T-E-A-C-H-I-N-G in S-H-A-R-J-A-H

Yesterday, I gave my first spelling test. I have ALWAYS wanted to administer a spelling test since I was a kid, and this was my moment. It was quite satisfying. I circled around the room as I gave the words, and you better believe I put each word into a sentence. "Stain. He had a stain on his shirt. Number three is stain." It was brilliant. And I was very adamant that my students be quiet during the test, and they actually were! I was very impressed with them. I also told them to keep their tests a secret because I have a few "answer-sharers" in my class.

So, teaching is difficult. Sometimes it's actually physically difficult because you use every muscle in your body to do something. It's like you're on stage and are performing, and my voice feels raspy at the end of the day because I'm talking ALL DAY LONG and louder than usual.

My day consists of me looking at my schedule and saying, "All right, well let's do this." Plans hardly ever turn out as expected, so "winging it" will become a skill I will add to my resume. I have 26 students, and my room is very small, so things get a little tight now and then. And loud. I have kids in my class who could talk to a stone wall, they're so chatty. Why, oh why, must you come up to me while I'm doing something and tell me something completely irrelevant to everything else? Why, oh why, must I give directions 800 times and you STILL don't know what you're supposed to do? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself throughout the day. So as you can imagine, I sometimes get impatient, so when a kid does something ridiculous, I put a splash of sarcasm in my voice as I say, "What are you doing right now? Why are you over there? Sit down." I do a lot of finger snapping too. If someone's talking while I'm talking or asking a question without raising their hand, I snap in their direction, and they cut it out. I'm not quite sure where I picked that semi-strange thing up.

Anyway, about the UAE (or at least Sharjah)...It's not quite what you'd expect from a Middle Eastern country. Everyone made it seem so scary with tons of rules and everything, but it's really not. (I'm sure in some parts it is, and you must be careful), but this place is like a hodge-podge of cultures and people, and it can't really decide what it wants to be. Near my building is a big mosque, but then right around the corner is TGIFriday's. Our grocery store is right next to our building, so we can walk to it, and the only time you realize you're in the Middle East is when you walk through the sand parking lot to get there. Oh and of course the shady men who work in the grocery store who have no scruples about openly staring at you because you're different. There are dress code rules, but they're not really super enforced. When I'm around Sharjah, I try to wear knee-length pants and shoulder-covering shirts, but when we go to Dubai, it doesn't matter. It just feels weird to get into a taxi in Sharjah in something Sharjah would deem "inappropriate". Everyone also speaks English here (or some version of it), so Arabic is not required of you. To be honest, I feel like Germany was more of a culture adjustment because there everything is in German and not German and English, and they didn't have peanut butter or tissue boxes. Here, everything is in English as well as Arabic; I can buy Jif peanut butter; and my goodness, they use tissues for everything under the sun (like drying your hands or wiping your sweaty face) which are too big of jobs for tissues to handle. This country hasn't figured that out yet I guess. 
Oh, and disappointingly enough, I hear the call to prayer every day, but I have yet to see people stop what they're doing to kneel and pray. Bummer. Lastly, I have a parent in my class who wears an entire burka so all you can see are her eyes. After I met her, I saw her the next day and actually RECOGNIZED her. How you ask? We don't know. I must be getting good. Future resume skill section: 1. winging it 2. recognizing women in full burkas