Education

Tuesday, July 12. 2005

I'm so sad, depressed, tearful and truely helpless at the moment. Nothing can express what I feel.. This is going to be a long entry. I'm just passing through my thoughts about education. Everything I'm writing about is from my personal pain being brought up in this system.

I got to work as an instructor to a Ministry in Jordan. Teach them how to program PHP, one thing everybody should know, you can't teach those who don't want to learn. Before I even started I requested that the Ministry should buy books for all trainees, and they did. Now, I've been training them for almost two months, and most of them didn't even read a single page of the book. Nobody does his homework, no one researches. For one thing I blame trainees themselves, and I blame education. We were not educated to appreciate the value of learning.

I still remember I was kicked out of classes during university because I didn't bring my book!

I asked a professor to help me & work with me on a project that included changing the philosophy of web development, he was like "oh ok, I need to eat now. Maybe we can discuss this later. Simply, reading his lips, he was saying: 'Fuck Off' "

I remember failing courses cause I Volunteered to talk about things that really matter, like OpenSource. And my teachers would give me a big fat Zero because I didn't attend the exam

I remember those who were creative, innovative and wanted to learn got lowest marks. And those who like to be spoon fed, and learn blindly got highest marks.

When I was in the elementary school, I remember a song my sister used to play on our old Philips Stereo. And after a couple of times, it was my favorite. That song was, "Another brick in the wall( We don't need no education". Strange how I was a small kid, and could understand that I didn't want to be educated the way I was being educated. I used to ask my sister to play it everyday, and everyday I would put it louder and louder.

If you've seen my previous entry, you'd know that the average arab kid reads 6 minutes extra curricular books. If this didn't make you cry and do something about it, you're just as bad.

We're raising retards teachers. You're just another brick in the wall. I promise you i'm gonna do something about this. I'm gonna take a brick or two and send them to hell

Posted by Ammar Ibrahim in General at 05:25 | Comments (13) | Trackback (1)

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Fact #6
You know what really, really, REALLY pisses me off? When someone looks at me sympathetically when I answer that I study Fine Arts and Design. Sympathetically! Then they say to m

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This is indeed very sad..I assume the interviwees are university students, which is beyond shocking!!
I'm not sure on who or what to blame this on..education, media, families..??
wat i know is that the we're slowly, yet strongly, becoming brainwashed and what used to be considered important is now becoming nonsense..
I hope ppl watching this will take the impact of the situation a bit seriously and spread the awarness..our region will either fall or survive depending on the brains of this and the coming generation..if we keep on answering '..ma ba3ref' to every other question or insist that Amal Dunkol is a famous singer with a great voice, then I'm not sure wat our future will be holding for us..but it definitly doesn't look very promising!!
Guys..pls take sometime to read things in general..even if for a couple of hours every other day..like God's (SWT) first message to Mohammad was (ASWS)..IQRA'A

#1 Doa'a on 2005-07-12 06:13 (Reply)

This problem permeates education and goes into our daily work lives. Our employees are some of the lowest productive in the world. I am ashamed at the level of performance.

My family owns a small business in Amman and we hire ~10 people at any given time. Stock/Inventory control, sales, punctuality, and even theft are all issues that must be continuously monitored. I believe I've deconstructed the problem to its two roots:

1. Iza il shoghol mish shoghol abooy, la teez teezy. (If the business isn't owned by my family, I don't give a flying F***).

2. Kul wa7ad hoo fahman, inta hala2 jay it3almo keef yishtghil. (Everyone is an expert, who are you to tell/instruct him on how to perform his job).

A friend owns a kitchen manufacturing plant in Amman. Every order would go out missing some pieces, so he hired one more guy to merely oversee that everything on the checklist is ON the van going to the customer's house. EVERY ORDER STILL GOES OUT MISSING SOME PIECES.

How do you develop the American work ethic? We can hate them all we want, but no one can say they don't know how to 'perform.'

#2 Ameen Malhas (Homepage) on 2005-07-12 09:01 (Reply)

Ammen, The Americans are one of the nations who most cut corners... dont get me started about work ethics!

#2.1 mariam (Homepage) on 2005-07-13 03:28 (Reply)

Akh Ameen, exactly. Adding to what you said, people don't belong to places they work in, most of the time they hate where they work.

