From Limbo to Turbo: A Rocky Start to the School Daze

Part One: The Harsh Start

In April of this year (2014) I accepted a job at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to teach English in the University Preparatory Program. Sue and I had a number of reasons why we decided this would be a good move for us, both personal and professional. One of the professional reasons was that I wanted to finally take my 25 years’ worth of English teaching skills and experience and use them overseas. Another reason was the opportunity for career advancement, which the Dean who hired me had held out as a future possibility. The future came much quicker than anticipated.

Alfaisal University: My New Home

King Faisal, who ruled from 1964-1975, is known in Saudi Arabia as a great modernizer: he put the country’s oil wealth to good use, abolished slavery, and fostered education. Many of his kids are US-educated and hold prominent government positions today. To Americans he’s probably most (in)famous for the 1974 oil embargo. He was assassinated in 1975 by an allegedly insane nephew. To this day many Saudis firmly believe his murder was a CIA-orchestrated plot as revenge for the embargo. After his death his family started the philanthropic King Faisal Foundation. One of its most important projects was starting Alfaisal University.

Test Day in Mr. John's Class. Note the balcony for the gals.

Alfaisal University is based on the American model of education; the instruction in all the courses is in English. It currently has about 2500 students, divided among four colleges: Business, Engineering, Medicine, and Science & General Studies. While it’s technically a liberal arts education, the Humanities aren’t emphasized (interestingly, they do include Islamic Studies). By Saudi law, there is no such thing as a co-educational university; the sexes cannot mix—ever. Usually this means that there are women’s colleges and men’s colleges. However, there are two universities who have been granted an exception to this; one is Alfaisal. Generally speaking, the women stay on the top two floors, the men on the bottom two floors. (Both female teachers and female students are allowed to come to the male areas if they have a purpose for being there.) However, all of the classrooms on floors 2 and 3 have two levels: men on the bottom level with the teacher, women up in a balcony (like at a theatre), where the teacher can see them, but the male students can’t. Women cannot teach men, but men can teach both males and females.

Somewhere under the General Studies Department is the UPP: The University Preparatory Program. The UPP is responsible for taking about 450 academically under-prepared students and getting them ready for university study. The focus is mostly on English, but also includes math and science. It’s very similar to the community college model of “developmental” education: covering the material students were supposed to get in high school but didn’t. At its heart, it’s an intensive English program. While we’re somewhat peripheral to the institution, we are also essential to it as the UPP takes students who otherwise wouldn’t be eligible for university study and giving them an avenue of entry. So we are the feeder institution for the rest of the university, and therefore vital to it.

That is the admirable goal of the UPP. Little did we know what a basket case of a program we had just stepped into.

Red Flag Warnings, or Lando Calrissian Comes to Alfaisal

The hardest adjustment to life in Saudi Arabia was that the English Preparatory Program at Alfaisal University that I came to was in complete disarray when I arrived, if not outright chaos. And the “solutions” involved the teachers getting the shaft. In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader tells Lando Calrissian, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.” Like Lando, we kept muttering to ourselves, “This deal is getting worse all the time!”

"I am altering the deal."
(This one's for you, Emmy K)

With less than a week to go before the Fall term was slated to start, none of the new teachers had received any communication whatsoever about class assignments, syllabi, textbooks—nothing. We just kept being told to be patient. I had never met most of the female faculty I’d be working with, and we were still awaiting four more male and five more female faculty to arrive. That was the first of many Red Flags.

Our first faculty meeting wasn’t a meeting at all, but a software training session. But at least we got to sort of meet each other for the first time. An affable but pedantic British guy based out of Istanbul explained to us how to use the online companion software that supplements the reading book used in Level 3. He kept talking about, “As you’ve seen in the textbook, this part of the website goes with the content in each chapter.” We hated to break it to him that none of us had ever seen the textbook before, and this was the first time we had even been told what textbook we would be using. (PS: The software sucked: poorly designed and lousy pedagogy.) This wasn’t boding well: Red Flag #2.

The came another rude shock: None of the three returning male faculty from last year were actually coming back. The program director, who was long overdue at this point, sent his resignation from the US. Moreover, the teacher with seven years seniority with Alfaisal resigned: a kind, intelligent, soft-spoken man named Mark, who had been unfailingly helpful to Glen and me since our arrival. The third faculty member, officially still listed in the schedule, had been keeping everyone guessing as to whether he was coming back or not. They guessed wrong: he decided on the day before classes started that he wasn’t returning.

That left the program with no leaders and only half the teachers in place. On the male side, therefore, there were no returning faculty to mentor us new hires. Plus, that left 7 teaching positions to be filled by 3 brand-new faculty: Glen, Brent, and me. On the female side, they had 10 teaching positions, but only 6 of the faculty had arrived as of the start of classes. If you’re noticing a 2^nd-grade math problem here, then you’re apparently way ahead of the interim administrators who had taken charge of the program in the wake of all the departures. (Red Flag #3: What the hell is going on with this program? Why were we left with so many vacant positions at the 11^th hour, right before the school year was set to start?)

Testing, Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 . . .

Four days to go, and none of us still had a teaching assignment. And now we had MIA faculty without a clear plan for coverage.

So at last we had a teacher meeting with the interim administrators. They revealed our teaching assignments, passed out the syllabi, and divided us into teams according to which of the four levels we would be teaching. I got Level 7/8, along with two faculty on the female side.

Alfaisal had decided the previous Spring to double the enrollment of the UPP by adding two additional lower levels. The strategy was admirable: we would capture more under-prepared students who were intelligent and motivated enough to make a success of the university, but whose high school background had left them horribly unprepared in the sciences and English language study. (Un-Fun Fact: Most Saudi high schools are horrible: half the school day is devoted to religion and Arabic history, leaving not near enough time for the three Rs or English.)

We finally got our first look at the new and “improved” syllabus that “they” (who? not sure) had been working on, including the syllabi for the two new levels. 80% of the syllabus was devoted to quizzes and tests; 20% was devoted to whatever else. For anyone not in education or ESL, let’s just say that this is inordinately heavy on assessment. There’s a popular fallacy that standardized testing = educational improvement. It doesn’t. Most of us detested the syllabus we’d been handed. But with four days to go, there was little to be done about it. Because of our hue and cry, they backed off on the part of the syllabus that required us to administer a quiz at least once a week in each competency area (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar).

Tamrika, Glen, & Brent: Lucky you:
you're teaching an overload

But they still hadn’t revealed to any of us how they were planning to handle the courses for which there was no teacher assigned. The students showed up on campus for Orientation Day on Sunday, August 31. The first day of classes was Monday, September 1 (just like Harry Potter). That Sunday evening at 6:00 pm, they sprang the cruelest surprise of all: several teachers were informed that they had to teach a double load: as of tomorrow morning, they had to prepare a three-hour lesson for an additional class at a different level, in addition to starting their own assigned class for the first time. That left them overnight to prepare six hours worth of lessons for two different classes they didn’t even have the textbooks for.

I only narrowly avoided landing in the same crappy predicament: I would have gotten assigned extra work too (either university composition or preparatory English), but they couldn’t find a course for me that didn’t conflict with my existing schedule. I dodged that bullet—temporarily. But fear not: My turn was coming—and how.

Next Post: Part Two: The Fix Is In – And Guess Who It Is