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[The Steakinator]

I just finished my contract at Sur University College (SUC) and received all my money so I�m willing to open my mouth now. Needless to say, these aren�t universal truths, they�re just my personal experience and experiences many of my coworkers shared with me.

If you don�t want to read the whole thing, these are the general points:

1) Omani students know that SUC is the gathering point for the worst (or at least close to the worst) academic achievers in Oman.
2) It�s a degree mill. Students are passed knowing nearly nothing.
3) Admin never backs you up and tries to skim off of staff�s overtime and vacation pay.
4) Exceptionally high staff turnover rate due not so much to the location (Sur) as simply the general situation.
5) Majali wasn�t an issue.

Majali
One of the writers on this blog said something like �in the past, Majali�s only form of vetting was that you had applied.� Wow, is that ever true. I applied to about 50 jobs in one night and was called and hired by Majali at 8:43 the next morning. He wanted to fly me out within two days, but flew out about two weeks later. As much as people like to complain about him, though, he was the saving grace in the job and my only complaint was that he told me it would take a month or less to get my Omani work visa/permit when it actually took nine weeks. This was due largely to the two facts that from the time I arrived to the time I was issued a work visa (nine weeks), there were two holidays (Sultan�s birthday and Eid Al Adha), which meant the ministries were closed. Second, my college degree was at first rejected due to it being unrelated to education, ESL, or English Literature (I�m an Anthropology major). Either way, Majali worked his �magic� (i.e. wasta) and got my papers handled. Meanwhile, my wife, who�s a Syrian national and cannot get a visa on arrival, was waiting in Istanbul where we had been living while I had to send her money to live in a hostel � that was awful.

Aside from that, Majali and his office took care of whatever I needed. When the college tried to short change me (trying to calculate my vacation pay on 30 days vs. 40 days), I called his secretary Miss M. and she called the accountants telling them to calculate it from 40 days. When I didn�t want to leave on July 1st, but a bit later and the university refused, I called up Majali�s office and they called the university and sorted it out. The same was true when the college put me in a crappy apartment way out on the opposite edge of town for a month, I called Miss M., she talked to Majali, he called the college, and within a few days, I was moved to a much nicer apartment with brand new furniture right next to the main supermarket in town. One of my other coworkers was constantly paid late by the college so he started calling Majali each month; each time Majali found out, the situation was sorted out within a couple days.

So, in my experience, Majali is the easiest person I had to deal with because, compared to the admin at the college, he seems to understand at least something about how Westerners think, work, and handle situations. It is true that what he says you will get is exactly what you�ll get, nothing more and nothing less, but that�s the beauty of it, that you can depend on your contract in an area of the world where contracts are seldom upheld to the letter. Also, it�s true that he isn�t a guiding father-figure like some people would like him to be. He�s in this to make money.

Like most recruiters and colleges though, bargain on the salary. I was offered 850 without accommodations but over the course of several days, bargained it up to 900 with accommodations and 30 for transportation (which was later changed to 40 due to staff grumblings) and supporting my wife and I, save the vast majority of my regular pay check (not including overtime) each month and left Oman with just over $13,000 from 8 months of work � not bad. The city itself isn't so bad. It's a great place if you like a lot of private time, enjoy reading for several hours a day, and Indian food is your thing.


The Accommodations

I arrived in Sur and stayed at the Sur Beach Hotel for several days. After my first day at the college, I was informed that I would be moving to a new place that afternoon, which, I discovered was a s***-tastic apartment infested with cockroaches and largely barren of furniture in Al Barr, on the opposite side of town from the college and about 1 � walk from the souq with taxis few and far between. The only plus side was the direct view of the sea from the bedroom. Much to my surprise, the place was devoid of bed sheets, pillows, towels, dishes, silverware, etc. Granted, I�ve never had a job that included accommodations so I was a bit na�ve in this respect. But would it have killed the college to get one of their several drivers to drive me around for an hour to find the necessities that night?

After a month of asking (more like harassing) the CFO, I finally called Majali and he made sure that I got moved into a better apartment within a few days. It even had brand new furniture and was a 30 second walk from the main Khimji�s supermarket in Sur. Though, later, when the heat kicked up, you could smell the slight hint of sewage in the apartment and, towards the end, no matter how much poison we put out and no matter how many times we scrubbed the kitchen inside and out, there was a cockroach problem.

The "College"

The place is owned by a Bahwan. This Bahwan is the cousin and brother-in-law of the Bahwans whose names grace so many companies in Oman. Unlike his cousins who are/were known for acts of charity and generosity, He is renown by the locals for being extremely cheap. An Omani friend once said that he�s �hunts Baisa (pennies).� Everything is done as cheaply as possible and cheating staff on overtime and vacation pay is normal. Most people in town, regardless of nationality, will tell you his companies are crappy places to work.

