76 Trombones down Sheikh Zayed Blvd.

This week I joined the cast of The Music Man, produced by one of the local expat chorus groups (I haven't figured out which). We open at the end of May at a location to be determined (but probably either the British school or another accessible auditorium). I will make my Arabian stage debut as Townsperson #5. I was too late to nab a solo in "Wells Fargo Wagon," but came in time to be cast as one of River City, Iowa's teenagers (no short jokes, please). My stage buddy is an actual teenager named Reena, who goes to one of the international schools in town. We have to link arms and march gleefully behind Professor Harold Hill during "76 Trombones." Our stage position in "Shipoopi" is also prime.

Ocanada (my teaching partner) got me into this. She joined up early enough to have a solo in "Wells Fargo Wagon" and has been listening the to The Music Man CD before school every morning. I was Child #4 in the Carpinteria High School performance of 1984 and still (oddly) remember every word to every song. There seemed no reason not to sign up here in Abu Dhabi and resume much the same role I had so many years ago.

The high school drama teacher at my school is playing Professor Hill and the mother of one of my advisees is Marian (the female lead). For those of you not privileged to have every note of this American theater classic burned into your brains, the Music Man follows the exploits of 'Professor' Harold Hill, a con man who dupes Midwestern towns into investing in boys bands and then runs away with the dough. He meets his match in the citizens of River City, Iowa, especially its brainy librarian, her adorable little brother with a speech impediment, a barbershop quartet and a bevy of gossiping, gingham-clad matrons. What's not to love? One of the songs is about the evils of billiards. Another is based on the claim that all Iowans are stubborn, testy and socially awkward. Yet another, as I have mentioned, is entitled "Shipoopi," which is never actually defined, but I believe can be used as a synonym for sweetheart. The whole thing opens (rather brilliantly) with a group of salesmen talking in the rhythm of a train steaming its way across the plains.

I'm looking forward to learning all my stage moves and refining, in the time-honored musical theater tradition, the act of pretending to talk enthusiastically to my fellow townspeople or pantomiming excitement, glee or dismay. Last night at rehearsal, I was measured for my costume. Apparently, given my stage age, a pinafore will be involved. Stay tuned...

Student led

I started the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell this weekend--and not a moment too soon. The chapter I'm currently reading meshes perfectly with something that happened at school last week.

In the chapter "The Trouble with Genius, part 2," Gladwell discusses the way middle class children are raised differently from working class and poor children. It's a phenomenon I've read about before, but Gladwell, as usual, sums up the research with accessible panache. Long-story-short: middle class children are raised to take control of their lives from an early age. They are trained to express themselves clearly and not be afraid to shape a situation to their liking, whenever possible. The message that they get from their parents is that they have every right to speak up, be heard and make themselves understood. As a result, they are comfortable in a wide variety of highly structured situations and able to engage in the world on equal footing with those around them, even adults in most cases. Working class children, in contrast, are trained by their parents to respect authority, accept the world as they find it and adopt a position of distance in unfamiliar situations. Both ways of looking at the world are learned traits linked to social class, and have nothing to do with genetics, race or personality type. Neither is morally superior. However, given the way our society is structured, the abilities middle class children learn provide them with an incredible advantage throughout their lives.

Which brings me to last week at school. Half of Wednesday and all of Thursday were given over to student-led conferences, which are exactly what they sound like. The students amassed a portfolio of their work done over the course of the year in all classes (including electives and PE), reflected on it and then shared it with their parents in a conference-like setting. All told, they spent between 35-60 minutes talking their parents through their work. At the end, parent and child set a goal for the child for the remainder of the year. The parents wrote their kid an encouraging letter, and the kids filled out a post-conference reflection. Then they went home.

As a teacher, I spent class time helping the kids get their portfolios ready and giving feedback on reflections. Ocanada, my math/science counterpart, helped them figure out what they were going to say. But when it came time for the conferences, my role was to make sure everyone knew where to sit and fetch things like pencils and Kleenex as needed. The kids were in charge. One boy's father tried to grab his portfolio early on in the conference (in order to page through it at his own pace). The boy grabbed it back with a polite but firm reminder, "This is my conference, Dad." Most parents were happy to go along with the program. It was cool to walk around and hear them talking to their kids about their work.

