Maha's musings

Last week I announced about the Speaking assessment to be conducted for the term. The students had to deliver a speech as / about any of their favorite fictional characters. When I explained about the task and discussed the rubrics, I couldn't spot the usual excitement but an unfathomable fear. They weren't excited but hesitant. I gave them a week's time for preparation. Yesterday I started calling out their numbers for the delivery.  I had expected some peels of laughter and titbits of information as the topic was something dear to the students. To my surprise out of the ten students I called, only three students could speak confidently; some had come unprepared whereas others simply fumbled despite preparation. The class looked too eerie to proceed further that I had to postpone the assessment.  The period was about to end in ten minutes and the students were not ready to listen to any serious teaching. So, I thought of narrating a story. Before that I instructed them to ...

  Today, a student stood before me, his face grim, voice tight with frustration. He was convinced that his peers had been making fun of him in their mother tongue.  When I enquired, I found out that it was just a harmless casual chit-chat.   Though the incident seems to be a normal misunderstanding outwardly, it highlights a silent challenge in our diverse classrooms: the words we don't understand can hurt the most, fostering feelings of exclusion, insecurity, and isolation. In some instances, it has also been mentioned that some students even indulge in name calling in their mother tongue and others pick up these words without knowing the hurtful context.   In a linguistically rich and diverse country like UAE, our classrooms are kaleidoscopic with students who grow up hearing, absorbing, and navigating multiple languages every single day. But the flip side is, it sometimes builds an invisible wall of discrimination among the students. When they connect with t...