There was no staff handbook to refer to for rules and procedures (the lack of which, I assume, is standard in the Gulf) and orientation was less than half a day and on the spot, partly because I was a late hire and partly because I think there was no orientation to begin with. Later, when I asked the registrar about a staff book containing rules and procedures, he said with exasperation, �Why do we need a rule book when you can just ask somebody?!� Cases in point, you have to do a thumb punch each morning and afternoon. The arrival time was changed from 8:30AM to 8:15, then 8:20. Likewise, the finishing time was changed from 4:00PM to 3:30, but then it was later announced that you could leave at 2:00 if you had to come back for evening classes. No one had informed me I had to be present to invigilate the mid-term and final for my evening classes and then the admin acted incredulous when I told them I didn�t know having assumed it was the same procedure as the morning/regular classes in which you�re forbidden from invigilating for your own courses. It was alternately announced by members of the admin that if students didn�t show up for a class (which is fairly common), the teacher had to stay there 30 minutes before leaving, then 10 minutes, then 15 minutes. Students who missed 25% of the classes weren�t allowed to sit for the final, but that was never enforced and one student attended 2 of 62 classes but the admin still insisted he could sit for the final � at the same time, we were expected to keep meticulous attendance records and issue warnings to students at the 10%, 20%, and 25% absence marks. Bank accounts had to be closed 30 days before leaving, then 15, then five, and then they didn�t need to be shut down at all. Even though these are little changes, it shows the general sloppiness of the college. It�s a nice new campus, it has some big names attached, they�re super heavy on paperwork and making everything look official, but in the end, it�s just unorganized and they prefer it that way so that they don�t have to be held to follow any of the rules they�ve made and they�re fairly fickle with how they apply them, whether written and unwritten.

SUC also has a partnership with an Australian university named �Bond University.� From what I�ve heard, it�s the only private university in Australia, and judging by the fact they certify degrees granted at SUC, I doubt the quality of education there. Each semester, a cheerful Australian-Pakistani comes out to the college, looks over the quality assurance materials and tells them they need to actually prove something, makes rye comments to the admin concerning the lack of students able to speak English, then meets with the teachers and listens to our complaints. He then acts as an intermediary who presents the complaints to the admin. That was how the staff allowance was raised from 30 to 40, but since the university is moving everyone out to the campus, the travel allowance is being revoked in 2012-2013, which is really going to suck because the campus is way outside town. Someone claimed it was 17 kilometers from the souq, which wouldn�t surprise me.

The other pet project is something like a �statement of common purpose� (I don�t have access to the website now to look it up the name they�re using) with the American University in Cairo. They tout it like the students are going to be studying at the AUC, but in reality, all it states is that the AUC will allow SUC to use their curriculum for the Engineering department.

The Administration

The admin is a �colorful� mix of Arab expats handing work off to Indian accountants and secretaries with the occasional worthless Omani secretary sitting in their office caring for their fingernails, playing with their IPhones, or hitting on some of the male students.

The dean is a Jordanian who is a nice enough guy one on one (just picture the typical inhabitant of east Amman � sour, serious, glass-half-empty type of person, etc.) but is an awful manager. He has about as much backbone as an overly ripe banana and can�t be bothered to stand up for staff in the face of students, in fact, he can�t really even stand up to staff, he�ll usually just look at the ground or stare at his desk and doodle when you confront him. He makes 3,000 Rial a month just in his capacity as a dean, not counting several projects he has on the side so the last thing he wants to do is rock the boat by insisting on standards or discipline.

Due to the fact that there�s no formal policy on how to handle complaints, students are constantly marching into the dean�s office to complain about instructors, easily in the dozens. The dean is so passive, though, that you�ll almost never hear what the students have claimed you�ve said and/or done so the idea of what you�ve �done� just festers in his mind as he talks to other staff about it until you confront him and pull it out or one of the other staff inform you.

He�s more or less ineffective and nearly every time I came to his office, he was signing something. I don�t think he does anything else aside from teach a class or two, attend some token meetings, and sign papers - loads of them. The place is really, really heavy on paper work and when grades come in, each teacher has to turn in a six or seven page packet per class with different breakdowns of the grades that the dean takes a cursory glance at but claims he �carefully reviews.� The same goes for the monthly reports in which the average class has to be broken down into �objectives, methods, outcomes, etc.� They have to be turned in, but there�s no evidence anyone ever looks at them. One coworker claimed he had turned in the same one three months in a row changing only the date at the top and no one noticed.

