Preparing for school start

Tomorrow marks the first day of me teaching here in Abu Dhabi.  Not really as nervous as I probably should be.  I will prepare the best I can, but really my objective tomorrow is to establish a presence in my classroom, one that the students will respect.  It helps being really tall and have an athletic build.  My first goal is to have complete control of my classroom.  They don't have to understand all the words I am saying to understand that I won't tolerate nonsense in my class.  The thing that makes this first day hard is just not having much experience with these kids.  This will be my first time with Emirate students so there are some cultural differences and other things I have to understand.  I am, however, going by the theory that at the core of it all, kids are kids.  They are going to be feeling me out at the very beginning to figure out what they can get away with, and what they can't.  And since they may not understand everything I am saying they will primarily be basing this information on my demeanor and personality.  I usually project a loose easy going personality to get my students relaxed followed by communicating what is acceptable in the class and what is not.  I try not to be the traditional my hard nose, you do what I say or else, teacher because I found that the students respond better to a less militaristic approach.  Beside, back in the States I was trying to encourage the kids to think and explore ideas, and pressuring them to think is like trying to force someone to be happy and carefree by threatening to kill them if they don't cooperate.

Here, however, I believe that that hard nose strict approach is what they are used to.  One teacher that taught last year described the class room in a way that I thought was helpful.  The teacher is like the sheik of the classroom.  Here, the sheiks are the rulers and they have all the say.  This is a community that is used to "what I say goes."  They are not used to the democracy of having a say, but assume that the Westerners will let them.  But unfortunately, like all kids, they take advantage of this and will take whatever the teacher is willing to give.  Before long they could be running all over teacher, teacher loses respect and more than likely will not gain it back.  I don't plan on revolutionizing the politics of the U.A.E.in my classroom, so I will make sure to establish myself as the sheik with authority, not so much that it turns off the students, but enough to show that I am in control.  This is the plan; we'll see how it goes.