I've tacked this on to my old blog as a "service" to teachers who may be thinking about making Cairo their home. I hope it helps.

The Bad:

1. International schools in Cairo are businesses. Nothing more. They do not exist for any other purpose than to make money. You are an employee of that business first, and a teacher of children second. The business these schools are in is to graduate kids with A's. These kids need these A's in order to get into engineering or medical school, which is the only degree any of these kids, or more specifically their parents, want. (Sort of like how being a doctor or lawyer in the U.S. was so important to rich parents back in the day.) The customers you are serving as the employee of this business are the parents of the children you are teaching. The school may alter the grades to insure the child gets his A+ to get into engineering school. (Businesses need good word of mouth; you do not get that with unhappy customers.)

2. Many of your students know that the work they do in your class may not reflect their final grade, so will do no work. Or they have come from schools where the work they do did not reflect their final grade, so enter your room assuming they need to do no work.

3. American schools here in Cairo have a reputation as "easy." And in many ways, compared to the National and IGCSE systems, it is easier. Your kids, especially ones new to the American system, are probably kids that could not make it in other systems or schools or  come into your school assuming it'll be a piece of cake.

4. The kids you will be teaching are the rich of Egypt. Many have no concept of personal responsibility, honesty, or hard work. Wealthy Egyptian society does not reward those types of behavior, especially for the children of the rich. This is especially true of the boys. (I'd give anything to teach in an all girl’s school. Anything.) The boys here grow up in a family atmosphere where anything they do is good and where all their needs are catered to, where they know that no matter what dad will have bought them the apartment they need in order to get married, the car they need to get around, and probably the job they need to earn a living. Their only job as adolescents is to get into engineering school. You’d think this would drive them to excel, but you’d be wrong.

5. Egypt is a very class conscious society. People below your class are there to serve you. Egyptian teachers are part of the servant class. Your kids will have probably come up through what is known here as “The National System.” The public schools in Cairo are a nightmare. Horrible places. So anyone with any money sends their kids to private schools. The national system is the private school version of a public Egyptian school. They teach the same curriculum, take the same exams, only in rooms with windows, fans, chalk boards and books. Parents usually send their kids to these schools from K through 10^th or 11^th grade as they are far cheaper than the IGCSE (British) and American schools. Many then dump them into the American schools if it looks like they will not be able to pass at their current school with a grade good enough to get them into university. The teachers at these national schools are not trained teachers. The vast majority of them are engineers who could not find work, mathematicians who could not find work, and doctors who could not find work. These people are being paid slave wages and are working in conditions not much better than the public schools. They have rooms packed with unruly children who have no respect for them, are being forced to teach subjects they do not know and are not trained to teach, and know all that matters is the exam at the end of the year. So what do they do? They beat the kids, yell at the kids, and only teach half of what the kid needs to learn for the final exam. The other half of what needs to be learned is taught in “tutoring sessions” at the teacher’s home, which cost extra. All this means is that when little Ahmed comes into your classroom the first day of school his only experience with many teachers are the ones who hit him, who are a lower class than him and who never really gave a damn about him or his grades. In other words you get students who are used to running amok, used to little to no actual learning going on in a classroom and are used to telling their teachers to go to hell and getting away with it.

6. Discipline is a nightmare. “Full of energy” is the nice way of describing these kids. Unruly and disrespectful is a bit more accurate. They’ll lie to your face, ignore your attempts at management and will argue with you for hours over anything that happens that may adversely affect them (arguing is a national pastime here).

7. Cutting corners is also a national pastime in Egypt and your kids will do the same. Plagiarism? Nothing wrong with it at all. Cheating? Perfectly acceptable under any circumstances.

7. Forget any kind of critical thinking learning or active learning. These kids have absolutely no concept of it. Thinking independently is not a valued trait in this country and the educational system does not reward it. Group work is unheard of, so the first time you try it you’ll be in for a nasty surprise. The first time you ask a student’s opinion on anything you’ll be answered with, “where do I find that answer in the book?” Anything that requires an independent thought will be met with stunned silence or a class wide freak-out. The educational system here is based around “The Final Exam.” Nothing else matters. Your students only have experience in rote memorization. Nothing else.

