Albawaba.com - Ramallah
A senior Palestinian official has described education as a forgotten victim of Al Aqsa Intifida that has gripped the occupied territories for the last two months. In an official report by Khalil Mahshi Director General for International and Public Relations in the Ministry of Education, Ramallah, of which Albawaba.com has received a copy, the official describes how the three A’s (absence, attitude and attention span) are having a very negative impact on Palestinian pupils’ ability to master the three R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic). By using the English proverb “You can take the horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink” as his theme, Mushi gives a sad but illuminating account of the negative effect the current troubles are having on the schoolchildren of Palestine.
It is widely accepted that frequent absence from school has a very detrimental effect on pupils’ academic progress and personal development. Using Mushi’s allegory, the ‘horses’ often don’t reach the educational water.
“I called four schools for boys and girls across the whole age spectrum,” comments Mahshi, “most indicated good attendance but also quoted many examples of the difficulties pupils were having reaching their schools and returning home.”
The high attendance figures for Palestinian schools are remarkable considering the almost nightly traumatic experiences of many pupils.
Mahshi, for example, reports that “on the evening of November 24th, clashes erupted between the Israeli army and the Palestinian police close to the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the south of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army fired rockets and heavy machine guns, from tanks and army boats at sea. Many of the shanties and concrete-block houses in the refugee camp close to the clashes were hit. In the shelling which started around 6.00 p.m. and continued until 2.00 in the morning, more than 40 citizens and 20 houses were hit, in addition to a mosque and a clinic. More than 100 families from the refugee camp fled their houses that night, in addition to hundreds more who took refuge with relatives outside the camp, and in other areas of Gaza, during the past few weeks. Those fleeing became, hopefully temporarily, refugees for the second time in their lives. Palestine TV and other local TV stations broadcast live footage of families fleeing their houses during the shelling. Tens of children, women and men were creeping and crawling in the narrow alleys in the refugee camp, away from danger.”
The following morning, Mushi called Dr.Abdel Munem, the Assistant Deputy Minister of Education for the Gaza strip to check on attendance and learned the surprising fact that the average attendance for all the schools in the area was over 90%. Mushi commented that Munem sounded tired from lack of sleep and the pressure of work under these emergency conditions. He and other senior colleagues from the Ministry of Education have not been able to reach their offices in Gaza city since November 20th when the Israeli army closed the road between the north and south of the Gaza Strip. “They have to use temporary offices in the Khan Yunis District Directorate of Education,” Mushi explained.
Many areas are suffering from a lack of teaching staff since teachers living in the north of the Gaza Strip cannot reach their schools. Using Mushi’s allegory again, the ‘horses”, managers and trainers cannot reach the “stables”.
Mahshi also asked the schools in his area about their pupils’ attitudes. Even though they were at school their traumatic experiences must surely have affected their ability to learn. Mahshi relates how he “pressed them (the schools) with questions about the children’s interest in schooling that day taking into consideration that they may have been scared the night before and not slept well due to the shelling and shooting.”
Many teachers told Mahshi that they find it helps to start classes by talking about the children’s experiences from the previous day. One of the teachers commented that this strategy “helps the children to wake up and become attentive. It also helps them to air their fears and hopefully, to overcome them.”
Knowingly, or unknowingly, these teachers are offering their pupils post-traumatic counseling – a technique used with great effect in North America to minimize the harmful short and long term effects of stressful situations. Counseling, again using the allegory, can put a “horse” in a mood to drink deeply from the educational water poured into the classroom by the teacher.
Mahshi’s final A is “a” for attention span - for how long will the “horse” drink before it becomes distracted and bolts from the “trough”?
“The attention span of pupils in schools in normal circumstances worldwide is known to be short,” explains Mahshi. “The lower the grade level, the shorter is the attention span. The more irrelevant the subject to the students, the shorter the attention span. The more abstract the lesson, the shorter the attention span. The more monotonous and boring the teacher, the shorter the attention span. This matter is a major challenge for teachers, curriculum specialists, teacher trainers and educators at large.”
“The Palestinian Curriculum Development Center (PCDC), at the Ministry of Education is taking attention spans into consideration when designing the new, Palestinian, textbooks” added Mahshi. They are producing colored textbooks which include a lot of illustrations, photos and practical activities to be done by students in class and after class hours. Textbooks for grades 1 and 6 are already in use this school year, as a test. Based on the results of this year’s test, the textbooks will, hopefully, be improved for the coming years.”
In the present situation in the West Bank, however, the best efforts of curriculum designers, text book authors, and teachers cannot completely cure pupil attention deficit. Following an incident such as the attack on the Khan Yunis refugee camp,
the children were, in the words of one school principal, “exhausted and some were sleepy.
“What do you expect? These are emergency conditions. We are implementing emergency plans to keep the children in school. It is therefore not surprising that the pupils have emergency attention spans, emergency concentration and emergency ability to understand what they are being taught!” said the official.
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