Even before I read Gladwell, I knew that we dedicated 1.5 days of school for student-led conferences as more than a fancy show-and-tell. There is an immense value in having students reflect on their own work and brainstorm ways to improve. But that's not all. Student-led conference mesh perfectly with the middle class parenting discussed in Gladwell (and pioneered by the educational sociologist Annette Lareau). The kids are in charge, presenting their 6th grade essays and stories in a barely disguised dress rehearsal for future presentations to professors, committees and bosses. The parents (taking the role of evaluators) are totally engaged in helping their kids develop a confident presentation style, and showed this by asking questions, making comments and reviewing each piece carefully. No one grumbled about the kids missing a day of school. The parents and kids (thanks to the response of their parents) knew the day hadn't been wasted.

The question now becomes, how transferable is the idea of student-led conferences to schools that serve working class and poor children? Kids can be trained to do just about anything. But in order to make these conferences successful, schools will have to spend time a bit differently (collecting portfolios, spending time reflecting). It gets to the heart of something I've been thinking about all year, and that is, what are the best ways to make available middle class ways of interacting in the world (the ones that provide a later advantage) to working class/poor children? How do you pick and choose? Of course, there is an endless array of social issues involved in educating a child and only a few take place within a school building. But what should take place within that school building? Are student-led conferences something worth transferring? Is this perhaps a better method than going to great lengths to enact the more traditional parent-teacher conferences? (See the post"On the List of Things To Ponder" from November 22, 2008, for details about getting low-income parents to attend conferences.)

One thing that is undeniably true about student-led conferences (as opposed to parent-teacher conferences) is that parents and kids leave the room together and most of the time they are smiling. The students are completely involved in the discussion of their own work, and they are the ones leading the conversation. The set up alone puts parents in the role of supporter and observer, which is really all they can be, especially as their children grow up. They won't be leading their offsprings' lives, after all. Student-led conferences strike me as authentic in a way that kids are rarely asked to be in school--not just as prep for future board-room presentations, but because they are taking full responsibility for their own labor, habits and outcomes. I hear people complaining about how kids today are asked to grow up too fast. Then I hear complaints that kids aren't given enough real responsibility. Student-led conferences seem to be a happy medium. Kids are asked to present their thoughts on their own work to a receptive audience. What comes out of these conversations is measurable only in what the kid him/herself puts back into future achievements as a result of reflecting and speaking about what s/he did before. In the end, it sounds a lot like how we all learn, regardless of where we come from.

Dubai days

I probably should write about my softball team's first game today against the big American school in Dubai. We lost 5-4 in one of those evenly matched contests that could have gone either way at any time. They won today. We could win next week in our double header. Yes, we only play this team until the tournament in mid-April. It is the only other softball program in the whole country. So, when I say I have the best team within 100 miles, it's not just coachly bragging. If we win next week, I can safely say I have the best team within 1,000 miles--or however far away Doha, Qatar is from here. Until we beat them at the tournament, of course...

But I don't really want to write about the game. It was great for the girls, but featured no Bad-News-Bear moments of victory or startlingly bad errors on the other side. I want to provide an eyewitness account of Dubai, which has been much in the news lately for its recent transformation from shiny Gulf Cinderella to desert pumpkin. Some of you may have read the New York Times article about unemployed expats abandoning their Mercedes, mortgages and credit cards at the airport to flee back to their home countries and avoid the prison sentence for debtors in the UAE.

We played our softball game in the shadow of the Burj Dubai, currently the tallest building in the world. It's a pencil-thin, half finished tower, only the tallest of the countless unfinished buildings that dot the skyline. The Burj is scheduled to be finished this December, but other structures aren't faring as well. In the stands during the boys game, talk turned (as it does these days) to rumors concerning Dubai's downward spirl. People reported project sites abandoned like those airport Mercedes, foremen instructed to fill in holes and sell all the equipment. The big American school, once full to bursting with still more parents lining up at the doors, now doesn't have a waiting list at all.

But the most noticeable image of Dubai's decline, in my opinion, is on the road into town. Coming from Abu Dhabi, the terrain is pancake flat, a scrubby desert plain. The only contour is provided by overpasses and uniformly square billboards placed at regular intervals all along the road. The billboards and overpass ads are all empty these days. No one is advertising on any of them. The people are trickling away, but the ad space was the first to be abandoned. It's almost apocalyptic, in economic terms.

