by Titus Green

“So, are you listening? Zees is how you use the Blackboard for teaching your lessons online.”

Blackboard. Black hole more like. A colossal, dark void of pedagogic malpractice. Zoom and, even worse, Microsoft Screams were the chosen Silicon Valley Saviours for our gruesome parody of an English program. We were assembled in the stuffy lecture hall to receive technological guidance on the Promethean marvels that were going to save the university’s Preliminary Year English Program from the productivity wrecking waves of the Covid tsunami.

“Your course list is here. And zees is where you put students’ grades.” The Egyptian Math instructor leading this dismal tutorial was becoming more enthused with every syllable, as though the circumstances had magnified his importance to the university, and to his Saudi overlords. His great moment had come.

“But how do you get back to the main course menu?” asked Jim in irritated Glaswegian tones. “I cannae be messing around with all this high-tech, you know, when I’m trying to teach the lesson!” I wanted to shake the canny Scot’s hand because he spoke for the entire English teaching faculty, who had just wanted to collect their monthly tax-free pay cheques with minimal friction during their hardship postings in the Kingdom of No Humanity. However, the noxious invisible fiend from the east had other ideas, seeping through the King Fahad causeway and into Saudi Arabia in a diaphanous viral mist packed with pathogen. It had arrived and was wreaking its havoc.

“Pardon please. Again.” The Egyptian’s ears, conditioned by years of BBC English for listening practice, were in no condition to cope with Jim’s brogue and the Scotsman abandoned his line of questioning with a roll of the eyes and a dismissive hand-wave of weary disgust. Our shared sentiment was a bitter cocktail of dread and ennui, as we waited for the next digital dose of disaster from Google or Yahoo as COVID’s fluid narrative evolved in updated HTML pages.

More cranky questions followed, and the tutorial looked headed for derailment. I cast glances at colleagues and their blank expressions were barometers for disbelief that a virus from China had turned the planet into a giant prison inside six weeks, and that we were now inmates of this silent, sickening jailer. A key difference between us and the conventionally incarcerated was that normal prisoners did their time without obligations to deliver a third-rate cut-and-paste English language course remotely through convoluted menus, applications and screens.

“And zees are the instructor notification settings,” continued our guide earnestly to a space dense with the molecules of confusion and fear. Just two days earlier I had been walking down the campus Belt Road naively assuming it was going to be just another day of charades in front of a projector and sleepy, tardy boys with nothing but the desire for time to pass and to collect their attendance mark. On the road towards the 21 Building Tim, on a morning jog, called out to me.

“You won’t find anyone down there. The students have been sent home,” he informed me cheerily. It was not a complete surprise: the rumors of panic among the university’s executive management as the Wuhan curse had penetrated Iran and surged through the Gulf were rife. Then, it had reached Bahrain, infecting a taxi driver and hitch-hiking over the King Fahad Causeway. Apparently, it had also reached Qatif in the East, carried back by Shiite pilgrims returning from Iran. It was heading for us, across the deserts and through doors like a snarling jinn, and the clueless misleaders of Prince Salman University had not done a damn thing to prepare for this scenario.

“So, what now?” I asked.

“Dunno. I just bumped into Donald as I was crossing the road at the gymnasium. He stopped his car and shouted, “Ahoy there! Have you heard? The university’s sent the students home!” Then he sped off.

“Like a CNN reporter, on the spot?” I replied and we both laughed grimly in shared understanding of the frenetic Irishman’s self-installation as the faculty’s town crier and distributor of horror stories about former teachers.

“Can’t believe they couldn’t see this coming! What was wrong with them?” I asked as I surveyed a conspicuously deserted campus. Almost no traffic on the roads and no thobe-wearing figures within the vehicles either. A couple of vans of indentured Bangladeshi workers passed us as we spoke, but nobody else. The absence of Saudis was an ominous sign.

