Teaching Assistants - The valuable resource that is overlooked.

Classrooms today, particularly the lower grades have hidden gems called the Teaching Assistants. Sometimes, these are teachers in training but more often than not mothers of school age children who take up a job to match their children's school hours. Talk to them, and they will tell you that they stay, because they enjoy the company of the kids, long after their own grow up. But they are not given any credit for the work they do, simply because they do not have the requisite degree. This is in spite of the fact they spend far more time with each child, and will remember what each child is doing or has done. The teacher dumps a whole lot of responsibility on them, and some are far more experienced in the classroom than the newly qualified teacher.

I am now beginning to believe that a good Teaching Assistant can help your child far more than the teacher. In fact in some classes the kids have a far warmer relationship with the TAs than with the teacher. Unfortunately, the TAs have little or no room to take any decisions or even comment, come what may. This brings the classroom to a standstill.  I have seen young teachers with hardly any experience speaking very rudely to the TA who have at least 6 plus more experience than them. This ruins the atmosphere in the class and the children are affected. The TAs are expected to shoulder responsibility, but get no share of the praise. With the concept of streaming the class teacher brushes off parent questions with a simple "I don't know" which I think is not acceptable. Our teachers did not have assistants and they had 65 children in each class, and they knew the children. Now teachers crib if there are more than 25 and claim that they cannot manage even with assistants.

The school managements have to have some kind of guidelines for division of responsibility and weightage for experience. The teaching assistants must get more credit for all the work they put it for it is they who are the unsung heroes of the classroom.

The thin blue/red/purple line. What is a challenge and what is pressure?

For NYPD the Thin Blue Line was a phrase used by officers to describe an unwritten rule - not to rat on fellow officers who may have committed a crime. In other words it was a synonym for a cover up.An officer would retreat behind a wall of silence or simply not do the needful investigation if a fellow cop was a suspect, come hell or high water. I am using the phrase to mean the line between what educators call pushing and what is a challenge.
Now there are many schools of thought here. Many educators in the last decade have advocated strictly positive reinforcements messages to get the child to do what is required. But I feel that is not enough because it is like tarring everyone with same brush. Most kids today are far smarter than their parents and teachers in many ways and know when to push the right buttons. And we all have to admit that kids are hard work whether smart or not since they keep you off balance all the time. No day will be the same as the one gone by or the one that is coming. Now here is where the teachers come in. Before I make my point I must pause to say that being a teacher or a doctor can never be just a job or a career since both professions wield an enormous amount of influence on people's lives. A good teacher can make a child rise far above his or her intrinsic ability.  My problem is that most educators view this as just a another job. I feel if we give the children the opportunity to learn they will regardless This is an effort which the teacher has to put in. They have to get involved and they have to feel and they have to intuitively assess where the child is, to offer him or her better challenges. Self motivation is not something a six year old or even a ten year old has, somebody has to do it for them. If parents and educators wait for this it may be too late.

Unfortunately, to cover up what they are lacking, there is an astonishing amount of stonewalling by the schools. They seem to want to bring everything done to the lowest common denominator and will try as much as they can to avoid or discourage questions. I can hear the collective gasp of outrage across the teaching community here and though I know some very good teachers the above is what perhaps most parents have come to experience. No supervisor or deputy head or principal will admit any wrong by the staff and yet nothing changes. What is worse they discourage the parents from expecting more from the child. Somewhere there seems to be a disconnect. Why is it so wrong to expect your child to work a little more than what is strictly required? Life is no ball game when they grow up and if they learn to give their best and expect no less effort from themselves then they will be better adults in society when they are older.

Take Amy Chua book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". A lot has been said about her methods but if we look at it objectively it was just a memoir of her efforts and her mistakes. But there a big lesson in that for all parents. While genius come at a price it is not wrong to expect the best from your child. If we can find a method where we praise and reprimand equally and at the right time the kids actually respect and love you more. So Amy Chua's methods were definitely pressure but getting your child to buckle down and do some extra work every day, even if it is for 1/2 hour is not. I have personally seen the joy and the sense of achievement my daughter has when I do not let her give in when she finds something hard. So mums please do not listen to the teacher alone- sometimes your instincts work better. Besides no child comes with a handbook and every child has different abilities. Celebrate that and above all do not let them give up!!

