The Blessings of Noise

They are noisy teen-agers!

And they are here…that stillness which had permeated the campus for my previous three weeks is joyously and youthfully dispelled.

This last Wednesday morning, with the sun shining brightl—wait, we get the point, it is sunny and bright every day in Jordan, the 109 inaugural families arrived with their suitcases, a few fans, their new KA blazers, some snacks, a few limousines, a million cell phones and lots of happy faces. And a little trepidation mixed in too. I learned in the last few days that there are no boarding schools in the Middle East—before university, this idea of a 9th grader going off to a boarding school is an unknown concept. Granted, a few teen-agers of this area may have journeyed to Switzerland or the US for a boarding school experience, but this is a foreign idea for them.

From 9:00 until 1:00 they arrived for this 4-day orientation, signed forms (nothing nearly as dramatic as the experience I had getting boxes from the cargo hold at the airport!) and signed up for laundry service, shook hands with various Deans, visited the nurse, and made their way to the dorms where a very eager group of faculty helped with bags, tried to pronounce names correctly, and extolled the virtues of our advisor/advisee system.

At 1:00 all of the families and the faculty filled the auditorium for a welcome address by the headmaster and the chairman of the board. All these parents had decided to turn over their most precious investments to a strange school, an unproven school, but a school whose mission, ethos, hopes and dreams obviously appealed to them. It must have been a heady experience for the two men on stage since they had been working on this school for years.

The very best part of the day came next. Lunch. Now, yes, we all know I love food. (My dear friend Anne always says, “Oh, look—food! Our favorite!!”) But it was not the actual meal, nor even the prospect of food that moved me.

After the opening remarks (just to remind everyone: on this historic day) there was a formal luncheon for families faculty and staff in the dining hall. I was maybe right in the middle of the crowd (for once it was okay not to be at the head of a food line) and before me, and after me, there was this stream of people. You couldn’t really see the path! There were mothers and fathers and little siblings and teen-agers and faculty all in this wondrous pilgrimage to lunch. It reminded me of the crowd in Central Park back in February, 2005 for the project known as “The Gates,” in which part of the art was experiencing this outdoor art installation with a crowd, and it was always a happy crowd during dismal February. This was a crowd cognizant of the excitement and possibility that any school year offers, but maybe this is ramped up a bit since everything is new here. I saw our headmaster, and he and I looked at each other, and with a nod to each other, we knew how electrifying it was to have this crowd eager to see what would come of this experiment in education.

At lunch the faculty served the parents (even if it is just a metaphor—how typical!) and got to know some of the people. At my table I had parents from Holland, Dubai, Jordan, England, and Syria. Just at my table!

For the rest of the day there were meetings, handshakes before and after every proffered door opening, and then finally around 6:00 the parents left. Of course they were more bereft than their children!

We met with the boys on our floor (I have 12 boys on the floor, and by the end of the night I had memorized all their names, and even pronounced the names close to Arabic accuracy—by the way, some of these Arabic sounds are so subtle and tricky. Another bytheway aside: if you ever need a catch-phrase that works in almost any conversation, the phrase is “hamdillah.” It covers everything from, “Fine, thanks be to God,” to if someone asked how the meal was, it can be, “just wonderful—from the hand of God,” to a nosy query about your salary, you can answer “hamdillah” and it means, “God blesses me well.” The emphasis seems to be on the –dill syllable. Finished with the Arabic lesson of the moment.

We have formal sit-down dinner with our table—a group we will see at various meals for three weeks and then they move to other randomly selected groups. We remind them that this is our home, and we are all family, and how families must survive and thrive together. The drudgery of rules is hard to make exciting, and we remind them that King Abdullah treasures his experience so much from the US school that he wanted to recreate the ethos right here in his homeland for his people. He believed the rules shaped him so powerfully and purposefully that he insisted on this matrix of rules. You know, America should have thought again about rejecting monarchies, perhaps. It is powerfully handy to bring up a popular, successful king in urging these 14 year olds to follow the rules!

That night, we had a S’mores J’ama. (J’ama is the new word for the term “feed” often used in schools for feasts at night—“J’ama” is Arabic for fun gathering, and also a little less bovine sounding than “feed.”