Now for the good stuff:

1. I love all my kids. Hard to believe after what I’ve said above, but it’s true. I teach about 100 kids a day and with maybe one or two exceptions I love them all. Sure they’re Unruly, but they’re also truly full of energy and life. I cannot tell you how out of control these kids are. But it’s not an evil out of control. It’s just kids who’ve never been taught to sit still. If you treat them with love and respect, they’ll give it back to you in spades. (Sure, they’ll still lie to your face, swearing their dad really was in the hospital so they could not do their homework, but they’ll do it with love.) Sometimes I end a class early and let the kids do whatever they want. Suddenly the whole class will burst into song and dance. Kids will start banging out a beat on the desk, the girls will begin to dance, the boys will sing along, it’s magical and I would not trade those moments for anything. I go home on many nights totally beat from spending my day trying to get my kids to care, but I’ll try to remember that these are kids who’ve been really given the short end of a real education, have rarely been disciplined for anything, and… they’re just kids.

2. As a teacher here, you can teach  pretty much anyway you want. It really is pure teaching. No real standards. Very little oversight. I’ve experimented like crazy since being here. I’ve learned a lot about teaching. It’s great. You gotta be a very flexible teacher to survive teaching here; if you are you’ll go far. If you are not, you’ll quit and go home.

3. Discipline will be your biggest challenge, but as I mentioned above, the kids are not evil or scary. You will have no pregnant girls, no weapons, no school cliques, no girlfriend/boyfriend issues, no racial issues… The kids, at least at my school, bond very well.

4. Egypt is a great country! Egyptians are fun loving, friendly people. Your students will be the same. Again, the trick to making it as a teacher here is to gain the respect of your students. They will not learn for the sake of learning and they will not follow your directions because it’s what you are supposed to do in a classroom. They’ll only do it if they like and respect you.

5. Egypt is really a great country! Everything is dirt cheap here. With your wages you can live very very well here. You can have a nice flat, a housecleaner, a cook… You can eat out every night and travel every weekend if you choose. All of Europe is a $250 flight away. All of the Middle East, the same. Egypt has 5,000 years of history at your doorstep and some of the best diving and snorkeling in the world only hours away. Last July, at the end of the school year my wife and I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Sharm el-Sheik for a week. With my work visa we got a $750 a night room for $95 a night. In a hundred years we’d never be able to afford anything like that back home. We’ve taken long weekend trips to resorts, beaches and dive spots just for fun. Again, back home we’d have to save for years for the same experience. It’s a great lifestyle.

6. The expat community is large in Cairo, but very friendly. There are a number of clubs just for expats that are great places to escape the grind of living here. (While Egypt is a great country, it’s also a real pain in the neck sometimes. It’s nice to “escape” the reality of the place occasionally.) There are hundreds of excellent restaurants that serve up any type of food you’d be interested in. Once to get involved with the expat crowd, you’ll have a blast. We rent yachts for parties on the Nile, sail the same river on Thursday night felucca parties, go camping in the desert, take deep sea fishing trips on the Red Sea and drink a lot of beer.

There majority of schools here are pretty bad. Truly schools that operate as only businesses. They’ll lie to you. They’ll screw you. They’ll treat your contract as only a theory, not binding. So you gotta be careful. My school was a nightmare. Every day my stomach would knot up as our bus got closer to campus. Every night I’d swear I was quitting. But after about four months I got into a groove. I began to understand my students and they began to understand me. It was never easy, but it became tolerable, even fun.

To survive teaching and living in Cairo you have to be chill, flexible and patient. You have to be the type that can roll with the insanity. If not you’ll be miserable. Don’t take a job here expecting a wonderful, enriching, teaching experience. It probably won’t be. Don’t take a job here thinking Cairo “can’t be that bad.” It is. Which is one of the things I love about it. It’s an insane, overcrowded, polluted, dirty, city. But I know that every day I’m going to see something I’ve never seen before. And for me that’s the reason I live overseas.