Third country children- are they truly global or just lost

Dubai is a city of contrasts, a huge salad rather than a melting pot. It is a city where each community retains its identity and its ties while living together with others. So what happens to the children born here and who grow up here. Here is my take on their life as third country children. The children in Dubai grow up rather privileged. A mother once commented that when she takes her children back home, they come across very naive compared to the children there. The exact quote was "Dehatis in branded clothes" which translates as village bumpkins in branded clothes. In some ways it is very true since the majority of the children here have things done for them. It is a wonderful place for doing a lot of stuff but teaches very little in terms of life skills. Our children grow up sometimes very unaware of life. Also there is no sense of belonging in a way. The country they were born in and brought up in considers them aliens. The country whose passport they hold treats them like that. They have no flag to salute, no national anthem to sing. While one may argue that this is a great opportunity to transcend national borders, our children can do so only if this beautiful country was more of a melting pot. Instead it is like a giant salad, where each portion is distinct and untouched by the character and quality of the others. Perhaps one can go as far as to say that Dubai is home to various ghettos. Each nationality does not really mix with the others nor adopts any of the culture. Arabic should have been second language to these kids. Instead they barely know how to read and write and not speak it at all. What a tragedy this is!!Perhaps here is where we as parents need to stop and think whether we are truly giving our children the international experience. But I also feel that unless one learns to appreciate one's own culture and traditions one finds it hard to appreciate the other. What do we need to do to give our children a sense of identity and of belonging? I have still to find the answer. If only I can help my child to be part of the melting pot and fully appreciate our own culture will I feel my child is a global citizen, completely at ease with various nationalities and able to appreciate the similarities and accept the differences.

Newspaper Club-The Juice on JPS-Learning responsibility

"New Term-new edition of the JPS newspaper. Last term saw  the first edition of "The Juice on JPS" published. The first ever newspaper club at JPS was born. The children drawn from years 4,5and 6 had a taste of the trials and the euphoria of bringing out a newspaper. This term we aim to be more realistic about it with the children being on google docs, doing the stories on time working on deadline etc. Watch this space for more on this as the newspaper team evolves." This is what I started writing about the newspaper club I started at school. Then the post got abandoned as we worked further on the project. The kids are lovely very talented and smart but I see just one problem- the lack of commitment and more importantly the fact that nobody not even the parents, enforces the value of it.

I see this as a general state of affairs among all our kids here in Dubai. They are very pampered and cossetted. Either their parents do it for them or teachers or some adult. They have no idea about the consequence of things and I feel the lesson sooner learnt, the better. This is where I agree completely with Amy Chua author of the "Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother". She has put forth the idea that the more the children are challenged the better they perform and that their self confidence grows with each battle won. Life is tougher in some ways now. Being good is not enough- one needs to be excellent to achieve anything


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I think we all need to drop the idea of celebrating every scrawl our children do and urge them to reach for the stars in their chosen field. Demanding excellence from oneself is perhaps the best competitive edge we can give them in the life's journey.

Unfortunately our school systems now are concentrating on building average kids because they teach them it is "OK" if they have not achieved a goal. I feel that concept has gone too far and the children have now begun to accept "OK" as their objective not demand excellence from themselves. Tomorrow's leaders and achievers are those who will throw "OK" out of the window and concentrate on doing their job to better than the best of their ability.

I hope that this term the "Newspaper Club" at JPS demands and achieves  that excellence and that we are able to help this bunch of students have that wonderful experience, that of creating a truly excellent product.

Customer Service and Front Desk - The silent and most often "unrewarded forgotten" sales team of the business

Most businesses spend a huge amount of money on their sales team. They train them and incentivize them. But then, they forget a bunch of people who are customer facing and who are actually responsible for more than half the sales. The"Service Staff". It is this sales team who can actually make or break your business particularly in these days where advertising costs are high and companies are relying more and more on social media and word of mouth to get and keep the customer.

