The End Game is in Sight!

Saturday 15th August 2009
OK, my followers far and wide, this is very likely going to be IT for this leg of my Saudi Experience. It's holiday time FINALLY and in four days from now I'll be sitting in Bahrain airport waiting for the plane to England. And no doubt I'll be enjoying …. well, some of the things that are prohibited here in this country.

Yes I'm sure of that. And just for the sake of defiance, I'll sample as many of those as possible. But before you raise too many eyebrows, I must say that I'm talking about food and drink related things ONLY!

As said before, these last few weeks have been much more laid back than before. I have been glad the end of this soldier boy course is coming. And, by now, we know well who is going through and who is going BACK. Too late for those no-hopers now. And good riddance to them!

However, I'm sure they'll slip through the net somehow and I'll STILL see some of those ugly faces on my return to the college in late September. That's the way it works here – it's who you know.

And that ANGERS me! WHY should these toe-rags, these lazy good-for-nothings who make NO ATTEMPT to do ANYTHING AT ALL these past 18 weeks be allowed to go on and get their 'reward' of entry to the college and their medical course??

Ahh there are many answers to THAT and it's just the way that things work in this ridiculous country and in its so-called education system. But you have to wonder WHY we were put on this course in the first place if this IS to happen.

This makes me very angry thinking about the students and what they are allowed to get away with. And I have seen it in action in that exam I sat in recently as invigilator. The way that the Saudi teacher came in and went around at the start of that exam HELPING the students who had problems with the questions. And the guy who does the computer teaching over where we work who was even chatting with them throughout rather than doing his job and keeping them quiet. YES! I had gone up there with the intention of being the “hard man” and not letting anyone talk. But seeing this I thought “What's the POINT?”

Anyway, back to present time. So how do I feel now? Well obviously I'm extremely HAPPY that FINALLY I have reached this point and that I will not see those ugly mugs again (well, until September I guess anyway). There are exceptions and there are some of them that I do wish well. Those that were prepared to put in some effort even when they found the going tough always get my respect. Nobody asks for miracles, but if a student is prepared to “have a go” and get to grips with this language, then THAT is what it's all about, isn't it? This is what we try to encourage our students to do – to gain confidence in learning English and to go on from the point they finish the course on.

Have I done that with them? Sadly no, I cannot claim much success. I think that those whose ability was good at the start have CONTINUED to do well and those who were struggling at the start are in much the same boat. If I compare test scores throughout the course then these show this too. Those scores are pretty consistent for most people with one or two random or chance variations or successes.

Speaking of successes, I doubt that any OF those were gained with any real effort and were more likely the result of cheating and, let's say, “pooling” of certain knowledge at test time. Ohh, COME ON! Of COURSE I tried to stop them and deducted marks from those who overstepped the mark. But I feel I was too lenient …. and conversely the students probably feel I was too harsh. Well, if I had cracked down on EVERY single occurrence of communication and other kinds of cheating at test time, then it would have made it almost an impossible task and both they and I would have only got frustrated, distracted and annoyed, and in THEIR cases it would have made tests an impossible thing to finish without tears.

It was hard enough doing the tests with them as I have written about plenty. WHY would I have wanted to make Test Days even more UNBEARABLE?

Then there is the relationship between the students and myself. And here we must look at something of Saudi student mentality a little. There is one student (the one I refer to as “Leg Man”) who says that, “You are TEACHER in the classroom and FRIEND outside it!”. However, I think that the FRIEND side is too much present in their minds INSIDE the classroom as well. For them, we are all good friends and buddies together in the class and none of us want anyone else to come to any 'harm'. They do all they can to help each other out and there should be a sense of 'comradeship' all round.

On one hand, I really do appreciate how they do come together. They do seem to look out for each other, and I see this especially when I am taking the Attendance Register and one or more of them is not present in class. “Five minutes please!”, they always say hoping that either the absent person WILL arrive or that I will forget to mark this person absent. Some of them even try to STOP ME marking an absent person as so. And no matter how often I have explained the rules that absent means just THAT, they never understand WHY I AM marking this person as absent. They even think that if a person has an EXCUSE for being absent, I should not put the 'X' because in THEIR eyes an Excused Absence is not the same thing.

Some places I have worked do differentiate between Excused and Unexcused Absence and there is a way to mark the register to show which one of these is correct. But here there is no such thing. In fact, there is only PRESENT or ABSENT – no mark if a person is LATE as many places would do. So LATE is the same as ABSENT here, which in a way is fair enough because latecomers are annoying.

So THAT is another annoyance for me – the fact that no matter how many times I explained this, they STILL kept on at me NOT to mark this person as absent because in Five Minutes he will be here or that he is with the commanding officer or even, as we have had recently, the student is in hospital.

Ahh – now THIS is something I haven't mentioned before. Yes, at the start of the course there was Leg Man in plaster and on crutches for many weeks and there was the other guy who had his appendix out. But a couple of weeks ago there was something new. And it really sounded very frightening.

The story was this: three of my students and one from the other class were driving back one Saturday morning. Maybe they were in a hurry as time was short and so maybe they were going a bit too fast. But somewhere up the road towards the college the car had a blowout of one of its tyres. I don't know which one but I suppose it was a front tyre because of what they say happened next. Basically the driver lost control and the car turned over and rolled and rolled over a few times. The driver and front seat passenger were flung out to the road quite badly and the two back street passengers were also bashed about quite a bit resulting in leg fractures. One said he had been sleeping and on waking up wondered why he was in the middle of the road. Or so he said anyway. He was the luckiest of the four and was back at school only a few days later.

The other back seat passenger was back earlier this week after about a week with a similar leg fracture. But the two front seat guys remained. At the start, the driver was unconscious in hospital and the other guy had amnesia and was rather cut up on his face. As I write today, the word is that they ARE both now out of hospital but since tomorrow is the last day and it is Final Exam day, I am unlikely to see them again.

UPDATE: both of the two hospital cases DID turn up – quite bravely I thought – to take their Final Exams. One of them had his face still cut up pretty bad and was very swollen and teeth were missing. The other guy, quite heroically, was here still in his hospital nightgown and with crutches. He, unfortunately, had a bad exam though the cut-face man did quite well.

UPDATE to the Update (1st February 2010) - The guy who had had the worst of the injuries was not present at all his semester. On asking about him, I was told that his leg (and maybe other) injuries had been too bad and that he, quite simply, could not continue as a student. This is sad for me because the man in question WAS actually a good student and DID know English pretty well. I mean, WHY did it have to be HIM and not one of these other morons?? Sometimes life is so unfair to those who deserve better!

Yes, better say something about the Final Exam day. Well, it was brought back to the Sunday quite unexpectedly. This meant no Speaking Exam and, as we understood it, no Military college entrance exam. Ah, or so we thought.

We had it all nicely organised. Exam Day as here, we set up the room well with labels on desks to ensure that cheaters did not sit together. It was nearing 8 o'clock. SUDDENLY the students were all gone!

Where were they? Oh, they had been taken out to the Mess Hall! Why? Well, it's a better place for the exam, the men in uniform said.

IDIOTS!! The time was two minutes to eight. NOTHING had been said to use, the teachers. They just took them out without any warning to us at all. TOTAL lack of communication and even MORE TOTAL CONTEMPT.

But that is the way these military types work. They do as they please and they don't consult.

OK, I'm finishing this off some days after having started it. Which means there will be holes. However …. see the next entry for The Last Straw!!