Today was the first day of the three day meetings of the UWC National Committees for the Middle East at King’s Academy. The photo above shows just a small fraction of the expansive campus which seems extremely well financed, beautifully set out and well equipped.
It was a welcome relief to experience cooler temperatures today. Although the forecast maximum temperature was 28°C, the temperature reached only 26°C with a relative humidity of 37% - heaven!
After introductory welcomes and ice breakers, we received an update on the UWC Strategic Plan, completed workshops on understanding our audiences and communicating who we are, we considered the “X factor” in student selections by examining key attitudes and skills, and looked in depth at selection processes, including application forms, written tests and interviews.
I contributed one of these sessions, presenting information on the selection procedures in Hong Kong, focussing on our new online application process, the references required and the aptitude testing we undertake. This provoked a lively and very satisfying session of questions, answers and discussion.
The day’s sessions concluded at about 7 pm with a presentation on the impressive project to establish a new UWC in Spain. Then, following a great Middle East style dinner in the dining hall, we were entertained by a troupe of dancers performing traditional Jordanian dances, even including the waving sword over the head of the lead dancer.
The internet security at the school seems somewhat over the top. Having spent almost an hour configuring my computer to accept the necessary passwords and protocols, several ports are still blocked, and one consequence of this is that the settings on my website have been changed and I will need to upload every page of my entire website again from scratch, a job that will take potentially about 48 hours with a good internet connection. However, that won’t be possible while I am here at the school because the internet is turned off in the rooms at about dinner time each night – and the port to upload my site is blocked everywhere except in the IT office.
There is an article about the internet blocking in the student newspaper here at King’s Academy; while some filtering might be appropriate in this school setting, given the extreme nature of the blocking I think I would have written the article using much stronger language.
Anyway, these problems might help explain why uploading this diary will be a patchy for the next few days.
