Guest post: Teaching from the Heart by Denise Keene

As a special education teacher living in the United States, my job is to apply specific teaching techniques to educate children with special needs. The work is not easy. There is a lot of personal struggle on the part of the students. Many of them display frustration with themselves (and with you, the teacher) on a daily basis. Verbal communication is often difficult to understand for both the students and the teachers, as many of my students have delayed language skills. The classroom is often a storm of chaos.

However, within all this confusion, there is a silent understanding between myself and my students. This understanding is made possible not through words but through actions and feelings. As many know, human beings can and do communicate with one another through the energy we give off and the body language we use. Although my students never look me in the eye and say, “thank you for teaching me, Mrs. Keene,” I know that they appreciate me. Their happy energy and unexpected hugs tell me so. And although I can’t express to them how much I care through words, I know that they understand my love for them, because I remain positive that they will eventually learn everything.

We are able to have this mutual understanding, because I practice teaching from the heart. This is an action that sounds like it is difficult to master, but it is actually quite simple. All it means is that you leave behind all your pre-conceived notions about learning. It also means that you refrain from thinking of yourself as a master of the subject you are teaching and more of a nurturing guide. Instead of just repeating information to your students, you guide them to the information through hands-on, self-operated activities. This is especially important for teachers of special needs children, because most students with special needs don’t respond to long informative speeches or verbal directions. They are visual and active learners.

For me, teaching from the heart also means throwing scheduled “learn by” dates out the window. This is a practice that is very difficult for people to accept, because we have been brainwashed to believe that all humans should be able to learn at the same rate. This is not true in special education, and it isn’t true in regular education, either. The saddest thing is to see a child who has been made to think they aren’t smart, because they didn’t learn to complete a certain task by a certain date. This kind of learning is based on pressure, stress, unwarranted feelings of defeat and more attention given to the performance rating of the overall school than the education of the individual child. These things do not happen when you teach from the heart.

In a nutshell, when you allow your heart to guide your teaching practices, you create a more nurturing learning environment for your students; an environment that produces a more positive response from students and excites more interest in learning.

Denise Keene has been a Special Education teacher for 15 years and likes to write articles about various related topics. She also owns the site <a href=http://www.mastersinspecialeducation.org>Masters In Special Education</a>.

 

Hang on to your seats… here we go with home schooling!!!

This poor neglected blog has been sitting idle for so long that it is growing cobwebs… and my dashboard tells me that the maximum viewers I have had in a day for more than a year is about 6. Today i posted a link to the home schooling network I have just joined here in Pakistan, and my stats have shot up to over 80 views in a day!!! MashAllah! What that tells me is that perhaps there is a good reason to start writing again, since home schooling is my new passion and is clearly the passion of plenty of other people around.

So here I go…. back to the blog inshAllah!!

We have been back in Pakistan for almost 4 years now, and that has involved 3.5 years of screaming at the Pakistani schooling system that says that the best way for kids to learn is to cram information down their throats and see how well they can regurgitate it. After 3.5 years of this torture (I am a bit slow really) I finally and very suddenly decided that enough was enough, and i was going to yank my kids out of school and start home schooling. While I was screaming all those years, my kids were crying with frustration at the same school system – the 10kg bags they had to lug to school every day, the 30 minutes drive to and from which in summer was nigh on unbearable, the insensitivity of the teachers, the stupidity of many of the kids, the massive waste of time that went on nearly every day when teachers were absent or busy etc etc etc. Not to mention the inordinate amount of stress heaped on the kids to do exams every 2 months, maintain their performance, come first in the class blah blah blah.

I am sorry, but this is not MY philosophy of education.

I have long held a private dream to start a school called ‘Love of Learning’…. but i never realised it was going to be with my own kids! I believe that school should teach children to learn rather than shove information down their throats. I believe that if kids learn at their own pace and the things that they want to learn, then there will not be a dread associated with it, but rather a love. I also believe that the basis of all learning for Muslim kids should be Islamic character. What does it really mean to be a Muslim… how to behave, how to treat others, how to think and how to relate to Allah, because as we all know, Islam is a complete way of life. Why is it then that in school it is just one tiny subject, and taught in such a boring way that everyone dreads it from the earliest days of school until the end?

