Halfway through this interview, Nabil Alaydi (42) suddenly chuckles. ‘I remember something’, he says, sitting in an empty room in the technology lab of Lumion, the secondary school in Amsterdam where he works. Then follows an anecdote from the time when he was still a teacher in Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp just outside the Syrian capital Damascus.
A student had been scolded and threatened to throw himself out the window. “Go on,” Alaydi had replied coolly, assuming he was joking. But then the student actually disappeared from view. ‘I was shocked, we were on the second floor. When I looked out, I saw the student standing on a ledge, his hands clasping the edge of the window.’ He grins. ‘Funny, right?’
Schoolyard as battlefield
He was a lot stricter in Syria than in the Netherlands, he continues. For a reason: the classes consisted of more than fifty students, while the maximum here is thirty. As in the Netherlands, Syria is struggling with a teacher shortage. “My friends all wanted to be engineers or doctors, but not a teacher,” says Alaydi. “They think it’s a difficult profession.”
He himself thought otherwise. A graduate of physicist and chemistry from the University of Damascus, he wanted nothing more than to be in front of a class. He went to a secondary school in Yarmouk, which was run by UNRWA, the United Nations aid agency that focuses specifically on Palestinian refugees.
He enjoyed working there until 2012. The advancing fighting between the Syrian regime and the Islamic State terrorist group had turned the schoolyard into a battlefield. The school was forced to close and Alaydi fled to Damascus, where he started working as a teacher again. The arrival of many refugee children had increased the pressure on education in the capital. ‘We worked in two shifts,’ says Alaydi. “One in the morning and one in the evening.”
When Damascus was no longer safe either, Alaydi fled to the Netherlands, a country – as he had read on the internet – where there is no corruption and education is highly regarded. He was determined to resume his teaching profession. Once he had a residence permit in his pocket, he was able to participate in Status Holders for the Classroom, a work-study program for former refugees with an educational background, through the UAF Foundation for Refugee Students.
Physics Connects
This school year he started as a technical teaching assistant at the Lumion in Amsterdam, where he supervises the practicals. Because his diploma from Syria is not fully recognized in the Netherlands, he can only obtain a teaching certificate if he completes a few more courses in pedagogy at the teacher training college. “But that costs money,” he says. In order to pay for his education, he wants to set up an institute for tutoring in physics and chemistry. These can take place at his kitchen table in Kampen, where he lives.
Until then, he will continue to travel back and forth to Amsterdam. Every morning he takes the train around six to be on time. He talks about it: Lumion is ‘a really nice school’, he says several times. ‘The students are very polite. If I struggle with the language, they help me.’
According to Alaydi, education in the Netherlands corresponds for 80 percent to that in Syria, although there is more room in the Netherlands for interaction with students. Despite this, his way of teaching has remained unchanged. In the assignments he gives, he brings theory and practice together. ‘I connect physics with life.’
His mind wanders back to Syria, to his old school in Yarmouk, where he once instructed the students to make a hot air balloon at home. The result amazed him: with a simple system of threads, a nylon bag and kerosene as fuel, students had succeeded in creating a balloon that actually rose into the air. Alaydi, beaming with pride: ‘Yes, that was a really nice day.’