One Point for Feminism

Today was a marvelous day.  I started off in a room with my principal and the financial secretary, negotiating my salary. By the time I was done, it was several hundred shekel higher than what they’d promised me in the summer, and several thousand higher than what had been on my first paycheck. It was also established that staff who are advising students on extended essays would receive a large (thousand shekel) stipend per student. This, methinks, accounts for the famous gender pay gap: when a man goes in to argue, he comes out with a higher salary. When a woman makes her case, everyone comes out with higher salaries. One point for feminism.

An Anne of Green Gables moment-- yes, here I am sometimes "Teacher"

In my first class, a student brought in a poem on slavery, and asked her classmates what the nature of slavery is. I was fascinated to see that European students turned to their Israeli counterparts and said, “You’re going into the army. You’re not free.” It was interesting to me that the Israelis responded by saying, “You don’t know how we feel. And it’s our reactions, not our circumstances, that dictate our freedom.” It was also fascinating to me that nobody asked the one Palestinian in that class, whether living in a country in which his Israeli peers would go into an army that might control him, limited his freedom-- he had to make the point himself. So the students will breach some boundaries, but not others. When I asked students to range themselves along the wall to express the degree to which they felt free, he was on the highly enslaved side, together with the neo-Marxist Israeli and a Macedonian student. 

My students in my upper level class created various digital projects in response to “Goblin Market.” They are clever enough that the ones who made “fakebook” accounts for characters had friended each other, creating a whole backstory of posts on each others’ walls in reference to the poem. One set debated on whether it was a children's poem or not: "Ms. W, you basically gave us soft porn to read, right?" Yep, because I'm the best teacher ever. As they speed-dated each others’ work, I marveled once again at their self-motivation—it was possible for me to run down for a board marker and come back to find them all still excitedly looking at each others’ work.

In my first-year class, we played the “Great Game of Power” as an introduction to language and power. Students positioned first a chair in a grouping of other chairs, then themselves, in positions of the greatest power in the classroom. It led to discussions about power attributing to the order of things, the relationship between things, the normalcy of things… and we subbed in “language” for “things” and had a good discussion going. After students messed around with modalities a bit, they were challenged to, in partners, create two statements on the same topic, one with a great deal of power, one much weaker. Soon we were arguing about the cultural nature of power and whether you were more powerful if you bent someone to your will without explanation, or if you were more powerful by convincing them.

I jumped into the 12^th grade TOK class in the afternoon to deliver some quick information on extended essays. I ticked off my points, fielded a few questions, and left quickly. As I left, the students applauded and shouted, “well done!” I can’t get over how they clap for anything here, even the announcement that their rough drafts are due in a month.

As the school day ended, the staff room filled with students. My buddy the economics teacher and I were surrounded by supplication after supplication for guidance. Finally, an hour and a half after the day had ended, I ran from the room, saying plaintively, “I want to go home!” to any student who tried to intercept me. In Israel, teachers aren’t expected to stay late— “partani”, or tutoring hours, are built into our schedules. Tomorrow I will have an entire day without frontal class time, just meetings and tutoring and planning. Israeli teachers have a much healthier life-work balance. But the students all seemed desperately convinced that if they didn’t talk to us NOW, they would never make it.

As I left, a crowd of students approached me on the sidewalk, chanting “Allahu akbar.”

“Ms. W, Ms. W, we’re doing cultural exchange!” Some Palestinian students had dressed up one of the South American students in a keffiyah and long white robe, and were prancing around joyously, teaching everyone who passed to say "allahu akbar." I stopped to film them, but they grouped into a photo, and so I left school with the image of a bunch of happy kids printed in my mind.

The truth is, this kind of teaching is utterly easy and joyous. While I push myself to find ever more clever and creative ways to educate students, they take suggestions as easily as rain slipping into a leaf. They are so open, so excited, so passionate. The work I am doing leaves me hyper and energized at the end of the day.

Even in a tiny room without enough chairs, these students LEARN!

That’s not to say that I’ve already adapted perfectly to Israel. I’m struggling with the climate of the country. Whenever I think that I might spend the rest of my days in this sick, sandy heat, without a proper green rainstorm, or the crispness of snow, a headache starts to throb between my temples—I haven’t felt quite physically fit since I landed. Whenever I encounter Israeli service or lack of efficiency and design and competence, I dream about Anglos taking over. Whenever I speak with Israeli men, who mansplain more than any other (unless they are condescendingly “matoking” you), I sigh again for the Southern gentlemen among whom I’ve spent the last two years. But with all of these things, I am very, very happy to be here, teaching where I am, giving to where I am. Because if it were perfect, then what would be the point?