The Students

I'm gone now, and I can say a few things without risking hurting feelings.

It is an expensive school, so the locals attending have parents who are rich. Often very rich. A large number are over-privileged as a result. Much more so than rich NZ kids, because NZ is a basically meritocratic society and your parents' connections really aren't worth very much. But rich Arabs can rely on connections (called wasta in Arabic) to smooth their way and get positions and opportunities regardless of merit. 

It wasn't unheard of for locals to send their kids to the school based entirely on its perceived status, with little interest in anything other than that their kid was learning English and making good connections. 

So rather too many of the local kids, though by no means all, were not interested in learning − or in school in any sense.

Cheating, for example, was pretty rife. They did not consider it an issue, even when caught. In fact some took it very badly indeed if you insisted that not doing any work and then cheating was in some way a problem. Their parents paid your wages, and you were meant to not ask too many difficult questions. Indeed the very worst considered that you had cheated them if you insisted on giving them a low grade just because they couldn't do the work. I had one girl who was disruptive and lazy and yet who then asked for a good recommendation for entry into another school − and I think she thought I should give it too!

The non-locals by contrast generally have employers who pay, or are staff kids. They tend to have quite demanding parents, who are hard working and relatively clever themselves and who value education highly. Those students were hard working and keen to learn, often somewhat excessively so.

They did not tend to stay into senior school though, as parents tend (as we did with our kids) to return them to their local system for the secondary schooling. Those that stay tend to be ones with terrible local systems or staff kids.

So while the students were not unusual in terms of the spread of natural ability, they were quite different in terms of work ethic, with a lot of veering towards the extremes. Lots of very hard workers and lots of very lazy. This was made more obvious because the classes were streamed. 

I had an (NZ) intermediate year class which had one excessively exuberant young lady in it, but otherwise was an absolute delight to teach. My other junior class had a couple of stroppy and badly behaved boys, but still a bulk of clever and dedicated kids who lapped up everything they were given. Despite being the middle class in terms of ability they absolutely smashed the end of term test. 

By contrast my dealings with Years 9, 10 and 11 were very different because I had the bottom classes. There was a definite sullen and difficult edge to them. They were at least as bad, collectively, as any NZ classes I have had − and I have taught bottom streams at both St Peter's and St John's. Both classes had a block of students who had no interest in work, and their laziness set the tone for the unfortunate good students who happened to be in the class because they weren't very clever or who didn't speak much English. 

It was almost impossible to fight the minor behaviour problems, because the school had no detentions or keeping in class as punishments. Students who arrived habitually late, for example, could do so with more or less impunity. I could not even do what I do in NZ for such students, which is lock my door and refuse to let them in until I had set the rest of the class some work, because I was not allowed to leave them unattended. 

Seating plans were allowed, fortunately, but I wasn't allowed to seat them separated out, as I would do for a similar NZ class – so they got to chat happily for the whole period if they wanted. The school allowed you to take phones, but you couldn't keep them past the class and there was no further punishment, so there was little point really. Therefore I couldn't even use my standard tool of driving them to do some work out of sheer boredom if they didn't.

It was, to put it mildly, frustrating to know what I wanted to do and not be able to do it because of the way the school worked. I ended up teaching those classes very little (not that they much minded).

I also took some Year 13s for a bit. The bottom (of two) didn't do as much as they should, but obviously by that stage any really lazy students had dropped out. They were very similar to a Year 13 NZ Statistics class. Whereas the top class, who I relieved for a couple of times, was like a really good Calculus class.

The result was that I felt like I was teaching in two very different schools.

It wasn't to the end that I noticed that in my three months I never had to once report an international (or staff) kid. Every single disciplinary action, other than a short reprimand, was for an Arab student! Not all the international students were hard working or nice, of course, but the worst ones were like your average Kiwi student who doesn't cause any trouble even if not terribly diligent. I'm glad that it took me to the end to realise that, because I would hate for it to have affected my teaching to be prejudging based on origin, but there's no way I can look back now and not notice it.

