Talkin' From The Heart

(a 15 minute read)

To teach is a gift.  To see a child ‘get it’ is such a blessing and so rewarding.  When you become a teacher, or a parent, you put yourself last.  Children come first.  ALWAYS.  When you are an educator, you have to be educated, a seeker of knowledge, past, present and future.  You have to keep learning, otherwise do not expect your pupils to learn.  Teaching is not about you, it is all about the pupils.

Having coached and mentored adults in business and English (ESL) for a decade in the UK, I was given the opportunity to teach children in a classroom here in Egypt last year.  I had taught children in workshops in the UK as part of the community groups I belonged to, but never had I been given twenty little people to take care of and teach Literacy, Numeracy and Science before.  Before the first day of term, I spent time researching the latest techniques, subscribing to education blogs, talking with teachers across the globe and absorbing as much information as I could.  This choice of career is one where you cannot mess around.  You have to be serious about it.  You have to be creative.  You have to be on the ball.  You are responsible for how a child views learning.  You are responsible for whether they get it, or whether they don’t.  This is more pressure than getting that million pound deal or losing it.  This is someone’s life you are dealing with and you have to get it right; and if you get it wrong, you have to make sure you make it right afterwards.

On the first day as class teacher, you could say I was ever so slightly nervous.  More so when the children arrived with their parents and the  parents bestowed such kind words upon me.  I looked to my co-teacher and we were both in shock.  Thank goodness for the Arabic teacher, who had done the ‘first day’ before.  She took the lead, and we followed.  Then she left, we stepped up and over the following weeks and months we continued to step up.  Little did we know the better we did, the worse it was for us.

Once the initial nerves were over, I couldn’t wait to get to school everyday.  I LOVED these children so much.  They were all bright shining lights, stars in the sky at night.  They were generous with their love and enthusiasm, and so very different to the young children I knew in the UK, but then they were from a different continent, a different culture and a different climate.

As each week passed, I noticed things were not going as well outside my classroom as they were inside the classroom.  The other teachers were starting to ignore me, or making snidely comments.  I put this down to work pressures as the term progressed.  What I didn’t expect was to be outcast just because my husband was taking care of our children when they were ill and because my husband made dinner for us.  Nor did I realise they would snub me just because I refused to eat the cakes and biscuits they offered, even though they all knew I has a wheat intolerance.

Things got worse the better the children did, and my head of department became nastier towards me as the first term wore on.  I was obviously very foolish in thinking that she would be happy with the progress the children were making.  I thought the better we did, the better it looked on the department and the school.  Obviously to be successful was the wrong thing to be.

Over the first two terms many things I did caused me problems.  Drawing and painting pictures of characters in books that helped us in class upset the art teacher.  Refusing to take part in the Secret Santa because I wasn’t Christian really upset them, especially the Arabic & Religion teacher, even though I took her Arabic lesson that day.  She was also very annoyed with me because for her birthday, the children made her a card and wrote their names in Arabic, something my co-teacher taught them for the purposes of the card; something I thought they would be able to do, I mean they are Arabs after all and we were half way through the school year at this point.

The children in my class were able to read more fluently than the children in the class above, and some of the children 2 classes above.  This greatly upset all the teachers, although they should have been happy because it meant their jobs were being made easier.  But no, long term thinking wasn’t in their realm of thinking, just jealousy and belonging to the tribe.  The classroom displays I created with the children offended all the other teachers too – just because they were good and displayed the children’s work, rather than shop bought printed items which the other teachers chose to use.  Taking over the morning exercises when the PE department refused to do it, not to mention the creative movement and drama lessons when the respective teachers left annoyed them too.  Eventually I was made unwelcome in the staff room, and told by the headmistress not to speak with other members of staff.  I was then not allowed in my own classroom to do the wall displays during art lessons, although the art teacher had her own art studio to use, because ‘it was upsetting the other members of staff’.  With no staff room to mark work in, I sat outside on the benches to mark the work.  This became a problem for a variety of stupid reasons including mixing with the ‘national department children’.  I then moved to the library, until the Head Librarian decided to join the growing group of people who hated me.

