A Return to High Stakes Teaching... and Blogging

This summer, I’ll be teaching English in the periphery of Israel. “Periphery” is used here the same way “underprivileged” is used in the US, since in Israel, anybody who doesn’t live in the center near Tel Aviv or Jerusalem has less access to, well, all the good stuff that masses of humanity can provide when they cram into urban centers. I am ecstatic to return to periphery teaching in a new place, to learn a new culture, different from the Tel Avivi mentality I've come to love. 

The program I’m working with is called TALMA, a summer English program connected with CHOTAM, the Israeli equivalent of Teach for America or Teach First. I like the CHOTAM model a million multiplication tables more than I liked TFA. Firstly, they’re educating teachers to be teachers, and they’re actually hoping that their members will stay teachers. Secondly, it's such a small country that there's less danger of a savior complex, less a sense of outsiders butting in, and because they’re laidback blunt Israelis, there’s no quid pro quo vulnerability or emotional abuse. 

This summer, I’ll be sent with two other Israeli mentor teachers and 33 international teachers (from the US, Canada, Ghana, Australia, etc.) to co-teach a population that I don’t generally see in EMIS, my current school. I’ll be co-teaching with one of the internationals in the mornings, and mentoring a group of them in the afternoons. The populations we'll work with have no access to native speaker English teachers, so this is an attempt to close an opportunity gap through summer programs.

I’m going to be down south in Ashkelon. I’ll likely be teaching in Kiryat Malachi (a development town with a large percentage of Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, carrying the baggage of Palestinian dispossession, maabarot, and current-day racism). Ashkelon is on the beach (woohoo!), 13 kilometers from Gaza (um…). I have lots of imposter syndrome about being one of the Israeli mentors, and lots of excitement about teaching new populations, and working with international teachers who can bring me up to date on teaching in the international scene, and the combination of the two has moved me to return to blogging.

The Israeli staff spent this past Shabbat in a hotel in Netanya, getting to know each other (there needs to be a word for “גיבוש’ in English). The teachers seem like incredible people, and I’m only sad that I won’t get to work with them all.

One of the undercurrents of the weekend was a really interesting relationship between the staff (mostly secular) and religion (four or five of us are shomeret Shabbat). I’m used to being the only Jewish person in a room full of respectful non-Jews; being religious in a room full of secular Jews, a couple of whom feel free to make disparaging comments about religion, is going to be more interesting. I was shocked when, during the group interview, teachers who were asked whether there was any population they didn’t want to work with answered, “charedim.” When I raised a point about the first mentor meeting plan (that every American coming from TFA has seen Adichie’s “Single Story” video at every MTLD meeting ever), another teacher responded, “yeah, but you read the same parshah every single year, over and over.” I was surprised by the degree of antagonism she expressed to a stranger. To be fair, I don’t think she understands the depth of difference between Americanah (which I do reread every year, along with HAYS—shout out to HL) and a Ted Talk. Anyhow, it will be an interesting dynamic, and one that I’m becoming more and more accustomed to in the past year as I continuously enter liberal spaces with my mitpachat stamping a label on me before I open my mouth.

At graduation with EMIS alumni;
I'm a little confused about how to selfie,
but my kids get it.

Last night, my EMIS alumni visiting for graduation made bug eyes at me when I told them I’d be teaching in Kiryat Malachi. A nice preview of how hard it will be. It reminded me that I need to gear up with memories of Harding… riding the bronco of classroom management while smiling the entire time to keep the kids feeling safe and happy. I’m excited to get into the game again, in an Israeli classroom—always my dream. Teaching starts at the end of June—we’ll see how it goes!

People Who Look Like You

“Ms. W, how do you feel about the fact that everyone here who looks like you is outside, calling us Nazis?”

My student looked from my face to my mitpachat (religious woman’s headscarf), and back down to my face. It was last year on Israel’s Memorial Day for soldiers and victims of terror, and my sister and I, as well as two of my students, had chosen to attend the joint Jewish-Arab memorial ceremony that draws hordes of protestors at its gates every year. The protestors were confined to the perimeter, but as we passed, I noticed that many more of them were dressed like me—in a skirt and head covering—than the people seated in the audience.

“It is possible to be a religious Jew and also to believe in peace. The fact that I look forward towards a solution and not backwards into hatred, that I can make room for others’ mourning even as I deal with my own grief, is part of my religious outlook that demands building out of the pain. It sounds like a contradiction, but that’s okay, I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Pretty words, Ms. W, pretty words… What other sins of skimpy thinking and bypassed paradoxes can you cover with a Whitman quote?)

