School

Although one of the things that I want to do while I'm in Palestine is conflict resolution training, my official responsibility here is teaching and fundraising at the Friends Schools of Ramallah/El-Bireh. 75% of my time, I teach English to students in grade 1-6. Currently, my emphasis is on reading and writing, and I am trying to carve out time in my schedule to work with the Ethics/counseling department to develop a written curriculum that will help students develop into socially responsible adults with solid critical thinking and conflict resolution skills and a commitment to community service. The remainder of my time is spent fundraising for the upper and lower schools at. I could easily take any one of these three jobs and make it full-time!

The students at the Friends School can be a bit of a handful for me to deal with at times, but we are managing. They tend to be a chatty bunch, and my teaching style is very different from that of most of the teachers here (who tend to stand at the front of the room and lecture). The volume of 25-30 children is LOUD, and I'm still trying to figure out the best way to keep it at a level that doesn't require me to raise my voice to be heard. Teaching, as in the rest of life, requires a bit of trial and error. Tips, however, would be appreciated!

By far, the greatest challenge is that I don't speak enough Arabic to help them to understand the material if they aren't familiar with the vocabulary. I know from my own firsthand experiences with Arabic, however, that it's difficult to listen to someone speaking in a language that you don't know very well. I try to listen and understand as much as I can, but after a while, my tendency when surrounded by people speaking Arabic is to tune them out and do my own thing, and I suspect that the students do that with me sometimes, too!

The language barrier is particularly challenging with the youngest children. I try to remind myself to use very simple vocabulary and to speak clearly and slowly, but it's difficult to know what reasonable expectations are. I had 25 kids in 4-6 grade ask me what the words "recent" and "consider" mean this afternoon in my after-school reading and writing workshop. I'm pretty sure that I knew these words in 4th grade, but I have to remind myself that in 4th grade, I'd been speaking English for nine years and my whole life was immersed in the English language. Not the case for these kids!

If anyone has any good Arabic-English sites, especially those geared towards kids in Elementary School, please let me know. Also, online ESL materials.

Shukran!

Below are photos that I - and others - have taken since the beginning of the school year at the upper and lower school campuses. Enjoy!