I made matters worse for myself again when I arrived at school one morning to find the corridors filled with water.  There had been a leak of some kind, so me being me, I took off my Ugg boots, rolled up my jeans and found a mop so I could help the matrons clean it up.  The headmistress came over to me “what are you doing? you shouldn’t be doing this! You will get sick”  I couldn’t put down the mop and stand around watching.  The matrons got paid very little and if I got sick, I could afford the Dr’s fees, they couldn’t.  So I continued to help until all the water was gone.  We were supposed to be a team after all, and what kind of message was it sending to the children? A dishonourable one.  One where the middle classes look down upon the lower classes.  One where the more money you have, the less you do.

Anyone that remained friendly with me faced comments and isolation.  They either joined the group against me, or they experienced a milder case of what I was going through.  I was reminded by one of the teachers that in Egypt they have a saying ‘me and my brother against my cousin, my cousin and I against the world’ (one of the most tribal, anti-Islamic sayings I have ever come across, and probably why Egypt is in such a mess at the moment).  When I responded with “we should stand by what is right and just, not just stand with blood because it is blood” she looked confused.  This thought was so alien to her, and with it being alien to her, the behaviour of the Prophet Muhammed must also have been alien to her, because he stood for true justice.

It got to the point where I dreaded going to school.  I also hated checking my email account due to the number of vicious emails from my Head of Department and the Principle of the school.  The emails were so vile and nasty, they were unbelievable.  Not only were they sent to me, but they were also sent to my co-teacher.  Very unprofessional to say the least.  The jealousy that manifested itself amongst the other teachers was shocking.  Some of the teachers were so tribal it was scary to be the outsider.  One even went as far as to tell my class and her class (we had a joint lesson) that I didn’t love Egypt because I wasn’t Egyptian.  The look of horror that fell upon the children’s faces broke my heart.  I quickly informed them all that I loved Egypt.  I had chosen it as my home, and even though I was born in England, loved and missed it very much, I wanted to live in Egypt.  Egypt was my new home.  This was also the same teacher who decided to criticise and belittle me and the British accent just before I, and my co-teacher, gave a presentation.  Her nasty, childish behaviour had got to a point I couldn’t bare, so I told her that the UK had the largest number of accents than any other country, and the accents she loved from the US originally came from the lower class Brits, Italians and the Irish when they occupied the territories originally belonging to the Native Indians.  This was the first time I had publicly stood up for myself, and it made her shut up, for the time being.

Following that day, her and her cousin decided to make complaint after complaint about me.  None of them based on fact, just pure fiction from their small minds.  I spent more time in the headmistresses office than I cared to imagine.  What was really sad was the headmistress could see what was happening, but failed to do anything about it.  She even asked me “what can I do? I cannot do anything? Do you want me to speak with them all?”  Er… yes! You are in charge of this ‘team’ and it is your responsibility to sort out problems like this, better still stop them from happening before they get to this stage!  Instead, she told me to not speak to any of them, even if they spoke to me.  She then informed me that if another complaint was made about me, then I would be removed from the school.  When I told her this was an impossible position, simply because they could all make false complaints, she simply stated “well that is just how it is”.  Here was a woman wearing a hijaab, praying in her office and she was willing to sit by and allow her ‘team’ to victimise and bully a member of staff who was really great at her job.  Did she really understand the concept of hijaab and what it meant to be a Muslim?? Obviously not, otherwise she would not have allowed this kind of behaviour to continue in ‘her’ school.  But then again, the perpetrators of this nastiness all wore hijaab and constantly told me ‘about Islam’ and what my ‘Islamic duty’ was.

At the end of the second term I was asked to resign.  I refused again and again.  I was not prepared to leave the children at this point of the year.  I told the headmistress that it didn’t matter what they did to me, I signed a one year contract and the children deserved to have their teacher until the end of the year, and unless they fired me, I was not leaving.  The look of shock on her face was almost amusing, but also telling.  She realised in this moment that I knew my legal rights and if they fired me, a legal battle would commence.  They had no grounds to fire me.  I had done nothing wrong, in fact I had done everything right, unlike my colleagues.  I knew my human rights and I was not going to be bullied out of the school.