Finally I settled Suhaib, Mohammed, Hashim, Lawrence, Adel, Abdullah, Tamer, Tareq, Matt, Suhayb, Zaid, and what’s-his-name (that was all done without cheating, and as Maria says in “The Sound of Music” when she forgot a Von Trapp child: “God bless what’s-his-name.” They are here. The real adventure begins.

Yesterday was full of summer camp-like ice-breaker games and group initiatives. In the afternoon the coaches and co-curricular teachers tried to sell their programs so these 109 students could sign up for sports/games/communityservice/dance/art/music/drama in the afternoon. Wow. They had 10 choices for how they could spend 4:15 to 6:00 every school afternoon. By the way, an addendum to last week’s crisis. Somebody figured out I was not a Squash star (think of the myriad ways they may have come to that conclusion!) and I am co-teaching the Drama. Yes, a victory of sorts. I get to teach drama. But the
“co-“ part will be a challenge. I think co-doing almost anything in the arts is troublesome at best. But, there are lessons to learn here I am sure.

Last night we met with our groups for preparations for the finale of orientation: the KA Olympics. There are 8 teams, with 13 or so students and 6 or so faculty on a team. There will be Olympic events tomorrow (there is talk of medals and awards—who wouldn’t want to win the inaugural cup?????). But between now and then, the team gets to work on banners, t-shirts, skits. Good heavens—a veritable summer camp extravaganza! My friend Mary Massey would love to join in—she is a friend who always wanted to be a Professional Group Sing-a-long Leader.

Finally, at the end of the day, there was a Faculty Recital of sorts. Sana, the art teacher, brought out a blank canvas, and as she started to fill the canvas with design and color and hope, a violinist and pianist played, and soon an Arabic teacher recited a poem over all these cultural flowerings.

I participated in a skit, playing a venerable History Professor called in to wax about the historic events at KA. If any of you are Denison alums, you would certainly recognize the voice and mannerisms I used—can you guess? I wore a tweed jacket and scarf (trying for that ivy-league-tweedy-stuffy look) and searched vainly through a pile of books on anything that might help interpret these momentous events at KA (In the indices of my books I see B.B. King, and King George’s War, and Kenya, and Kuwait…but…and I guess it went over, for there was laughter and applause, and you know, I guess there is a hammy side to my personality. It was exciting to jump into doing something funny at the beginning.) One Arabic teacher commented, “Mr. John—you were an entirely different person there.” Okay, I will say it: it was nice enjoying compliments from these new people for whom I have given myself over.

I will offer a few quick words about today—and I hesitate to invoke the clichéd phrase, “from the sublime to the ridiculous,” but it is apt!

Today was Sports Try-outs Day. And of course that means that the arts classes had their first day to begin teaching their discipline. Eight students signed up for drama (one of my new friends here, a gifted swimmer, had only two sign up to gad about in the pool and train). This was really it. The first day, not officially in a coat-and-tie-with-syllabus-in-hand, but students, me, a room. The magic baby!

It was a delightful two hours. I used many of the classic theater games, explaining the reasons behind them; their favorite was “Killer,” one of the best loud-is-there-a-homicidal-maniac-in-the-room games. It was easy. These teen-agers from the Arab world were so much like the classic drama classes at Charlotte Latin back in those glory days of my Drama Department, albeit, the first day of a year, but still enthusiastic and fun.

I was on cloud 9 as I went to lunch—this would be a snap this teaching gig!

Teachers always need to watch the cocky strut. There’s always something else after lunch!

We met with our Olympic group to work on our skit. We had about 2 hours. But hey, we already had a great idea and framework for this 3 minute skit…

But hey, nothin’!

After two hours I told them we should at least run through the skit one complete time before we went to an all-school meeting. During that “one time,” after all my directorial flourishes added to jazz up this skit, all my hearty instructions about how we were going to pave the way for drama at KA, in the middle of that run-through, a girl loudly, proclaimed, “I don’t want to be in this play.”

And there was deterioration of spirit and material…

The entire gamut of an educator’s experiences in one day…

Postscript: it is night now, the performance is over, and I can relish the noise of the dorm, the unfamiliarity of Arabic sounds, the attempts at theatrical splendor, and the not-so-surprising realization that teen-agers are darn similar, in the Arab world or the western world.

Tomorrow I will relate the terrors of trying to operate a copying machine in Jordan, and the preparation for the real first day of school.

Always more to tell, but now bloody noses to wipe up and boys to check on (the girl’s dorm is not in another country, which might have been wise…).