Then there�s the assistant dean who�s Iraqi and even more useless than the dean but yells a lot and has accumulated for himself the fear of the students. No one really likes him, but he shouts loudly until he�s shouted at and then he more or less turns tail and lowers his head a bit when he talks to you. He�s not a full professor and he got his Ph.D. in one year from, he claims, a British university. He teaches some IT classes and organizes student events. What he really does, though, is kiss an obnoxious amount of butt. When the owner shows up to anything, everyone just continues what they�re doing and the dean more or less ignores him. Not the assistant dean, though. He gets up and does what can only be described as a �chimp walk� to the Sheikh while vigorously clapping his hands high in the air and beaming, offers to escort the Sheikh to his seat and takes him by the arm, like he�s helping a little old lady up the steps.

He also organizes events like graduation and gets frantic. When it goes well, he comes to the Sheikh and asks for a raise, a promotion, or some sort of new honor, that�s how he got to be assistant dean. The first dean when he was hired (not the present one) didn�t want to hire him because of his one year Ph.D. so that dean was sacked and he was hired anyway.

His other personal mission is to enforce the unwritten dress code. He continually promised me, as well as the rest of the staff, to provide us with a lap tops, which I never received.

One day, he came and told me to pass one of the dumbest students I�ve ever encountered, a 40 year old with the most pathetic, sniveling, sobbing whine I�ve encountered in my time teaching. The guy would come into my office crying because he had failed the final with 10% saying, �teacher�. teeeaaacher, help me� heeeeeelp me!� and then feign crying with his hand and head on the desk, then lift it up, sob some more with his head in his hands, throw his head back and lift his hands up before repeating the process. The guy�s final grade was something like 15% but not knowing any better and wanting to avoid problems, I passed him with 50% - God knows, he would have been passed anyway.

The assistant dean�s son also studied at SUC � dumb as a brick and unable to utter a sentence in English despite the curriculum being in English, but he graduated and possibly with honors.

Probably my favorite moment with the assistant dean was during �Culture Week� when a student shoved the assistant dean�s son believing that the son was taking pictures of women. In reaction, assistant dean charged the student, shoved him, and I think punched him after being punched, before running around grabbing other students by their dishdashas while screaming and pushing some. Meanwhile, the student who had shoved the son was pulled out of a side door near the front of the theater by two other students while he was kicking and screaming in full traditional Omani regalia (the knives, the belt, stick, etc.). I was fortunate enough to be only a couple meters from the action. The most embarrassing part for the college was that this all happened in front of Sur�s Wali (governor) who was an honored guest for the event.

The assistant dean is also the head of the disciplinary committee, which is a joke. Students can pull just about anything and will be given a �final warning� that never amounts of anything. Added to it, several staff and admin members told me the assistant dean accepts an unusually large amount of bribes such as expensive cologne and bottles of booze.

After I caught a student cheating on the mid-term, the student complained to him so he decided to coach me on how to deal with cheaters. His words were (and I swear to God these were his words), �When you see them cheating, you need to politely ask them, �please don�t cheat.�� General speaking, the only time you �ask� in the Arab world is when you�re an inferior speaking to a superior and lack the power to bulldoze your way through. But that�s the situation there, the students run the show and they know it. They know that if they repeatedly complain about a teacher, regardless of how pathetic the complaints are, the teacher will most likely be sacked. Two teachers who had taught in Saudi stated that in their experiences (each two years), though the students were generally obnoxious, the admin usually backed them up more than at SUC.

There�s also the chief financial officer. I�d say him and the dean are really the most pathetic individuals in the school. Some people have the heart of a child, but he has, according to one teacher, �the brain of a child.� He�s the nephew of the Sheikh and went to study in Mumbai but repeatedly flunked out so his uncle brought him back and put him in charge of the university�s finances. Because he still didn�t have a college degree and was the CFO, he enrolled as a student at SUC and never attends classes, but manages to get A�s and B�s. One teacher said that despite the fact he never shows up to class and doesn�t even take the final, at the end of the semester, the admin tells you to assign him a grade not less than a B. Don�t expect him to get anything done for you and, unlike the dean who carefully reads what you ask him to sign (but not anything else), the CFO will most likely sign anything you put under his nose, regardless of whether or not he understands it.

