EXAMPLE
Here is a concluding example of how many Middle Eastern students are not trained prior to arriving at universities to comprehend what the true costs and values of education are. Last Wednesday, I had painstakingly prepared a quiz for my two dozen students based upon a reading assigned as homework on Tuesday.
At class time on Wednesday afternoon, only two students showed up for class. These more-serious students then noted--as usual--that unnamed classroom leaders had determined that the entire class should skip that day, i.e. with the hope of persuading either the teacher or the administration not to count that class period absent. Some excuses could be concocted at a later date for the absences when-and-where needed. This occurred exactly one day after both an administrator and counselor had come to talk to them about their behavior attendance and other issues.
I tried in vain to get these two particular students to take their quiz for that day--for their own good. Moreover, I could then decide whether they had understood the material at home or not. (The quiz was a listening task that basically replicated the reading topic from the night before.) These students refused--knowing or believing that Omani group sense of respect and tribal pressures are more important than what a foreign teacher has to tell them. Finally, after it became clear that I would neither cancel the class nor cancel the quiz, these two male students said good-bye and went home.
Later, I declared my consternation to my local administrator. He simply shrugged, "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
In short, the administrator had already warned that particular group of students about the importance of attendance and of the importance of keeping up with assignments, which we are trying to instill in these students through the practice of continuous assessment. He wasn't going to waste another word on them.
I was left with no evidence of learning for the day.
Hopefully, these students will get the message when their (low) marks for the term come around--because, in this society, they are quite likely to bamboozle their way out of any attendance warnings they receive.
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