“Typical way in this part of the world isn’t it though? Always reactive, never proactive,” said Tim, who sounded resigned to whatever horrors Covid’s incoming meteor would inflict on us. While Tim’s pragmatic stoicism was a variety I admired, I knew it wasn’t going to be sufficient to fortify us for the troubles ahead. Something much stronger would be required.

“Yes, risk-assessments, contingency planning etc. These are compound nouns just not found in any Saudi management textbooks,” I added, contributing to our condemnation of Gulf ESL leadership. I thought about mentioning a former British colleague at my university in China who’d worked in Jeddah in 2011 and almost drowned in a flash flood when the city’s sewer-free drains could not cope with torrential rain. The tragedy had almost occurred because his employer, the English Council, had refused to close its teaching center during the downpour because the Country Director was paranoid about losing profits.

“Well, we don’t have any work then? No lessons to teach. No bone-idle, lard-arsed Saudi boys to chivvy along. I think this calls for a celebratory coffee down at the café, don’t you?” Tim’s grave look told me all was not well.

“I wouldn’t bother going down to the Student Mall. Everything’s been closed. The mini supermarket. The cafes. The works.”

Two hours later we received the intranet message outlining the first phase of our doom. In a terse, threatening tone we were told that due to the rapid spread of the virus the campus was under a curfew. The campus gates would be shut, the staff supermarket would now only be open from 9am to 3pm, giving us a minuscule window in which to get basic provisions from the store’s wretched shelves. Campus security guards would be patrolling and enforcing the curfew vigorously. Then, one hour after receiving this cheerful missive, an additional digital order came from Brad telling the entire faculty to assemble in the largest lecture hall of Building 20 at 12 noon sharp the next day. Our Program Director had been mercifully silent over the previous twenty-four hours, but now it was obvious he was carrying out his orders from above that, during the pandemic shitstorm, the pedagogic shitshow must go on.

When the how to migrate immediately to online teaching with subpar training and an atrocious IT infrastructure tutorial was over, we were ushered out of the room by officious factotums and left to fend for ourselves. In the corridor voices were raised and concerns forcefully expressed. We were told to continue teaching the program, from Building 21, using whatever online platform suited us. We were to do all the necessary online administration immediately, get class lists and meeting links prepared for students and somehow do all this and find time to get to the abysmal supermarket before three o’ clock to purchase some mouldy flatbreads for sustenance. Brad was ‘available’ in his office to answer questions but deflected all those concerning the robustness of the teaching building’s WIFI signal and network bandwidth. Program Manager Ishmael, meanwhile, was telling anyone with concerns to talk to the hand in his inimitable, empathic style.

“Well, what could go wrong?” I asked, attempting to introduce levity in front of Tim and a very irate Jim.

“It is not acceptable. They are hanging us out to dry! This is the support we’re getting while this is happening,” he replied angrily, referencing the pandemic’s exploding infection rates with his pronoun. Jim was still emotionally fragile from the passing of Rick three weeks earlier, although the amount of thought we were committing to that sad event was diminishing with each hour and tap-and-swipe check of Worldometer’s updated infection numbers. Covid’s baleful shadow was now massive, and we were shaded by the giant Hydra and its multiple, hissing serpentine heads. Very soon we would suffer when it flicked out its infectious tongues.

“And what are we going to do about coursebooks?” asked Tim with legitimate concern. “Have they scanned PDFs of Headway, National Geographic and the TOEFL books for us to use online? How the hell do they expect us to get all that scanning done by tomorrow?” As it transpired, we would be receiving almost no practical help from our American management in performing these miracles and absolutely zero from the Saudis, who seemed to have vanished like Marie Celeste crew members. We would have to rely on colleagues with copies of this magnificent material on flash-drives to share them with us.

