(Belated) End of School Year Report

Over here life is a bit too busy now because we are trying to tie up loose ends (like this blog post) before the family long holiday which starts on Monday 18 August.

School lessons ended on 20 May and Athena’s and Yusef’s end of term exams were over on 14 June. And after that, three months of uninterrupted leisure (boredom?) until 23September, when the new school year starts. Iranian children usually sign up for classes of swimming, painting, English, pottery and all sorts of things they don’t have the time to do during the school year. Athena and Yusef would like to divide their holidays between London and Greece, but we are not millionaires (yet), so we are going to Greece. We are flying via Istanbul because there are no direct flights from Tehran to Athens, which makes the fare quite expensive anyway. We’ll spend four nights in Istanbul and then fly on to Athens on Friday 23 August, where we’ll stay with my parents for a month.

Although this is going back a bit, I haven’t mentioned what happened with the children’s new schools. I’ve mentioned before that they spent a year at the special Adaptive School, which caters for children who’ve come from abroad, like them. They both did extremely well, exceeding everybody’s expectations: Athena got an average grade of 19.85, coming top of her class (even among students who had been at the school for more than one year) and Yusef 18.79, coming second after a boy in his second year at the school.
With such grades Yusef enrolled in the third and last year of Rahnama’ei (Guidance) School at a small private school twenty minutes’ walk from our house. He’ll only be there for a year before he moves to High School proper (Dabirestan), so another search will be on next spring.
Athena faced a tougher choice: having finished the first year of Dabirestan, she now had to choose among four academic directions (Islamic Studies, Humanities, Maths/Physics, Life Sciences) or Art/Vocational High School. Although I would dearly have liked her to study Humanities and Hossein Maths or Sciences, none of the academic directions appealed to her, so eventually we agreed that she could go to Art School (Honarestan) to study what is here called ‘Graphics’, but includes freehand drawing, calligraphy, working with colour, professional photography, hand printing and other lessons up to a professional standard. So by the time she graduates from Honarestan, she will have all the technical skills she will need to work in design at the same time as continuing her studies at university. She would have taken Art for GCSE if she were still in England, and she would probably have continued it at A level, so, all things considered, she is better off here.

We looked around a few Honarestans and eventually we settled on one not too far from our house. Our initial visit was not very encouraging. To begin with, no men were allowed inside the school grounds (all schooling is segregated in Iran), so Hossein and I sat at a small security office by the front gate and waited for the headteacher to come out to us.
When Hossein explained that Athena was currently in the Adaptive school this year, the headteacher said she regretted that they do not enrol girls from there, because the school is a mish-mash of people and in the past girls who came from there were problematic. Hossein explained that in our case we had no other option but to enrol her there; also when he visited the school the year before he had got a very good impression of it, so he didn’t look further. He added that Athena had been a very good influence on others in her class rather than learning bad things from them.
The headteacher softened; she asked whether Athena dresses modestly like her mother and whether she follows religious precepts. If she doesn’t, she will find difficulty fitting in with the girls of the school.
By the end of the interview she was quite changed. She invited me inside to view the school, spoke to me in English, offered me ice-cream and showed me into the library “We’ve got a foreign visitor,” she told the librarian. There are other foreign mothers in the school too, she said, and she hoped that I would be able to be involved in the affairs of the school.
So it now remains to be seen how well they will both settle in their new schools.