Why don't you understand?

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two girls share a book in a class at the local primary school in the village of Kwanawis

When we were children, our families kept telling us that we are the leaders of the future and we will be something big. Of course, that made us feel so interested to start school and go study. However, in Yemen, you would be shocked to know that our approach to education is really bad. I believe it makes a complicated generation.

For me when I was in school, the situation was not different. I remember I was so interested to start my first day in school holding my father’s hand to go there. I thought that place would be wonderful. But I was so wrong. Days went on and I was suffering at school. We were more than fifty students in one class which made teaching hard. The teachers could not teach us all and consider the needs of each student, so they just explained what they had to and kept going. Meanwhile, I was like a wall - getting to know nothing.

I had a problem learning some things. I needed more time to understand some things. School destroyed me. Most of the teachers were shouting at me when I made mistakes, especially if they had explained before. They kept telling me, “why don't you understand?”

They did not know that I just needed someone to teach me step-by-step, not fast.

My college was also not very different. It was the same problem as in school. Nevertheless, we were not a lot of students. One of the teachers there would get so angry if someone asked her a question and she would say, “If you do not understand, go and ask your classmates.”

I was one of those students who was asking her. I went to ask my classmates about something after the teacher got so nervous because I knew nothing.

Indeed, I went many times to ask my classmates. The big problem that I discovered is that most of my classmates did not understand either. They kept everything in their head without understanding, they just memorized it. So, everything I have learned was just by keeping it in my head and I knew nothing, and then I was shocked by reality.

Everything was different in the world that I faced and I knew it then that I had to teach myself again.

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Yemen