Teaching is an Endurance Sport

My first act of winter break was to hop a bus to my physiotherapist. I packed up my piles of grading and the little envelope of merry Christmas letters that students had written, and half an hour later was telling a disapproving yet oddly friendly (for an Israeli medical professional) physiotherapist exactly how, in June, I had hurt my ankle in a half-marathon and been in pain ever since.

The woman quizzed me gently, gave me some exercises to do and advice on how to manage the pain, and then took me by the shoulders and looked me deep in the eyes.

“We need to make sure we’re on the same page. You’re not running the Tel Aviv marathon in February, right?”

Tel Aviv Teacher Life:
Grading at the beach

She reminded me of my mother. I grinned. “No, ma’am. I just want to run again. However long it takes.”

I called my mom on the way to the bus stop, ready to share my glee that I’ll be able to run again.

“Okay, great. But, listen, you won’t do the exercises too much? Not more than she told you to do them? Don’t overdo it.”

I get it. I tend to overdo things. It’s part of the danger of teaching. If one line of feedback helps, then a page ought to be even more useful. If one student needs an ear for their emotional outpourings, ten more probably do, as well. If I can make a lesson plan better through an hour of work, twenty hours will give my classes an ironclad brilliance.

But, as my physiotherapist explained, the rest in between the exercise is as important as the exercise itself. The muscles need time to strengthen. The philosophies need time to coalesce. The swelling needs time to go down. The planning needs time to catch up to itself.

In the two days before break, I had no clue how near I was to straining a ligament. I was giddy with organizing an exuberant Christmas talent show, deftly preparing my first-years for midterms, composedly torturing my second-years in practice essays. I assigned Extended Essay supervisors for the entire junior class and tracked down those who hadn’t submitted proposals for private chats about their unformed research goals. I listened to one of my Palestinian students talk about her identity crisis for an hour (it had been at least two weeks since I’d last touched base with her) and failed to make time for the student whose cousin was stabbed and in a coma. I wrote three college recommendations, didn’t snap at five kids at whom I wanted to snap (please don’t talk to the other ten), taught my first painfully inconclusive TOK class in three months, failed to navigate school bureaucracy to get a student the materials she needed for her extended essay experiment, and had a backlog of four classes’ worth of essays to grade.

Just so you know: I fall somewhere on the lazy side of teaching. I have colleagues and friends whose lists extend far beyond mine. There are those who are still responding to their student emails (at this point in break, I have only responded to the desperate emotional pleas, and the really funny ones, like my student who wants to solve world hunger, below). I don’t know how they do it.

Cheeky, eh? 

 

So now it is break. It is time for rejuvenation. I have graded half of my classes’ work. I have read books that I am not teaching. I have fallen in love with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, with Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and the poet Warsan Shire. I have stared at the ocean, sometimes alone and sometimes not, for hours each day. I have seen Star Wars (it’s good!), Pride and Prejudice (the play in English—it was not true to the book), and יחסים מסוקנים at HaBimah (it was incredible). I have started to process the moments when my Palestinian students put me on edge with their claims and anger, the moments when rightwing Israelis shock me with their claims and their anger, and the space I live in between them. 

I have helped people in simple, concrete ways, ways that are untroubled by a politics of hierarchy. I have used both of my arms as railings so that a man who fell off his bike might shakingly climb back up them to a standing position. I have cleaned my Bubbie’s kitchen and carried a baby carriage up some steps. I haven’t had to think about the words that I use or search for meaning in tragedy. I have thanked G-d for the chance to help people without also having the chance to hurt them.

And for the first time in five months, I am running. As soon as I broke into a stride, I knew my mother and physiotherapist were right. The euphoria flooding me hit me hard. I don’t know what addiction is like, but I imagine it’s something of the chemical joy I feel at making my own speed, at feeling my legs eat up the ground and my muscles carry me over distance. After several kilometers, my ankle twinged and I remembered that I was supposed to walk a minute, run a minute. Regretfully, I slowed. But only so that I can run again, and farther, next time.

Someone Might Think I'm Jewish.

