School Photos

Teaching. It isn't the job it once was--0ne that came with a long-term pay off in the form of a guarantee of job security and a generous pension. As we were leaving Greensville there were daily reminders as to how the state of education was changing, with talk of reduced or cancelled pensions. The spring was lay-off season for the next school year. With each day leading up to the inevitable announcement of job cuts, the school felt more and more like a shark tank...the questions was always one of "Who will get eaten next?"

I felt like I was teaching constantly, which was ironic since my job was often one of support instead of one of pure instruction. When I wasn't teaching, I was running recovery for some crisis or another with a student (referred to as "putting out fires"). And when that wasn't happening, I was planning for what I would teach next. And when I wasn't doing either of those things I was recovering from teaching and putting out "fires". I liked the work and loved the students, but I found in the day to day schedule that I felt I wasn't really teaching much, and in the three seconds a day that I had free I would reflect upon the questions of "what is learning?" and "what does it mean to be educated?" and "why are we doing this anyhow?"

And then some other student would show up, a teacher would call, or a crisis would brew. And those questions would be set once again upon the back burner in favor of the more immediate need to respond to a parent who was looking for a translation, or to feed a child who hadn't eaten since the day before, or to help someone pass a benchmark test or a quiz, and there would be no more time to think upon such things as "why are we doing this anyhow?"

It took me months to rehabilitate myself after four years of the exhausting teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover-->teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover cycle. In retrospect, the absence of time to reflect upon why I was investing so many hours a week in something that didn't clearly justify such immense and intense energy was sapping. However, just this year, I am feeling like I have recovered enough to start to reflect on the whys of education again. This, of course, brings me no closer to an answer but at the very least I am feeling like I have the clarity of thought to entertain these questions once again, and that clarity of thought is affording a bit more freedom to move beyond pencil paper and look at the possibility of education away from what is conventionally thought of as education.

Last month we did the unthinkable and took a whole day off from school to travel to Nizwa, about an hour away, and study things unrelated to our regular course of study. We looked at dungeon designs and torture techniques in the historic Nizwa Fort.

We studied cultural differences in non-verbal communication and toilet signage.

We looked at big rocks and then climbed up and down them.

We studied armory and battle techniques.


And we practiced looking like punks in photos. It was quite the day.

The forced me to reflect back upon the last time I traveled anywhere with a large group of school-aged children, since we had traveled to get where we were, and all 11 of the kids were definitely of school age. I was teaching in Greensville and we had taken the entire second grade on the annual voyage to North Carolina to visit a life sciences museum. The museum itself went down a treat but two of the buses inexplicably broke down an hour from the Virginia border on the way back.


All 240 students were wonderfully patient and, even though countless baseball games, scout meetings, and church functions were missed, everyone was understanding. The museum was great fun, of course, and properly aligned to our science standards for the year. The kids were threatened within inches of their lives that they must behave properly in this public place and they behaved accordingly. It was a really nice field trip and went off without a hitch--more or less.


Now fast forward two years to the trip to Nizwa. It was totally unaligned with any suggestion of a standard that I might have been following. The kids ran and screamed like banshees through the dungeons, which were a health and safety nightmare with no lighting, extremely uneven flooring, and thick authentic chains hanging from the walls. There were no guard rails on the stairs but we managed to not lose a single attendee.


Tehva found the historically accurate toilets and went so far as to pull her pants down before I could stop her. No one read many of the well-written informational plaques. Many of the children nearly wet themselves with fright after they stepped on a motion sensor and triggered a recording of bomb blasts, meant to simulate this passage during a battle. No one signed a permission slip.


My teacher brain kept muttering that this was quite possibly the worst field trip I had ever coordinated, simply because there were no standards, no outcome goals, and no clear way to define what the kids had learned.


And yet, this is the trip they keep coming back to day after day in school on their own, without my prompting. They have painted pictures of the mountains surrounding Nizwa. Silas wrote a fictionalized account about a battle fought in nearby Tanuf after we visited the remains of the mud village there. They look at the photos and laugh at how goofy they are. They have looked on the internet for additional information about the "murder holes" we saw built into the side of Nizwa Fort, from which defending troops would dump boiling date syrup on intruders.


And throughout this spring I keep asking myself about the nature of learning and what it means to be educated, simply because we have done more of these types of trips this year and less of the worksheets and book work with which I had become more comfortable while in Greensville. I am sure that the quality of the education they are getting is enough, but does it allow for enough quantity? Muscat is a competitive place for quantity of educational input and, in comparison to the ones going to the gold standard schools here, I question what I am doing.


Many of the children around us attend the Choiefat School, which is known as "the test factory"--kids are hit with several tests every week. Their job is to study study study and then score high on these exams. Failure brings instant remediation classes. Others attending the Indian School here memorize large portions of text to prove their academic acumen. We do none of that (although Tehva has inadvertently memorized long sections of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere this week) and sometimes I feel bad as a result. In comparison, what I am doing seems not enough, especially when we go joy riding off to Nizwa or other surrounds on a fairly regular basis.


At the end of each day I ask myself, after reflecting on the lessons du jour, "Did we do enough paper-pencil work today? Hmmm...not sure. We did do a bit away from the school room today. Hmmm...Maybe tomorrow we should really sit down and write for six hours straight. Does it really matter, when 13 years of primary and secondary education are done, whether one has been outside of a school building? Does it matter whether or not school has been undertaken as a paper-pencil experience rather than a hands-on one? What to do...what to do?"


The general feedback I get from people in reaction to hearing about these types of experiences we have undertaken in school this year is, "Wow...that is an amazing education those kids are getting!" Many of these people are other parents who say they wish their child was getting such a rich and varied education. And yet I wonder, what kind of education is it that they are getting? Yes, others are exuberant about what we are doing, and yet it often still feels like I am jumping off of a precipice when it comes to actually doing these things.


In the end, because I lack the enormous fortune it would take to enroll three children in the English-medium schools here (does anyone have a spare $60,000 to $70,000 just sitting around that they would like to roll my way?), this experiment in education will continue as, quite likely, will my anxiety level. Stay tuned.