First and foremost the first aspect that you need to condition yourself (one of many things!) is to forget about everything that you have been taught as a teacher previously. This might sound a little crazy, but this is very important in order to stay sane whilst you are in Manarat. When you first arrive at the school, no one tells you anything and you are left on your own. In a typical teacher appointment at a new school you would expect to be given a tour of the school, a staff handbook amongst other important things for a new member of staff, this is something that does not happen at Manarat. As teachers we have become accustomed to certain things being in place in the Schools, things like; a computer at your desk for you to do your work; a chair that is not broken and safe to sit on etc. In a normal environment these things are a given, however Manarat is not a normal school (in fact I don't think we can call it a school to be honest) and certainly the environment is not normal! The following are just some of the fundamental things that a school would require to operate and exist as a school, but these are things that are not available at Manarat School Riyadh and the way it is heading will never be available:
No system of Communication
There is no school computer network, that's right I will repeat that there is no computer network in the whole school! - we're talking about a school that has 2000+ pupils on roll, more than 200 teaching staff (this includes both teachers from the boys and the girls section) and none of these staff have a school email, shared resource area and everything else that you would expect a school of this size to have by default. We will highlight the technological state of Manarat School Riyadh in detail in another post.
There are no telephones available to ring other teachers in the school or parents. The teachers are expected to use their own telephone credit to contact parents! You are not given any money toward the cost of the call and they will certainly not re-imburse you for any costs incurred whilst contacting a parent. There is no system of student records in terms of student data, history, needs, any medical issues. All in all you have no idea about the styudents that are in your classroom and you are just expected to teach and then at the end of term prepare a 'test' for the students.
Another communication issue is that the children in the school can barely speak English and at times you have to repeat yourself several times for them to follow basic instructions.
No teacher timetable when you start the term/semester
This is something that we were dumbfounded by when we were told that we will receive our timetables on the first day of school! So you have no idea how many periods your are teaching or what classes you have. We have never seen such chaos and disorganization on the first day if school in our entire life. The irony is that we were coming in a week before into the school and spending the whole day at the school due the school not having planned anything in place for that week - the school admin themselves had just come back from holiday and nothing was planned. They were planning for what will happen in the upcoming year during the week that they returned from holiday. After they agreed on a 'makeshift' plan the teachers were told to come in on Saturday to start working on what they had just put together after they were coming in for 5 days which were wholly unproductive at no fault of the teachers - due to incompetence, poor organization and planning skills on the part of the school management. The timetable changes out of the blue one week you are teaching 5 periods on Monday and the next your are teaching teaching 7 periods, there is no consistency, you can't plan anything - the number of lessons change and so does the the timings for the lessons. At the time of this writing there is an emergency timetable in place, as the school did not recruit enough teachers (there is an extremely high turn over of staff, many teachers leave after just 1 year and some even within weeks of arriving) they are short of 11 teachers - which means that there will be many periods that need to be covered by teachers in additional to their allocated timetabled periods.
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