For 6 years I taught English to junior high students at the 5th Junior High School In Makkah. I taught 7th, 8th and 9th graders. The first year, I taught 4 classes of 8th graders (24 hrs per week). Their English was poor but they were willing to learn. I always asked them to use the new words they learnt in class in sentence at home. One of the words was "pour". So a student wrote "I pour poetry out of my heart".

Only once I taught English to two classes of 7th graders and continued to teach them in 8^th and 9^th grades.  The result was fantastic. They were the best students a teacher can ever teach. They used to bring boxes and bottles from the cafeteria that have the English words we studies in class, and bring stories to class.

They used to watch T.V., pick a word or 2 and when they came to class, ask me about their meanings. A student cut pictures of reptiles and glued them on a large card-board, brought it to class and asked me to write "Reptiles on it". They used to watch T.V. and write a summary of the stories.

They used to prepare the school broadcast program once a week. They turned "Joha and the figs", a story in their textbook into a play, memorized it, made their own costumes, brought a basket with plastic fruits and played the roles of Joha, Joha’s wife and the Sultan. They used to write their own stories.

I used to type a legal size one-page story with 30 questions. They used to read the story and answer the questions in less than 40 minutes without asking me about anything.

We used to take lessons in the garden. I would bring a map, a ball (to teach "play, throw, catch") animals and other realia. The students.

Although they did not know many words and structures, they used them to talk about anything and to express any idea they had in mind.

I used to teach them English songs. They would use some of the words and expressions from the songs in their composition.

We used to write one composition in class per week. I never wrote the compositions and never asked them to memorize anything. Instead I trained them to write. I used to choose easy topics like "My School, My Mother, My Classroom, Our Garden, What I do every day and so on." Once I asked them to write about what they do in the morning, so one student wrote " I wake up in the morning, open the window and see  a drop of golden sun", a phrase from a song.

Some had a notebook in which they wrote their own stories and poems.

Before reading a lesson, I used to ask them to tell me what they could see in the picture to prepare them for the reading. After giving the names of all the things, the smart ones would come up with answers that I never expected like : ican see 4 legs (of the chair or table" , a cat on the floor, a floor under the cat, a cat under the chair, a chair over the cat and so on.

When we first participated in the school broadcast, I used to teach them songs, poems and have them act a short play. Once I asked a student to memorize a poem called my dog. Few days after she recited it in the school broadcast, she asked me to look at a peom that she wrote. Her poem was entitled "My Cat" and she wrote things about her cat similar to the ones in the dog’s poem. It was a surprise for me. I thanked her and encouraged her. Her poem did not have rhyme at the end of each line.

Every week, we had an English club for 2 class sessions. The students used to bring books with stories and poems. I read a poem and showed Sara the rhyme at the end of the lines. Then I changed the words at the end of her cat poem to make the line rhyme. I left the classroom to get something and when I came back, the students showed me 2 poems that they wrote together while I was away. I was so thrilled and started to jump up and down. I took the poems all showed them to my colleagues all over the school. I was so happy as I never expected students in grade 8 to write poetry.

I had twin sisters in one of my classes. They were our neighbors. They used to memorize 15 words on their own (not related to the textbook). A cousin of theirs went to London during the summer holiday and took an English course and when he came back, he was competing with Ahlam & Sameera and they were smarter. So their father told my brother and asked him to thank me. When I was in the States, their father always asked my brother to say hi to me. 

Everyday they had a spelling quiz, Everyday, they had to memorize the new words they studied that way.

When my students were in grade 7, I never asked them to spell words. Once the Enlgish supervisor visited my class. At the end of the class session she asked few students to go to the board and spell some words. I was a bit nervous as I never asked them to spell. To my surprise, they could spell words like ‘car, cat, book, pen’ correctly.

Every time we studied a new grammatical structure, they were suppoed to use those structures in sentences at home. For every correct sentence, I used to give them gold stars on the honor list posted in class. I was surprised when one of the students write 45 sentence using ‘if", a rule that even college students find difficult and make mistakes when they use ‘if’.

Whenever they went to the Secondary School, my students were always the best and their teacher used to send me their praise and greetings.

When some of my students went to Umm Al-Qura, they majored in English.  While doing their teaching practicum, i.e. teaching English in the schools, their supervisor, who was my classmate in college and my friend later, used to tell me how creative and enthusiastic some of them were when they were teaching. When I asked about their names, I found out that they were my junior high school students and they were teaching the way I taught them.