Remember when Britney said you better work bitch if you wanna live fancy? Well, she missed out one very important adverb: you better really work bitch if you wanna live fancy in Dubai. However, even if you weren’t planning on living the private jet, Maserati, martini sipping lifestyle which obviously my teacher salary can afford (did my nose just grow ten inches longer?) you still will be really working bitch. Or at least I was.
You see, it turned out that making friends near the end of the school year was a laughable concern to have. No. Scratch that. Making friends wasn’t only a laughable concern to have but, in the grand scheme of things, it was a snowflake in comparison to the avalanche of concerns that starting in a new school near the end of the school year brought with it. Especially starting at an international private school.
Now, I wasn’t naïve in thinking that it was going to be easy peasy lemon squeezy. However, I didn’t quite expect it to be as difficult, difficult lemon, paper cuts in hands surrounded by fire, difficult as I found it. I was in my fourth year of teaching. I was seasoned. I had previously worked at a school where a teacher being called a bitch by a pupil was a normal occurrence and, actually, a greeting of endearment. Yet, this is where one of my first problems lay. As that was no longer the type of school that I was teaching in. I was a teacher that had taught on the frontline, knee deep in the trenches and I didn’t know what it was like to be behind it. But that’s exactly where I was: behind it. And, like anything else, dealing with the unfamiliar brought many new problems with it.
My first problem came in the form of names. Or rather, the un-forming of names. Back in Scotland, secondary pupil names are pretty straight forward: Nicole, MacKenzie, Lauren, David and another couple of Nicole’s thrown in there for good measure. Easy to pronounce. Easy to remember. Easy. But, as I’m sure you will be shocked to hear, there were no MacKenzie’s or Nicole’s where I was teaching. In fact, names ranged from: Yael, Haozhe, Anesuishe and Xiomara, to name but a few. I mean, these were letter combinations that I had never set eyes on, never mind tried to pronounce. What sounds did they even make when spoken aloud? And how badly were the pupils going to let me have it when I, inevitably, mispronounced them?
However, queue my second problem. As mispronounce them I did. But slated I was not.
While I was fully aware that the pupils at a private school would have much better behaviour than my last, I wasn’t prepared for the other personality trait that came hand in hand with such behaviour as a result and that was that they were all…‘soft.’
Now, soft isn’t a word I would ever associate with any Scottish person; with the only soft thing about us being our oversized bellies as a result of all of the haggis, shortbread and Irn Bru we consume on a daily basis (okay, maybe the Irn Bru part isn’t too far-fetched…). So trying to accommodate my cut throat personality and drier than the desert surrounding me humour to these new types of pupils was definitely going to be a struggle. However, I did have one advantage that bought me some time when it came to stepping down as Miss Sarcasm Teaching Queen 2021: my accent. You see, none of the pupils could actually understand a word that came out of my mouth. Queue problem three.
Now, before you all make the joke, I’ll make it for you. Yes, I am an English teacher. And, yes, I am Scottish. And yes, I don’t know who in the recruitment agency mucked up but they did somehow manage to employ a Scottish teacher to teach English at a private school in Dubai, but here I am. While I knew my accent was thick, I didn’t realise just how thick, with it becoming apparent that not one child knew what a jotter was and pupils were regularly coming up to me shouting: ‘Get out of my swamp.’ And, while Shrek is Scotland’s national hero, it is never good to be compared to an incoherent ogre. Clearly, my accent was going to need as big a glow up as Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries.
However, all of these problems were manageable. Easily resolved. It was the twenty gazillion other issues that were the real problem. These ‘real’ problems included: dealing with a new curriculum; going from a 13-person department to a one-person department (not the norm FYI); writing year reports for 100 kids that I had only known for five days; uploading lesson plans every week – had I time travelled back to University? – creating curriculum maps for the next school year and being observed fifty million times to ensure I was competent at my job. Easy, right?
Now, if you aren’t a teacher and all of that means nothing to you, basically I had a shit ton upon a shit ton upon a shit ton of work to do. It was incomparable to any other teaching year or workload amount I had ever had in the past (and if you can’t work out the math – as an English teacher I know I wouldn’t be able to – that includes teaching during Covid; gasp, I know).
Yet, I was working for a private school and I was living in Dubai. Glorious sunshine every day, the beach at my doorstep and a hub to travel all around the world. So, if I wanted to maintain my sought after fancy lifestyle, I was going to have to grin and bear it as many others had done before me and, as many others would do after. Even if that grin did have to be drawn on with a Berol pen some days, I made sure it was there and I made sure I got to work, bitch.