It does show that despite a school's valiant efforts to the contrary − and the school did try very hard indeed to distill a culture of respect and work − the culture our students bring into the classroom is difficult to overcome. 

Thoughts on the school itself

Private schools are common in Jordan, because the state system is very poor. My school is towards the top end in terms of prestige, being old and well established (though there are several above it who have selective entry).

The school therefore competes by being more community focused, and particularly accepting of students with difficulties of one sort or another. The children that need it get a heavily personalised system of teacher aides in class and pull-outs – for which the parents pay, of course.

They take the social aspect of teaching extremely seriously, with a form class system that in many ways mimics the social aspects of what RE deliver at St John’s. There is a very large emphasis on extra-curricular, although not so much on sport compared to a NZ private school. They do try to keep students doing PE until the end of schooling, which is good.

The school is 700, but is heavily weighted to the Junior school. It seems that as students get older the internationals tend to go to their home country – either because parents shift or via boarding school. This leads to very small senior year levels compared to junior.

The staff seemed very good and committed to their jobs. Bad staff are moved on, in the way only a contract system can achieve. I really could not have asked for a nicer department to move into. It was very friendly, good teachers and well organised.

The staff overall do however come and go at a very quick rate. Most see out their two year contract, but many don’t renew because Jordan’s not a long-term spot for everyone. Not many teachers stay past a second contract – the sort of person driven to be an international school teacher isn’t one who stays at the same place. Coming from schools where half the staff have served for decades to one where five years puts you in the “old timer” category was a real change.

It doesn’t matter so much with teachers, but the management likewise are all new in the last two years to their current posts, and many of them completely new to the school. My Head of Department is something like the fourth in five years. The result is that the school is always in flux. New systems are always being introduced and old mistakes repeated. That isn’t so good.

On the plus side, the school is quite wealthy and well resourced. Teachers get their own rooms. The IT set-up is good. Class sizes are small. It pays well – of the gripes in the staff room, none were about pay or resources. 

Staff are required to do extra-curricular stuff, but not necessarily much outside school hours, and certainly not all year. The teaching load isn’t particularly onerous, so the expectations are quite reasonable.

It’s a good school, which strives to do well by its students. 

For me it’s weakness is a lack of attention to detail regarding low-grade poor behaviour, which allows them to slip slowly into very poor habits. I think the school’s reliance on the good students mostly being obedient is allowing the poorly behaved to have too much freedom.

I’m not much of a disciplinarian, but I like to sweat the little stuff like arriving on time and wearing uniform.

It’s also a bit Hogwarts for my taste. House points, extra-curricula and challenges get far more focus than academic performance. They mean “community school” very literally. The parents have bought into that, and the students like it – but it just isn’t for me.

Food

During our time here we have attempted to try most of the traditional local foods, without being fanatical about it. Mostly it's like Lebanese food, which is hardly a surprise, but with strong elements from the Bedouin desert tradition. Most of the stuff we read on-line about the local cuisine is quite accurate.

However, it omitted to tell us how much the locals like fast food, of all types. Foreign brands are extremely plentiful, including ones like KFC that I hadn't imagine would transplant very well. But even more plentiful they have lots of the local pizza (manakish), falafel and kebab (shawerma) outlets, many of which are mere hole-in-the-wall operations.

I was surprised how much they like pickles. Not just olives and gherkins, but all sorts of pickles – carrots and turnips for example. The takeaway kebab I had with pickled turnip (above in pink) alongside chips was very Jordanian (they really like chips).

Yoghurt is plentiful, as we expected, with a lot of traditional recipes using it. Many of them use jameed, which is salty dried yoghurt which is then rehydrated. They also drink shaneeneh, which is thin salty yoghurt common in the Middle East and into India – I quite like it, but it isn't to everyone's taste. A lot of the cheese is salty too – which I presume was because it kept longer that way.

The locals are also very keen on nuts and pastries. There are whole shops selling nothing but nuts in various flavours. We haven't tried many, but the smoked almonds we had were very nice. Quite a few of the local dishes have nuts in them, especially almonds.

