other people all of the time. Tis was my own, individual apartment, my own quiet space to customize to my liking. No more fighting for space in the kitchen or waiting for somebody else's laundry to finish so I can use the machine. No more complaining about people not cleaning their dishes or helping tidy the place. I could do what I want, when I wanted to. Awesome.
As far as first impressions go the school is a doozy. Although the building itself is huge with brand new facilities, equipment, smart boards, etc. It is not without it's quirks. As you can imagine, with the large censorship laws in this country, it's a giant pain the neck getting anything shipped here. Textbooks were notoriously difficult because their content had to be scrutinized first. At the time of writing this entry I am still waiting on Teacher's Editions for 4/5 of my textbooks. We are also we still waiting for our IT equipment to show up and rely on household wireless routers with weak signal to provide a very unreliable Internet within the school walls. That aside, we have amazing classrooms, a big new cafeteria, full size soccer pitch outside, new gym, a large black box theatre (my baby), state of the art music rooms with a recording studio, and an outdoor swimming pool. Not bad.
If there's one thing that makes the decision to move here bearable it's the group of people Mark has assembled to be this school's founding staff. Every single person is a dedicated, hard working, creative, and helpful teacher but more; they are all genuinely lovely human beings. We have all clicked immediately on a friendship basis and it has made life a lot better here. Mind you, we do spend almost every day together, we all live in the same building, we are pretty much the population of this city...but if you're going to be stuck on a deserted island with a group of people, I'm glad it's this lot.
The students at the school have also been quite good. That's not to say there aren't any problem kids (completely inevitable) but we don't run into a lot of the issues that a larger school would. There's only 100 or so students and all of the classrooms are within one small block so we all see each other often. Mind you, we started with about 30 students...over tripled our numbers in less than two months. This has understandably made some things frustrating (like trying to plan for lessons when every day you have a new face) and there are astronomical differences in English comprehension levels. Some students speak and write in perfect English in a range to students who have never spoken or written a word of it in their lives! Why a parent would want to take their 9, 10, 11 year old child with no English experience and put them into a school that has a language of instruction and interaction in English is beyond me. I suppose they want them to pick up the language but at those ages it is extremely difficult. I keep telling myself that it's all for the good of professional development having to modify, accommodate, and differentiate between so many things...but man, can it ever be exhausting and time consuming. We've reached a level now where we can't add more students in most classes until we gain more teachers, so at least there's some consistency on a day to day basis now.
Two months in and everything's just chugging away at a good pace. The students have really settled in and I have some great interactions and teaching moments with them in the class now that we all know each other a bit better. We just had a week long break during the Eid Al-Adha and will be trucking along through to the winter break starting on December 19th. I'll do my best to get some pictures of the different parts of the school soon. On my Facebook page you can also view pictures of my apartment, the surrounding area, plus various trips to Jeddah and my recent trip to Dubai (more on that soon).
Until next time folks!
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