Jabba the Hut and other stories

Schooling is expensive here. I don’t get much change from $15,000. Yes, it’s private. And the teaching medium is English. The only other alternative is going native and doing it all in Arabic. Or Urdu. So we can’t vote with our feet.

And herein lies the problem. The school has fantastic teachers. But the management sucks. The primary school is vacillating between two different teaching systems, doing both of them in a half-arsed way. The teachers haven’t been trained properly in the new methods (they are sort-of changing between British SATS and PYP), so they not happy. The parents weren’t even informed of the changes until after the fact. After doing PYP for most of the year, the kids get informed that they have 3 months to do the whole SATS system and write external exams. So you have a school full of confused kids, 14 teachers leaving, the principal flouncing around and going on recruitment trips to the UK, and the parents looking for rope and a tree (luckily the desert doesn’t have too many trees). The Principal of the primary school (Jabba the Hut) is totally out of her element and is blissfully unaware that the school is imploding all around her.

The Principal of the secondary school is ok, so nuff said about him. The head of the school, herinafter known as Poison Dwarf, has small man syndrome. When challenged at PTA meetings his favourite tactic is to grab his mobile phone, pretend to answer it, and flee the room. The secondary school can’t decide which side of the fence to sit on either, so the school management finds itself with their proverbial balls stuck in the barbed wire.. they haven’t decided which education system to use either, but have fired teachers and told kids “the option of subjects you chose earlier this year is no longer available”. What makes the situation more dire is that it seems the school may not yet be accredited to teach in the new system – this of course means that when darling Johhny or Ahmed want to apply to study at Cambridge or MIT they gonna tell him, “sorry we don’t take people who haven’t had a proper education”

What to do? Changing school means (i) commuting (as in 3 hours a day), (ii) moving to a different city, (iii) changing jobs and leaving the country, or (iv) sending the kids and wife to another country and seeing them once or twice a year. The joys of expat life….now where did I leave that rope?