Begin at the very beginning

Yesterday I did something that might have gotten me deported from other Moslem nations. I was teaching a class for a lecturer that couldn’t make it, and was guiding a female student towards solving a problem by herself, and eureka she got it. And in that moment she beamed, I was pleased for her, and I ever so barely poked her fully covered upper arm with my index finger in a congratulatory “you got it!” move. Even as my finger headed in the direction of that arm, something cultural was slowing it down, like there was a “stop” sign just my side of her. But it didn’t come to a full stop until a moment after it breached the intersection. We both pulled away a hair, she giggled and I blinked, and we went on about our business. But I spent the next ten minutes with a slight shiver…

The work, for better or worse, is going to be fascinating this year. It looks like I’ve been summoned here to fill grandly conceived new buildings with quality education infrastructure. I’ve been asked to make sure the big new language (English and Arabic), culture, and religion building is stocked with the right technology, furniture, rooms, etc. to outfit at least the English and Arabic language portion. I’ve been asked to identify a core group of decentish teachers and turn them into people capable of training future teachers in sound language-teaching practice. Additionally, I’ve been asked to design curricula for both the soon-to-be-born English teacher training college in the Education Department, AND for a sustainable English language program that includes the requirements of the national curriculum.

And that’s just here at the university. I’ve also got responsibilities in the city itself, designing outreach programs and seminars for language teachers all over, as well as the two American mentees I mentioned before. That’s quite a handful, especially after what I’ve seen this week. Teacher tardiness is apparently chronic throughout these institutions. Not one afternoon class this week began within twenty minutes of the official start-time (this in a city where the traffic provides no excuse). Students were dozing waiting for their teachers, and teachers never apologized. Only one teacher prepared or thought at all about the lesson before stepping into the classroom, and I witnessed reading classes in which no student practiced reading, and listening classes where no student had to listen, and where the teacher took class time to figure out how to use a tape recorder, and in the end failed to figure it out. I saw a writing class in which students listened for an hour to a lecturer describe the steps in writing an essay… and yet the students never practiced any of it. There are no materials to speak of, and no plan.

Where do I begin?