Feature Omar at the campus coffee shop, where I stupidly shell out $4.60 for coffee drinks each school day. I can't leave him in class when it's time for my break, so I take him with me. He immediately climbs up on the counter, grabs a sucker, and asks:
"How much this one?"
"Four Dirhams, Sir," replies the thirtyish guest worker to the eight year old local. Work visas are tenuous here, and the service people generally seem afraid of the locals, even the kids.
"Maybe no Dirham?" Suggests Omar, whose soul is that of an imperious but charming used car salesman.
The woman eventually gives in, but when I intervene, paying full price for the sucker he no longer wants it, and I throw it in a desk drawer where it sits for weeks. Later, he'll find it one day when I've hidden all the pens in an effort to end "drawing time," and he's ransacked my desk trying to recover them.
Omar is a master negotiator, and like most practitioners of that trade, he's not satisfied getting what he wants, but must get what he wants on his terms. In one of many gross misestimations of my powers, he seems to think that, not only do I control time, but that despite wielding such a mighty power, I'm easily duped:
"How many left in class?"
"About an hour," I reply, neglecting to correct his horrible grammar.
"How about ten minutes?" Omar suggests.
"Omar, I can't make your Mom come any sooner."
"OK. Fifteen minutes."
Now it's the fifth day of Ramadan, and the winking subtext of our banter has gone flat. Although fasting is the stereotypical excuse offered to explain erratic behavior during the holy month, I'm fairly certain Omar simply objects to having had to come to class at all. To be fair, we were supposed to be done by now, but his family, with little or no notice, postponed a week of classes and went to Abu Dhabi. It's only an hour and forty minutes away, but the highway is fraught with menace. As a result, Omar is stuck in an Arabian version of Summer School, and doggedly rebuts my lame attempts to play the Freddy Shoop role:
"Bromar, my man, how are you today?"
"I am not Bromar, I am Omar" he replies. Although incredulous at first, Omar eventually catches on, and we cultivate a game in which he perfects his mock outrage at my nicknaming attempts.
"OK, you call me Boss Man, and I'll call you Little Boss Man."
"I am not Little Boss Man."
I suggest this one day during break, after we've both checked our hair in the mirrored wall of the elevator interior. This particular vanity is mostly theater, and I play it up, mussing and then repairing my coif, taking my sunglasses on and off, until he eventually does the same. To my secret delight, he does eventually call me Boss Man, but only when he's trying to wheel and deal with me, hoping to engender good will.
"Omar... USA number 1!" I say, now content to simply wind him up.
"No. Is number five." My used car salesman is blossoming into a diplomat.
We have our schtick down by the time Ramadan rolls around and I'm flummoxed by Omar's demonstrative unhappiness on this particular day. Omar has been my most challenging student to date, in part because he's my first real student. I've taught guitar lessons, and I've done a bit of tutoring for people switching from Windows to OS X, but I've never taught something as legitimate as the English Language. When things go poorly in the classroom, I'm momentarily stung anew by my utter lack of credentials or formal training. In fact, my mere employment in Dubai's huge educational money machine makes me skeptical of the machine itself and, paradoxically, less concerned about having to wing it every single day. And yet today, when I can't even get the kid to lift his head off the desk, I do wonder about my presence in a place that calls itself 'Knowledge Village.'
Normally, when Omar fixates on some deficiency of logic in the workbook, or simply refuses to work, we turn to the white board, where he draws blocky SUVs with seemingly dripping exhaust pipes that turn out to be machine guns. A few weeks in, when I discover his insane love of lions, I draw several for him; lions giving the thumbs up while riding BMX bicycles, bicycles that have caught mad air off launch ramps, launch ramps that send said bicycles flying over the heads of other lions who look on in awe. And so on.
This morning I can tell that none of that is going to work. So I simply pick up one of his books and read to myself, opting not to spar with the Mohammed Ali of teacher-student combat. It takes at least half an hour, but it works, and he eventually requests his single favorite assignment, perhaps the only one this willful child has ever completed in entirety; Animal Quiz Show.
Years ago, I read an article about how Blue's Clues was developed to be stickier than, say, Sesame Street, by use of simple repetition. I may have this wrong, as my memory has a creative bent, but Blue's Clues was designed to be a superior learning tool, in large part because it repeats the same episode five days a week. Apparently bludgeoning repetition works well for kids.
In place of a Masters in Education, I have this article that I read years ago and at least partly remember. I seize on this little chunk of knowledge, and it becomes the rationale for allowing Omar to repeat Animal Quiz Show, sometimes as much as five times per lesson. Omar has long ago memorized every answer, so one day when his Father shows up to sit in on the last few minutes of class, Omar appears to have become an English speaking dynamo, and nails each answer with feigned earnestness.
Later, on a subsequent visit, Omar's father, an exceedingly kind person and genuinely concerned parent of the sort you would hope to encounter on any continent, informs me that he's forgotten my Ramadan gift in the car, but that when his wife comes to pick up Omar for the final class later that week, she'll have my new English language edition of the Koran with her.
The nature of the gift is not entirely unexpected, as Omar has asked a few culturally curious questions that suggest a somewhat religious home life. Questions like:
"How do you pray?" Which I wasn't quite sure how to answer, so I showed him a few poses which I've never actually struck, but that describe a sort of TV version of American prayer-- whatever that is.
And, "You eat pig?" To which I respond, "Oh yeah, pig, cat, dog, canary, gila monster, whatever you got." I then had to explain what a gila monster is.
I was surprised when the gift did arrive, and turned out not to be for me at all, at least not directly. "For your wife," explained Omar's Mom, handing me a giant gift bag that contained a cylinder full of musky Arab perfume, a scarf that Vanessa ended up really liking, a sequined dress from India that we gave to a co-worker of Vanessa's (who loved it) and a tiny, pink, telephone-shaped bedside clock that looks like it might have belonged to an anachronistic Marie Antoinette. There may have been some other stuff in there too, but there weren't any religious texts. I'm not sure what happened to the Koran, which I'd been looking forward to thumbing through if not actually reading, but it was very kind of them nonetheless.
I found Omar's family as charming and thoroughly enjoyable as they were unpredictable. I'd fallen sideways into teaching, as the freelance market had gone soft, and by this point I'd given up on actually meeting any Emaratis. One morning Omar's Mom dropped off Omar and his six year old brother Salim, simply asking "you don't mind, do you?" I didn't really, although Salim had already been prohibited from auditing the class, as the first day had proved far too chaotic with both brothers running around the classroom and constantly glomming all the dry erase markers. Omar wound up being decently focused on Animal Quiz Show that day, while Salim drew monkeys on the board, so it worked out alright.
I've had a lot of writing work lately, as things seem to be coming back, but I hope to pick up a few classes when we get back from our upcoming trip. I have no idea what I'm doing, the pay is not great, and the success of the student is really ultimately up to them anyway-- but I like doing it. I figure, if I can't shape young minds, I can at least scar them. To be fair, Omar was by far the youngest of my students, who ran as old as mid-forties and averaged somewhere around eighteen. I like to think that, although Omar basically refused to do the work, our constant teasing, negotiating, and declarations of disbelief in the other's behavior all comprised an education of sorts. It was, at the very least, all conducted in English.
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