international schools in Dubai Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

Yesterday was ACBON Day. Not my favourite day in Dubai: Air conditioning back on day. And it seems to have arrived earlier this year.

It also coincided with what must surely be the best day in the school year: International Day, the day when everyone is proud to share their culture and traditions with their friends, and mums turn up in bosom-revealing costumes (the European ones, at least).

The children go to school wearing the national colours or traditional dress of their home country, then in the afternoon there’s a huge and colourful, cosmopolitan fair on the playing field.

Hello world!

Some 50 countries were represented out of the 85+ nationalities at the school, and browsing the stalls is always a culinary adventure: yesterday you could nibble on kimchi (from South Korea), Brazilian BBQ meat, a Victoria sponge cake (British), German Halal beer, Spanish paella and so much more, while admiring the Kiwi Haka dance and other performances from all around the world. There was a parade too, and the children had all painted flags that were strung up as décor.

It’s a wonderful afternoon – and you’d think all the parents would agree.

Apparently not so.

She was the first woman I met at the start of my stint selling coupons, for drinks and rides (and by rides, I mean the bouncy castle and slide. The amazing food was all provided by the mums, and was free).

“I want a dirham back,” she demanded. A shadow darkened her face. I couldn’t quite understand why she was so annoyed. Her forehead furrowed, and her eyebrows had hooded over eyes that blazed with anger.

Then her friend came over and wanted 20dhs back (the exchange rate, for those not in the UAE, makes a dirham worth about 18p and 20dhs about £3.50).

Ladies, let it go, I’m thinking. A dirham, really? The whole point of the fair is it’s a fund-raiser for the school, which presumably your children attend.

I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt (in Dubai, if you don’t understand someone’s behaviour, it’s always worth reminding yourself that their background is probably very different from your own – ie, they could be from war-torn Syria, or, if it’s a workman botching something in your home, he’s probably from a poverty-stricken village in rural Bangladesh).

But, no, it didn’t work. Their bling suggested otherwise, and they weren’t polite at all.

I’m looking around at all the hard, hard work so many parents had put into the afternoon – the cooking, baking, decorating, signage, assembling stalls, manning stalls for four hours.

While my co-coupon seller disappeared to ask if we could give refunds, I found myself bristling, then saying, “You know, everyone’s just volunteering here – the money all goes to the school.”

YOUR CHILD … YOUR CHILDREN … WILL BENEFIT, from things like iPads in the classrooms, and playground equipment. Except I didn’t actually say that.

“Aha,” she snapped back. “It goes to the parents.”

And I presume she meant the parents’ committee who’d organised everything – and I wondered, what on earth does she think they’re going to do with the funds?

Spend it all on gin?

Son1 attends an International Baccalaureate (IB) World Continuum School. I have no idea what the ‘world continuum’ bit means, but I do know that there are students enrolled from more than 80 different nationalities, and the importance of diversity and acceptance is hammered home to them.

I have to say, I do enjoy seeing the sea of faces in the playground, and all the myriad shades of skin and hair colour – there are Scandinavian children with the whitest blonde hair, Asian kids with beautiful, dark, almond-shaped eyes and perfect skin, and smiley, dark-haired youngsters from countries such as Iraq and Jordan. Other nations well represented at the school include Germany, France and South Africa.

Four IB programmes are offered, and something that’s quite different from the education I experienced is the focus on presenting their work orally. Besides breeding a new generation of toastmasters, I do think all this speaking in front of the class is instilling a level of confidence in these school kids that’s sure to be valuable in their careers down the line.

A leap of the imagination and you never know what you’ll find on board

But it also comes with its fair share of angst. (Being a risk-taker is another key IB ‘principle’, and as my friend put it, if your child isn’t a risk-taker, another system might be better).

Personally, I’ve been really impressed with the IB curriculum, especially by the way it encourages ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking; however, this weekend saw me nervously chewing my lip over Son1’s homework.

The words ‘Prepare an oral presentation (two minutes – not more, not less)’ immediately got my attention – as did the instructions to rehearse the speech, paying attention to clarity of voice, expression, posture and eye contact. Remember, these children are 8, going on 9 – and only cue cards were allowed.

The prompt we used was finding a bottle on the beach with something inside it. Son1 had to continue the story. At first, it was like extracting teeth – he ummed and ahhed, dropped his pencil, half slid off his chair, then ran off to the toilet, his mind a blank. It was only when we hit on the idea of a bottle from the Titanic that his imagination started firing on all cylinders.

Suddenly, his brain synapses went into overdrive. I could almost see his electrically excitable neurons lighting up, and out of his mouth flowed a (rather inspired, I thought) story about raising the Titanic from the seabed. To paraphrase, there was a magic ball in the bottle that was dropped over the shipwreck site, creating enormous waves that caused the Titanic to come to the surface.

“That’s great,” I encouraged, as he really got into the swing of it. “And was the ship in one piece?” (Yes) “As good as new, really?” “And what about all the passengers? Were they all brought back to life and reunited with their families?” Clearly, I needed a happy ending to history’s best-known maritime tragedy.

“Oh no, mummy!” he said, his eyes shining with story-telling glee. “They had blue skin, and their faces were falling off. They were zombies! There was a message with a handprint of blood, telling me I had to shoot them. All of them.”

If I do manage to make a writer of him, I think it’s safe to say his genre will be fantasy sci-fi.