Yesterday there was a red suitcase without any apparent owner on my bus. A passenger asked whose it was. Nobody claimed it. Slowly, people began to freak out. A scared Russian woman requested a translation from me: “it’s a bomb scare, they’re frightened of the suitcase. It’s not yours, is it?” It wasn’t. There was a range of reactions. The teenagers in front of us were especially hysterical and began the general exodus off the bus at the first stop we reached, while the guy in front of them was totally calm and didn’t even take off his heavy-duty headphones as everyone shouted, “who owns the red suitcase?”

Setting Map of The Awakening

It was his, of course.

The driver got kind of mad, but everyone calmed him down, and the girl who’d first asked whose suitcase it was sat down and began flirting with the owner. I felt slightly sheepish, but also glad I’d kept my cool and hadn’t gotten off the bus. There was a strong sense of camaraderie throughout, as though, if we were all going to die in a few seconds, we wanted to do it cheerfully and together. And if we weren’t, well, we had a good story. After two months of attacks, the Israeli attitude towards violent death by terrorism has evolved into a team-building activity.

Someone asked my Palestinian student, “are you going to the climate march in Kikar Rabin Friday?” and he responded, “Hell no! I’m not going into Tel Aviv. Someone might think I’m Jewish and stab me.” A little introspection on who “someone” is might be interesting for him. That's also probably the best evidence against Israel being an apartheid state I’ve ever heard; we’re integrated enough that even the people determined to kill us can’t tell us apart. Don't let that fool you, though-- there's a great distance between not being an apartheid state and true equality.

Character Map

The Palestinian students in my classes are making close friends with the Israelis, who grok them better than anybody except students from other Muslim countries. Many are also truly struggling with their identities as Palestinian in an Israeli school. It would help if we had more Palestinian staff—two Arab teachers are not enough for our school’s mission. The administration has assured me that they’re working on getting more. I think it’s urgent. At times, I’m very conflicted about my own identity plopping up silently in my head while working through ideas with my students; they need more teachers who share their accents and discomfort with Israeli soldiers and naming of Yom HaAtzmaut as the “Naqba.” I can make a safe space for that in class, but I’m silently uncomfortable in the midst of my matter-of-fact mannerisms. And I can’t imagine how the all-Israeli teachers who spout political diatribes in the staffroom are dealing.

We had the oddest moment in a staff meeting, when one teacher wanted to space midterm exams out to make them easier for students. It gave me a moment’s mindboggling insight into an Israeli education system that, while being just as test-based as the American, doesn’t actually regulate those tests with any kind of intensity. Whereas in the States I always felt like education was some kind of holy crusade, here classes are a distraction from the important business of kvetching about students. Teachers wander into class with as much preparation as a TFA cadet—that is to say, a lot of contradictory nonsense that they espouse very firmly, and that confuses the students to maximum effect. Say what you like about teacher education programs, my traditional Masters was the most useful teaching instruction I had (besides, of course, trial-and-error learning on my poor students). But the Israeli system doesn’t seem to begin to approach the things we take for granted in the States: student-centered instruction, and investigative learning, and diverse methods of instruction, all appear brand new to them.

Thematic and plot maps

I recently created a new way to teach my students how to support their ideas with evidence. I put two theses that I want them to consider on the board (for example, “The Awakening is a modernist text,” and “The Awakening is a naturalist text,” or “birds are a symbol of femininity in the text” and “cigars are a symbol of masculinity in the text”). They don’t have to be opposed, just related. The kids work like mad for ten minutes, finding support for each statement in the book, and at the end, two names pop up beneath each thesis—they’re going to have to convince the class of theirs in two minutes or less. They take it very seriously. They don’t clap at the end of a speech; they pound the table like they’re at some hoity-toity board meeting. Their intensity in learning is incredible.

Today, they practiced for their oral exams. Their eager explications filled the room as they gestured and graded each other in partners. As they left the room, I pulled an incredibly cheesy teacher move, and stood at the door, high-fiving every kid as they exited. Well, some I clapped on the shoulder, and one I elbow-bumped (Hassan is always original). Every so often, something reminds me that I’m one of the adults that stand between them and the abyss of despairing teenagehood, whether they are tossed by low body-image or depression or a national identity crisis or genuine grief, and I want to wrap them up with an affirming love that will power them through. That part of teaching, at least, is the same wherever one goes.