The Lebanese college that resists the bombings with digital schooling | EUROtoday

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«Our college students hold all their desires, even beneath the bombs. It is our duty to make them proceed to review on the highest ranges.” Thus Sister Maya Beaubi, director of the Sacred Heart School of Ain Ebel, in southern Lebanon. His school – a 165-year-old tradition – is just five kilometers from the southern border of Lebanon, caught between the grip of Hezbollah and Israeli bombs. In these days Sister Maya is in Milan, to participate in the “CHFIDES-Everyone’s college” exhibition, as part of “Do the suitable factor!”. Some of his students should also have been at his side, completing a twinning project between the Lebanese school and some Milanese institutes. The kids from the two countries have been writing to each other for months, they have a WhatsApp group where they used to send messages about music and sport. Now messages about fear are arriving.

Can the school function? Where are the students of your institute?

Unfortunately, 50% are displaced across Lebanon. We have students from kindergarten to high school. There are people who can’t find a house because every time they move, there are bombings near them. Because the bombings, now, are not only in the south, but in the Bekaa, even in the suburbs of Beirut and even inside Beirut. Our school continues to function, but we need to agree on exactly what we mean by “open”: do the children continue to take lessons? Yes, they do it, but not in person, because it is practically impossible. We can’t even move around the village, there are bombings all around. People haven’t slept for days, because there are attempts at ground maneuvers on both fronts: by Hezbollah and by the Israelis. We are afraid of everything.

Can you call them, do you know where they are, can you talk to them?

Of course, we have been listening to them since day one. In our faculty we’ve got been finishing up a complicated digital undertaking for 5 years. Students have high-level Artificial Intelligence functions. We have a platform and we are able to observe the scholars intently: whether or not they have the Internet, whether or not they have electrical energy, whether or not they have achieved their homework. The professors appropriate all of the homework, we do punctual monitoring. Every day the academics inform me who’s absent, who has not entered the platform to submit homework, and many others. There is an entire workforce that all the time stays in contact with dad and mom to know if they’re nicely, in the event that they want something. For instance, in the course of the Israeli assault final yr we saved 4 faculties open and I went there with some courageous academics. We adopted college students wherever they had been to take exams in particular person and get genuine grades, as a result of our college students have desires. Even although we’re a Francophone college, they’re accepted to Anglophone universities in Paris, England. All this even beneath bombing.