I don’t think I actually said that. I remember pointing to the four or five kippot and mitpachot near us; “there are some other people who look like me in here.” There were, and they were all standing within hand’s reach of me. Perhaps mitpachot have a magnetic quality, and Beverly Tatum can write her next book on why all the religious people flock together during peace rallies.

I thought back to that moment this past Thursday. Once again, my sister and I and a bunch of my students stood in a rally for peace, this one by “Women Wage Peace,” which markets itself as a bipartisan, across-the-spectrum peace initiative that simply wants an agreement which satisfies both sides. As we drew near, we noticed that almost all the women were white and middle-aged and wearing the same t-shirts with blue sashes. Then I noticed something else. I was being noticed. 

“Did you know that lady?”

“No…” A woman in a mitpachat had come up to me and, smiling and nodding, said hi. She seemed to be the one other religious woman there… as we marched, I noticed a few more, but my observations were nothing to how people were watching me.

“I think there are more hijabis here than mitpachot.” In my head, I started counting. The people near us were giving me startled double takes, nodding approvingly, thanking me for coming… My sister noticed one and guffawed.

“That was a hard second look! She went up and down you with her eyes.” I edged away from the woman who had done it.

At one point, one of my students asked me about it.

“I’m wearing a religious headscarf, and it’s unexpected here.”

“But you always wear it at school, and you’re the only one there, too.”

“Yeah, but they know me there… and this is a very liberal rally.”

“Ah,” my student nodded in understanding. “So religious and politically liberal don’t fit together?”

In Tel Aviv, they often do. Among parts of my friend circles, we manage to make it work. But he was right. It was odd enough that everyone around us was startled by me. It’s odd enough that at moments, in my work, I wonder how my students see me. This is the first year that I’m starting already “out,” already clearly identified as a religious Jew to anybody who knows the dress code. What do the students in our peace-driven Israeli-Palestinian-International school assume about me? Will I become as close with my Palestinian students as I have in the past? Will they feel as safe in our classroom? The way my identity plays out as a teacher is something that I’ve grappled with privately for a long time, but its new visibility has me processing more urgently.

This year, my teaching has launched with a solid start. I’ve taught both my curricula several times before, and if occasionally I shake things up and teach some new material, it fits into a framework of confident experience. Now that the first few hectic weeks have ended, I’m looking for more edge. How to push the classes beyond simple English and Psychology into world-building.

Paulo Freire wrote, “reading the word is reading the world.” Spurred by some of my family, friends, and community members who, during Trump’s election, voted for him without understanding the effect it would have on minorities, I reviewed our class booklist. My students can choose to privilege their comfort above others’ survival, if they wish, but it will be a choice. They will know what they are choosing. They will not be able to claim financial incentive or party loyalty or foreign policy as reasons, together with a complete ignorance of how identity-based oppression operates. They will have to consciously choose their own advancement over someone else’s survival.

 

We will read Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, to remind them that Mexicans are writers, cooks, and revolutionaries, rather than rapists. We’ll cover Satrapi’s Persepolis and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to jog students out of a complacency in which the only history that matters is their own country’s, and for the richness of characters that uncloud some stereotypes about people living in a Muslim country, or an African one. We’ll do Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and track the historical basis for every dystopian detail. We’ll read Auden’s poetry because every gay student deserves to read a gay poet who challenged societal norms with ruthless witticisms in perfect verse.

I am flooding my students with books about and by people who look different, each to the other, so that they will read the world with all the complexity it holds. So that at their next rally, they attend without assumptions about who belongs. So that when they write the world, they don’t forget to include people who look different from themselves. And perhaps, together, we will figure out how to write ourselves, and read each other truly.

There are Days (Ode to Expat Living)

It’s been two years, this month, since I made aliyah. Mostly, it was a very good decision. But there are days.

There are days when I stand in the middle of my living room, arms upraised, and declare, in my best Scarlett O’Hara accent, “Canada. I’ll go back to Canada.”

There are days that start out in the Canadian consulate for a pleasant fifteen-minute wait, where the only rude person in a fifty-foot radius is the Quebecois who complains that the Israeli security guard doesn’t speak French.

