Category: Teaching

I had a wonderful time teaching for 21 years on the Arabian Peninsula; I wish I could have stayed longer. My students were smart, funny, creative and kind. Yet, coming from a different culture, I had some assumptions which I needed to unlearn. I realize the following might sound negative so I want to be clear: there are difficult students no matter where you teach. My students in the Emirates and Oman were 99% lovely and 1% challenging.

teachers control all areas of a school

This was the first assumption I had to unlearn. On the Arabian Peninsula, teachers are in control of only their students only in the classroom only during class time; any other attempts to correct behavior can be seen as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. Asking a student who is leaning against a “no smoking” sign in a hallway to stop smoking was met with a furious denunciation most of the time. Asking students to stop screaming in the hallway was likewise often met with contempt, in addition to louder screaming, hysterical giggles and rude words.

The first few times this happened, I thought I was dealing with unusually difficult students but I soon realized this was the norm. It didn’t matter if I asked politely, merely gestured or evoked my status; very few students would willingly put out the cigarette or stop yelling. I did not have the right to police hallways.

if students make mistakes, they will be polite

On the Arabian Peninsula, the older you are, the more self-control you are expected to have. This can set up a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for students in that if they are rude, they believe that the elder teacher must keep their temper. A common tactic was for a student do something wrong, act rudely, elicit anger from teacher, then claim victim status, thus shifting the conversation from the student’s mistake to the teacher’s anger.

Nothing was more infuriating for a student than a composed teacher, such as my saying sadly and slowly, “I am so sorry, this paper is more than a week late so I can’t give you a grade. I will review it for mistakes so you are ready for the midterm, but your grade is zero.” My staying calm meant they could not get traction to change the focus from their not doing the work to my being “angry.” My expressing sorrow and speaking quietly meant the discussion centered on them, not me.

students with a low level of English will be the hardest to teach

This seemed to me quite straightforward, the less I could communicate with a student, the less I would be able to teach them. But the opposite was true. Students with low language skills would either make an effort by focusing in class, getting help from friends, coming to see me in my office or signing up for tutoring. A few tried to cheat, but if I caught them, they would either give up and drop the class or settle down to work honestly.

The worst difficulties were always with the students who had a high level of English. There was often a terribly dynamic in which they felt that, since they had always received straight As, high grades were their right. Other teachers had feted their ability to speak fluently, so they felt they had mastered all the necessary skills.

The most grueling conversations I had were with students who expected a perfect grade for perfect English combined with problematic elements such as giving a presentation while twisting their body, clutching their clothing and reading long paragraphs off PowerPoint slides or someone who wrote an essay without any grammar mistakes which was a hodge-podge of ideas in no discernable order.

Trying to explain that there was a difference between writing correct sentences and having well-organized essays was futile. Trying to explain that even good writers revised and reorganized their work was futile. It was also futile to explain that shorter sentences and essays divided into paragraphs are expected in English essays. Some students had gone through high school and some university-level classes with non-native speakers of English who allowed 60-word sentences and two-page essays which were all one paragraph. My saying that this was not usual in academic English was viewed as an attempt to steal their well-deserved marks.

It was frustrating for both me and the student to have these kinds of conversations. My point was, “you have the basics down, now let’s get you to the next level of writing with stronger openings, more fluid transitions between topics, better quotes, more interesting endings, etc.” Their point was, “I am getting 100/ 100 in my other classes, I know everything I need to know.”

teachers’ interactions with students are based on professional considerations

The most common metaphor for teachers is that they should be like a “mom,” i.e. endlessly forgiving and accepting. And like any situation with one mom and several children, students were always on the lookout for any signs of partiality.

Over the years, I tried to refine my teaching to eliminate any chance of being accused of favoritism. Instead of asking “who wants to read” or picking a random student, I would always start with the student who was sitting to the far right in the semi-circle. I used rubrics with highlighters to grade papers. For example, if a student lost points because of grammar issues, I would highlight the word “grammar” on the rubric in yellow and then highlight the paper’s grammar mistakes in yellow so they could easily see the correlation between their paper and their grade.

When they handed in an exam, I would immediately flip over the cover page with their name and I graded exams by going through everyone’s first page, then everyone’s second page (without looking back to see how a student did on page 1), etc.

All this effort mitigated some of the complaints but there was no way to make all the grades unbiased in their opinion. For example, I based the portion of the grade for “class participation” on three types of grades: 1) homework and recitations, 2) if they participated in group work and 3) reading checks, when I would walk around the room at the start of class to see if they had written notes/ definitions for the text we would read that day.

I picked which days I would check for reading at random and would write them in my planner ahead of time so I would not base my decision given who was present or whether I could see writing in their texts as I walked into class. But students would still complain, “She KNEW I didn’t do the reading, that’s why she checked today.”

