First Day at School

Assembly time at Madani Girls' School

 We had already visited both the boys’ and girls’ schools and met the teachers and had a quick look around but today we actually started at the girls’ school properly.  Martin was in the girls’ school on the first floor and I was placed in the girls’ school on the ground floor.  Until June this was one school but the decision was made to create two schools on the same site but with different administration and staff. The smaller of the schools, upstairs has around 400 pupils and has smaller classrooms and higher ability students, whereas the downstairs school has around 800 pupils and larger classroom sizes and are lower ability students.  I was amazed to observe a class of 84 students crammed into a classroom without any room to move.  You couldn’t get a fag paper between them.  We were told that the classes upstairs were small – around 30 to a class but the classes Martin saw were 40 to 50.  High schools consist of only 3 years of students, 1^st years are aged 14, 2^nd years are 15 and 3^rd years are 16.  The 3^rd years are being prepared for exams and so we will not be working with them in the class, just with 1^st and 2^nd years.

They were very excited to have me there

Singing and saying prayers

Lined up ready to say their bit

The day started at 7:30 with assembly and a group of girls led the assembly with a mixture of poems, pop songs and prayers in both Arabic and English, presumably for my benefit.  A couple of the girls were really nervous and tears welled up in me for them and I gave encouraging smiles as best I could.  The head teacher asked me to say a few words which was a little daunting as I had to use a microphone and I hadn’t prepared anything.  But I just told them my name and that I was from London and I had come here with my husband to work with their teachers to help them with listening and speaking English.  I then said “and as I look around at all you beautiful and talented young women, I look forward to getting to know you all” They let out a big “whoooo” at the word beautiful!

Hard to tell them apart in their uniform but their footwear shows their individuality!

I only got to observe a 3^rd year class and as I said they were crammed in tightly. As you would imagine, a few students were particularly active and most of the students didn’t fully participate.  It would be impossible to move around the classroom and check on student’s understanding.  Similarly there would be no moving around for the students and so the only thing to do would be to group the students into 6, with 3 in front turning around to the 3 behind and working together.  Ideally, there would be a seating plan so that the groups were mixed ability and the better students could support the weaker students.  I discussed these thoughts with the teachers in the staffroom and  they we happy enough to try them out. 

One teacher has worked in Saudi and had already been exposed to these ideas and was very interested in trying them.  The other teachers were a little negative but I understand that.  The truth is that my ideas are theoretical as I have never worked with such large classes and the ideas may need refining.  But what they are looking for from me is to show them how to incorporate modern teaching methods and expand listening and speaking skills into the curriculum.  We were led to believe we would definitely not be doing that but instead working with the teachers and improving their language skills.  The conflict arises where the teachers have a deadline to complete the curriculum and therefore do not have time to take a leisurely approach and spent time on developing speech.  Not forgetting of course the broad range of ability in the class and the fact that probably half the class are way below the ability of what what is being taught.

However, as it turned out we didn’t try anything out and were whisked away by the Ministry to attend a workshop on introducing a Debating Society in school.  This was very interesting and I look forward to the possibility of getting involved.