There are days that begin with an efficient Canadian government worker looking at my documents, stamping my passport renewal form and asking if there’s anything else she can do for me within three minutes of my sitting down at her desk.

There are days where I manage to completely fudge both the Israeli healthcare system and Israeli banking, and think that perhaps I’m just too much of a provincial idiot to live in a foreign country.

There are days when I tramp home through the Tel Aviv heat, sweat slicking every inch of my skin, and think to myself that even if this is the Holy Land kissed by G-d Himself with blessing, it would be nice if He would stop slobbering on me and drooling down my back every time I step outside in summer.

There are days when I can’t even look at people’s faces as I pass them, and the urge to knock over the person who seems to be INTENTIONALLY blocking me on the sidewalk gets so strong that I bite my lip and draw blood.

There are days when I realize that the person blocking me is one of my old students, arms spread wide, grin spread wider, literally bobbing up and down on the sidewalk with joy that we’ve bumped into each other.

There are days when I return to the bank and the teller takes one look at my face and refuses to do anything until I have taken several deep breathes with him and practiced some calming yoga moves in the middle of the bank, and we are both laughing.

There are days when the bank teller wishes me Shabbat shalom not once but twice in lieu of an adieu, refusing to say goodbye when he can say something that places us as part of the same tribe.

There are days when my healthcare representative calls me just because that’s a service they provide, and is thrilled that she can actually give me information. 

There are days that I sprawl on the floor of my living room under the fan, arms under my head, and declare that I'm not going anywhere. 

The ceiling fan responds, "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Cultural Confusion: Personal vs. Professional Spaces

I just sent the following email to one of the Ministry of Education’s district coordinators, and as I pressed send, I was perfectly aware that it would cause him enormous confusion. I wrote:

I do not have a work phone number, but you can reach me through the school office phone during regular work hours at -----. I will be reachable this coming Sunday between ---. If none of those times work, send me an email and we can sort it out. 

Looking forward to discussing this with you,

Now, to all you North Americans, that may seem like a perfectly normal email. But when he sent an email asking if he could call me to explain something, he surely expected my personal phone number, and he surely expected to be able to call me in the evening to sort it out.

Now all you North Americans are shocked. Give your personal phone number to a professional contact? What a breach of professional conduct! What an inappropriate idea! What a lawsuit waiting to happen!

I agree. But now I live in Israel, and the expectations here are completely different. People use their private cell phones for professional use. They get called at all hours of the night, and I’m not merely talking about doctors on emergency call. There’s a mingling between personal and professional life that happens here that seems immoral to an American like me.

One note—my life-work balance is a MILLION times better here than it was in the States. While I still work on weekends and evenings (I’m writing this blog post as a break from grading IA’s), my planning hours are flexible and much less taken up by data nonsense and mindless form-filling than in the States. Also, the general atmosphere of the staff here are much more like family than an American work environment. The principal walks around in sandals and sends me emojis, we make the custodian cups of tea to get her through the day, and we know each others’ families and hang out together after work.

But still, I feel my phone should be off bounds. I am not in the staff Whatsapp group, and I refuse to give my personal phone number to an outsider. I don’t want a call on my personal line for professional reasons. I don’t want to bound up from my chair to check a text, only to find that it’s from work. Our IB coordinator calling me is one thing—I know her and trust her and she only ever calls for urgent, time-pressing matters, or else because we’re friends and she’s calling non-professionally. This is something else.

Probably, I’m being silly. I’m certainly aware that my hopeless crusade to turn Israel into a written culture, instead of a damnably backwards oral one, means destroying some of its bonhomie in favor of cold efficiency. But truly, couldn’t the district coordinator just write an email instead of calling? Why must I waste hours of my time on personal contact when the written word is so much more reliable, and a nice, solid record, too?

Another Israeli cultural phenomenon to which I must accustom myself is my students constantly having absences for army draft interviews. The first time a kid told me they’d be gone because of their “Tzav Rishon,” I looked blankly at them.

“You’re missing class because of first turtle?” I translated poorly, and quizzically.

Since then, I receive at least one email a week titled “First Turtle Absence.” I’m thinking of storming the drafting office and demanding that Israel stop the churning of its military-industrial complex –or at least during English class hours.

In my end of year conversations with students, one of them told me she feels pretty good about our classes, because “everyone knows that a Wenger 5 is an IB 7.” I guess I was the only one who did not know that. Sometimes I wish I could just smush the IB markbands into their faces until they inhale the criteria and have them memorized like me. But probably best to avoid that as a teaching method.

