First Day of Work

It didn't take as long to come as I had expected- not that I had known it would come at all- and when it did it surprised me.   But while riding in my supervisor's car on the way home today- I relaxed.  I took a deep breath, stared out the window at the beautiful desert landscape pockmarked by torn down buildings and ones on their way up, noticed the sun low on the horizon and the perfect air pressure, temperature and humidity, and cracked a smile.  A good smile.  Like the ones you smile when you're doing something exciting and fulfilling and adventurous.  I could have been hitch-hiking in southern Spain, or maybe Arizona at the right time of year.  I could have been in Vegas.  Vegas seems more appropriate.  But of course I wasn't, and my supervisor steering his car at high speeds into a quickly disappearing lane quickly jarred me back to reality, but it did happen.  I relaxed- while in public even.  It had everything to do with the day I'd had.

It started the same as the day before it.  A van picking me and a few colleagues up at our hotel/apartment building, an awkward ride with awkward "new guy" conversation, but then I arrived at our school.  It was sort of a satellite campus, a quad if you will.  Four buildings connected by an open-air courtyard with kiosks and cafes in it, but it was the people who I encountered that left me with the feeling that what I'm doing isn't really all that crazy.  So much so I almost felt disappointed.  They told me that my work environment would be a world of contradictions.  That expectations for the teachers as well as students were made impossibly high, that student-motivation would be incredibly low, that the bureaucracy of the whole mess would make your head spin with its seemingly unending demands, and that despite all this, the job was relatively easy.  I met some great dudes (the women are at a completely separate campus).  Young guys exploring the world and making money (not unlike your humble blogger), guys with a little bit of a screw lose, older guys with it both completely together and completely not, Jordanians, Brits, Anglo-Indians, philosophers, linguists, actors, and honest to goodness teachers, slackers and xenophiles.  Each took their time to take the new guy under their wing, show me the ropes, and give me the "real" scoop into what the heck was going on.  And with all the chaos going on around me while others tried to organize the whole mess, I found lots of time to just hang.  I added to my fluid Arabic vocab list which consists of about 12 phrases, numbers one through 10 and some basic nouns, prepositions, verb conjugations, and questions words, and got some help with my pronunciation.  And at the end of all that, I got to spend some time shadowing another teacher and floating around helping his students complete their assignment.

It was the students that did it for me most of all.  They were about what I expected in a lot of ways- lazy, unmotivated, entitled, always trying to talk their way out of doing work, copying off their neighbor just to get an answer filled in, and too silly to get much of anything accomplished.  But they were great.  And they liked the crap out of me, asked me all kinds of questions.  I was able to inspire nods of knowing approval about my home state, the land of Hoosiers, by referencing the NBA (a trick I learned over the years), and allowed them to locate it in their mind by first picturing where on the map Chicago is.  I even got them to tacitly approve of my abbreviated name by referencing Pamela Anderson's Emmy snubbed role of C.J. Parker in Baywatch (thank you, Eastern Europe).  I was having so much fun and feeling so relaxed that I almost let my guard down.  A student asked me what I thought of Obama, and where I would usually jump at the chance to get into all of my feelings, hopes, disappointments, opinions and anecdotes on the matter, I suddenly remembered to have caution.  Some topics are never appropriate in a Saudi classroom, politics and religion being chief amongst those.  One complaint from a student to the dean has been cause enough for many a teacher a whole lot cooler and more qualified than myself being canned and ran out of the country.  "I don't talk about politics," I replied.  A student leaning in just over my left shoulder nodded in agreement. "That is good," he said with scrunched face.   A few others in the back nodded too.