MS LINA WOULD HAVE DONE IT BETTER:
Reflections two months into
the job in Amman, Jordan
Faye Fayyumi
15 January 2026
I predicted that the first two months of school would be difficult, but I didn’t know how they would be difficult. In the first place, I got sick for a whole month – one thing after another, starting with a virus that went around the students and teachers, and made worse by standing out in a dust storm while supervising the playground. It’s also just a really tough job. You have to hit the ground running from day one and then it’s relentless. Over the past decade, even when I was employed and not only doing freelance graphic design work, I always had some control over my time. I was able to move days around, move things around. Not now.
I also wasn’t dealing with people all the time, let alone kids. I’m teaching art classes in grades one, two, and three. The fact that they’re kids is a blessing and a curse. In many ways, the fact they’re kids makes it much easier. Sometimes, they’ll just run up to you and hug you; that’s really sweet. Even with the most nightmarish ones, you have, or you find, a soft spot for them somewhere. There’s also some incredible moments. After several years of working as a designer and moving between different art scenes – in Amman, Beirut, and briefly the US – I had grown weary of many aspects of being a cultural worker. Seeing my first grader recognize composition for the first time, without even knowing the word for it, is a world away from the stultified meaning art and design had begun to take in my life.
At the same time, it’s tough because it’s so much responsibility. It’s a whole different ballgame from sitting behind a computer all day. The social aspect of it comes with a lot of baggage, but it’s also rewarding. I think I am using such generic terms because it’s hard to outline the spectrum of experiences while I feel like I’m barely keeping up. I feel like I’ve been put through a washing machine with rocks for the past two months. My peace has been thoroughly disturbed. Every single day is new and, because I teach children, time fills differently; every couple of minutes something new takes place in their world which makes it so the time moves slower. But I also have a lot less time to be troubled by everything that’s going on in my head because I have trouble to deal with in front of my face. That’s a nice thing.
Very weird and interesting things happen in a classroom. The classroom is truly a reflection of everything bigger than what happens in my 50-minute class. It’s a reflection of the parenting that all the students are receiving. It’s a reflection of the school culture and the way the school is run: the hierarchy of administration and teachers and all kinds of tension and anger. Then it’s also a reflection of the wider society and how it functions.
During the first week or two, I got so angry at the parents. I’d think, you’re making me do all of this work, all of this work on your behalf, you’re outsourcing all of this labor onto me as a teacher. When the kids first come back to school in the summer we give them an exercise where they’re supposed to draw what they did over the break and I try to guess what they did. One kid said, “I don’t have anything to draw because I was on my phone all summer.” I’m so angry at these parents because they’re making my life so much more difficult sending me a phone-addicted seven-year-old. He has so many issues with emotional regulation, with attention, and I have to try and deal with a classroom of 20 other kids, all with their own problems. I had another kid in the first grade say to me about his peer that “if she ever talks about my mom again, I’m gonna slaughter her.” Literally he said, “I’m gonna slaughter her and slaughter her entire family.” This of course leads me to understand that a first-grader is hearing these things in his home, probably, or on YouTube, which is marginally less terrible. (I hope he’s not hearing it from his parents.)
Classroom management is really tough. I’m constantly failing and part of that is because I’m a new teacher and part of it is the nature of the job. You can’t be precious or conceited. The first day I went home and I started bawling. My student in my first class, the first grade, started crying because she wanted to go home to her mom and I didn’t know how to deal with it. She kept crying and cried so much that she threw up. She couldn’t breathe and then she threw up. Later that day when I went home I started crying. I held it in all day and then I got home, called my partner, and started crying so much that I couldn’t breathe. I began retching, and was nearly on the verge of throwing up, but I managed to hold it in. (Every once in a while you get these psychological gems.)
I love teaching second grade. By this point students have usually developed some dexterity and can function more as a social group than first graders, who might understand that they should show up to school but are still super attached to their parents. First graders just seem like aliens to me a lot of the time. The second graders have learned how to be part of a school community, but are still too young to be as vicious as third graders.
I have a Third Grade A and a Third Grade B class. I feel I have 3A under some control and we have some chemistry. But in 3B I feel like most of them actually hate me. And to be honest, I hate some of them too. Part of the feeling of failure is that you need to bear the weight of the kids’ frustrations and projections and find a way not to let it inform your teaching, and it’s actually incredibly difficult to do while trying to teach at the same time. They can sense the anger. I’ve had to become such a disciplinarian with 3B and that is not a style I like or that I think is very successful but it’s the only way, with my current skill level, that I can get them to cooperate with me. But there are these times where I’m being strict or disciplining or warning about consequences where I think I’ve exited the realm of a last-resort expediency to get the classroom to move and I’m just expressing anger. There’s no training for how to mitigate this with the school.