#2.2 Ammar Ibrahim (Homepage) on 2005-07-13 14:26 (Reply)

Isn't is one major failure of this society that you don't need education in order to achieve something. Why should you educate yourself when it doesn't matter? for me it seems that the only thing you need in Jordan is washta (what a great conclusion). Many students end up as taxi drivers or stay unemployed after they finished their education. Where is the motivation for education? here in Jordan, first of all you have to be lucky that you were born into a family with washta. If you don't, then leave the country. but if you had luck than keep on driving with your fancy car around the abdoun square and give a shit to education. Your father will get you a job. Maybe you are employed by a ministry. There are a lot of them - i like the ministry of governmental performance most (what are they doing?). i guess this kind of ministry only exist in Jordan. don't worry if you don't get a job now, the next parliament reshuffle will be in two months, maybe three months. i'm sure than you're lucky!
Summa summarum: what is missing in Jordan? RESPONSIBILITY

#3 Dennis on 2005-07-12 09:49 (Reply)

I hear you. I do. This anger has been building up inside me for years at school and now at university, it makes me want to cry!!
At my university, "Oh, he's a great doctor!" = he's always late by ten minutes, gives us only 40 minutes, and frequently absences himself!"
Twelve years at school... what have we learned? Yes, we learned arabic, english and math, a little geography and edited history.. But I would say the greatest thing we jordanian students have learned and would top the world in is our amazing capacity for memorization. "Min il jilde lal jilde"... like a poem. Yes, give me a 50 page book of meaningless words that belong to no language and make absolutely no sense, and I will learn it by heart. But projects and presentations are everybody's most hated task.. anything but that! Ever since the 1st grade, our teachers gave no importance to any question that said, "what do you think about...", every exercise that needed group work or discussion or that asked us to read further or do some research. It was not as important as finishing the crap we were supposed to finish before the end of the year. And this boring, stupid education policy made us hate books and everything associated with them.. "Reading?? AW NAW!!"
What our education system has done is kill our curiosity, our need to know why and how, our thirst for knowledge, for answers, for more. It doesn't matter to us, simply because we will never have to invent, create, discover and innovate.. it's not our job. We were not properly trained for that. Our job is simply to receive, isn't that more than enough for us??

We have not been encouraged to dream, to make our own path, to create a personal image, an opinion, to find and appreciate our individuality. Put that dream to sleep for a while, you don't need it now. Flow with the crowd. Take the safe road everybody travels. Just study the book like everybody does will you? Don't you want an A? This is what you have to do to get it! Simple! Why complicate things??

How long will we refrain from "complicating things"???

#4 Rania on 2005-07-12 17:37 (Reply)

That's the problem with the Tawjihi system. I thought that the Universities in Jordan were different than that, but I guess I was wrong.

#5 Ziad on 2005-07-13 01:40 (Reply)

Ammar, I agree with some of the things you have had written here, we are spoon fed, even in math, I depended on memorizing... I wish someone has explained math to me properly!

however you will get a big fat 0 in any university in the world because you dont attend an exam

so i wont sympathize here, if i were a teacher and a student fails to attend an exam, without any explenaton, i would fail them too. because it just will show me they dont care.

#6 mariam (Homepage) on 2005-07-13 03:25 (Reply)

Mariam, It happened that I showed my professors that I'm going to speak in a conference, and I showed'em my ticket and invitation. All I was asking for was a Make-Up exam, some of them refused. And I do care, I always went a week before I traveled.

#6.1 Ammar Ibrahim (Homepage) on 2005-07-13 14:22 (Reply)

If you have a good excuse then you are right. But if someone just does not show up to an exam for no reason at all... then well the 0 should be with simsem just like a ka3keh from Salah il Deen in Abdali!!

#6.1.1 madas (Homepage) on 2005-07-14 04:48 (Reply)

You know Salah il deen in alabdali!!!!! OMG!

#6.1.1.1 Ammar Ibrahim (Homepage) on 2005-07-14 04:52 (Reply)

You�ve just reminded me of one time I had to teach and train teachers at "ma3had al datreeb" on adobe illustrator, most of them were snoring and the rest are drawing love shapes on Corel draw!!!

#7 Sha3teely on 2005-07-21 16:26 (Reply)

Mate don't take it to heart. I have had similar experiences over the years . You try your best & wonder 'what the hell am I doing wasting my time with these tools' Accept that some people are just fucked. If in your heart you tried your best at the end of the day then they are the ones who have lost out! Cool blog & greetings from Australia

#8 Harry (Homepage) on 2005-07-21 17:01 (Reply)

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