My Journey

Reality perception

My name is Sultan Awwad, I have been teaching English at UNRWA for about 7 years now. Although I have applied for an English teacher post to UNRWA, I have not realized the gravity of becoming one until I saw my name in the local newspaper. I didn't know what to do or what to expect. Nevertheless, I saw comfort in the fact that I spent about 12 years in schools as a student and naively assumed sufficiency of such an experience in performing my upcoming duties as a teacher.

Unfortunately, the comfort zone I capsulated myself in shattered into pieces when I saw the eyes of 45 students staring at me upon my first entrance to a class as a teacher! I then discerned that experience alter our perception of reality drastically.
Peculiarly, a boy sitting back close to the corner window (my favorite spot) called Hashem reminded me of myself; the glittering eyes, the confident smile, which can be interpreted mistakenly by a green teacher as a welcome sign. Yes, I was a green teacher but an adept student in giving teachers a hard time. Hashem would have been a perfect friend when I was a student; but now it is a whole different story! There is nothing pleasant in having someone like me in any class! I wanted to scream loudly "I'm one of you" I desperately wanted to reclaim my seat near that window where I could do my monkeyshines and manage my pranks. The only brilliant thing I did that day, which came out of instinct, is keeping a direct eye contact with them and wearing a shaky smile, which I strived to use as a cover to hide my fears. I saw no practical use whatsoever of my experience as a student except for my unrivaled ability to spot wicked students, which called for an emergency plan.
An emergency plan
I started to retrieve memory for the best teacher model that could deal with a naughty student such as Hashem. And there it was. Who else could it be? It was Mohammad aljaiousy; my tenth grade English teacher. I came to school the next day with high aspirations but things did not work as I hoped. I then turned to my capable peers to sip from their rich experience in terms of classroom management and teaching strategies. Some tips really worked fine but  it many had fallen apart when applied. It took me almost a year to realize that there was no unified booklet for teaching and that I had to invent my own.
I often saw teaching as a process of explaining a topic, encouraging students to ask questions, and giving Exams where some would pass and others would fail. I saw my performance as a teacher determined mainly by the evaluation sheet a supervisor fills upon attending a class of mine.
Milestone
All this changed three months ago when my mobile phone rang. It was my supervisor asking me whether I wish to participate in an intensive course by Dr. Michael Morsches. I had no idea about the course; nonetheless, I agreed to enroll.
Later on, we began communicating through the internet. He first required a brief summary about me, which I provided in no time. Then silence prevailed for a couple of days to be later dispelled by an assignment about philosophy. This course really sucks "I told myself". I hate philosophy. I hate people who write about it, talk about it, not to mention people who ask about it. However, I had already signed the contract! Nonetheless, Dr. Morsches had the redeeming quality of providing some elaboration on the questions he raise. He cut down the wicked term into three more wicked ones: ontology, epistemology and axiology.
I don't like the taste of failure, it is bitter, that’s why I made a good use of the notes provided by Dr. Morsches on each topic and ran a tiny research on the web. It turned out that philosophy isn't that wicked after all; it is a science that we live and experience everyday and certainly affects teaching and learning as well. It is the set of beliefs and conventions we hold, whether realized or not, which govern our behavior.
Philosophic responsibilities
It was blank inside my mind when I sat down to write about my philosophy as a teacher, but soon thoughts started to gush fervently as an eager prisoner longs for his freedom. I have started my philosophy article with questions I had carried with me almost forever; questions about the nature of things and people, about the perception of reality, about my students' nature and needs, about the process of knowledge acquisition, about the society and the ethical system we live in and about the values our student's cherish most.
Structuring my philosophy clearly, gave me a completely new self-reflection spectrum. My attitude as a teacher came to make more sense and I could see clearly my strength and weakness spots not only as a teacher but also as a human being. It is like having the sagacity to isolate frivolous, impertinent, and unreasonable variables of a ramified task profession and focus more on the core of teaching or "my philosophic responsibilities" as a teacher.
Setting up my philosophic responsibilities as a teacher, made me re-evaluate and reset my classroom instructions, my assessment techniques and the evaluation process in a more congruent pattern. Moreover, I came to perceive my philosophy in light of the goals set by the organization I work at, which added a great asset to my knowledge in keeping an equilibrium between the goals of the organization and those of mine. E.g., I didn't see a reasonable ground for applying authentic assessments by UNRWA because I had no clear perception of the overall image, nonetheless it turned out to be a crucial component in achieving my philosophic responsibilities.
I then realized that evaluating a teacher has more in it than just ticking a static evaluation sheet by an Ed. Specialist where both teachers and Ed. specialists have a little control over the many weltering variables in a rather blurry evaluation context. A teacher's evaluation should be based on teacher's congruent performance in the light of the philosophic responsibilities he/she cling to. In addition to that, I think Ed. Specialists' philosophic responsibilities should be reflected on the process of teachers' evaluation, which would yield a more natural equitable evaluation process for both teachers and Ed.specialists.