A week... already?

It is hard for us to believe that another school week has ended. Time moves quickly here. It seems that the weeks end in the blink of an eye but at the same time it seems like we've been here for years.

It was a good week, it was a bad week.

Good
Swell made nice with the TAs again. It turns out that they hate their lives at the school and in Nablus. They don't like not doing anything but they've done nothing for so long that they don't see themselves doing something. They want to become clinicians but they were only trained in theoretical work and have no practical knowledge. Too little too late. They should have told us that at the beginning. During our time here we could have made them into bang-up clinicians. Swell asked if they would want us to help them if we were to come back. They don't think that they'll be back. So the already understaffed school is about to lose two helpers. They were also the ones to teach the glasses fabricating/dispensing class (which I won't do as I have NO skills in that field). It turns out that they have never dispensed a pair of glasses in their lives. So they are teaching something they don't know. Odd.

Bad
One of the TAs mentioned to Swell that she feels that his program is producing too many optometrists. This is something I've been worried about since our arrival. They are increasing class sizes every year. There are only 2 million people in Palestine. They do not need 30 new optometrists every year. If they were to limit class size the students would get a better education and it wouldn't saturate the optometry market. A situation analysis has never been done but needs to be done before they produce hundreds of unemployed optometrists.

The dean of the faculty of optometry is a very, very busy woman. She is married, has two young children, is working toward her law degree, and is on numerous committees, boards, etc. Swell found out that the dean has applied to get a masters in law following her summer graduation. I am uncertain what her future in the faculty of optometry is. Her secretary has been offered a scholarship to go to school in the UK. If she does well on her english test she'll be going there next year. As it stands there may be no-one to teach these kids or do administrative duties next year. I find this very interesting. It was a program that was started simply so the school could have a program. Very little effort has been put into ensuring a good curriculum is developed and that the program is appropriately sized and sustainable.

If you recall I was asked to make up a test for the second years. It was a test on procedures. I made one up that I thought was relatively easy. The average was 58% with a range from 42%-78%. It was predominately multiple choice with a few short answer questions. The types of questions they got wrong were very basic. They did abysmally.

Swell gave the third years a contact lens exam. The low was 7 out of 20 with a high of 19/20. The scores were all over the map. Abysmal.

We had a rough day yesterday trying to decide who's fault this is. Are we really just that bad at teaching? Is the language barrier really just that bad? In Swell's conversation with the TA she learned that all of the students have been very babied in this program. That they can do what they want, when they want. I guess that we've been a little bit different for them.

I wrote yet another email to the dean telling her of these problems. We'll see where that goes. In the meantime we have two weeks of classes left (but Tuesday is a holiday - May Day) and then one week of exams. At some point I'm supposed to give the third years a final practical exam. They will fail. What do you do when they fail and you have no time to make it up? A disaster that we've decided is not our fault. This has been a great experience for a lot of reasons.