Job Discussion Forums

[whereamiagain]

Dear Flutterbayou (see earlier post)

Your friend at the college has given you a very truncated version of events. No matter how �non political� (whatever that means) your informant may be, this is not really a very helpful explanation of what has happened.

As I like to tell my students CONTEXT is (nearly) everything. The points you mentioned, work hours, early finishng or cancellation of classes have been matters of serious discussion and negotiation with our HOD and the Dean of the college and have affected all but a few teachers.
It goes without saying, not all teachers are the same, and so feel the effects of college mismanagement rather differently.

Here at Nizwa teachers can be divided into the following groups:
A. Those that give a damn and are willing to speak up for fairer working conditions applied to ALL employees of the college. And argue for a professional and motivating learning and assessment environment for students.

B. Those that give a damn but tend not to speak up for fear of retribution and/or cultural reasons did not wish to challenge those in power. These include many teachers who are on a good wicket here and have families to support. Many in group B give welcomed moral support to group A � and I should add, were pleased with any concessions that group A managed to negotiate. (see below for details)

C. Those that give a damn but who are, shall we say, �company� men and women who would say unhelpful things like �oh but it�s in your contract� and who seemed oblivious to the fact that rules were not evenly applied across all employees. Funnily enough, several members of this group were first out the front gate once the working hours had been relaxed !

D. Those that do the job and don�t upset anybody about anything. This group contains, amongst others, disaffected former members of the other groups! I find myself gravitating to this group more and more these days.
E. anybody I left out

With respect to work hours, there was, in the middle of second semester, a renewed effort to enforce the 8-4 working day despite the fact that we had no working Internet connection, a profound lack of teaching resources, inappropriate or non-existent course books and virtually no supplementary material etc etc. Many teachers were sick to the back teeth of being required to stay in cramped, noisy offices with clunking air conditioners, ten year old computers and no internet connection and then, in order to do our jobs well, forced to spend a couple of hours at home preparing lessons, finding interesting material etc. I don�t know the situation at other colleges but we are constantly being slapped with memos about compulsory (that�s right) e-learning via blackboard, attendance at staff trainings, when we can�t even access the internet and barely access the colleges internal servers. Our technical infrastructure is woeful - the Dean doesn�t even have an email account!
If this wasn�t enough, the 8-4 rule was overlooked for teachers working in other departments. Many of us therefore began to self-flex as a remedy to rapidly deteriorating staff morale. This lead to a �dirty dozen� list being drawn up by the HOD who one day went around to see which teachers not scheduled to teach were absent from their offices at 8.30 (I think it was). This list included a teacher who had been downloading listenings and making CDs at home to be used by ALL second year teachers (and at his own expense he reminded me) as the NZ university who provides the curriculum FORGOT to include a listening component for second semester (that�s another story).

I, along with many of my colleagues, discussed this at length with the Dean. My point, which was stressed many times during an hour 75 minute meeting was that the college couldn�t have it both ways. We shouldn�t be forced to stay at college all day when we are not supplied with the most basic tools needed to do our jobs. I also pointed out that the list drawn up by the HOD included many hard working teachers but DID NOT include teachers who may have arrived at 8 am but were now sleeping soundly in their offices, beavering away on a MA or PhD, or reading an outdated copy of HELLO magazine. What matters, to the HOD and the Dean, is that we are THERE at 8am � a warm body in their designated chair.


The Deans response was measured, a mixture of polite deference and thinly veiled annoyance. At first he agreed that the situation was indeed bothersome and conceded that the working conditions were inequitable and given the constraints we were working under, he thought that with some rare exceptions, we were doing a solid job. However he made it very clear to me that he wanted to be seen as a �strong Dean� and though unfair as they may be, the regulations are those of the Ministry of Education and as such he had no choice but to enforce them. To my complaint about the freedom accorded to teachers in other departments he simply said that the English department, unlike the other more diminutive departments, had become unwieldy and therefore too difficult to �control�. When I pointed out that admin staff seemed to have a lot of flexibility with their hours (dates and tea anyone?) and that they came and left college as their desires dictated, I was assured that there hours were strictly enforced as they had to bundy in and out with an electronic fingerprint reader � I pointed out that, as I understood it, is was possible that they checked in at 8 am and easily disappear as long as they checked back out at 4pm. His reply: �Oh, you are very observant�.
Trust me, this is only the tip of a very deeply submerged iceberg of inconsistencies, fabulations and flagrant hypocrisy.

After five or six similar meetings, the Dean called a meeting and reversed his decision. From the beginning of the next academic year we would indeed have more flexible hours that would include teaching/consultation hours/meetings etc . Unexpectedly, when pushed by a group A (see above) teacher to ameliorate plunging staff morale immediately the Dean with a deep sigh agreed that English department staff could be, at their own discretion, follow more flexible hours. He also affirmed that we were all having our contracts renewed. I will concede however that the syntax of this particular utterance contained some L1 interference and required the minutes to be consulted �( these were not circulated by order of the HOD but are available for consultation on the minute-takers computer !!) At the meeting the HOD was made a bit of a fool of as it transpired that it had been the Dean who had asked him, after a fit of peak, to name late-comer names. So now the Dean was now the hero of the story and the HOD the villain. Thats showbiz.

Did this lead to a free-for-all of four hour days and class cancellations � umm no it did not.

