First Day of School . . . Kind Of

So . . . today was our official first day of school with students attending. I woke up at about 5 this morning, rearin' to get to school and meet some of the students.

By the time we arrived, some students had already arrived and were giving Christopher, Andrew, and me funny looks (which I don't blame them for doing). We walked to our office, set our things down, and then went to search out an administrator to find out what our schedules would look like and which classrooms we would be in. At this, the vice-principal chuckled for a minute, then explained that we should not worry because no actual teaching would be done today or tomorrow; rather, it was supposed to be a time for the kids to get re-aquainted with the school and socialize with friends after not seeing each other for 3 months. Though this made some sense to me, I still feel like this can be accomplished with a bit more (or a lot more) structure in place. However, I realize I can't change certain cultural traditions in a day (or probably ever), so I let this one be. Anyhow, to make the point I was trying to make, because everybody knows that nothing actually happens on the 1st day of school here, only about 1/3 of the students actually showed up.

Since we are supposed to be teaching 1st graders in the morning, and since the 1st graders (new to schooling since they don't do kindergarten here) were all shuffled into the gymnasium to watch movies all day (not a totally bad way of getting them hooked), guess what--I watched movies all morning. The Lion King. In Arabic. Twice.

The afternoon was a little better. While the other two were lounging around in the office (because presumably we weren't supposed to be doing anything according to several of the teachers), I decided I would go walk around the school and create something to do for myself. As I was walking across the courtyard, I noticed some boys from the 2nd grade classroom peeking their heads out and then running back inside. I thought I'd go check to see what they were up to, and to my surprise found that there was no teacher in the classroom! So I quickly ran back to our office (they'd been in there for 10 minutes with no teacher without causing any real trouble, what was another 30 seconds), grabbed some coloring pages and some puzzles, then went back in to supervise the teacher-less 2nd graders. Without my knowing any Arabic to speak of, along with their not knowing any English, we managed to get some coloring done in a very orderly fashion. I even got them to understand that they were to only use 1 crayon at a time, and if they needed to get another one, they had to either trade with a friend or come trade with me. Not a bad start, I thought. Then we got a bit more serious. I got some puzzles out, split them into 2 groups, and had each group work on a puzzle with each other. They were pretty timid to get up and work cooperatively with each other (something they probably don't normally do in school here), and so it took a lot of hand-gesturing and intense guidance to get the activity up and running. However, to their credit, they didn't do half bad working with each other and solving the puzzles once they got going.

At this point, Andrew and Christopher came looking for me and we did the rest of the activities through co-teaching. Since we still had quite a bit of time left, and we didn't really have any other tangible things for us to work with, I decided I would teach them some common classroom phrases in English. We spent a good solid 30 minutes on "sit down," "stand up," and "line up," all successful and all without them understanding a word of what I was saying (initially anyway). Finally, to wrap things up for the day, I wanted to see how well they knew their numbers from 1-10 in English. What I found is that they could recognize the symbols for the numbers ("1" for "one") and that they could recite the numbers in order from memory, but things got a bit screwy when I had them try to recognize the numbers out of order. Though this was a bit frustrating, it gave me some good insight into how they have been taught English before, as well as where they're at with their English-speaking skills.

At the end of the day, the kids all rushed off to the buses, and all of the students and most of the teachers were out of there within 10 minutes of the bell ringing.

All in all, I'd say the day was most interesting and a great first experience with working with students who could not speak any English. We'll see how the rest of the year goes!

Good night from Abu Dhabi,

Matt