Abu Dhabi is a different story. Although this emirate supposedly underwrote much of Dubai's expansion, they have played it conservatively at home, plus there is still plenty of oil under the sand. Although I can spin plenty of dramatic fantasies about Dubai turning into a desert wasteland with dunes reclaiming the skyline and the whole metropolis reverting back to its pearl-diving shack and camel train days, I know that won't happen. Dubai is here to stay, though perhaps in a more muted form. The Burj Dubai may even get more than 10 minutes as the world's tallest building if the economy also slows the projects in Saudi, South Korea and New York vying for the top slot. Only time will tell how soon the ads return...

Go Hammurabi!

Another chapter in the continuing saga of teaching 6th grade social studies began this week with the start of a cool simulation game about Mesopotamia called Empires (not to be confused with the videogame of a similar name). For those of you who remember Oregon Trail fondly (as I do), this is along the same lines. Groups of kids become ancient clans who must gain resources, build ziggurats, conquer territory and complete a series of content-specific tasks to win points as they vie to become the Greatest Civilization of the Ancient World. The kids come to class buzzing with excitement and already know more about this time in history than a spin through the textbook and a traditional quiz would have provided.

However. Doing one of theses games from the teacher's point of view is like reading the directions to 50 board games all at once. There is a dizzying array of rules and procedures to keep straight and communicate to the kids. Sure, I could play the game without a problem at this point, but instructing a classful of 6th graders to do the same is like herding cats through a Sumerian irrigation system (ie: very, very complicated). And the amount of old-school accutrement that accompanies Empires is truly astounding. Aussie (the other 6th grade humanities teacher) and I have cleaned out the school's supplies of different colored thumb tacks, which represent armies. The kids are buying them at quite a clip and battling like crazy on both sides of the Tigris and Euphrates (represented by maps Aussie and I painstakingly traced and laminated).

It's cool though to see the kids learning so many life lessons alongside the history. I think that's been the most surprising and wonderful thing about teaching social studies for the first time. Learning about past human systems really does help us understand the ones we live in today. Even on the 6th grade level, there are so many concepts that translate into the present. My students understand in a fairly deep way that things like laws everyone understands and a peaceful transfer of power cure many societal ills. (Go Sargon and Hammurabi! And boo to the late Roman emperors...) They know that cultures with deep class divisions don't fare as well as those less rigidly structured (let's take a lesson from that one!). They undersand that conquering your enemies may get them to shut up for awhile but doesn't necessarily mean they go away. And keeping the army well fed and happy is also a plus, if you can swing it.

The Empires simulation brings with it all of those and other lessons. For those of you not familiar with simulation games, they attempt to mimic the conditions of an era of history as much as possible. Students are usually grouped in some way (tribes, clans, covered wagons), then asked to do a series of tasks (ie: fairly typical social studies assignments based on the era of history they are studying), which result in their gaining the resources and points they need to construct a classroom version of that historical time period. For example, in Empires, the 6th grade Babylonians read about the real Babylonians, and write essays, design models, draw murals, etc that represent the real Babs' life and times. With the points they earn for learning so much about the real thing, they can buy thumbtack armies and Post-It note ziggurats to help them conquer little squares on the classroom map and take over the land of other clans, who are busy doing the same thing. They are also learning about tax shelters (map squares with a ziggurat are not subject to the 50% temple tax on all other laminated land parcels), supply and demand (resources are limited and there are specified trading times when they can get what they need); the role of luck and fate (sometimes the best laid plans don't work out and some other team enslaves your thumbtack armies); and the importance of working together (groups who bicker--like governments who bicker--get a lot less accomplished).

Today, we had a little talk about the importance of keeping track of the money (unlike in the real world, my students can't go into debt to finance their militaries) and using their resources wisely. Which leads to the last lesson of this week: it's hard to get people to listen to reason when there is money and power to grab. Figuring out how to do this will solve a world of woes, both inside and out of the classroom. I'll let you know if I find an answer, but so far it's not looking good. As the only adult in a world of 12 year olds, I want to be the voice of wisdom, counseling prudence and productivity. But my students nod earnestly and, like organized humans everywhere, have exactly none of it. After all, if my neighbor's thumbtack armies are breathing down my neck, I'm not going to invest in a school for scribes no matter how many points it'll earn me. I'm going to the teacher and asking for more thumbtacks. If that results in an arms race, we'll have yet another lesson to learn. Stay tuned...