***

“Hello Ahmed. Hello Nasser. Hello Osama? Can you hear me?” I felt like a flight controller anxious to make contact with astronauts lost and floating in Covid’s chaotic gravity. Where were my students? Why weren’t they joining the lesson? Did they know how to find the Join Course Room option in the right sub menu? Had I made the modules available? Had they checked their e-mails and, among the confusing plethora of drop-down menus and information overload, found the right link?  Or had they simply decided there were higher priorities during a global health emergency than participating in a shonky, shambolic English program rendered even more preposterous by remote delivery? If that is what they had decided, then I applauded their sanity. I looked at Blackboard Collaborate Ultra’s bleak, empty screen in disbelief. I thought about the bizarre experiences earlier in my ESL career, such as working fatiguing split-shifts in a dysfunctional Seoul hagwon that had reformed gangsters teaching TOEIC classes. However, that episode in high strangeness could not compete with this entrance into the Twilight Zone. Then I saw the little dotted circle rotating to indicate joining in progress and was relieved to see a solid black square with a white circle occupied by a rudimentary human silhouette appear. It was crafty Nasser, with his camera off, entering the meeting. I enabled his microphone, and the rascal spoke. 

“Doctor. Hello!” 

“Hello Nasser! Good to hear you! How are you?” An unexpected surge of warmth for these lethargic, unproductive young men filled me. Just hearing their voices had an ‘anchor on reality’ effect that, despite the incredible events taking place across the planet, a sliver of the old, futile yet familiar routine had survived. But how on earth I was going to teach prescriptive grammar classes through this graphical maze? I swatted the question away as more of the ‘old guard’ of expert shirkers appeared on screen.

“Cameras on please class.”

It was Brad’s edict: maximum surveillance of the students at all times to ensure that students couldn’t get away with join and then disappear routines as football matches, Netflix or PlayStation took over their attention while joining the meeting guaranteed their attendance and entitlement to university stipends. However, Blackboard Collaborate refused to cooperate, as the network buckled under the bandwidth demands of so many genies appearing after I’d rubbed Blackboard’s magic lamp. Suddenly, their guttural syllables became a mess of garbled, tinny noise. Airborne bit strings disintegrated, voices vanished and figures in the onscreen cubicles turned into circular silhouettes and then disappeared. 

“Khalid! Osama! Naif!” I called in despair, wanting the lesson to proceed in some way at least. Anything. Any positive outcome to keep the despotic management off my back during this turbulent, pathogenic dystopia. Moments later, the little dotted revolving circles reappeared and my proteges started returning. The pedagogical prison was repopulating, care of cutting-edge technology, but as soon as the little thumbnail figures in pale thobes with blurred backgrounds arrived, yet again they vanished.

“Cameras off please class. The network cannot support all the video streaming.” To hell with the unworkable department edict. If it didn’t have the proper network facilities for twenty actors for this farce, joining from all points of the kingdom, then that was the university’s issue. The lesson proceeded, with recurring disappearances, as I scrolled down the contents page of the Headway Intermediate workbook, viewing its vast catalogue of grammatical reinforcement with disbelief. I was obliged to subject the class to a gap-fill activity to practice using type 1 phrasal verbs. Get out of here. Fly away from this worsening mess were the type 1 verbs I wished to add to the dreary cloze text confronting us. I’d have to preview the exercises carefully before each lesson however because we had no choice but to use the standard, non-halal editions of Headway. The department had no soft copies of the ‘Middle East Edition’ to share with us, and as far as we knew was making no effort to obtain any. My lesson survived for thirty-five minutes before the network of fiber optic canals, overflowing from this nonsense, and the WIFI airwaves gave up the ghost. Tense, agitated voices in the corridor summoned me. 

“Looks like the network’s on the fritz,” said Ibrahim, an American convert, to Jim and his office-mate Paul. I walked over and greeted them with a weary grin and other faculty members emerged from their offices.

“Isn’t this an absolute car-crash of an exercise? It is a pile-up on the M25 motorway,” I said with a rueful head shake. Ibrahim, a native of Michigan, frowned at the word motorway.

