Classes Galore .... but the END is Nigh!

Friday 30th October 2009
Now, this is the third or fourth time I have sat down to write this entry about my lessons this past three weeks.

Is that a good sign? Well, yes, perhaps it is. It means, I think, that I haven't had much to write about. Mind you, also it is true that my teaching schedule is very heavy and so maybe it is that I have not retained enough in my over-stretched mind and maybe I am too tired to get to the keyboard for writing purposes.

Nah, that's an exaggeration. Yes I DO have a heavy teaching timetable of 27 teaching hours these days. It means that most days I start at 7.30am and finish just after 2pm with only the 15-minute breaktime and hour and quarter lunchbreak for relief. The lunchtimes are now all here at home, but every day except Saturday I start right after lunch at 12.30pm which means that I have only about 45 minutes eating and chillout time here. No lunchtime internet session then (except Saturdays as I said). And so all I do is put on the Indian “Neo Cricket” channel and watch whatever they are showing. Just this week has been the India-Australia ODI series which has been good to watch (in the 45-minutes I'm sat here!). Oh, and last week was the first of the so-called “Champions League Trophy (CLT)” twenty20 series involving, presumably, the champion counties of England, Australia, South Africa and West Indies. Oh, and the two best India Premier League (IPL) teams, who not surprisingly did very badly since many of their star players were back in their “proper teams”. Well, I DID enjoy the CLT games I watched. Not normally a fan of the “slash and bash” twenty20 format but THIS CLT series did have something proper to watch in it as the teams were REAL ones as opposed to IPL paid-for ones.

So the lunchtimes are shorter. But to compensate for this I do not go into the college unless I REALLY must …. which is, in fact, only when there are meetings and on Wednesday afternoons when I take in my used-up week's class registers. Oh yeah, and of course on Saturday afternoon and Monday afternoon for the 2nd year Clinical class lessons.

Well, why SHOULD I go in? I have spent MORE than enough wasted time in that building and sitting in that chair and for WHAT? Nothing – that's what! To have half a year of my life WASTED by that place and their total disregard for and contempt of what my colleague and I tried to do with those soldier boy moron so-called “students”. Hah, every time I use that word with them it makes me seethe. Just to see them now every day, as I have to do, in the 'new' section of the building I have to go to teach is enough. Thankfully they are now somebody else's problem and headache (though THAT was mentioned last time). Well, I say Hello to a few of them – the rare few who ARE worthy of wearing those green medical students 'uniforms', but the rest of them can f***k off! Anyway, going back to my staying away, I don't even bother to sign out now, and nothing happens. Because I am over at this other building, I am not required to sign in. The way I see it, I finish after 2pm and I'm certainly NOT going to go all the way in to college just to bloody SIGN OUT. What a waste of time! Nobody checks it or cares about it.

And anyway, for now the gate-hole in the wall is open again! Remember that? Yes, and remember how it got closed again with no warning? Well, we'll see how long THAT lasts this time. For now, it IS open during the day till about 4pm which is time enough for me to conveniently use it to and from my classroom and that building. I sincerely hope it DOES stay open, but this place being what it is you can never rely on that (or, indeed, on ANYTHING!).

OK so here we are just after the completion of Week 3 of teaching this new timetable here at the college.

And I must say that things are going quite well on the teaching side now.

Wait a momento, buddy boy! Did you just say something NICE about teaching here? Hang on, let's check back a mo …. YES, it seems I DID!

Must be the sun. It's still very hot out here in the afternoons, and it must be getting to me. Am I getting …. “comfortable” here?

No, no, NOOOO!! Nothing of the sort! But I DO, at last, have a class now which I DO enjoy teaching.

What a relief! Why couldn't I have had them from the beginning? Things might have worked out for me a whole lot different instead of having idiot-brain soldier boys making my life a hell. Ah well – that's the way it has worked out. But NO – before you ask – I will NOT be changing my mind about leaving after my year is up.

A very nice class they are! I mean the 21-hour a week 'Pre-Clinical' class as they are called by the college. This just means that it is a kind of “foundation level” course before they join the college properly. The aim is to get them a grounding in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and in the English language of science lectures and texts which they are likely to see in the course of their studies.

The way they do things here is NOT to divide the students up by English language level. So the class you get is a mix from the good, the middling and the very basic abilities of English. But as an average, you can say that the class is at 'Elementary Level'.

I don't have a problem with this. Even in a language school where students ARE more divided by language level, there are always students who are in the “wrong class” either because they have come too far, too fast or because they messed up the Language Level Test or some other reason. As a teacher, you simply have to deal with it. And usually what happens is that the students help each other. Some days you have to over-explain things to individuals who have not quite grasped what your instructions were (for example). But that's OK and is just part of the job of Language Teacher. All you can do is go for the “Safe Middle Ground”. Yes, it is true that those at the lower end might get frustrated at not understanding and yes, those at the higher end might want things to go faster. But you simply CAN'T please everyone ALL the time. Some teachers would say you should do more to cater for such mixed level classes by giving them different work to do, but that is NOT feasibly possible and you only end up with extra work. And HOW do you judge who is Stream 'A', Stream 'B' and Stream 'C' anyway? A pointless waste of a teacher's time and energy, and let's face it guys we spend WAY too much time on preparation as it is! Don't break your back!