Happy Birthday to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)

This Monday is the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, known as Mawlid, which in lowercase form can refer to any birthday celebration. (Of course, since the Muslim calendar is lunar, March 9 is the day it falls on this year. Next year, we'll celebrate it 11 days earlier.) We have Sunday off, our only three-day weekend, in honor of the day. Apparently, it doesn't matter which celestial body determines your calendar or which dead leader your culture chooses to honor, mid-week birthdays are always attached to the closest weekend. The Prophet himself is no different.

Most Muslims celebrate Mawlid, though in Saudi Arabia, they regard honoring Muhammad above other prophets as idol worship and point out that there is no evidence in the Quran that Muhammad celebrated his birthday during his lifetime. More's the pity because everyone else embraces the day with sweets for the kids and a day off for the adults. At school on Thursday (which is the equivalent of Friday, remember), kids were handing out candy and baklava-type desserts. One of my favorite advisees swept through the room on his way to lunch with three trays of a soft, chewy treat loaded with honey and pistachios. He demanded that I help myself to a generous portion in honor of the Prophet and looked visibly pained when I took a less (in his mind) celebratory slab. (It was delicious, but even the sweetest baklava has nothing on the pastry this kid was peddling.) I don't know if one's dedication to Muhammad correlates to the amount of sugar one consumes, but I felt I was doing my part.

In some countries there are parades and carnival-like celebrations. A quick glance through the search engines reveals not much going on the UAE other than youth group events (to take advantage of the day off from school). I will be preparing for a Mesopotamian-themed simulation activity and holding an optional softball practice, but thoroughly enjoying two days in a row of weekend. Mawlid Mubarak!

Survey says?

Yesterday the teachers at my school took the annual faculty survey. It was computerized and had an alphabet's worth of questions (literally! There were sections A-S...) about every possible aspect of our work lives, from the quality of classroom furniture to the finer points of parent communication. After putting aside the mental itchiness that comes from squishing complex issues into checkable boxes, I added my thoughts to the common pot. As faculty surveys go, it was comprehensive, but low key.

One question, though, has been hard to get out of my mind. It was actually a statement. The survey asked me to rate the strength of my feelings on a scale from "strongly disagree" (1) to "strong agree (5) or somewhere in between.

The statement was this: I am proud to be a teacher at (this school.)

I stopped and thought about it for a long time, then put a 3. I was a little bewildered to find myself in a situation where I would put less than 5. Teaching is not the kind of thing that comes in half measures. At least it never has before. Not being proud to be at my school was a disturbing surprise, made all the more disturbing by the fact that I'd never thought about it before. It got me thinking yet again about the paradox of sustainable work vs. true vocation. Is it possible to have a genuinely satisfying job and not be consumed by it? Is it OK in the ultimate, this-is-your-life sense not to be 'strongly' proud of what you do for a living? Does less than 100% proud translate into less than 100% commitment? Is less than 100% commitment OK when you're in the business of educating children? Why bother to give only 85%? Where does that 15% go? Is it waste or bankable energy?

It's not that I'm ashamed to be at my school. Not at all. I'm pleased to be here. The kids are wonderful; most parents are very chill. The curriculum is interesting, and I have a lot of freedom to try new things. The content standards are reasonable. There is no testing pressure. I have a laptop cart in my classroom (technically I have to share it, but ownership is 9/10ths of the law...). I still work one day on the weekend and several hours after school, but am rarely emotionally spent. It's a congenial, relatively stress-free environment, and most faculty members are invested in keeping it that way. I don't judge them for this. I, too, appreciate the cozy calm.

But this doesn't inspire feelings of pride--and I feel its absence like it's a whole empty wing of my internal structure. This has been a good thing to discover and ponder because part of the reason I'm in Abu Dhabi is a desire to explore sustainable ways of being a dedicated teacher. But is the cozy calm I feel at my school what sustainability is supposed to feel like? (Because if it is, then it's not really what I'm looking for...) What does sustainability feel like anyway? Is it possible to find a school with a stronger sense of itself and its mission, or more of a connection across the community that is ALSO a healthy, sustainable work environment?

Or maybe it is not possible to have both a strong community united by a common mission and a job that is relatively stress free and congenial. Maybe it is one or the other. I would appreciate your thoughts on the short survey below. I will not ask you to fit your thoughts into checkable boxes. I will ask you to help me find the answer to these plaguing questions.

1) Is it possible to be 100% dedicated and not be consumed by your work?

2) Is it possible to have a strong community united by a common mission AND a relatively stress free, congenial and sustainable environment? If so, please give an example of such a community. If not, what is a more realistic balance?