Nuts outside a shop in downtown Amman

There are also a lot of pastry shops, and I continued my practice from France of trying one or two of each type. I would have bought more but the locals buy by weight – generally quite a large weight – and I got sick of try to explain that I only wanted one or two. The local pastries tend to be variants on flaky pastry, nuts (almonds and pistachios, generally) and a generous smothering of honey. The larger shops also have extensive ranges of cheesecakes, cake in general and ice cream. But while they have a fondness for sweet treats, the Jordanians fortunately don't make sweet main dishes.

Dates, figs and apricots have been dried here for many centuries obviously. But they have added many modern varieties, such as kiwifruit. My favourite is candied pomelo peel (pomeloes are like giant green grapefruits, and more or less inedible when fresh) while Alison prefers the dried mango.

In general people here seem to buy in bulk, and you can see someone buying eight lettuce or five kilograms of tomatoes at a time. Mostly this isn't an issue, Alison just buys the small amount we need, except when it comes to bread. We just can't eat a kilogram of unleavened bread before it goes stale and they don't sell it in smaller quantities. There's plenty of leavened bread, but it has been perhaps the most disappointing food type we have had here – tasteless, fluffy and sweet.

The locals drink coffee and tea a lot. The tea is often minted and almost always very sweet. The coffee is strong and often has cardamom or other herbal flavours. They seem to not to mind it cold, judging by how long they take to drink it.

For those at St John's, I have made sure to try a range of the local extruded cheese snacks. Mostly they have been very disappointing. The only nice variety was a pea one Alison found (from Indonesia, I think).

The photo makes them look pale. They were as virulently green as most cheese snacks are orange. 

Finally, you try something new only to find that it's actually something very familiar. I bought a bag of "stone chocolates". They actually look remarkably like stones, which kids must find amusing. They taste exactly like Smarties.

My Classroom

So this the room I have taught in for the last three months. The stuff on the walls is obviously not mine.

On the plus sides,

• It is quite sound-proof to the corridor and outside, so there are few outside distractions; 
• There are windows along the whole back wall, so there’s a decent natural light component; which comes from behind the students;
• There are two air-conditioners, which means it can be cooled or heated rapidly;
• The desks and chairs are sturdy;
• There’s a large storage room attached. 

Things that don’t bother me, but might others,

• The teacher’s desk is tiny. Luckily I am used to keeping a clear desk anyway.
• It is small (literally half the size of my previous classrooms -- 32 sq m compared to 64 sq m), which isn’t that bad as the class sizes are small. 
• The Smartboard wasn’t working, but I never wanted it anyway and I just used it for my PowerPoints. 

On the downsides,

• It is noisy, as a result of the lack of soft surfaces and the small size. One loud student is far more dominant here than in my NZ classrooms. Posting the distracting ones at the back doesn’t work, as the back is so close to the front.. 
• I can’t lock the door. This means I can’t keep late students from entering at their leisure. 
• The absolute killer though, for me, is the lack of whiteboard space. I am used to well over four times as much, and even then I run out. I have found this very limiting, as I can’t have a couple of worked examples on show as I run up a list of practice exercises. 
• Notes have to be done via the projector and PowerPoint, so the class has to move at the pace of the slowest note-taker (which is very slow indeed when you have a limited autistic boy in the class).

Those who know me will wonder why the desks are in groups. It’s not my choice! I was told that I could have them any way I wanted, except I wasn’t allowed to put them in rows. At that point I thought I might as well see how groups worked, and to minimise the change between teachers I just left them the way they were.

It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it certainly wasn’t a success. The small size of the room negated some of the issues about them sneaking out phones etc -- I could see what they were doing as they were so close. But I had to have quite rigid seating plans because I had to keep the excessively chatty people separated from each other. Having group seating and then seating them in groups deliberately chosen to avoid them talking to each other seems twisted to me. I will be going back to rows in pairs.

Religion

Jordan is slightly over 90% Muslim and it doesn't take long to spot it.

