Dubai school aims to teach UAE children some manners

Diana Haddad started the Molly Manners etiquette school after being shocked by seeing children misbehave in the UAE.

Pupils tick off a list of activities of things that they did or did not help with at home during a Molly Manners class. Yamen Attiyat, 8, watches as Silvana Hughes, 6, double checks her brother, Antonio’s, list of activities. Molly Manners teaches both etiquette and social skills to children. Antonie Robertson / The NationalShow less

DUBAI // You won’t find children walking stiffly, balancing books on their heads at UAE’s newest school for manners.

“It’s not like a stuffy etiquette class,” said Diana Haddad, owner of Molly Manners UAE, which opened in Jumeirah Lakes Towers in December.

Not only that, she said, but encouraging pupils to misuse books is against the teachings of the modern etiquette school.

“We do have a posture exercise, but in a modified way,” said Ms Haddad. “We don’t use the books because the students have to learn to treat books with respect. They have to look after their books. We tell them its something valuable.”

Ms Haddad, a former teacher who spent years in the corporate world, was moved to open the GCC’s first branch of the American-based Molly Manners, after witnessing children misbehaving at social gatherings with her friends.

“The way they were talking — they had their grandmother with them — and the way they were talking to her was very rude and they were very rude to each other,” said Ms Haddad, a 37-year-old who moved to Dubai from Lebanon seven years ago. “They were kind of careless and saying, ‘Whatever,’ ‘I don’t care,’ you know, these terms that apparently this generation uses a lot. These are things that I would have never dared to do when I was seven years old.”

And, of course, it made business sense, she said. Dubai has a small number of finishing schools but none is focused entirely on the needs of children, Ms Haddad said.

“There’s a methodology behind teaching kids manners,” she said. “It’s very light and fun and interactive by nature. They do lots of things. They don’t sit and then they listen to a lecture.”

They play games like Bad Attitude Bingo, where words representing bad attitudes are scratched out from the Bingo cards, and draw pictures of superheroes destroying bad manners. There’s a lot of role playing, as one of the instructors, 28-year-old Hana Erskine is a trained drama teacher from the Czech Republic.

In a recent class, four boys and one girl enrolled for the summer camp were being taught restaurant manners. Ms Erskine pretended she was a waitress at a restaurant called Creepy Cafe. She handed a menu and the kids giggled in disgust as they read off some of the items like snake skins and crickets.

When asked what he’d like to order, one student answered, “Nothing, I ate lunch at home.” He was commended for his answer, but then continued. “I guess I’ll just have something small.”

Ms Erskine recommended the crickets.

“I caught the crickets just yesterday, so they are very fresh,” she said.

“OK, make it hot please,” the young boy asked.

The children are taught to set the table using a fairy tale story to help them remember the rules.

“There’s a story in the table-setting class about this princess, who is called Princess Spoonela, and her prince, Prince Fork, is on a napkin island and they are separated by a lake of alligators and the Knife Guard who is defending Princess Spoonela,” said Ms Haddad.

The place-setting is personified to help the children understand that the fork goes on the left of the plate on top of the napkin, while the knife is placed on the right, with the blade facing the plate, and the spoon is to the right of the knife.

They learn patience and sharing through an exercise in which a string is circulated among the students and they each have to add a certain number of beads.

Mrs Haddad said most parents express a desire for their children to learn how to listen above all else.

“This is something that they need to work on a lot,” said Mrs Haddad. “When we have requests coming from parents, you see lots of things are around listening. Everything is around their ability to listen.”