“How does it work, with both of you in the office teaching online at the same time?” I asked Jim and Paul. Jim looked even more exasperated than two days previously when we’d left the training meeting. He usually got on well with his English officemate Paul, yet there was clearly tension brewing.

“It doesn’t,” said Paul peevishly.

“We have to wait until the other finishes talking, and then get our instructions or comments in. If we talk at the same time, they cannae hear us. It’s a total mess,” said Jim, whose watery eyes suggested a determination to do a good job, and to be professional in his delivery of lessons however horrific the working conditions. Poor Jim, a former merchant seaman and generous sugar-daddy to at least three Thai ladies over the causeway, was close to crying and I confess I was near to tears myself. Get out of this place. The type 1 phrasal verb tormented us, and malevolent, guttural laughter emanated from the closed terminals of the kingdom’s shut-down airports. Were we to become trapped, forgotten lepers in this compound of stress, teaching doomed Blackboard Collaborate lessons until we starved, or the Delta variant cornered us, and we coughed to death in ‘self-isolation’ with large, hazmat-suited campus security guards poking us with disinfected cattle-prods?

Later in the day, after I had had a similar experience with my second class, I walked despondently over to the student mall in search of sustenance. The university had kept one grimy little broiled chicken and rice stall in the mall open, where you could obtain the same bland, dry portion of chicken mandi daily served up by taciturn, masked workers from South-East Asia. Since I had to be back at my hovel by 3o’clock sharp for the curfew, these tasteless, high-carb meals were the only hot food I’d be getting each day. The glaring sun heated everything. Giant cockroaches, with their cherry wood coloured armour, scuttled around the refuse skip at the back of the mall and scrawny, mangy stray cats launched themselves up to the torn bin-liners stacked up at the top. Then the adhan broke out and its plaintive, lamenting call had never sounded so forlorn. It called believers to empty mosques, since big assemblies were now forbidden. The only submission would be of the remote kind. Digital lessons and prayers transmitted on Covid’s cruel, confining bandwidth. The university’s main gates were shut, with ingress and egress forbidden by scowling security guards. All we needed was Prince Prospero to throw a masquerade to guide us to obscure gothic deaths, miles from our homelands. Back in Building 21, I eavesdropped on remote lessons in progress as I passed office doors in the corridor.

“Sultan! Turn your camera on or you get no attendance,” growled the familiar, peeved nasal tone of Phil from Birmingham just as his South African officemate Ron chimed in with the page number of a Headway Intermediate Workbook exercise the sleeping scholars of Hofuf were supposed to be doing. Then I caught the barely audible murmur of a student reply ‘from the other side’ of this surreal séance with the academically deceased. I could make out no words, but the familiar whiny intonation indicated the speaker wasn’t happy with Phil’s long-distance discipline. “Now listen, don’t try my patience—“That’s not an irregular verb, there’s no ed.” Phil and Ron’s voices were colliding in the shared office, and I wondered why they hadn’t tried using  headsets to make the challenging ‘two instructors remote-teaching in same room and time’ set-up possible. From outside, the ambient noise was like that of an international scam call-centre when Raj from Delhi calls and says there is a critical problem with your Windows OS, with exhortations to participate and pay attention substituting long-distance con scripts memorized ad nauseum. Further on, it was panic stations inside Donald’s office, with the garrulous Irishman flustered and frantic as connections crumbled and with them the possibility of hustling his students for high evaluations.  

“Ahoy there! Tariq! You’ve gone. No! You’re back again. Bilal’s coming in now…” In his excitement, Donald had become a Galway horse-racing commentator but there were no academic thoroughbreds amongst the runners, just fatigued, confused young men from a generation not used to curfews, masks or social distancing. 