Dubai has for long been famous for bad customer service, but it got away with it since someone higher up came out quickly to soothe ruffled feathers. But they have got complacent as well thinking that where will the customers go, particularly in the medical industry here. I have had such a bad experience with Prime Medical Centre recently here in Jumeira. Their doctors are fairly good, but the front office is terribly disorganized, and overbook and double book and basically make you wait for over half an hour, even if you an appointment. Remember, they are only a clinic and handle no medical emergencies. So I see no reason why a patient who has bothered to make an appointment, is made to wait for half an hour. This has happened to me not once but four times in a row because the front office staff had either forgotten, or were overworked, or understaffed, or whatever. My point is that the business has not only lost a loyal customer "me" but, I will probably now tell all my friends and everyone else not to bother going there. So they have lost future sales which they have to invest very heavily in to get back. The problem is that the attitude is to fire the guy who did this, not fix the systems. If you cannot get the service people motivated enough if you overwork and underpay them this is what happens, and businesses will have to wake up to this stark reality sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, we fail to acknowledge in our whole lives, that the little jobs matter, in the big picture, and those who understand and appreciate that, will pip the others to the winning post.

 To finish this with a happy story, I wonder if you heard of a restaurant called "Maanvaar". It is a restaurant in Karama serving Marwari food, started by a person from Jodhpur India. "Maanvaar" means hospitality in Marwari. It started as a six-table restaurant. It was literally a hole in the wall but the food was yummy and we converted many a skeptic. But perhaps, more than the food what brought people there in droves was the hospitality and the service. Every waiter fed you with joy and every customer who left came back with a few more. Today, that restaurant has expanded to twenty tables, they do parties and catering and they have a special sweet shop which sells Marwari sweets. For a niche Indian cuisine restaurant to do so well without massive advertising and deep pockets, stands testimony to the oft-repeated mantra if you take care of your customer they will take care of you.

Where does one draw the line?

I look around me, at my own child and at children around me and think gosh! they are very lucky kids in every sense of the word- or are they? When we give them all that they need want dream or even before that are they lucky or are we crippling them mentally and emotionally. Our children do not know what it is to need which is great but they do not know "want". When I say that I mean that they get things before they know it even exists. In a way we are taking away their ability to dream about something and work towards a goal. Living a privileged life is great but if that takes away basic survival skills that is not the best life to live. I worry for my child because even if I stop buying the stuff she still gets it from the host of uncles and aunts and cousins and friends. Where does this end? How can I teach her that one need to work for a goal.

Happy new Year

As the New Year kicks off I decided to start it by attempting to keep up with one of my resolutions which keeps getting put off year after year. The resolution to start writing again and more importantly keep at it. Somehow other things have always taken precedence and this passion has been put on the back burner. I heard about a great way to keep up with your resolutions. Make It Public.So here it it people -"Musings of a School Mum" because that is essentially what takes up a bulk of my day but with my daughter growing up I hope I will have a lot more to share with all of you.

Earlier this morning I shared a comment on volunteering in the school on the site iVillage. A lot of parents who do volunteer were unhappy that they seem to be doing all the work while others just sat back. Well here is my take on this. For those who do not bother to help when you can you miss a wonderful opportunity to see a part of  your child's life  that you would otherwise not get. For those who work and complain do as much as you can possibly with joy, nobody is forcing you- it is voluntary after all. I believe that all who volunteer get something from it after all whether it it friends, information, networks or just plain satisfaction of doing something good.

Last term I went to the school principal and asked him why we did not have a school newspaper. He agreed to start one provided I helped out which I accepted. So now we have one run by head of literacy assisted by me and written and published by the students. By the time my daughter moves up the school I hope it will be an independent entity run entirely by the students and I hope she will have the chance to write in it too. The lesson I learnt was that while ideas were great implementing them properly were harder and managing limited resources were harder still. Most importantly I hope I will be able to translate the lessons learnt into reality in this term with a better advice for the newspaper team.

Next week school reopens and there will be more musings hopefully.