Our team of 13 arrived in Jordan over the course of 24 hours. I was the first to arrive - at the delightful hour of 4am! I had had a pretty long flight - it had been 23 hours since I left Washington, D.C., where I had been visiting my parents. I had a long layover in Istanbul and then my flight from Istanbul to Amman was a little longer than normal because it had to be diverted over Cairo to avoid Israeli/Palestinian airspace.
Arriving in Amman
WebDev, Curriculum Adaptations, Cultural Immersions:
An Update from Our First Week
I’m together with Neil and Pamela on the web development team. On our first day, I taught the first lesson of the day. I was nervous, but despite some initial technical issues, things ended up turning out well. I got through all my slides at a reasonable pace and got students to install an IDE create their first web page.
Cats, Jesus, and Shawerma:
Reflections from the First Week of GTL Jordan
The first week of GTL Jordan has come to a close. Our group of thirteen is currently on a bus back to the Landmark Hotel after a trip to the Dead Sea. Drifting between bouts of sleep and scattered conversation, I watch the Jordanian landscape shift from mountainous terraces and patches of farmland to towns of beige blocks and finally the busier cityscape of Amman. Herds of sheep and shepherds and camels accompany us along the path.
Coding, Kebabs, and Karak Tea:
Midway Reflection in the Cradle of Civilization
Amman, Jordan - the scent of cardamom coffee mingles with the hum of coding, while the ancient whispers of Petra echo in my dreams. This has been my life for the past week and a half - an MIT student trading algorithms for hummus, trading calculus for the captivating chaos of a sun-soaked marketplace. My placement into Jordan was actually more spontaneous than the rest
Cultivating Change:
Exploring Education and Innovation in Jordan
“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie!” A student demands as I’m milling around the classroom during a project-working session. I quickly rush over to her, expecting a question to debug her code or clarifying an earlier lesson. However, her question catches me off guard. “Sophie, I never asked you, what do you work on at MIT?” Though slightly disappointed by her deviation from the task at hand, I'm also flattered by her curiosity about my personal and academic pursuits.
Last Day of Class
Watching the screen in the front of the room, I tried to fully digest what I was seeing. A presentation on LLM chatbot bias? Wow. We, the instructors, had thought of adding a lecture on the ethical gray areas involved with Artificial Intelligence and its uses. But never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that some of the students were not only fully cognizant of the biases, but were adamant in trying to fix them.
The Friends We Made:
The Magic of the Boulevard
If you’d asked me at the beginning of the year what I looked forward to the most in Jordan, my answer would have been – exploring the country. But sometime during the three weeks of the program, there was a switch, and if you ask me now what I’ll miss most or what was my favorite part of the program, my answer, without a doubt, will be the friends I made. So I welcome you to join me in reflecting on my journey and figuring out at what point the switch turned and shifted my mindset :)