There�s the registrar who�s more or less a straight shooter but has no qualms with taking hours off of your overtime at the least deviation from unwritten rules. After being emphatically informed that I had to be extremely lenient with attendance and prayer times for evening classes and to �make them happy,� I changed the schedules for two evening classes to be 1� hours twice a week instead of 1 hour three times a week at the students� request. Knowing that everything turns into a big dog and pony show with the admin, I decided I wouldn�t even bother telling them but just do it since in the State, Turkey, and Syria, class schedule depends more on an agreement between the instructor and students. I even mentioned it to a few other teachers who said they�ve done the same and there was no problem. Three weeks later, the registrar got word and informed me that I had to have a formal written request signed by all students in the class stating their desire to change the class and that none of them could have a schedule clash. There had been a few students who would miss the half hour, but because the entire class was made up of doing worksheets, I didn�t think it was a big deal. In fact, the registrar had even signed off on the registration paper for one girl who couldn�t attend the class period. For those three weeks that I had taught that classes on those schedules, they docked me 1/3 of my overtime pay until it was switched back. For the other class, they still docked me on did the same even though the schedule was approved by the dean and the dean had assured me I would be paid all of the hours. In fact, he had told me to record the overtime hours as if the schedule had never been changed. In the end, I lost about 85 Rial with that but for some reason never considered running it by Majali.

One time while chatting, I implied that one of my students had been passed by the admin when I had failed him. At this, he got worked up and went to great lengths to tell me that the admin would never ever change a grade unless the head of department and the teacher agreed and then he challenged me to give him the name of one student whose grade had been changed. I told him I wanted to see the final grades of all the students in my classes for both semesters and he told me to come back that afternoon to get them. When I came back, though, he didn�t have them and told me �tomorrow.� Occasionally, if a student does atrociously, they�re failed. But, if they repeatedly fail the same class, I believe three times, or perhaps it�s four, the teacher has to give them a small assignment that takes about an hour or two and then pass them regardless of what they hand in.

Finally, there�s the HoD for Foundation. He�s a nice guy - a British and American citizen who�s spent most of his life growing up in the Arab world and Europe (but somehow still doesn�t speak Arabic) so he�s wise to the Arab game and knows how to play it when necessary (being very vague, making friends in high places, keeping mum about most things, knows how to navigate the minefield of Arab men�s self-esteem, etc.). Because of this, he gets along well there. He fell into the job because no one else would stay long enough and the college doesn�t want an Indian being HoD. Being the only foreigner in the college�s history who had stayed more than two years, he was automatically made HoD even though he has only a BA and not the mandatory MA. Due to this, he�s the �acting� head of department vs. the actual HoD. As much as possible, he�ll show you around when you arrive and introduce you to people. I�m not saying this to be disparaging of him, he�s a great guy.Rrather, I�m stating this to show the high staff turnover rate.

The Staff

The plus side is that the staff got along surprisingly well united largely by our general dislike of the students and admin. The HoD is as helpful as he can be and will take his time to get to know you and the other staff members are friendly. There were only five native speakers in the college, including the HoD and myself. Two of them were guys who worked at SUC part time simply because their wives worked at the Applied Sciences College and they couldn�t get in there. One of them left after the first semester. So, in the end, they could only recruit two natives for that semester out of 45 academic staff. In the second semester, there were a total of six native speakers. We only had one dysfunctional nut job: an American lady who was crazy and left after two months when, according to the college, her papers didn�t pan out. She had what seems to have been an imaginary husband. It was a great example of �the only vetting is that you had applied.� After she left, we went through her office to find all the student paper assignments (she hadn�t kept any grade records, just mounds upon mounds of papers and it became clear she had probably never taught), we noticed she had given detailed feedback on essays that were clearly cut and pasted from the internet and had given an A+ to ever single assignment, quiz, and test with phrases like, �great job!� and �keep working hard!� written in red ink above what were Wikipedia articles and Oman tourism ministry pages put through google translate. Several of the papers even had the url at the bottom.

The admin tried to organize a staff party but it fell through when it was announced that we would have to pay 5 rial each and then handle our transportation out to, I believe Ras Al Hadd � a boring enough place as it is. Several times teachers organized hikes in Wadi Tiwi, Wadi Shab, and Wadi Bani Khaled, trips to Muscat, etc. but, for the most part, unless you like drinking overpriced Tiger beer at the Sur Plaza Hotel for the 6-8pm happy hour�.you�re out of luck for social interaction.

Making friends with the people at the applied college isn�t a bad idea and several of my friends taught/teach there, though they too have an incredibly high turnover rate. For the 2010-2011 academic year, they had something like 17 of 33 academic staff quit, do runners, or be fired before renewal even came up. At the Applied Sciences College, they have a much better deal (essentially lay low and just show up for class) and even though their students aren�t much better than at SUC (and some would argue worse), their behavior is far better.