So we are home schooling, and of course it is not as easy as it looks!! In fact the first month was filled almost entirely with horseriding (which we now finally have time to do). The second month is so far about me getting my act together as a teacher and deciding how much of the school curriculum we should be doing, and how much of our own projects. Does it matter that the kids are getting behind their school friends? Are we doing enough? Should we be working towards the O level exams or just doing our own thing? Should I stop them playing on their computers?

So far the biggest sign of success is that the kids don’t complain about school in the mornings. I wouldnt say we are ‘loving learning’ just yet… give us another few months for that!! But we are certainly ‘liking’ it a whole lot more, and that is a significant victory. Al Hamdulillah!!!

 

Al Hamdulillah

All Hamdulillah.

Thank you Allah for all the blessings you have thrust upon me in the last week but have been too busy and ungrateful to notice.

Thank you for 8 new projects for my writing team in one week that have seemed completely insurmountable but now have almost completed thanks to my champion team and a whole lot of angst on my part. Thanks particularly to the many writers who submitted their work late and taught me to keep a bit of perspective on the writing gig – indeed it is not going to save the world, a country or even a person. It is just a job!

Thanks for my fantastic kids who are my best friends and never fail to put me back in my place as an inadequate human being that cant think of anything to give them for lunch, forgets to make them brush their teeth and cant be bothered to push them any harder to study for their exams, despite them still not knowing how tall Nanga Parbat is.

Thanks for the incredibly confronting lessons in mortality these last couple of weeks with more people dying around me than have died in my whole previous 40 years. The learning has been enormous and although I continue to grieve for all of them, the sweet preciousness of life that I still have is more keenly felt than ever before. The inspiration of the strong people around me serves more and more as a reminder of how to live with faith and without fear.

Thanks for all those I love and who are my friends despite my uncountable failings. InshAllah by the time my own end comes, I will have done something that has made Allah happy with me.

 

Amin

 

Every breath you take…

“Every drop of sweat

And every breath we take in life,

if not taken for the sake of Allah,

will lead to regret and sorrow on the Day of Judgement”

- Ibn-e-Qayyim

A friend of mine posted this on facebook today and it is so penetratingly apt. I am going through an altered reality few days where it feels pretty much like I am in one of those snow globe thingys being shaken up by Allah the One.

It started with “Inception” – which I started watching on Sunday night. Thanks to the pathetic speed of our home internet, even when I load a movie for hours it still has to buffer regularly, so when I am watching a movie I am also Facebooking, reading the news etc. So while watching Inception I came across a terrible story of a street car race in Bahria Town (just near us) where a car lost control and flipped over onto the crowd, killing at least 5 people. It was terrible and I was deeply moved by it. The obligatory You Tube video was eerie but i just couldnt bring myself to watch the accompanying video of the bodies. Here people seem to love blood and gore, but it feels like the height of disrespect to be seeing dead people like that. I turned off Facebook and persisted with the movie for a while. I think i am the only person left who has not seen it, so you will know that it is all about the altered perception of reality and what is REAL.

For those with spiritual leanings, you will know that the whole spiritual truth is that this life is not real – we have simplified the magnificent complexity of Allah’s creation of man into a living breathing ego that WANTS everything and veils us from the TRUTH. I am blessed to have a husband who reminds me of that in every day, and although I am a grand failure when it comes to living a spiritual life, I can see what he is talking about very clearly.

So Inception was gripping from that perspective, however at about 11pm I gave up on the buffering and left the movie until the morning. I slept with the haunting thought of those dead people squashed by that car, and their new realities. I thought of the mothers who had lost their children and loved ones and the new reality that they also had to face without the people they love.

