By: Sheila
Hello! We are now at Jubilee Institute, a coeducational boarding school in Shafa Badran (the northern outskirts of Amman) for students gifted in STEM. It is technically winter vacation for our students, and some of them are coming from as far away as Ma'an to attend the GTL program with us. Again, we are honored to have this opportunity to teach some of Jordan's brightest minds.
Jubilee is interesting in that there are several streams that students pursue within the school. Some opt to go into the international stream and aim to go off to Europe or the United States. Others take the national stream and take the Tawjihi in their senior year. We found out on our first day that most of our students fall under the latter category--and that many of them don't speak English (today in class I tried to translate the idea of virtual water into what broken Arabic I could muster--outside of class I've managed to have a conversation about politics and gravitational waves with a group of national stream students in broken English/Arabic).). We also found out that instead of 9 students (as we originally thought), we were teaching 149 students in total. There were many surprises on that first day.
But now we've settled down! Every morning we wake up around 7:30 and walk 2 minutes (past the physics themed park equipped with a Foucault's pendulum and an Archimedes screw) to the cafeteria for our traditional Arabic breakfast. Classes start at 9 AM, and we teach discrete math (An), computer science (Lucy), building and product design (Srimayi), and biodiversity/environmental science (me)
until 1 PM. Then the rest of the afternoon is spent preparing for the next day's lessons and exploring Amman (things are a lot farther for us now than when we were living in Um Uthaina). We haven't had the opportunity to explore this area yet, but we are planning to do that soon!
While it's hard at times getting information across to students (imagine what it's like to learn a new subject in a foreign language!!!), once they understand, there is this flicker in their eyes that makes all the language struggle worthwhile. We will be finished with this particular group tomorrow (we only have three days with each batch of 50 students--it's a bit hard to get their names down, but we're trying!), but we have two more groups over the next two weeks. Here's to making an impact on Jordan's future!
^ Trying to measure biodiversity in the King Hussein science park