I heard sobbing, and when I turned left down the corridor, I found Jim in a crumpled heap in front of the door of an empty classroom. Copious tears were coursing down his craggy face. His bulbous, beetroot-coloured boozer’s nose was massive and his pink, glistening eyes were the vulnerable messengers of his misery.

“Jim, mate, what’s wrong?” I asked disingenuously, knowing the obvious situation.

“I couldnae teach the lads with the racket y’ know. The noise from Paul’s big geggie when I’m trying to talk. I asked him to wait until I’ve finished my turn to say the next instruction to the students, and it’s just nae working.” It seemed like the last forty-eight hours had aged him fifteen years. He looked grave-ready. Prepared for the coffin and the receiving hearse. We commit his body to the ground. He died trying to rescue virtual TOEFL lessons nobody would remember. Ashes to ashes.

“And I come down here, believing—stupidly as it happens—that since nobody is teaching in these classrooms, that they’re not being used with half the university now empty, that I might actually be able to use them to, you know, teach my lesson without disturbances and what do I find?” He yanked the door handle and slapped the centre of the door with an instantly dissipating anger. It was true: every available classroom, where teachers could teach this unstable, ad-hoc online course in optimum conditions, was locked. I did not have the time or energy to fathom the university’s logic or challenge its surly janitors. I returned to my office to collect my things to go home before the campus curfew began and learned that a fight had almost broken out on the second floor. Ishmael, evidently on social distancing enforcement rounds, had almost been chinned by Roy who hadn’t taken kindly to our Program Manager’s blunt and pedantic reminders. The South African had been summoned for a Zoom disciplinary meeting with Brad and there was talk of a verbal warning.

“If they fire him, where can Roy go? The world’s locked down,” I said to Tim.

“Well, if he is canned at least he won’t have to deal with any more of this Blackboard or Zoom shite. It’s almost given me a stress ulcer and we’re only two days in,” said Tim slouching back in his office chair. He had caught Jim’s haggard face affliction. Viruses. Curfews. Faces no longer just lived in but caved in. We had all problems, and our problems were just warming up.

Two days later, the paragraph we’d been dreading flashed onto our screens, bearing the university’s green and white logo with the campus’ central observation tower. It ordered us to retreat to our campus housing units and continue teaching from these locations. The campus was now off limits and security patrols would severely punish any transgressors. There would be a daily two-hour opportunity to buy grim, overpriced provisions from the staff supermarket, but nothing else. Delta was mutating, along with our optimism. The message was terminated with a hope that Allah would soon bring the terrible pandemic to an end. I told Tim, in one of the last opportunities we would have to hold a face-to-face conversation before the edict came into force, that Allah would need to deliver additional technical support otherwise our online program would disintegrate. With many expletives, I asked how on earth we were expected to teach our classes on rationed data with modest, pre-paid 5GB data bundles from local providers such as Zain and Mobily. Almost all of the instructors living in the dilapidated ‘shabab’ block bought pre-paid packages for personal internet use and not for the massive consumption required to host these pedagogic fiascos. Almost nobody had broadband. And who was going to pay for our data, since we were working online? More crucially, how the hell were we supposed to get down to the Zain and Mobily stores in Al-Khobar and purchase said bandwidth, since the companies’ online recharge portals were unusable, and we were forbidden from moving more than a few hundred metres each day?

Brad was bombarded with e-mails from many in the faculty, including myself, protesting at the total absence of technical and general help from the university in making this unworkable teaching transition. He ignored questions about the fairness of being expected to buy the massive amount of bandwidth needed to feed this sick patient. Senior Level Coordinator ‘Dim Don’ defended the Saudis’ performance, justifying their inaction by citing the global chaos. This stance would ultimately isolate him from most of his colleagues and judging by the savage exchanges in the WhatsApp groups I’d joined, he had been branded a traitor. 