Morning came and I got the kids off to school. I was still haunted by the car crash and looked up as much information as i could – which was not much except that there was a little girl in hospital and two fathers and sons killed. Watched a bit more of Inception and blew my mind a bit more, then headed off to school to pick up the kids. My 11 year old daughter came to the gate with a tear stained face etched in shock. “Did you hear?” she asked, and I learned with horror that two of those killed were our friends – Safi’s class fellow and cousin of her best friend, and his father. Their sister was in hospital in a serious condition and their mother, a friend of mine, was left with her life so smashed up it was hard to imagine how she could get through.

The snow globe of my reality shook so hard that I could barely stand and could barely breathe. NO. NO. NO. This was not even my family, but the shock was unbearable. Yet people die tragically every day dont they? Lives are shaken like this every day, yet we go on. There is a scene in Inception when the van is falling off the bridge and in their dreams they are without gravity. This is our lives really isnt it? Worlds within worlds, floating through what we call life. The jerks we receive in the form of life-changing moments are miniscule in perspective. The only thing that matters is to hold onto Allah. This family just built a new house, the wife was doing her PhD, they had a million plans. And now they are gone. Everything they thought would happen will now never happen. It was nothing but illusion in the first place.

So Ibn-e-Qayyim is so right that it is as unbearable as the tragedy unfolding here. There is NOTHING to live for except Allah the One. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

 

 

Anybody have an electric heater?

OK so it is REALLY cold here now. And in usual Pakistani style, there is no gas. Yeah, I know just earlier in the week I was blogging about the virtues of living in Pakistan – but I am not feeling so positive about Pakistan today. NOW I JUST WANT A HEATER THAT WORKS.

For those who dont know, I live in a house with 15 other people… a large assortment of parents in law, brothers and sisters in law and tonnes of kids. We have ONE gas connection for the whole house and that connection has to service the 4-burner stove (that runs for most of the day), 6 gas heaters (one for each bedroom), and three hot water heaters. Right now the gas supply in our one pipe is only just enough to boil water in about 15 minutes. That is because in this country, there is a shortage of EVERYTHING (most urgently a shortage of FORESIGHT in our cherished leaders). In summer there is not enough electricity to meet the country’s needs so we suffer from long long hours of load shedding. In winter there is not enough gas so we end up with gas shortages – even the gas service stations are closed for a couple of days a week (and ALL our cars run on gas).

So here I sit, with my hands INSIDE the heater, with enough heat to warm one finger at a time (which actually just seems to make me feel colder), and wish for the luxury of gas.

But hang on a minute! The solution to this is surely to get smarter and think outside the whingeing mentality. What we need is electric heaters in the winter and gas airconditioners in the summer! Well I am not sure if there is such thing as a gas AC, but there sure are electric heaters.

So who cares if our electricity rate is the highest in the world… I’m going heater SHOPPING!

 

PS: THIS is why we live here

And as an addendum to my post yesterday, THIS is why we live here:

I was at my kids’ Parent Teacher meeting the other day – you know the ones … where the teachers spend the whole time telling you how great your kids are but that they really should study harder. I was flicking through Nabihah’s folder of work when I came across a page that she had written for creative writing. The teacher said “yes, look at this!”, and I saw that they had to write “when I grow up I want to…..”

The very first point on my 9 year old daughter’s list was (and bear in mind she is a very normal child who spends far too much time playing computer games, hates to study and does not even like the daily half hour session with the Kari who teaches them Quran):

“When I grow up I want to be a good muslim, so that when I die I will be close to Allah”.

I had that flash of immense love that parents sometimes have, and asked what the other kids wrote, thinking perhaps that they were encouraged to write something religious. But no – Nabihah’s best friend wrote “I want to be the Queen of the World”, the boys wrote “I want to go to the moon”, “I want to be a doctor”, “I want to be a pilot” and suchlike.

I stood up with tears in my eyes and said to the teacher and the Principal “I dont care WHAT marks Nabihah gets in maths, social studies, science or whatever. This is what REALLY matters”.

And THAT’s why we live here. MASHALLAH!!!

