I Am Falling in Love With My Imperfections

Today I gave a student permission to be imperfect. She needed to hear it, and watching her relax as we talked gave me pause. Perhaps we should all be allowed to be imperfect. Not all of the time—after all, the pursuit of perfection occasionally slides into genius—but every so often, we need to just let things be.  I left my student with the intention of being imperfect, myself, for the rest of the day. I might even carry it over into tomorrow.

Yesterday, a shipment of books arrived at school. They came in bubble wrap, and my colleague and I went to town popping it. We jabbed it with scissors, twisted it together, and stomped on it gleefully. While joking around, I began thinking about what the headlines would say in different newspapers:

JPost: “East Jerusalemite goes on savage stabbing attack in school staffroom”

BBC: “Israeli Jew violently destroys shared resources”

Teacher Ed: “Teachers develop new bubble-wrap-popping curriculum as part of peace process”

It was none of those, just fun. Sometimes, popping bubble wrap is just popping bubble wrap.

Our school had its annual youth peace conference today. Students and teachers came from schools as far as Jordan and Gaza, as well as the West Bank and Israel. It was delightful to watch them all playing games together and settling down to serious workshops on peace and coexistence. But during an introductory session, I was jarred by one of our school’s Palestinian kids who said that his “struggle” (the ice breaker question) was “living with the enemy.”

I looked around. Was I the enemy? Were the other Israelis in the room? I don’t think of him, or Palestinians in general, as the enemy—is that a privilege that I have because I haven’t personally been attacked, only people I know? Or because I live in Tel Aviv and teach in a Palestinian-Israeli school and thus have the luxury of surrounding myself with people who insist that Palestinian terrorists are not representative of Palestinians? Or because I have the privilege of not feeling oppressed, merely attacked? Well. It brought back the reality of why we have this conference, and indeed, our school.

Today it rained for the first time since spring. Here, it always rains for the first time after sukkot, exactly when we start to pray for rain. There’s something about that that hits me right in my religious Zionism.  

This evening, my sister opened a conversation like this: “Do you know what the worst thing in the world is?”

I considered my recent history. “Being stuck in the bathroom without toilet paper? Running out of money on your rav kav while on the 186? Your physiotherapist forbidding running?”

Being one-upped, my sister had to take it to its natural place: “Genocide?”

“Nuclear holocaust?” I parried.

“Genocide is worse than nuclear holocaust because it isn’t fair.”

“Nuclear holocaust kills everyone, and it’s someone stupid’s fault. How is that not worse?”

“Because there’s no one around to notice it.”

“Genocide isn’t genocide without some bystanders. Is that it? Genocide is only bad if you’re around to hear about it and feel bad?”

It turns out the worst thing in the world was our other sister, who has not called or skyped or emailed in the past week. Yels, if you’re reading this, if you’re out there, please send a messenger pigeon.

Elizabeth Carlson, "IMPERFECTION"

I am falling in love
      with my imperfections
The way I never get the sink really clean,
forget to check my oil,
lose my car in parking lots,
miss appointments I have written down,
am just a little late.
I am learning to love
      the small bumps on my face
      the big bump of my nose,
      my hairless scalp,
chipped nail polish,
toes that overlap.
Learning to love
      the open-ended mystery
            of not knowing why
I am learning to fail
      to make lists,
      use my time wisely,
      read the books I should.
Instead I practice inconsistency,
      irrationality, forgetfulness.
Probably I should
hang my clothes neatly in the closet
all the shirts together, then the pants,
send Christmas cards, or better yet
a letter telling of
      my perfect family.
But I’d rather waste time
listening to the rain,
or lying underneath my cat
     learning to purr.
I used to fill every moment
     with something I could
          cross off later.
Perfect was
     the laundry done and folded
     all my papers graded
     the whole truth and nothing      but
Now the empty mind is what I seek
      the formless shape
      the strange      off center
      sometimes fictional
                                 me.

The Last Page

Question 1: (Fill in the Blank) The first page of the history book starts with “The…” The last page of the history book ends with “time.” 

That was the last exam I took in high school. I read the question, grinned, and set to work on my essay.

It was an exam that, in retrospect, was impossible for me to fail. It was an exam that said, “I believe in you. You will know what to write here. I don’t even have to give you a question; you will still come up with the answer.” With such encouragement, how could I write anything but a nuanced and detailed analysis of modern European history?

Four years earlier, the same teacher came up behind me during my first ever high school history exam, and asked me, as my pencil trembled in my shaking hand, “are you nervous?” Without waiting for an answer, she dug her fingers into my shoulders in a fierce simulation of a back rub, electrifying every ticklish nerve in my body. I spasmed hysterically in my seat, and, blissfully unaware of my discomfort, she whispered, “You can do it.”

And she kept saying it.

She was a teacher who gave me books.

Cowisms hung on her wall. They explained everything.

She introduced me to Woolf, to Bronte, to Margaret Atwood, to the Forsyte sagas and the world of fanfict by Jasper Fforde. She spent her free time talking with me about the books she’d given me. When I was kicked out of some other class, I wandered through the school to find her in the teacher’s lounge or library, to share literary sympathies, sure that eventually she would kick me right back into class. She left her classroom unlocked for me during lunch so I could lie on the floor and read. She gave me a few now-tattered pages that I still use: pages of literary questions, of literary terms, of poems.

In her class, we debated.  We debated God the most, and then our teenage idealized utopias, and the endings to our novels (it still upsets me to remember that Garret thinks Mrs. Mallard died of joy in “Story of an Hour”). We didn’t debate feminism. It was a given in her class. (How I wish she could have seen a female president!)

She pushed us. For her we wrote essays, memorized chapters, slept with the history book under our pillows. For her we gave speeches, acted out plays, and filled binders with notes on novels.  She was terrifying, and inspiring, and one day, when I lay feverish on the library couch, she used her free period to drive me home. I worked my hardest for her; even if it was a topic I didn’t care for, I couldn’t bear to disappoint her.

Often, when I stand in front of a classroom, I find myself channeling Mrs. Moskowitz. I had the most selfish of relationships with her: I was her student. I spent all those English and History classes concerned with what she could give me, with what she could push me to do. So it gives me the greatest satisfaction to pass on some of her essence in my own teaching; to demand greatness and foster debate and model feminism. And, most of all, to give students books, and to talk about them afterwards. For even after the last page, the story lives on.  

Baruch dayan emet. You will be missed, Mrs. Moskowitz.