My First Week at School

This was my first week at Al Bahya Elementary School for Boys, and what a week it was!

As I mentioned in my last post, on Sunday we got lost on the way there and it ended up taking us 2 hours to get there. Luckily, we didn't really get lost the rest of the week and so now it only takes about 35 minutes to get there. Unfortunately, with the traffic coming back into Abu Dhabi in the afternoons, it takes a little over an hour on the return trip.

Overall, everybody seems very laid back and friendly, though for the first 2 days nobody really went out of their way to make us feel welcome and accepted into their community. By Tuesday, I realized I needed to take more initiative and make a greater effort to show interest in them versus trying to get them to take an interest in me. Over the past few days (Wednesday and Thursday), many more of them have come up to me and my English-teaching colleagues and we ended up all having some really great conversations.

One of the things I like most about the school is that the teachers all come from such a variety of backgrounds. Since Emiratis (people native to the UAE) don't partake in "lowly jobs" such as teaching (most of them really don't work at all but rather are pretty much given a free ride on life via oil money, but that topic is for another day), all of the teachers are expatriates from neighboring countries in the Middle East. So far, I have enjoyed getting to know teachers from Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia, and Lebanon, and I'm sure other nationalities are represented at our school as well.

Another thing I like about our school is the actual layout of the building. Basically, the building is a giant 2-story square: there is a very big courtyard in the middle, with all classrooms facing out to it. There is a soccer field set up in the courtyard, which I think is pretty cool.

One thing I don't like about the school is that none of the teachers were really doing any work all week. With a 3-day holiday coming up next week, our next day at school will be the first day students arrive. And yet, we still have no idea which classrooms we will be in, nor have we seen any sort of concrete schedule or class lists. Everybody here is just used to that and says that the first few weeks are for everybody to figure out what is going on, so I will try my best not to get to stressed out about it.

Since we were required to be at the school every day this week, and since there was no organized work to be done, I spent some time on my own trying to figure out how I can utilize the (very limited) resources available to me to start delivering the curriculum in some capacity. I also spent some time collaborating with my fellow English teachers on how we are going to get through the first few weeks since our kids will probably not know a single word of English.

Upon re-reading what I have written so far, it may sound like I did not enjoy my first week at my school. In all honesty, I though it was a great to get my feet wet with something so different than what I am used to and finally find out where I will be spending a great chunk of my time over the next 2 years.

Since it is the weekend here, I am going to go relax with some of my friends now.

Good night from Abu Dhabi,

Matt