This year, at SUC, only 7 out of 19 or 20 Foundation staff are staying and of those 7, not all of them are staying for sure. Two teachers are heading to China, one of which is returning saying it�s far more rewarding, enjoyable, and his life was happier (they cheated him out of about 225 Rial in vacation pay by calculating it out of 30 days and not 40). A few Indians are leaving, a bunch of Jordanian staff members are being given the boot, and one childish Iraqi Ph.D. who was hired to be HoD (though never installed in that capacity due to the fact that no one liked him) is in renewal-limbo because he resigned but then withdrew his resignation within 48 hours only to have them deny his withdrawal. Naturally, instead of taking it like an adult and moving on, he�s trying to fight it by taking people out to dinner, trying to make friends in high places, etc. Not installing him as HoD was one of the few good choices the admin made, but it seems to have been more for reasons of personality clashes with several admin members.

The Campus

The old SUC campus was right off the main road in town and about a five minute taxi ride from the souq - it was easily accessible from nearly anywhere in the city. With the 2011-2012 school year, the new campus was complete enough for classes to begin. The problem is that the new campus (which is right next to the new government hospital) is way out in the middle of nowhere with barely 10 houses in sight and a 20 minute drive from any of the supermarkets. The new campus is also a 30 minute walk (at a brisk pace) from the main street. If you want to hire a taxi to come get you and take you into town, it�s 1 Rial each way, while taxi rides inside the town are only 200 Baisas per person. Though, teachers hired a driver to drive them to work (but not from) and occasionally to the super market for 30 Rials a month.

By September 2012, the on campus housing will be finished and the college is moving all academic staff there. The three story staff apartment buildings are in one block with a little �road� going down and tiny alleys separating each building. They�re so close together that most of the units only get natural light from one side. On one side of the block, the staff housing buildings are four meters away from a dormitory and one the other side, they are four meters away from the housing for Bengali, Indian, and Pakistani manual laborers (which, with all the staring and cat calls, is just great if you�re a woman). I was able to avoid renting a car because I lived right on the main road and next to the main supermarket in town, but if they moved us to the campus, I�d have to rent a car. As long as we lived off campus, we could catch rides with staff because everyone had the same check in and check out times, but if you live on campus, leaving campus gets more complicated.

A lot of the stuff in the building is falling apart due to shoddy construction. I�m sure structurally it�s just fine, but it�s things like the desks, the bathrooms, etc. I�m not even getting into the piece of crap computers they give the teachers (the ones that had previously occupied the computer labs in the old campus). I think my office computer must have been at least a decade old and would spontaneously die and refuse to turn on for days at a time starting mid-way through the second semester, it didn�t have viruses, it was just a piece of crap. By the beginning of May, it had permanently died. Meanwhile, the computer lab in the library has about 30 computers and I�ve never seen more than two students in there at one time. I asked if could have one of those for my office, but was refused. I had to bring my laptop every day, which, the IT informed me, couldn�t be connected to the proxy or printers so to print anything, I had to head to someone else�s computer and print it, same with using the proxy, which is essential for working there (it contains all the print outs, grade sheets, new tests, etc.)

In the top floor of the Foundation building, there was a constant hint of what seemed to be rotting cheese and vomit. When the weather heated up a bit in March, the stench became almost unbearable and I nearly vomited in my office several times and had to leave the windows open each night to air it out. It turned out, the toilet in the staff bathroom had some sort of faulty pluming and it was backed up with sewage. We complained about this for a month before the admin sent someone to clean the pluming. Even that didn�t do much so we stopped using it and started using the one across the hall, which caused the stench to slowly die down to a tolerable hint of sewage so long as no one opened the bathroom door.

There�s other stuff like the windows in most classrooms are jammed and either don�t open or don�t close all the way, ants everywhere, and broken AC units. In private residences, AC units, bathrooms, sinks, showers, etc. can take a month or more to repair.

The Students

All Foundation courses will be single gender in the 2012-2013 academic year and teachers will only be allowed to teach their gender. Other departments will follow in 2013-2014. The students and parents lobbied for it. Not surprisingly, with the exception of one guy (who wasn�t even that good), I can�t think of any male students who could successfully communicate something as simple as what they did yesterday in English.

