Careers & Advising

If I was given one word to describe Advising and Career classes, I'd pick the word "ridiculous."

One period every week was dedicated to each Careers, and Advising. Mys. Faysan handled Advising, while the regional director, Mr. Hollandos, handled Careers. Sometimes, a sweet old man replaced Mr. Hollandos, though his name eludes me right now.

Advising was the most nerve-racking of all these sessions. Not entirely dissimilar to military-style inspections, Mrs. Faysan would walk between isles like the footsteps of doom, as the group leader checked every student's diary for omissions.

Our school had an absolutely brilliant diary that they designed in-house. I think it's one of the few diamonds-in-a-dung-heap type innovations that our school came up with, perhaps second only to their insistence not to have a ranking system, which wasn't really an innovation as much as it was a mindset. It is difficult to imagine that the administration had any capacity at creativity given their attitudes, but if they did design the diaries themselves, I'm impressed.

The diary was a detailed table labeled with single letters to mark subject name, material covered in class, homework assigned and their due date. It was a rather arduous task to fill it out to its completion all the time, so Mrs. Faysan made sure we were always on our toes.

One due date out of place would land a poor soul a detention. One subject missed, one single material covered of an entry a week old, and it was to the gallows. I can't recall if I was ever caught, but I don't think I was. I would have remembered the trauma. Other students who fell victim to these ridiculous detentions would actually spend breaks or lunchtimes before their Advising lessons, copying details from one diary to another.

After the diary Witch-Hunt was over, Mrs. Faysan would usually proceed to lecture us directly off an actual Advising textbook. It would have passages of testimonials from her former lackeys or lists of what a good student should be, followed by thinking and discussion questions that we as a class would "discuss."

Overall, Advising was a complete waste of time.

Careers was more interesting, though. Mr. Hollandos, his enthusiasm literally pouring out of his eyes, would pace to and fro at the front of the class, telling us stories of some smart kid in Cornell or some valedictorian in Carnegie-Mellon. And he didn't insist on checking diaries, although sometimes he did.

His replacement, an old man with a goatee and a pot belly who very much resembles Bernard Hill's character Theoden in The Lord of the Rings film adaptation, would rarely put people on detention. I can still recall myself forgetting something, and my group leader pointing this out to him. He lifted my diary, and looked at the missing entry for a moment, contemplating. He then handed it back to me, told me to fill it out and walked away. It was quite a moment, because I knew I was in for it this time, but was saved!

So once again, overall opinion? A splendid waste of time, much less stressful than Advising, and extremely relaxing. No complaints here.

Supervisors

Supervisors were the administration's foot-soldiers. They were in charge of things on the ground, of students picking fights during lunches and breaks, of lunch-time detentions or repeat AMSs or just generally hanging around to make the students aware of who was boss.

There were many supervisors in our school, and to brush them all with one colour would be very wrong. Some of them were really marvellous people.

Mr. Adnan is one of them. He was a short, stocky man, just past middle age, with greying temples. He spoke with a shrill voice, and he was my (and everyone's) favourite of the supervisors. An extremely reasonable man, he would help out whenever he could. Although he was the one in charge of pasting up all the AMS repeat lists in the middle of class (the ones that would distract everyone to no end), and also of going from class to class and reading out the names for detention, everyone liked him.

He would walk into class, and ask the teacher for a moment. "Excuse me, please," he would say in his refined Arabic accent, and the teacher would stop the class.

He would read out the names one by one, clearly, and really fast.

"You have detention today, one twenty, 9C classroom."

9C was one of the few ninth grade classrooms in the eigth grade corridor, and that class was always the focal point of detentions, all throughout my years in Choueifat. Mr. Adnan had several sons who also studied at the school. I never dealed with any of them, but his youngest son was in Grade 8 or 9 the year I graduated. I could pick him out in the middle of a crowd as Mr. Adnan, because he looked exactly like him.

While Mr. Adnan was in charge of reading out the names, Mr. Moammar was in charge of conducting them.

Mr. Moammar was one of the terrors among the supervisors. He was an old man who would smoke to no end, so his voice was deep and had a lot of bass to it, like the rumbling of a volcano. More often than not, the students would literally drive him mad, because although he was scary, he was also pretty maleable. He had a low flashpoint, but he wouldn't send people to Mr. Andari just for ticking him off, unlike Mrs. Faysan. I've seen Mr. Moammar on more than one occassion nearly hit some of the problematic local students, although he never went all the way, because it was against school policy.

He would go up into their faces with his fist clenched around a red pen he always carried, and he would yell something along the lines of "YA WALA!" which means "Boy!" as a warning. Sort of like, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry, boy!"

But Mr. Moammar wasn't all that bad. He had his bad days and his good days, and having to control the mindless rabble that was the crowd that regularly got detention, I suppose I can't blame him for evolving a predatorial attitude. My dealings with him were minimal, God be praised, but I have seen him smile, which is, by the way, quite a sight. Mr. Moammar, smiling and joking with the same local students whose posteriors were about to feel his boot a few days ago. With me, he neither yelled nor smiled, for which I was very thankful.

Mr. Thomas was one of the newer supervisors. What his function was toward the beginning, I have no idea. He was famous for wandering pointlessly from corridor to corridor during classes and breaks, and it was obvious that he landed the job initially from a contact he had somewhere in school, most probably Mrs. Faysan.

He was famous for a phrase he would use very frequently. When a student was in his clutches, and the student was bad, almost like the secret police would say, "I don't know what we're going to do with you," he would say "What to do?" in his broken English. He was, no doubt, another one of those French-educated Lebanese people with both the courage and the compelling need to work full-time at an English institution.

They made a song about his "What to do?" epithet at some point, of which only two lines I can clearly remember:

"Tommy's there for you,
When you donno what to do."

There were more lines, a complete song, I believe. But that was all I had ever heard in my time there, and I was satisfied with that. Because although Mr. Thomas probably had nothing to do the first few years of his job (and he was made fun of to no end during that time), he later went into the IT department at school, and became a rather important person.

In fact, me and some friends had the pleasure of working under him on one of his projects to design a computer-based multiple choice testing system.

Employee turnover at our school was probably one of the highest in the world, second perhaps to companies that hire daily labours. There was one supervisor whose presence I can remember for about two of the three semesters of a year. He was either an Irishman or a Scot (hard to tell between the two for me), very pleasant and fun to work with. It's hard to tell under what capacity he was hired, but whatever that capacity was, he only lasted about 6 months.

There were others, who came and went throughout the years. Mr. Thomas, Mr. Moammar and Mr. Adnan are the ones that were there the year I graduated.