Then they started to bully my eldest son.  His work was marked as incorrect when it was correct.  They allowed to other children to bully him and tell lies about him, even so far as to believe a little girl when she said my son had been hitting her that day… even though he had been off school for over a week following an operation.  Still they ‘knew this girl and she wouldn’t do this” er hello!! she has just told a lie which can be proven to be a lie and you are siding with her?? Seriously??

The final straw came when my youngest son was scared to enter my classroom in the morning.  When I asked him what the matter was, he told me that if he or anyone from his class entered my classroom they would be punished.  When I informed him that it was not safe for him and his classmates to be left in the class without adult supervision, he told me that he knew that but he didn’t want to get told off.  I told him to go inside my class and I would deal with the situation.  Little did I know that all the children had been told the same thing.  Most of the children were left unsupervised in the morning for up to 30 minutes, many were left waiting for teachers to arrive for lessons for over 10 minutes, but this didn’t matter.  What mattered was my Head of Department didn’t like me, she wanted me out and her best friend, the school principal, were happy to make my life as miserable as hell.  They were trying to manage me out, but it didn’t matter what they did, I was not going to leave.  That was until on my final day, I was called into the headmistresses office again, and told that if I came onto school premises again the next day, I would be physically escorted from the premises.

It has been almost 5 months since I was forced out of the last school I was in.  The first two months I spent grieving for the children I had left behind, 20 beautiful little people with pure hearts and enormous amounts of energy.  I was not just grieving because I was no longer their teacher, but because I knew that if they stayed in that environment, then they would lose a huge part of themselves.  They would be controlled, not disciplined.  They will be held back, because the teachers are not ready, or capable, to teach them.  They will be prevented from joining other schools because much of the information they are given is incorrect or not adequate.  I have been approached by nearly 20 parents over the summer holiday, many of them at their wits end because their children have failed entrance exams to other schools.  The business model for the school is “Hold them back, keep them here” a business model I do not subscribe to on any level.  When a child is ready to learn, you teach them.  If this means you have to step up your game, step up, above and beyond where you need to be.  But you see, I am not arrogant.  I don’t walk around with fake designers goods draped all over me and talking on my mobile phone when I should be in class teaching.  I don’t agree with putting my conversation with other teachers, about other teachers, before my prompt arrival to the lesson, or the class at the beginning of the day.  I don’t sit in the staff room moaning about the amount of work I have to do as a teacher.  I just get on with it.  As I am now doing in the new school I am working in.

I nearly gave up on my career as a teacher due to the organisational bullying that went on.  Would the other schools be like this, and from what I hear on a regular basis from other teachers across Cairo, it goes on everywhere.  Foreign teachers are hired to impressed the parents, but then after a few weeks/months, they are fired for a cheaper alternative.  But I didn’t give up, I kept going and thank God I did… I have been blessed with a new group of amazing little children, but the problems I see here in the new school upset me on a whole new level.  The teachers I work with are great, so is my Head of Department.  We have a laugh with each other, we support each other and share ideas.  Some of the Egyptian teachers have a mild case of the lazy attitudes from the last school, some like to interrupt the lessons just because they are not organised enough during their own lessons, but having lived here for 2.5 years, it doesn’t surprise me and I can deal with it in my own way.  The school knew before I joined I was a Human Rights activist, they knew of some of the problems from the last school, but I don’t think they fully understood it until I ‘had to come out’ when 15 of the children in my eldest son’s class were allowed to behave like animals towards him in the common pack mentality of Egyptian culture (me and my brother against my cousin raising its ugly head again) in front of the Key Stage Leader and teacher, and then my son was the one who got punished.  After the second time of it happening, and after my husband had 2 meetings with the Director and Key Stage Leader and nothing was being done, other than our child being labelled (a common thing for lazy teachers to do), I told the children myself that they were bullies and if they didn’t stop then I would personally speak with their mothers and tell them what their ‘little darlings’ were doing.  I got my first written warning, but so be it.  I would have done the same for any child.  I would do the same again.  Bullying is not acceptable on any level, yet here in Egypt bullying is prevalent in all areas of the community.