Through the help of some enterprising colleagues, we were able to make the necessary data purchases remotely through our providers and we soldiered on. Connections dropped and students disappeared, sometimes permanently into sink holes of digital and administrative oblivion. Meanwhile, we lined up like refugees at the staff supermarket between twelve and two with gaunt, blank faces. The expatriates had no appetite for small-talk or dour witticisms to save our diminishing camaraderie. The line was nearly one hundred metres long, due to the university’s inability to anticipate such a throng by providing such a limited window of time to buy provisions. People who’d forgotten masks were turned away, and some of our zealous colleagues took it upon themselves to start policing non-mask wearers making the journey on foot to the stores, resulting in relationship rifts and festering grudges. And then, to ease our anxiety in this terrifying and unpredictable time, the university informed us that the campus’ network of CCTV cameras would be fully utilized to enforce compliance with the curfew. Anyone captured sneaking outside would be hit with a 10,000 riyal fine and instantly dismissed. As faculty morale plummeted, pressure from the university to not merely maintain but surpass the lesson delivery standards of face-to-face teaching grew in torrents of delusional e-mail:

Now that the university is starting with full online instruction, Prince Salman faculty are expected to deliver content to students as effectively as, if not even better, than what they used to do in the face-to-face instruction. 

Somehow, we kept going in the mildewy confinement of our dusty, dilapidated apartments, with our stinky showers and grubby carpets. Each of us woke, ingested crappy nutrition and wondered if the past ways of life we’d known and mundane freedoms we’d taken for granted would ever return. The internet was also the pandemic’s hostage, obliged to update its narrative of misery whenever we booted up. Where had it originated from, that hideous, viral slogan slithering across the world wide web and into the world unconscious of Jung? The New Normal. The bulbous words drifted across the sky each morning when we went out onto our balconies to stretch or drink coffee. They grew legs and stalked us on our way to the supermarket queues and the giant thermometers we were obliged to walk through as we purchased awful falafels that reeked of hand sanitizer. 

Back at the laptop, the lessons were fraught with stressors as the absence of halal teaching materials frequently compromised my job security. If I forgot to vet the pages of the Headway coursebook and workbook before each lesson, I found myself having to suddenly stop screen-sharing when pictures of bikini-clad women appeared or select the highlighter tool to cover the legs of women wearing skirts to the distant groans of the frisky boys. Even worse, in an exercise to practice yet another suite of phrasal verbs the expression to do away with, meaning to get rid of something, was presented. Correct placement of the verb in a gapped sentence was then checked with a recording of a chipper-voiced Brit opining on the monarchy:

I think we should do away with the royal family. We don’t need them, and they cost too much money!

I grimaced as the sentence came out, wondering if any of the more sentient students had picked up on its meaning and was going to report me for attempting to incite sedition against the House of Saud. Would the secret police be knocking on my door, masked and observing social distancing? Other colleagues had similar horror story moments, and I was getting more and more concerned about Tim’s state of mind from his demeanor when we ran into each other at the supermarket. The tone of his WhatsApp messages was darkening, and there was talk of teachers breaking down in their apartments. Meanwhile, the management informed us that the first round of testing was imminent and that our readiness for proctoring was demanded. We would proctor from our mouldy, dingy cells of solitary confinement over poor yet expensive WIFI connections. We would work in perfect lockstep, without errors. Brad notified us in a typically terse message, opening the e-mail with Gents, a weird choice of salutation that often jarred with the somewhat cold tenor of his messages. Now the five-letter word perfectly described our course in a way comprehensible to British English speakers: it was a giant urinal. A vast lavatory of planning and execution.

Tim and I learned a week later, via a WhatsApp group, that the British Embassy was going to be arranging special exit flights for U.K. passport holders who had the fortitude to tackle the dense online bureaucracy and who could manage to get through to Saudia Airlines ticketing agents.

“What do you think?” I asked him as we waited obediently to enter the giant thermometer in front of the supermarket entrance.

“I’m ready to go,” he replied. I gave him the thumbs up.

THE END