So nothing much to say about the class. The coursebooks are OK. A couple of funny moments such as when I was doing a lesson-part on Plants. I asked, first of all, what we humans have as our Basic Needs. The obvious answers came from them like Air, Water, Food etc …. then one student shouted out “Women!”. Funny! Remember that Saudi classes are all male. Made me smile anyway. Ahh, and how right he is too! Oh, and another time went like this. In the grammar book we use (Betty Azar) there is a section on Present Simple, and on one page there is a picture of the solar system and some statements about it that you have to fill in the Present Simple of the verbs for. I had done the pages before it but then turned back to the Science book to the section on Plants. As always I started off with a brainstorm on what words they associate with the word “plants”. OK, they gave me words like 'earth' and 'sun' and yes, these ARE plant-related. But then I heard one shout out something which ended in “... eenus” except I couldn't hear it. Then I heard “mercury” and “stars”. Didn't understand this, but then I realised what was going on. The students thought I had asked them for words associated with PLANETS! YES, the next page in the grammar book! Well, think about the two words PLANTS and PLANETS and how similar they might sound to a student of English, and especially since they thought I was going on to the 'planets' page of the grammar book! Again, a funny misunderstanding!

Back in time a little now. In Week 1 was the first week of the new timetable and new classes. As ever in this place it was like crawling backwards through a prickly bush to ever get as far as having such an organised thing as a teaching schedule. When we DID get it, as I said before, it was still a thing liable to change and we had no idea for sure WHAT would happen on the first Saturday. So we had to come in at 7.30am on the first Saturday morning and expect …. well, the UNEXPECTED!

As you should know now, if you are a regular reader of all this blog stuff of mine, the Unexpected is Expected and the Unpredictable is Predictable as well as the Illogical being totally Logical. Ahh, but now I'm getting too cynical for my own good because, rather boringly, when I came in reliably just around 7.00am to sign in, I was told that we WERE all to start today but not until Period 3 (at 9.30am). Not much of a delay really!

My teaching timetable has changed a little since Week 1 but I have only had classes shifted about here and there. The 21-hour a week class started with eleven names on the register, boomed up to 23 NAMES and now has settled at the twenty-student mark. That is more than I'm used to but fortunately I have a nice big classroom which I can happily roam around in and not be tripping over bags and feet. Memories of my year of horror where I ALSO had all classes of fifteen in each and with tiny classrooms. Students were doubled up on each side of desks and absolutely NO CHANCE of moving around except up and down from my chair.

So the room and class size is OK for me considering classroom size. Yes it means I have many people to try to get round but that's alright with me. I have to mentally allocate “ticket numbers” to make sure I see everybody in the order they call for help. This can mean I cover a lot of ground in class but that's OK – I need the exercise!

So that's about all on classes. Now I'm going to do another unusual thing in this blog entry – I'm going to FINISH with some GOOD NEWS!

Surely not! I always end on a low! Ah but not today!

So what is it? Well, do you remember what I said some time ago about not being allowed out at Christmas and New Year? That, unfortunately DOES still remain the case. HOWEVER, let us now look forward to that Date Which Is Cherished which is, of course, my DEPARTURE DATE from Saudi Arabia.

My contract ends, I think, on 13th March 2010. This is about two weeks into Semester Two of the college year. Before that there is a two-week holiday which runs from 10th to 27th February, and this is a college holiday where all is closed.

As I knew it, I have sixteen (16) holiday days left of my Annual Holiday Entitlement which is, as you remember, 49 days in total. Are you getting a hint already? Ah, but there's more, and I had a surprise with my most recent payslip on which was the message “Leave Without Pay 7 days” and a deduction from my salary to reflect this.

When I saw this Leave Without Pay deduction, I was horrified. I thought, naturally, that the Powers That Be had deducted me for all those time when I did not sign out. But I asked about this and was told that this pay slip was for September.

Now, I hope I can explain this properly. Everyone who joins the college as a teacher has 49 days of holiday entitlement. However, until you have completed a full year on the job, you can not take them all at once. Well, there is also the rule that you cannot take a holiday in the first five months of contract, but I am past that now. It works out like this: until your full year is up, you have an “Accrued” number of holiday days. If you decide to take your holiday in month 6 then this means you have 'accrued' 49 x (6/12) holiday days which means about 25 days is possible. If you want more than 25 days then you need to EITHER have the remainder as “Leave Without Pay” or you can “Borrow From Future Holiday”. In the first case, you lose money but not holiday days and in the second case it is the opposite.

So with my summer holiday, I had 'accrued' 26 holiday days and had to decide which option to take. Well, in FACT, I decided to Borrow From Future and I wrote this on the memo which went with my Holiday Request form. However, like all things here, the incompetent fools upstairs either didn't see this or forgot it. So THAT is why I had the seven Leave Without Pay days on my pay slip.

At first I was quite obviously OUTRAGED at YET ANOTHER screw-up by those people. But then something VERY GOOD was pointed out to me. And that is that I STILL have now TWENTY-THREE (23) Holiday Days left to go and not sixteen as previously thought!

Yes, I lost money through the seven LWOP days. But DO YOU SEE what this means now?? YES!! It means I can leave EVEN EARLIER than I first thought. And that most likely means that on 10th February when Semester 2 ends, I will be FREE!

THE END IS IN SIGHT!

Of course NONE of this is going to be confirmed until much later and many stupid things can STILL get in the way. So don't jump around for me just yet and save your party candles until I know for SURE! This is only the THEORETICAL End Date, and is still to be confirmed.

But OH what a Nice Thought to end today's blog on!