The Egyptians pride themselves on being ‘religious’ people, and yet they forget the first word to the Prophet Mohamed was ‘read’ (ikra), before prayer, before charity, or Hajj, yet so many don’t read or gain wisdom (ilm – the second most used word in the Qur’aan after Allah).  Many think that wearing hijaab, growing a beard, praying and fasting is enough.  They forget that gossip and back biting, bullying, lying and being tribal is not acceptable and causes disharmony.  The word ‘salaam alaikum’ means ‘peace be upon you’ and yet they do not create a peaceful environment with their behaviour.  They do not understand the very basics of Islam and do not like it when people like me, who have a white face and are not Arab do not celebrate Halloween and Christmas… or know more about ‘their religion’ than they do.

So why, having known this about many Egyptians does my new experience as a teacher upset me on a whole new level? Well last year I was blessed with amazing parents, this year I am faced with another kind of parent.  The neglectful and disabling kind.  I have maybe 10 children out of the 29 that I teach that I would love to take home and give them a shower, brush their hair and clean their clothes.  I would love to take them shopping for basic stationary, or simply just shower them with love, because it seems they are not given these things at home.  One girl broke my heart when she told me ‘I wish my mummy and daddy hugged me like you do Mrs Dawn’.  My heart shattered into pieces and I had to fight the tears.  The others smell of dust every day, 3 of them are always sent to school in dirty uniforms.  2 of them have severe learning disabilities, which we are not allowed to speak about for fear of upsetting the parents. Oh I see! So it is OK to neglect the children by not giving him the support he needs to deal with his dyslexia; and to stop him growing in confidence and becoming successful, just because you do not want the shame it brings to your family, but it is not OK to enable him to becoming a pupil that loves learning and can become anything he wants to be?  And no, I don’t know who his parents are, and quite frankly I wouldn’t care if his father was President Morsi, I am a teacher and my job is to help him learn.  If he is being blocked in his learning because he needs medical care or additional support, then his parents need to know.  It is more shameful to avoid the problem than to admit it is there and deal with it.  It is a learning opportunity for both the ‘supposed’ educators and the parents; and if you truly believed in Allah’s will, then you would accept that Allah made your child this way and He is testing you on the way you deal with it.  Ignoring problems does not make them go away, it just compounds them.

The other thing that upsets me is seeing the lunches that these children are given.  Yesterday’s fast food take away from Hardee’s or McZion (aka McDonald’s), halawa sandwiches, chocolate sandwiches, crisps, chocolate cake, sweets, more cake, oh and then they are given 20LE to spend on more junk from the school tuck shop.  One mother complained to me at the parents meeting that her son was getting fat because he had too much homework to do and doesn’t get time to exercise.  No my dear, your son is getting fat because you send him to school with a box full of sugar, fizzy drinks (17 spoons of sugar per can) and then give him 20LE to buy more sugar.  Oh and by the way, that is why his teeth are turning black, he is constantly sick and is hyperactive and then sleepy in class.  Sugar rushes and crashes are not conducive to learning.  The neglect for the child’s health is appalling, but then when the whole family is fat and overweight, it is not surprising.  These are also the parents who have not supplied their children with the most basic of stationary supplies, such as a pencil, to write with in class. They don’t help them revise their spelling lists and or buy them age appropriate reading books to help them learn and improve their reading and comprehension skills.  As my husband and I say, how you are with one thing, is how you are with everything.

We then have parents at the other end of the scale who do absolutely everything for their children.  Even in year 8 we have students who do not know how to pack their own school bag! The homework is challenged at every turn because it is ‘too much for him/her’.  Really!? an hours worth of homework is too much for a 14 year old? Is there any wonder many Egyptians are unable to compete in the global employment arena?  The school administration buckles under the parents wishes and disables the children further.  This is not just unique to the school I work in, it is an epidemic across Egypt.  The parent shouts ‘jump!’, the school says ‘how high?’.  The parent says ‘do you know who I am?’ the schools reply ‘yes yafendim, sorry yafendim, three bags full yafendim, won’t do it again yafendim’.  If the parents want their child to have an ‘A’ grade, the administrations request the teachers make things easier for the students to get the ‘A’ grade.  I was asked recently to remove many of the graded work pieces so the grades looked better.  My response was quite simply ‘No’.  You see the thing is, to do that would not help the child, it doesn’t give them anything to aim for, it makes them lazy and it is deceitful and lying.  When I was told I had to, I said ‘I’m more afraid of Allah then you, the parents or the administration’, to which, as a Muslim, they had no reply.  What could they say?  I know that for many I may seem like every employers worst nightmare, but when I do my work, I want to do it honestly, effectively and produce great results (one of the reasons my book is taking forever to finish!).

