Isyraf, Merwede, Jabran, Zainab and Co.

Teaching at an international school offers great challenges, some of them specific to the international audience you're facing. Here are a couple:

- Learning the students' names is never an easy task, but here it's particularly hard! (and getting the pronounciation right is another challenge) 

- As a French teacher, working on nationalities had never taken me that much time. When listing everyone's nationality in French, I thought the list would never end: most kids have at least two nationalities and they didn't want to leave out any single one!

- Pronounciation and language difficulties are different for every student, since their mother tongues are as diverse as Rumanian, Afrikaans, Urdu, Spanish, Arabic, Malay, Italian, Tagalog, English, etc.

- Having so many languages spoken in the classroom, it's very likely that some kid will find a similarity with his own language and want to highlight it in front of the class (guaranteed interruptions!)

- Assignments written by Arabic speakers who are still relatively new to the English language can be very hard to read! It kind of looks like it's been written with the left hand... (which is probably what my Arabic teacher must think of my Arabic handwriting!)

- You want to be very careful about what you say in the classroom since the kids, in spite of being only 12 years old, already have their own (or their community's) political opinions. 

  For instance, mentioning Denmark can put you into trouble (I thought the cartoons affair was an old story, but apparently it's not!).

  Or, when working on French-speaking countries with an atlas, you'll catch a Pakistani kid pointing at a map of the Indian subcontinent and arguing with a young Indian about why Pakistan has more legitimacy over Kashmir.

On the positive side, when asking them why they wanted to learn French, they were able to name plenty of good reasons, and these didn't include the typical "I like the way it sounds", or "my parents want me to". 

The fact that they're both immature young and already open onto the world actually makes it really fun for me, and I hope to have some more stories to share with you soon!