As far as the college�s reputation goes, SUC is the last stop on the train � if you haven�t gotten off anywhere else, you have to get off here. The students are the bottom of the bucket for academic performance and intelligence in Oman. Students come from as far away as Salalah and Sohar to get an easy degree (and they�re very straight forward about it) because the college has cultivated its reputation as being an easy pass, and therefore, an easy degree. Case in point, one of my better students, who�s been accepted to the Engineering college, was explaining something to my wife (who�s a native Arabic speaker) and the girl didn�t realize that 8 minus 6 equals 2. She was really insistent that is equals 4 until my wife held up her hands and showed her that if you have 8 fingers and you take away 6 fingers, then you only have 2 fingers. Stuff like not realizing that � is the same as 25% is routine there. Shortly after mid-terms, I handed their graded mid-terms back to them with their grade (out of 50) written on the front. I would say at least 60% of the students in the class asked me to calculate the percentage. They couldn�t even figure out that you only had to multiply it by 2! I�ve taught in four other countries and I�ve never come across something like this. I�ve had students who didn�t understand how the grade was totaled, who didn�t understand how it figured into their total grade, etc., of course, but never before have I had students who couldn�t figure out math as basic as 35/50 is 70%, not to mention that nearly 2/3 of the class couldn�t do it. They�re been so coddled that their thinking capabilities have just turned off.

It�s not just a matter of English, either. Students would leave me notes in Arabic filled with major grammatical and spelling mistakes and errors that made the meaning unclear. Even my wife was unable to read some of them. This is an impressive feat considering Arabic is 100% phonetic with extremely clear and concise spelling rules. Just imagine what it takes to have incomprehensible spelling in Spanish or Italian.

Plagiarism is another big issue. I assume, though, it�s this way most places in the Gulf. The Applied Sciences College has its students electronically submit assignments and uses a program by the name of �Blackboard� to search for plagiarized material, but SUC doesn�t and I doubt it will any time soon. If you give them even a 100 word essay, minimum 80% of the students will copy something word for word from the internet or have their friends write it. Two stories come to mind in which students turned in papers they had cut and pasted from the net but had neglected to notice the papers were in German in one case and French in another. In another situation, a student used an IPhone in his lap to copy material for a written assignment. Having noticed early on he was doing it, I decided I�d let him turn it in and give him a zero. When he turned in the paper, indeed he had copied, but he had started mid-sentence and had apparently gotten it from yahoo answers because he wrote the entire URL (all 50 or so characters) not realizing that the URL wasn�t a word in the text. Even after this, he insisted they were his words.

Because the college is private and the owner is extremely greedy, everything is about money. They don�t want to lose even one student because even one student who fails or gets angry enough at a staff member to stop attending will then tell other students and the carefully cultivated image as an easy pass starts to fall apart. Due to this, the students feel free to pull just about anything with little to know discipline or consequences. It�s the worst in Foundation, but it�s widespread throughout the college. There were three incidences that stick out in my mind. The first was a guy who handed me something that he had hand copied from the internet. When I refused to take it, he did what Levantine Arabs call �turning the belt� (on the spot black mail). He stood and looked at me for a minute while I stared back at him from across my desk when suddenly, he got upset and claimed I had insulted his father (in a country in which publicly insulting an individual gets a fine of up to 500 Rial or several days to months in jail) and began yelling and shouting, waving his fist at me, etc. Another student who was sitting in my office waiting for help was baffled but calmed him down and told him what an idiot he was making of himself, but the guy then went and told the admin that I had called his father �s***.� I filled out an incident report and filled it right away but the admin wasn�t interested in evening bringing the student in to tell him what he did was inappropriate.

The second incident that comes to mind was when a student who wasn�t in the class opened the door midway through a lecture and started shouting across the room to his friend about going for tea after class. He kept going for at least 15 seconds while I was standing at the board so I calmly told him to come back after the lecture. He wouldn�t do that and just resumed shouting across the room. So, I went over, very calmly closed the door, and locked it. For the next two minutes, he literally pounded on the door with the bottoms of his fists repeatedly screaming �Open the door now! I�m a policeman! Open the door now! Now! Now! Open the door!� He was so loud that the students couldn�t hear me lecturing so I went over to the door, opened it, and said, �Did you understand me?� and then repeated what I had said in Arabic. He tried to barge his way in and then actually slammed his body against the door nearly forcing the door into my face. Once again, I push it closed and locked it. At that point, he started again with the mantra for another two or three minutes but even louder and with even more intense pounding. Behavior like this is just not normal for Omanis so long as they aren�t taxi drivers so the class and I were dumbfounded as we stared at the window in the door while a 25 year old was throwing a temper tantrum. At the end of the class, he came back, stormed through the door, pulled off his kefiyyah and egal (a Bedouin sign of wanting to fight) and told me off saying I was �lower than an Indian.� When I started to laugh, he ran off. The next day, he went to the admin and told them I had been sitting on the desk telling jokes when he politely came and requesting entry, at which point I had slammed the door in his face and cursed and insulted him in front of female students. I had to write an incident report with several students signing it and demand that they look at the closed circuit camera footage from the hall way to see that I was innocent. The dean didn�t want to get that into it, but he did tell me I needed to be more �understanding� of the student and told me I�d get a warning the next time something like this happened.