Then you have the parents who not only neglect their children as mentioned above, they leave them in the club all weekend with a mobile phone whilst they can go off and do whatever it is they do.  They put them in sports clubs so their bodies cannot rest.  They fail to be with them and teach them manners and respect, so when they go to school the teaches are subjected to behaviours that are shocking beyond belief.  Many of these children would have been expelled within the first 2 weeks of a decent school if they were in the UK for the foul language, violence and disrespect shown to the teachers and their peers.  But the schools are not tough enough, or they have labelled the child as being ‘a case’, ‘an exception’ or there are ‘problems at home’.  Indeed there are problems at home; there is no discipline, or ‘the right kind’ of love; so these children will do anything to get the attention they so desperately need, want and deserve.

The school I am working in at the moment is a hundred times better than the last one.  The staff are for the most part, team players.  The majority of them go over and above what they are expected to do.  Admittedly, we have to pay for all our own resources and make them if we cannot find them as a finished product in a shop (or can’t afford them).  Many teachers are spending 10% of their monthly salary to just be able to do the basics in the classroom, and yet as parents we are paying 35,000LE each year.  Putting my business head on, I know the profits in this school are huge.  But will the owners or the administration supply these basics? Of course not! This is Egypt.  Schools here are not for educating the children, they are for making money.  Giving prestige.

For Egypt to get better, the schools have to get better.  Parents have to start taking care of their children, nurturing them, guiding them, feeding them with healthy food instead of junk.  They have to acknowledge the learning difficulties their children have.  They have to start buying them books suitable for the child’s age instead of holding them back.  They have to believe in their children.  Some of the children in my eldest sons class (yr 4 – age 9) cannot read as well as my youngest son (yr1 – age 5), this is so upsetting for me.  If they cannot read and understand English, even with it being a second language, then how can they understand Maths, Science and all the other subjects they are being taught? These children have been in English speaking schools since they started at school.  This shows a lack of effort or understanding of how to teach reading and comprehension by the teachers employed in schools.  It shows that the parents are not taking enough care and pushing for better schooling; which to be fair to a lot of parents is not through a lack of trying.  They drive all over Cairo for additional tutors in nearly every subject because the teaching in many schools is shocking.  Some of the work I have assessed for my private students have been marked or taught incorrectly, and parents have to make the choice between their children getting the grades by answering the questions in exams incorrectly, or losing marks by writing the correct questions.

Until the Ministry of Education provides and demands better standards in schooling, the universities provide better teacher training and the teachers continue to learn new methods and continue with their own education; not to mention the schools have to stop recruiting teachers on the premise that they can simply speak the language, the children of Egypt will continue to suffer.  The schools in the UK, Europe and the US wouldn’t employ a bawaab (building caretaker) just because he speaks Arabic, he would have to have some kind of teaching/training and experience, along with subject knowledge.

There are many problems with the education here in Egypt, hence why I am about to embark on an Education project for my Masters degree.  Things need to change drastically.  Individuals have to step up and make a difference instead of relying on others to always do things.  Egyptians have to become the change they wish to see, take a lead from the inspiring Egyptians that led the revolution and died for a better Egypt, instead of criticising them. School owners have to put the profits back into the schools to improve education levels by employing great teachers, support teachers and providing resources; a healthy supply of food in the tuck shops would be a great start, which could then lead to an on site kitchen and dinner hall providing healthy cooked food.  There is so much to be done, and so few people moving in the right direction to make it happen.  Let’s hope the first stage of the revolution continues, otherwise it will only have been an uprising and it all those protestors will have died for nothing.