Tuesdays mean a meeting at 9am with the Principal. Today is Tuesday.
We have just had a great session for 40 minutes on the data analysis that informed our School Improvement Plan (see previous post).
I went through the process of tracking each grade in Arabic Reading and Arabic Writing for our school compared to all schools in Abu Dhabi and boys schools of our status.
Basically our boys perform really well at writing but poorly compared to other boys in reading (actually it's more specific than that - it's that our middle ability boys are not making improvements into better grades).
Their scores in writing are far superior.
So I went through this process with Mohammed.
Mindful that he is tired and preoccupied with family things. One of his daughters is in a hospital in Dubai. Poor guy - for some weeks now he has been travelling each day and spending long hours with his family and daughter there.
He told me this morning that he was leaving for Dubai after our meeting today which is why I restricted it to 40 minutes.
It was a good 40 minutes though. Less is more (always).
Made me think about how difficult it is to listen with all of our might. All the time.
Our boy brains are zapping from thing to thing and it's often difficult to sustain an attention span.
Boys in class are no different.
Jacky asks me sometimes, "What are you thinking?"
I usually answer - billions of things and I'm not lying.
I think we need to remember that the people we work with have a number of things on their minds and giving us some undivided attention is at times impossible.
Basically we need to cut each other some slack!
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