After seeing the students pull so much and the admin still kiss their hands, I took matters into my own hands when the third incident came up. During the finals for the second semester, there was a student who was cheating and repeatedly told to stay quiet. After being warned at least five times, I went over and grabbed his test. I�ve done this several times and the student usually tries to hold onto it, screams �please!� but it gets the point across. This guy, though, stood up and in front of 54 students and two other teachers, shoved me, threatened to beat me up outside after class and then really loudly called me a �f***ing b****� while point at me. I tried not to laugh, and I think I succeeded in that, but I thought I would call the assistant dean who most of the students are so terrified of. I called and called but he didn�t answer until sent him a text message briefly explaining what happened and stating I�d file a police report that night. Within 30 seconds of getting that, he was in the theater and of the whole five minutes in the theater, four-and-a-half were spent trying to convince me it was unnecessary to file a police report. He went over to the student, and in a very timid voice with the most polite Arabic possible and in a very meek voice, asked the student �Would you mind if I could please have your student ID?� The student flat out refused and laughed. The assistant dean then asked another student what his name was and called me out to continue telling me I shouldn�t file a police report. I filed an incident report, got the two teachers to sign and then surreptitiously gathered the contact info for several students present who were students of mine. I went to the police station and filed a report on the grounds of being publicly insulted. This time, I was going to make a point of it. The student freaked out and was calling the dean, assistant dean (who pledged his support to the student�), the registrar, and even the owner begging them to convince me to drop the charges. He even showed up in the prosecutors� office one day and cried so loudly and for so long that the secretary called me asking if I could come and just accept some money from him to drop the charges. Otherwise, the student would have to pay me up to 500 Rial or spend times in jail with a mark in his record, which means he�ll have a nearly impossible time getting a ministry job and, being social �marked� most people won�t want their daughters to marry him. Going to jail, even for one night, is extremely shameful and the stink of it never leaves you. His mother even came to plead for him and his uncle later telephoned to tell me off, but still, they still had to pay. After scaring the hell out of him for long enough, I finally told him I�d take 200 Rial and then I�d drop the charges. He gladly agreed.

As petty as it is and as much as we should be forgiving people, I stayed my guns because last year, the students chased out the former HoD for Foundation and forced him into resigning after he refused to pass several students who had failed miserably. In reaction, students came and protested specifically against him for several hours on the college campus with signs and slogans. The admin did nothing except call the Sheikh. Rumors fly about it, some of the staff claim the guy had told him he was forced into resigning with all his benefits while other staff who were there said that he resigned later due to the fact that he had lost all ground with the students. But the fact remains, the university didn�t reprimand the students or tell them that what they were doing was inappropriate. It wasn�t like they were protesting for living wages, against a foreign war, human trafficking, or corruption. No, none of that, they were protesting against a teacher because he expecting basic standards of literacy and was actually doing what a teacher does. Probably for this reason, the current HoD demanded a 50% raise if he were going to remain HoD for the coming year � and they gave it to him without question for two reasons (1) he knows how to make them like him and (2) he�s one of the few teachers who the students don�t complain about.

Essentially, the students can lie and slander instructors to their heart�s content when they don�t get what they want. As far as they�re concerned, they came to SUC to pass easily and suddenly you�re expecting something from them. The way they see it, you�ve reneged on �your� end of the deal. Of course, the solution is to give them all A�s and collect your paycheck at the end of every month, but most teachers find that (a) unethical and (b) an unrewarding job. Added to it, the admin wants to see a rainbow of grades, so long as �F� is not one of them. 50% is a passing grade (and the tests are so dumbed down it�s painful. On the final and mid-terms student, students in �advanced� English classes are asked to write sentences in the present continuous and are given the same readings for the comprehension session again and again). If a student has 45-49%, their grade will automatically be moved up to 50%. If it is 40-44%, the teacher is �encouraged� but not forced to move it to 50%.

The real situation is that the students at this college are, as stated, �the bottom of the bucket� in the Omani school system and SUC is the last stop. One member of the admin (who shall remain anonymous) said that, �of seven tiers of colleges in Oman, SQU is the first while SUC is in the sixth.� When you combine low intelligence with the fact that the culture here, especially in an area as conservative as Sur, has exceptionally fragile self-esteem (or, as one colleague put it, �ridiculously sensitive�), the mix is explosive � one of their more common claims (and I was usually guilty of this) was �teacher so and so laughed at us.� This accusation is like holding a match to a powder keg. The type back and forth light teasing Levantine Arabs and Turks absolutely love and thrive on, these people can�t stand. One day, while standing in the hall with a teacher talking about where we had gone that weekend while laughing a bit, several students walked by and somehow convinced themselves we were talking about them. What was their reaction? Go to the HoD and complain. When he brushed it off, they went to the dean and complained.