In third grade the other day, we were doing self-portraits and I have to teach them how to draw a generic face and then help them make it their own. So I drew the face and the head shape and the eyes and whatever. And the first thing they say, before I’ve even drawn the face shape, is that Ms Lina would have done it so much better. There’s all this comparison to the old art teacher who taught them since kindergarten, who they are really attached to. This makes me feel a little bit better because I have the sense that when I feel their hatred, part of it is that I am the replacement for Ms Lina. (The second grade also love Ms Lina but have accepted me.)
Anyway, I’m drawing a self-portrait and they are telling me that Ms Lina would have done it better. So I have to keep drawing. For me, drawing is something that is very hard to do in front of anyone, but I have to do it now on a daily basis. I get to the end and I say, I have curly hair, so I add some curly hair and they all start shouting, “Ms Lina! Ms. Lina! It looks like Ms Lina!” Ms Lina’s daughter is in the class; she’s wonderful and obviously great at art. And she says, “She looks like my mom.” The picture doesn’t look like Ms Lina; it doesn’t look like me. It’s the most generic face of anyone you know with some curly hair. But they had this moment where they all identified it as this missing ghost or who they wish I could be.
I thought the job would be rewarding because I would get to the end of the day and be like, I taught someone something today. Sometimes that happens. You’re like, wow, you know how to draw a cube now. It’s amazing that something got put into your mind. Other times they surprise you with the shit they say and it’s really enjoyable. But to be honest, the rewarding part comes from the way I feel like I’m in a struggle with these kids and with myself in a social setting. That’s not something you get doing graphic design.
For the most part, the administration makes this struggle worse. We recently had a groundskeeper fired for spending too long in the art room (apparently it was 35 seconds too long). She used to come up there to take breaks, because she’s constantly being called upon to do this or that, and she rarely gets to sit down. Overnight we find out she’s been let go after five whole years of working at the school. The kids constantly ask about her, wanting to know where she went. I don’t want to speak too soon about how things will play out for me because I’m new and I spent the first month telling myself I’d do it for nine months and then quit forever. But it does feel like I have a lot more anger and a much bigger sense of responsibility.
On the worst days that feeling of being treated with disdain by students and administration alike follows me home. There was one day I was thinking about how most of the kids in third grade who give me a lot of trouble are boys, and how I’d heard somewhere that female teachers are experiencing a lot more misogyny because kids are following people like Andrew Tate online. As I was driving home this driver behind me kept bringing his bumper right up to mine, in a really annoying way that drivers do when they want you to move out of the way. I had nowhere to go and he just kept tailing me really aggressively, until we got onto the highway and he swung his car beside mine and stopped for a second. He looked into my window and shot me this really dirty look and then sped off.
Every once in a while I reflect – not even in a political or ideological way; it’s just on the surface – and I wonder about what I’m doing and that part of my job is to be like a policeman with these kids. I think sometimes how terrible that is, and that I’m actually doing really bad work. The responsible part of it though, is that I feel like I’m part of these kids, part of this problem now. My problems when I was a graphic designer full-time were much more surface level and aesthetic and honestly a lot more narcissistic, ultimately coming back with questions like, “am I good; do I suck; why didn’t I think of that?” Overall I’m really glad that I took on the job, even though some days I think, I can’t fucking do it again. Tomorrow we have school and I have to wake up at 6:00am and be at school by 7:30. It brings me a lot of anxiety. On a Sunday morning at 6:00am I think, Fuck no, I so don’t want to do this, why is this happening?
When I got my first paycheck, I was like, are you fucking kidding me? You should be paying me 5K a month for the shit that I’ve been through. The schools are so fucked up and sure that’s obvious and you know that from far away, but when you actually experience it, it’s like a fucking martyrdom. The teachers are paid so little to endure so much, and I say this working at a private school where the wages are much higher. The classroom capacity changes from 16 to 20 students and those four extra students make your life hell. The fact that in the public schools, class sizes are getting up towards 40 and 50 students is insane to me. Absolutely insane. I said to my partner, why are there not more people being paid well to do this job? Our society should be 50 percent teachers and healthcare workers and instead they’re doing jobs like graphic design.
I have in my mind that at some point I want to start looking in on and learning more about the teachers’ union. But I have not. I have had zero time so far.
CODA: I finally did look into the teacher’s union and found out that it was outlawed and dissolved in 2020. Prior to its dissolution, the JTS (Jordanian Teachers’ Syndicate) had represented 140,000 mostly public school teachers. In 2019, after a month-long pressure campaign that was met with police crackdowns and mass arrests, the union secured a 50 percent pay increase for public school teachers, fighting against austerity measures imposed by the government. Women were primary actors in this mobilization, who at the time made up about 62% of public school teachers, and 89.9 percent of private school teachers. With the onset of Covid in 2020, the government reversed its decision to increase wages and staged a crackdown on the union, declaring it unlawful and arresting its leadership board. The 2019 campaign remains a remarkable example of tactical worker organizing in the country’s recent history.