by Conrad Lee
(Conrad Lee ’12 is in Trumbull College. Conrad is spending the summer in Jordan, where he will be teaching a program at King’s Academy and exploring nearby Amman in search of a deeper understanding of recent political events.)
I arrived in Jordan just after dusk. Looking out the window as the plane began its descent, I caught the last glimpses of the sunset as it spread long swaths of red and orange over the vast expanse of desert. Moments later we passed above Amman with its glittering lights, and soon afterwards felt the tarmac. That was my welcome to Jordan, and it describes how the country sat for a long time in my imagination. A city in the desert. But as I discovered, in the desert there was also an oasis.
I am here to teach a class of 8th graders as part of the Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) at King’s Academy. The school was founded in the summer of 2007 after King Abdullah II, the current king of Jordan, decided to realise his dream of building a boarding school that could bring to his country an education as rigorous and enriching as the one he had experienced while attending Deerfield Academy in the United States. The school that he created is a lush eden of grassy lawns and stone hallways surrounded on all sides by sand and rock. Students and faculty come from around the world, encompassing a wide array of backgrounds including Jordan, other Arab states, and the West. Soon after the school’s founding, SEP was developed as a way of ensuring that the benefits of a high quality education were made available to talented low income middle school students. This was to be accomplished through a selective two-week program in English and computer literacy during the summer. In the past, several students from SEP have gone on to attend King’s Academy.
This year, about one hundred and ten students will attend SEP, and I am one of ten teachers responsible for giving these students a solid grounding in English while they are here. Among the other teachers are two recent Oxford graduates, a current member of the inaugural freshman class at NYU Abu Dhabi (which opened last fall), and a former teacher of Mark Zuckerberg. To assist with any possible language barriers, we have fifteen to twenty counsellors here as well. Many of them are from Jordan and currently attend King’s Academy. We are here several days early to prepare class materials and plan the many extra-curricular and social activities we hope will make the experience fun as well as educational.
Today, the teachers and counsellors took the bus to Wadi Mujib Canyon on a field trip, mostly to get to know each other a little before starting class preparations. The gorge reminded me Petra, which I have only seen before in National Geographic, and which we will hopefully visit after the program. We hiked up a knee-high stream and climbed small waterfalls surrounded by deep canyon walls, then floated back down the way we came.
In the coming weeks I will be reporting from King’s Academy, and then journeying to Amman and the the surrounding region to learn more about the current reform process and other political events.