Teaching and Learning in Egypt

I hadn’t opened my eyes to the world when I joined the English department at university. However, I was lucky to find some of the hard-nosed academics who somehow passed on to us a sense of excellence that was, and perhaps still is, hard to find in our schools and universities. Circumstances always put me in closer contact with the academic staff to the extent that I was called a teacher’s pet behind my back.

Although I had a chance to be trained by some of Egypt’s best and brightest academics, I still had a greater aspiration for a better education that, sadly, I can’t yet find in Egyptian schools.

For two years I attempted graduate studies in one of Egypt’s top universities. Some courses really satisfied my thirst for linguistic knowledge, yet something was lacking to make me the kind of teacher I wanted to be. The part of graduate work I did didn’t include the kind of learner training I wished to receive. I wanted to be able to stand on my own feet in academia, not just stack my head with information and recall it when needed. To be honest, our teachers were so generous founts of knowledge and they did allow and demand discussion. The one thing I felt missing however was that we were not trained to do academic reading. All we knew is that we had a big pile of linguistic and literary texts to ‘study’ and cram for the final exam. I hardly ever remember any of those texts.

I tried to make it and pass to a next year qualifying for a master’s degree course, but couldn’t. I could pass exams, but actually learned nothing much. I decided to quit until I can find an opportunity outside Egypt.

I carried on in my teaching until I wanted to take my career a step further, which meant nothing like going back to graduate school. I knew what I wanted and where to go for it. It required substantial investment – for me – but I decided I must do it.

I applied for a CELTA course at the British Council in Egypt. Everything I missed, I found there. Anything I aspired for, was there.

Before the CELTA, one might have thought that ‘they’re going to teach us how to teach.’ When you actually show enough courage to start the course, you soon discover that – at least that was my case – they don’t teach you how to teach, but rather how to think about your teaching and go about it making decisions for yourself. They helped me start becoming the kind of teacher I longed to be.

Perhaps the most prominent thing I learnt on the CELTA is how to take a learner’s view of teaching. I think I had had such a view before taking the CELTA – I wrote about how I imagined graduate studies when I was a graduate student – but the CELTA made such an attitude more established and profound in my teaching creed.

Of course the CELTA didn’t make us teaching gods. Neither did it make us the best teachers in the world. It only taught us that the best teacher in the world is each person’s imagination. Although the course was a carefully standardised one, our performance as trainees varied as to how far we met graduation standards. Nonetheless, I can confidently say that a ‘pass’ CELTA graduate and a ‘pass-A’ one both had a minimum level of teaching knowledge that enabled them to build themselves a nice teaching career.

What I’m trying to underline here is that education in Egypt needs to be geared towards graduating people with a minimum of knowledge and skills shared by all graduates. Of course individual differences between learners will play a part, but teachers and schools should do their job in the way they should, which is to enable learners to discover their talents and abilities and allow maximum use of such talents and skills.

Teachers whose best effort is preparing students for getting high exam scores are not doing our country any good. They only serve their own interests by making a lot of money out of private ‘so-called’ tuition. They do not even recognise that students themselves are changing. What a teacher spent a lifetime teaching, a student can now easily get at a couple of mouse clicks. In the age of the Internet – and the year of the hashtag – the teacher is not anymore the fount of all knowledge. A teacher who really hopes to continue to be must immediately redefine their role and look around beyond their ancient coursebooks.

I’ll finish off with a story to show how learners are so independent now that they may not need a knowledge transferring device called teacher. In one of my young learners’ lessons at the British Council, the topic was ‘The Solar System.’ I was supposed to teach some English about this topic and get the students speaking about it. I remember all I did in that lesson was show a picture of the solar system and nominate students to speak – just to make the class a little organised. It could be useful to know that the students in that class were between 7 and 9 years old.

Teachers these days must be willing to accommodate the fact that their students might be more savvy about some issues than they are, in which case the whole educational system must be redesigned to produce people who know how to go on a learning curve and use teachers who straightforwardly embrace this philosophy.

Endnote: Here's another relevant article I wrote when I was a graduate student. And this is another article of mine about teachers as learners.