 

 

 

 

Another day, another barber shop

I was sitting in the (strictly men only) barber shop the other day waiting for Shams to have his 4-monthly hair cut under extreme protest and found myself in the same conversation I have with just about every Pakistani here who wants to know what the hell a white girl is doing in a country like this.

I quite like these conversations because I have taken it on as one of my missions in life to make Pakistanis appreciate Pakistan a bit more. The conversation usually goes like this: “Do you work in the UN?” to which I reply “no”. “Are you a teacher?” to which I again reply “no”. “Ahh your husband is from Pakistan” … “yes, thats right”. “What does he do?”. That is where I usually get stuck. My feminist side wants to shout “Judge me by ME, not by what my husband does!!”. My loyal wife side wants to create an instantly appealing kind of job that my husband does so that everyone will immediately thing he is as great as I KNOW he is. My truthful side usually mutters something about hotels and shops (which is the truth), knowing that it is an unsatisfactory answer and the poor Pakistani I am talking to was hoping for me to say he was a high court judge or something equally spectacular. Part of that of course stems from the fact that they were hoping I would be married to some bigshot that would make them instantly rich (in a land ruled by corruption that is a common dream) I always qualify it by telling them that he is a great man, but the disappointment is always evident on their faces.

The next thing they ask is why I dont live in Australia. Now that one takes some pretty fancy Urdu to explain, and Allah only knows whether any of them ever really understand what I am talking about, but this is where my mission kicks in. I usually answer that we choose to live in Pakistan, as strange as it is, because we believe this is a better life for us and our children than Australia can offer. That really gets them stumped. To the average Pakistani, the ultimate dream is to escape as far as they can away from this country, which is a symbol to them of poverty, hunger and hopelessness. The idea of someone coming from the mythical jannat that is the West to this hell-hole is confounding to say the very least. “WHY? Australia is so BEUOOOOTIFUUL! There is so much money! They are so good at cricket!!!!”

Of course my “better life” explanation is never enough. How could it possibly be better? This barber was certainly not satisfied. Sure, Pakistan might be dirty, poor, disorganized and seem hopeless, but even then it offers so much that Australia cannot. Everything is so comfortable in Australia that it never pushes you. It is a nafsi life where you live and die and never really get the whole point of pushing yourself to be better. It is hard to see the blessings because they are EVERYWHERE. There is nobody to give charity to, there is nobody to give zakat to, there is nobody to even give the other 2/3 of your baqra to on Eid (well actually you cant even HAVE a baqra – its illegal).  As a muslim what kind of life is that?

“Look” I said, pointing to all the Quranic quotes covering the walls of the little barber shop. “No matter how bad Pakistan may seem, Allah is always near. In Australia everything SEEMS heavenly, but Allah’s name is nowhere to be seen”.

By this point in the conversation the barbers had all stopped what they were doing to listen to this bizarre female trying to talk about Islam – because no matter who you talk to, religious talk is ALWAYS listened to intently.

Shams finished his haircut and was dragging me out the door for his promised treat, but I finished by telling these simple guys that the west might look clean on the outside, but the heart is empty, whereas Pakistan is dirty on the outside, but there is still a grain of truth left in even the most hardened of hearts and that is enough to give the whole of Pakistan hope.

Feeling pretty happy that I was able to spread my message a little further, I started to leave and the barber (like just about everyone I have ever had this conversation with) leaned in out of earshot of the others in the shop and quietly asked…

“can you help me get a visa for Australia then…?

 

Eid Mubarak

It’s Eid here and the whole muslim world have become carnivores for a few days at least as we slaughter sheep, goats, cows and camels in the memory of the Prophet Abraham. It was of course Abraham who was asked to sacrifice his son for the sake of Allah as a test of his faith, and then at the last minute Ismail was replaced by a sheep.