These are students that think a less than perfect grade is your personal view of them and try as you will, they won�t view it any other way. The dominant attitude can be summed up as �You�ll give me a good grade�if you like me.� As many times as I explained it, and even wrote it in the class syllabus that I do not grade their finals and mid-terms but that I grade the finals and midterms for other classes (that�s the system in Foundation at SUC), students would still come and ask, �Why did you fail me on the mid-term?� I�d point at to them the signature of the grading teacher on the bottom front of the mid-term and they didn�t seem to get it, thinking it was more or less a ploy. Regardless, the students are really slow (now, note, I�m not saying that all, or even most Omanis are, I�m saying that most of the students who end up at SUC end up there for a reason). The admin even backs them up and tells teachers to be softer with students and �help them� (artificially inflate their grades). It�s 100% business so going thinking you�ll make a difference is a pipe dream. The last head of department tried to have standards and was more or less chased out. The only way I�d ever advise someone to teach at SUC is if they really like lost causes and fighting a losing battle.

A handful of the students are bright, but of the two semesters and more than 250 students I had, I wouldn�t describe more than ten as even half way motivated. We all (or at least I assume all of us) come to the Gulf for the high pay, not the personal gratification of being a teacher, but unless you just have bare minimum qualifications, you can get much higher paying jobs with much better students almost anywhere elsewhere.

My final advice is work somewhere else unless you�re extremely desperate. If you�re desperate enough to work there, then you�re desperate enough to go to Saudi and make twice the money with a lower cost of living. According to two of the teachers who had taught in Saudi, �at least in Saudi, the admin backed me up.� Aside from the admin never backing you up and then actually actively undermining you as well as the fact that they�re probably the worst students in Oman, there�s not one specific thing to make it awful, it�s all of them together that just make it a crappy place to work. I can�t think of any staff there that are actually happy. The HoD has been there three, going on four years but even he seems worn out and somewhat unhappy. Even the lone Omani teacher, who�s also leaving, said on numerous occasions that the �laziness and stupidity� of the students at SUC was �amazing� and this is from a guy who could rarely find anything to complain about.

(MOD edit to remove names)

[veiledsentiments]

That was an interesting read over my morning tea. I'm curious if this place is #6, which college is #7?

Thanks for the description of your experience. I hope that your next job has fewer aggravations.

VS
(PS... I just must mention... it is not 'rye'... as in the grain, but 'wry.' Retired writing teachers never really retire from proofreading. Spell check can't always save us.)

[The Steakinator]

[johnslat]

Dear Steakinator,

I think VS was referring to this"

"One member of the admin (who shall remain anonymous) said that, �of seven tiers of colleges in Oman, SQU is the first while SUC is in the sixth.�

Regards,
John

Dear VS,

Also "rye" as in whiskey

[The Steakinator]

[quote="johnslat"]Dear Steakinator,
"One member of the admin (who shall remain anonymous) said that, �of seven tiers of colleges in Oman, SQU is the first while SUC is in the sixth.�

Ah, okay. I finished writing this a couple weeks ago and haven't gotten around to posting it until now so my memory of some of the smaller details might be a bit foggy at times.

Yeah, I agree, though, who could possibly be worse? I asked the guy who was worse and he mentioned the name of a college that I can't recall, but I haven't heard of since. The HoD would regularly say the students were the worst in Oman.

[La Reve]

OMG! Thank you, Steakinator, for writing with such vivid details about what is happening in education in Oman.

[madrileno]

Makes sense seeing as how the university's initials (SUC) sound like "suck".

[The Steakinator]

I should also add a bit concerning the medical care provided by SUC. Teachers at the ministry college have (as I recall) the option to go to either the government hospital or the private one in Sur. Teachers at SUC, though, can only go to the private hospital (owned by "the Sheikh" who owns the college). The level of medical care in Oman is low enough, due largely to the fact that they generally get the doctors who weren't skilled/experienced enough to get into Emirates, Qatar, or Saudi where the money is far, far better. With that in mind, going to this area with a chronic health problem is really not advised.

That being said, there is one good doctor at Sur private hospital, he's about 35 years old and from Al Anbar, Iraq, his English is decent and he can refer you to people for other things needed. Other than that, I would be extremely wary of any of the staff there. I have a few stories, PM me if you're interested.