There are mosques everywhere. In the cities they are often quite large, with towering minarets. However there are many smaller ones scattered about, with only a hint of a tower. The call to prayer goes up everywhere from loudspeakers, and they don't keep it quiet -- we hear our local one easily through the double glazing despite it being quite a distance away. If you stand in the right place you can hear two or three simultaneously, battling it out.

The big central mosque in Amman.

Friday morning is deserted, and very little is open. At midday you see significant numbers of men going to the mosques for Friday prayers. And then the afternoon is family time, with picnics if the weather is nice.

Schools and government offices take Friday and Saturday off in Jordan, but Saturday is just an ordinary work day for most shops etc.

However most Jordanians do not seem particularly fanatical in their observance. Few stop for prayers during the day – you see them sometimes in a quiet corner, generally older men, but only once or twice have we have seen families or women sitting quietly in prayer. My school pays no attention to the midday prayer time, although the more devout students and staff go to a classroom to pray during the 12:40 lunch break to make up for it.

Alcohol is freely available in bottle stores and some inner city restaurants. Beer is quite expensive, because of the tax rate, so they mostly drink spirits. There are few, if any bars serving alcohol, but the locals go to the equivalent where they smoke shisha (hookahs) which are extremely common.

Pork is available, but is not common at all. Similarly you don't see much shellfish or other haram (forbidden) food.

Most women wear a hijab. The current style is for quite tight fitting stretch fabric ones, often with a white layer underneath tight to the head. Generally they are coloured, often quite strongly, sometimes patterned. It seems many rural Christians wear the hijab too (certainly there weren't many people in Ajloun bare headed and that town is significantly Christian) although ones in Amman do not.

Some examples of some of the common two layer hijab worn in Jordan

Chadors are quite rare, as are niqabs, but you see them about. I suspect most of the people wearing them are not natural Jordanians, being visiting Saudis, Iraqis or Syrian refugees etc.

A lot of younger and wealthier Muslim women go bare headed. The queen, for example, does not cover her head (except at a mosque) and at my school's parent-teacher night there were few women with covered heads, although one was wearing a black chador. Only a couple of girls at my school are covered.

What you don't see hardly at all is women wearing a loose scarf, Iranian style, since you might as well go without as do that. In our suburb about half the women are uncovered, but in the poorer areas and out in the country it drops off to only the odd one or two.

A few women wear the old-style black flowing robes, generally older and poorer ones. Mostly women wear trousers, often with a very long coat over if it is cold, or a fairly long top otherwise. The younger ones generally wear the same tight jeans as NZ kids wear. Necklines are generally high, and sleeves almost universally long.

You see men wearing robes too, again generally older guys, though it is quite common to see younger men wearing them on Friday. A few men wear the keffiyah headscarf.

The seems to be very little of the chaperoning the Saudis go for. You often see young women wandering by themselves around town. This isn't to say that the society isn't sexist, but it does seem to be that Jordan is liberalising slowly. There are some female police officers etc.

About 6% of Jordan in Christian, largely Orthodox, concentrated in the northwest. You certainly see churches about, and they have towers and visible crosses. The state takes the opposite view of most Arab countries in not stressing an Islamic nature. The Christian community know that keeping the monarchy is in their best interest as a bulwark against factionalism, and the King likes loyal subjects regardless of their faith. That helps prevent a slide into the sort of sectarian divisions that Lebanon and Syria have struggled with.

It may not look much, but this is supposedly the site of the
the oldest purpose built Christian church known, in Aqaba.

Catholicism is less common, except oddly in the schools. Traditionally Islamic schooling was via the madrassas attached to the mosques, and they had a well-earned reputation for being more focused on rote learning of "correct" answers than the modern world needs. Islamic parents have long sent their children to Christian schools, who had a reputation for learning before religion – and here that often meant ones run by Catholic nuns and fathers. So you find in Amman a De La Salle College, a Rosary Sisters school, a Franciscan Sisters school and so on. The students at these schools are largely Muslim, although obviously the Christian kids tend to go there too.

(The more recent private schools are secular taking advantage of a huge market, as getting on towards half of the students in Amman go to a fee-paying school. Many teach in English or French.)