This festival is my favourite here because there is no forgetting the religious background behind the dayThe meat is divided into 3 – one third for the poor, one third for family and neighbours, and one third for you. In Australia on Eid ul Azha Muslims give to a charity to kill their sheep for them. They never see the sheep or get the blessings of eating their third. They dont get to give the charitable third themselves or share with their family or neighbours. My friends in Dubai told me they have to give a camel at the abbatoir because you cant kill sheep or cows at home. Even in some richer parts of Islamabad you have to give the money to the local mosque because they dont let you kill them at home.

Here on the other hand, it is a 100% home affair. I have posted a few of our photos for posterity. This year at home we had 4 sheep and 6 goats. The sheep arrived at home a couple of days earlier so we got to make friends with them and they were just gorgeous. Of course that also meant that the kids were in tears by the time it came to kill them, but can you imagine how Abraham felt with his son under his knife?

So the day went something like this…. After Eid prayers at 8:30am, the family all ate Eid breakfast together (halwa puri, sevigna and cake) then the butcher arrived. All the sheep and goats were taken to the empty block across the road for their last meal and run around. Then the goats came one by one into the garden to be killed. There is no hacking and slashing – they are rolled onto their side, legs are held and with prayers their throat is quickly cut.

(As an aside, Cosima tells me that they did a study of animals killed in this halal method and those killed by first stunning… they put receptors in the brain to detect distress, and with stunning they continued to have distress until they were eventually killed, despite being unable to move. The halal killed animals who had their throats cut with “Allah hu Akbar” stopped their brain function immediately. In terms of humane treatment, halal killing is the best. Plus because the spinal chord is not severed, the meat is not suddenly tensed. )

So 6 goats were dispatched pretty quickly, left for a while to bleed, then hung up on the gate and their skins removed. The sheep then came through and were also killed. We had 2 sheep, and mine was the last. He developed a taste for the birdseed we keep downstairs, and had eaten about a kg of that by the time his turn had come… it was my job to keep him away from the killing so he didnt feel distressed, but he was already in birdseed heaven. I shed a quiet tear as he was killed, but also said plenty of prayers for both him and us, that Allah would accept the sacrifice.

The next 6 hours were spent butchering meat. This is a huge job – cutting it into pieces and splitting every animal by 3… scores of little bags made up for the poor (who had been banging on the gate since morning), different cuts of meat separated for our home use, and parts to be given to all the relatives. Big bags of meat were sent to all the neighbours. The skins were all given to different people (they are much prized), the heads were given to others, the feet to others, and the stomachs etc to still more. The fat is melted down for cooking and the only things that were not used was the intestines and some of the stomachs, but these were all collected up and removed.

My mother and father in law cooked the first livers and spleens and distributed them for everyone to eat (me under protest) and my kids made themselves scarce for the whole event because they had grown too attached to the sheep to be able to watch any of it.

Until late at night meat was being distributed to the poor and cars were running all over the city sending legs of sheep off to the family members.

To those who say that Eid is horrendous and cruel, I wish they were here to see the love that was given to these animals and the way they were sent off. It is just one of the many things that make me proud to be a muslim.

 

Looking for writers who actually WRITE

It is only 9:45am but I am already insane today.

Running a freelance writing team in this country is a bit like trying to round up cats. Everyone is so free-willed that when you finally get one walking where you want them, the others flee off in a different direction. Here for some reason, very few people seem to have the discipline to actually work. They all say they WANT to work, but every month I have to send a furious email to my whole team telling them to take this job seriously – or get lost.

This morning one of my writers submitted his measly 3 articles (2 days late) and informed me that he would be taking 2 weeks off as of Monday. Perhaps he was thinking that he was doing me a favour by giving me a day of notice. Very generous. That is on top of 4 other writers who have taken a week or two off for other reasons (sick, exams, blah blah blah) and another 5 who are so busy in the rest of their lives that they cant possibly fulfil the 2-3 hour commitment of working for me each day.

That leaves me a total of 3 writers that i can count on to do their work each day and those 3 are my saviors. Without them I would have long ago been committed to some kind of mental asylum.