Like other colleges, second semester is peppered with extra-curricular activities � Cultural Week rehearsals, plays, outings to Muscat, admin meetings for students etc etc and because of the poor communication systems teachers are usually the last to know. How many times have WE turned up to teach only to be told that the class has been cancelled? Did some teachers take advantage of this constant breakdown in communications maybe. Or maybe occasionally they just gave up. If they did, does this make them bad teachers deserving of dismissal � oh, I should say �non renewal of contract�.

As Sandyman and Desertisland have pointed out the issue is one of transparency. Unlike our Omani colleagues, we do not have clear procedures in place with respect to the assessment of our performance as teachers. Ironically, NO complaints have ever been made about an Omani teacher in the past six years according to our current Dean as they are all such �competent teachers�. The fact that so many students feel at liberty to make what is often unsubstantiated complaints against teachers they deem to be unsuitable is a cultural phenomena worthy of close study � I have been in the Middle East for years and the way group dynamics play out in the classroom is truly fascinating and is the subject of many a conversation amongst teachers. It unfolds like this: a couple of students take a disliking to a teacher and then they start harassing their colleagues to sign their petition and before you can say �what the &#?* � the HOD is presenting you with dozens of signatures testifying to what a crap teacher you are. This happened to newly arrived teacher in first semester who taught in the room next to me and in my humble opinion was a wonderful teacher. A real shinning star. Indeed he had just been evaluated as such by a very experience and level headed coordinator. A couple of his habitually late male students were given a bit of a talking too about their tardiness and it started from there. Before we knew it, after some attempts at mediation, he had resigned. I have some of his students in my class this semester � they couldn�t even remember his name.

Let me be clear about two things. This doesn�t happen every day of the week. As many teachers in Oman will attest, Omani students are generally a pleasure to teach and they too suffer from the effects of incompetent administrators, poorly resourced institutions and uncertain futures. I also believe that students should, within clearly laid out guidelines, be able to give feedback on their teacher�s classroom performance.

Now herein lies the rub. Whilst several of the non-renewed teachers had written student complaints against them, others who are to be renewed also have had complaints made against them. It was the HOD who chose which teachers were to be terminated. Did the Dean, the hand that signs the paper, ask to look at the their coordinators evaluations? No he did not. It is as simple and as complicated as that. No responsibility, no accountability, no right of reponse.

I believe that the non-renewed teachers should have the right to address any charge of dereliction of teaching duties made against them. Instead, we have our HOD �popping� in on classes on false pretences, asking other staff members to check on their colleagues (with all but one refusing to do so) and students being interviewed about their teachers performance post class without their teachers� knowledge� this is not done randomly it is targeted at certain teachers already out of favour. More fodder for the file as previous posters have already mentioned.
This farce continues when instead of counselling �offending� teachers about their performance, a list is drawn up, passed on to the Ministry who then notifies CfBT and voila the country manager for Oman sends an email � no explanation just thanks but no thanks. And though CfBT makes a pretty penny from our labours, they simply do the bidding of their masters. No advocacy, no mediation, no protection.

As I said, context is everything. We are left to deal with these often stressful work events when many of us are far away from our friends and family, we rely on the kindness of new friends, in fact people we hardly know, as we try to make a space for ourselves in a culture we endeavour to understand and appreciate. Some days though I feel, as the American poet Sam Shepard did writing about an all together different context, as though my world is sheer convention and artificiality:

Even though you see it's a hoax
We continue as though it isn't
Even though we're duped
We agree to continue.

Time for a cup of tea I think.

[denise]

A very thorough account of life at the college. Thank you for joining the discussion.

d

[SandyMan]

Whereamiagain,

A very long post, yes, but also a very interesting one. This is an incredibly detailed analysis of what is happening at our college - and it's frighteningly accurate.

BTW, this is a goldmine for any teacher applying to Nizwa now. I wish someone had written something like this about Nizwa College two years ago when I searched the threads here at Dave's before my interview.

Do you do anything else than write essay-length posts? Like teach, for example?

[eha]

Seconded. Certainly does a little more justice to the complexity of things than the so-called 'official' version ever does.

[lodzubelieveit]

Thirded, from an ex-Nizwa teacher ...

[windstar]

I believe your experience at Nizwa College should not be only confined to that institution, everything is the same at colleges of technology apart from the HOD and HOC's names.
some 35 teachers in Al-musanaa college of technology had a meeting and submitted their minutes to the HOD which she dismissed as being rubbish. Then a group of designated delegates took it to the dean. What happened then? The people who printed the minutes or wrote them down were let go. What did these teacher do? They did not ask for pay raise or shorter work hours. They asked for mor books and supplementary materials for the students, requested to have photocopying "privileges" for educational purposes and more hours to teach students so that when they go to post-foundation, they could have a solid foundation. It is bizarre! Many will be let go in Musanaa college too.

[anyway]

Thanks for the info...
So, I take it group D doesn't give a damn??

[flutterbayou]

Thank you for having more to say about the ordeal, which is why this forum is in place, anyway.

I sent my original message in just so that we had a means of opening the door for more dialogue. Although I relayed precisely what my friend had written me, I also knew there would be other perspectives to consider and I am glad to see them here.

For all that goes on at these colleges, I find it amazing that some people stick to it to the end of their contracts. I admire you for staying the course.

But what shocks me is the inevitable post that will appear sometime next week: I am interested in teaching in Oman and want to know to which college I should apply.