Vowels are hard!

One of the more surprising features of Jordan is how much there is in English around the streets. In the  richer parts of Amman most shops have signage in English, although as you get to the less well off the ratio drops.

However because Arabic is very vague about vowels, with different dialects having different vowels for the same words, the Jordanians seem to find English vowels very difficult. The result is a lot of signs that are hard not to find funny.

A personal favourite is the Condles Hatel in Petra. Their other material is spelled correctly, but someone should definitely have been supervising the person hanging up the sign out front!

The other common error is getting the consonant order reversed. Because they read right to left, so I can imagine a person going "d" before "r" only to get the wrong because "before" has a different direction.

Meanwhile, of course, we recognise one word in Arabic, which is Amman  عمّان  -- so that we get on the right bus.

It looks hard, but that only goes part of the way, because the Arabs are huge on calligraphy, so they have an enormous number of different scripts in use. They are often quite stylish and beautiful, but do not make it easy for non-Arabic readers.

Different buses will have the name in very different fonts, so it's not just a matter of matching letters with the same shapes. These all say Amman.

But at least it is alphabetic.

Day-trippin' and getting stoned

Weeks and weeks ago now, before the excitement of big-name tourist destinations and transport mini-disasters we made our first day trip out of town.

Salt (or As-Salt, or Al-Salt) is only 25 km from home, a perfect distance for a taxi ride in Jordan. It's a hilly town - so hilly it makes Amman look flat - and was once the most important settlement between the Eastern Desert and the Jordan Valley. It was used as an administrative centre by the Ottomans around the end of the 19th century, and still has many buildings from that time, in distinctive Ottoman style (if you know what you're looking for). The only way to explore most of the old town centre is on foot; no need to designate the alleyways as pedestrian zones as cars simply don't cope well with staircases.

As well as several mosques (including one built on top of an old fortress), there are a couple of old Christian churches in Salt. We were walking past the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church just as the church warden was unlocking it to show a local and her two overseas visitors around, and they very kindly invited us to join them. We were shown around the main part of the church and then taken up a very narrow spiral staircase onto the roof to admire the view.

There wasn't a "please save our church" box, or we'd have gladly donated some money as a thank you. Instead we clambered around Salt some more then had an astonishingly cheap lunch (the look of incomprehension on Mark's face when he saw the bill had me worried for a moment), and taxied home.

We are tougher travellers now, and have learnt to use the local buses. Well, one of them, which runs from downtown Amman along the main road near home and out to Wadi al Seer, a small town just to the west of Amman. So a couple of weekends ago we caught this bus, and then another from there (a local taxi driver generously showed us which bus we needed, which just goes to show that not all taxi drivers in Jordan are terrible people) out to Qasr Al Abd, a ruined palace built in approx 200 BC. It mostly fell down in an earthquake in 362, but parts of it have been restored just enough to give an idea of its scale and style.

After exploring the ruins we walked a couple of km to some burial caves by the side of the road. Next to the path that led up from the road to the caves was an old chap with a walking stick minding his goats, and a few boys who might have been his grandsons or might just have been local kids.

The smallest of the boys attempted to sell us a large bunch of spring onions as we walked past, perhaps not having really thought through what tourists might want to carry around on their walks. When we declined to buy the onions he and his brothers followed us to the top of the path and appared to be suggesting we could just give them money instead.

We weren't enthusiastic.

Then one of the boys tapped Mark quite vigorously on the back of the head so we decided it was time to leave, and set off down the path towards the road. When we were about halfway I felt something bounce off my shoulder: the lovely lads were expressing their disappointment by throwing pebbles at us. Some of the pebbles found their mark, though most missed, and then they moved on to bigger stones. The old chap noticed what was happening and told them to stop, but in such a gentle way that he clearly didn't expect them to take any notice and they were naturally happy to meet his expectations. Luckily none of those larger stones actually hit us, and we made it back to the village to catch our bus unharmed. (The next kids we met that day wanted to take selfies with us, funny-looking foreigners that we are - altogether more civilised!)