One semester, as I walked out of the last class, one student was telling the others (in English, i.e., wanting to make sure I understood) “She ONLY checked readings on the days I didn’t prepare for class.” I know this was a self-preservation tactic (related to the next point) but the ones who practiced it created an unhealthy atmosphere of distrust towards teachers.

you make your choices and you live with the consequences

I went through my education with the idea that my grades were under my control. However, some students held the view that their grades were concocted from mysterious forces beyond their ken. Bad grades were not a result of them deciding not to do homework, come to class, ask questions or study; bad grades were the result of bad teaching and “circumstances.”

Being caught cheating on an exam or copying from the internet produced anger at me for not telling them that they were not allowed to copy paragraphs verbatim from other sources. When I printed out and highlighted the sections of the syllabus and assignment which explained that copying was not allowed, they said that they had not read that and hence didn’t know, so I did not have the right to lower their grade.

Some students had what I call the “two-world theory”; if they were late to class, they have a good reason but there was no acceptable excuse if another person (such as a food delivery person) was late. This odd dichotomy played out often. Students who missed 25% of my class complained viciously if a teacher missed their office hours. Students who turned in papers late complained about unorganized teachers. Students who broke rules such as using their phones in class, talking incessantly and copying homework from their friends complained if someone in administration did not do their job properly.

I never quite saw the contours of this problem – was it that the students were so endlessly coddled at home that they truly believed nothing could ever be their fault, or they felt so endlessly put upon that they were going to fight for whatever advantage they could get, or they felt everything was unfair and everyone was behaving badly so it didn’t matter if they did as well?

Of course, not all students acted like this, but the ones who did held on to the two-world theory so tightly that pointing out their hypocrisy (“yesterday you complained to me about how that person did not organize their time well and today you were 15 mintues late to class”) effected no change in attitude.

communal cultures means students will work well in groups

This is another issue that I don’t see all the contours of. I assumed that given the students were from tribe-based cultures and often spoke of the Omani dedication to peaceful coexistence, that group work would be a breeze. I quickly learned that a tribal upbringing meant that students would never rat out the students who did no work. It got to the point that a student wrote me an anonymous note asking me to stop doing group work as she had to do all the assignments; the other students in her group did nothing but she couldn’t say that publicly.

So I reworked groups as just discussion-based and told them that I would pick one student from the group at random to explain what the group had decided. This solved the issue of some students not participating.

But another problem remained: some students refused to speak to other students. I would set students in groups, then sit at my desk and pretend I was busy with paperwork. After a few minutes, I would look up and try to asses what was going on. Often if they were in groups of three, two students would talk and ignore the third one. So I learned to put students in pairs or groups of five. And I would always decide on the groups (deliberately splitting up any pairs of friends) as, the few times I let them choose, they would either pick their one friend, sit by the person they thought was the smartest person in the class or sit silently alone, making no effort to create an alliance, which is related to my next point.

try the new

When I was an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I signed up for a class on Northern European history on a whim because I didn’t know anything about that topic. On the first day we were given a list of possible topics for a presentation which would involve us teaching an entire class on the subject we picked. I choose the Finnish Civil War as I knew nothing about it.

When I went to the library to find some books on my topic, I discovered that my professor had written the definitive three volume history of the Finnish Civil War. I researched and cobbled a draft together, then went to his office to ask some questions and ended up sobbing as I was overwhelmed by having to explain this war to all my classmates in front of a Finnish professor. The poor man calmed me down and I managed to pull through.

I continued on this path of picking classes that were way beyond my knowledge base with similar consequences. When I studied at a German university, I took a class on Russian drama because I had never read one. German universities give collective exams after 3 years of study, but since I was transferring back to Wisconsin, I had to go to the professor’s office and have an oral exam at the end of the semester. One of his questions was “What is distinctive about Chekhov’s dramas?” I answered the best I could but I could not get the right answer which was the pauses between when actors speak. I had no idea about this feature as I had only read the plays; I had never seen one performed.

When I was accepted into my Masters of Education program for foreign language and social studies, the university required that I take two American History classes. I picked one on the 1600s and 1700s and one on the civil war. The Early American class had Masters and PhD in American History students and was based on class discussions. In the Civil War class, my classmates were two American History PhD students and we three traded off presenting books we had read. I was in way over my head all semester. I also moved overseas three times without knowing anyone in the country and traveled solo through Europe and several Asian countries.

I am laying this all out to explain why I was surprised that students generally refused to take any new class, even when they had lobbied for the class to be added to the plan of study. The first time a course was offered, so few students would sign up that it was closed or run with only a handful of students. Sometimes a new class was offered for 2 or 3 semesters before it was finally had enough participants. And the first semester of teaching a new class was misery as students dealt with their anxiety by skipping class.

Even a new type of assignment (such as writing a shape poem or a dialog with a character) was met with steep resistance. There would be endless questions and if I said “just go ahead and try, just write something, there’s no grade for this, dive in” inevitably several students would simply stare at the paper until I came and reexplained what to do to them personally. It was never a language issue; they understood what I was asking them to do, they were simply paralyzed at the thought of trying a new style of writing.

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