When there is no work, everyone writes me daily emails asking where the work is and how they are suffering because they are not making money. Stupidly, I have this over developed sense of responsibility that means I spend about 5 hours a day at that time finding new work. This is no easy feat and it takes a week or so to even hear about most jobs. Then by the time the work comes in, those same writers have often somehow decided that they don’t need the money so badly after all and are not available.

Although I am theoretically the boss, I feel more like I am working for my writers than they are working for me. I think I am living proof of the Hadith about the end of times when the slave will be the master and the master will be the slave.

I would usually draw some parallels now between the lack of work ethic in my team and the complete lack of discipline in Pakistanis in general which means the whole country runs like crap. But I am too self absorbed to do that right now.

Right now I just want WRITERS WHO WRITE!

 

MAA KI DUAAA

The idea of “cool” is so strange, yet it somehow rules our lives.

When I was a kid in the 80′s, I knew what cool was, and I knew I wasn’t it. Cool was perfectly flicked hair, rollerskating to “I wanna know what love is…”, white shoes, being athletic and a whole lot more that I wasn’t even close to.

Then when I was in high school, cool was hating your mother, smoking, art classes and hanging out with the right people. I certainly was not cool. I was into sheep, wierd music, dressing like a hillbilly and poetry. I was like the antithesis of cool – I had a yearning to be different, yet I still really wanted to be cool.

I guess now that I am 40, cool shouldn’t matter so much any more, but it does. But because I live in Pakistan I have to readjust my whole idea of being cool. Here cool is not those horrendously tight skinny jeans with tiny t-shirts and overhanging bellies (thank God!) that everyone is wearing in Australia. Here cool is wearing this year’s print of cloth (perhaps only my mother in law understands that because I certainly have no idea). It is wearing just the right length of qamiz (those long shirts we wear over our pants) and the right combination of ribbon and piping to make them cool. I am destined to always be a year behind, because I just can’t bring myself to throw away all of last year’s clothes because they are too short, too long, have thin ribbon instead of thick etc etc etc.

My mother in law is so up with what is cool that even when she goes shopping for tupperware containers she asks the shopkeeper “what is the latest?”. She has a whole network of sisters who talk of the phone every day about what is the “latest” so they can keep up with the ever-changing trends. Every now and then Cosima and I manage to strike it lucky and get the thumbs up for having the coolest and latest clothes, but mostly we get the rolled eyes and despairing “what will we do with them?” kind of grunts that indicate we have once again failed to get it right.

The amazing thing about Pakistan is that God is ALWAYS cool here. In high school in Australia believing in God was a first class ticket  to un-coolness. God was definitely NOT cool. But here, young girls wear their hijab as a style statement. Hip young guys with slicked back hair and pointy shoes have stickers with I LOVE ALLAH on the back of their cars. Even my own kids write religious poetry for their friends, love to wear hijab and carry their praying beads with them.

And not only is God cool, but loving your mother is REALLY cool. Even now, admitting that you love your mother in Australia is ultimately daggy. There it is cool to be rebellious. Here it is cool to be submissive. Roll love of God and love of your mother in together and you have a recipe here for eternal coolness (and heaven as well!). Because here “cool” is not just judged by your peers, it is  judged by Allah and His presence is felt everywhere you go. Getting the big tick from Allah is the ultimate in cool.

One of my favourite wierd things here is the sticker that many of the Suzukis proudly display on their back windows. Suzukis are a form of transport a few rungs below taxis… they are like little buses, and the drivers of these vans are the maddest, craziest young blokes on the road. They always drive like they are in a street race and they are the coolest guys out. The sticker says “MAA KI DUAAA”. This means “My mother’s prayer”. In Islam it is said that heaven is under your mother’s feet, which means that it is through her prayer and love that you can achieve Allah’s love. Mother is like the gate to heaven. So the prayer of a mother is understood to be incredibly strong. These guys are acknowledging that it is thanks to their mother’s prayer that they have what they have…. even if it is just a rusted up 50 year old Suzuki van.

Now that is COOL.