On Monday, my colleague from East Jerusalem interrupted my grading.

“How’s it going?” he inquired.

“Good, how about you? Ramadan going okay?” I responded.

“Baruch Hashem!” he answered, and exited winking as I burst into startled laughter. Sometimes our school feels like the oddest poster-child for coexistence.

Ramadan Mubarak and Chag Shavuot sameach, everyone.

With the Help of G-d

When I was in university, I turned in my honors thesis rough draft with a feeling of great anxiety. Called in to my advisor’s office to discuss it, we spent a good hour or so on the intricacies of the quest for autonomy in American literature, and then he started humming in a way that let me know we were going to talk about something uncomfortable.

“By the way, when you’re discussing Ahab’s defiance of divinity…”

“Yes?”

“You write it in a peculiar way… I looked it up and found out that religious Jews won’t write G-d with the “o” inside—is that why you wrote G-d throughout your paper?”

“Oh. Yes. Is it a problem?”

“Well, it’s not exactly… I don’t know…”

We sat and thought on it for a while, and then called in the help of some other professors to think on it, and I can’t remember what was decided. However, the episode came to my mind this morning when I was reviewing some student work that was to be sent to the IB, and came across בס׳׳ד at the top of a document.

בס׳׳ד stands for “With the help of G-d,” and some religious Jews automatically write it on every paper they lay pen to. I wasn’t opposed to it appearing on the document, and didn’t think the IB would be, either. But somehow it seemed… unprofessional. A breaking of anonymity. Out of place. And yet it was absolutely fitting—a student who feels G-d helped him with his IA should write it! What to advise him?

I talked about it with him, without arriving at any conclusion, until I asked one of the wise heads in my school. She gave me the most brilliant advice:

“Tell him to write it, but write it in white, so it doesn’t show up on the paper.” Genius. We’ll see what he thinks of it.

In psychology class, students were researching Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and checking their own countries’ cultural norms. A Palestinian student raised her hand.

“Ms.! Ms.! Palestine is not in the drop-down menu!”

Ooosh. What to say? I remember when a student, asked where Israel should fit culturally (Europe? Asia? Middle East?), said “it shouldn’t.” It felt like a punch to my gut. And here, this student had her nationality denied by a website… no matter that Palestine isn’t officially recognized as a country, it’s her identity, and it’s missing. Should she check out Israel? Jordan? Urrggh. Nothing I could suggest seemed fitting.

I decided to think about it, but not soon enough—the next day, when they took the Harvard Implicit Bias test, Palestine was once again missing. And I still haven’t decided how to respond when it happens beyond a sympathetic shrug. I don’t think I’m the right person to counsel a Palestinian undergoing an identity crisis brought on by an American website. Ideas?

We have visitors on campus, which means… it’s time for the psych kids to run proximity experiments! They’re cozying up to strangers, or initiating conversations from uncomfortably fall away, while others record reactions.

In English class, a student brought in some William Carlos Williams for a warm-up. Opinions erupted quickly:

--The plums represent love.

--The plums represent the apple of Eden.

--The plums represent impatience and arrogance and justice.

--The plums are plums! They are just plums! Why can’t they just be plums!

--Ms. W, what do you think? Can they just be plums?

--I’m not telling. Read the rest of his poems and come back to me.

Later, I got antsy in the beautiful weather and had the kids all write questions on paper, ball it up, and head outside for some dodgeball. Once an entire team was down everybody grabbed a few questions and we sat in a circle, having a lazy, wandering discussion about The Awakening.

In a recent psychology class on authority, I showed my kids videos of the Milgram experiment, and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, and asked them when it might be relevant in their own lives. I scanned the kids’ faces, wondering when an Israeli would think about the fact that they’d soon be joining the army. Only after a Vietnamese kid mentioned it, did one pick it up. I hope they remember it.

At the end of the class, I gave them a brief lecture about how not abusing power is one of the most important classes, one of the most important moral lessons they could ever receive.

“Repeat after me,” I told them.

“I will never abuse authority.” They intoned it solemnly.

“I will never stand by and watch those in authority hurt others.” They repeated it.

“I will never mindlessly repeat the words of another or follow their authority without examining it first.”

“I will never…” they broke into chagrined giggles at being tricked, and trickled out of the classroom in a slightly less somber mood.

Two weeks ago, on the senior trip in Eilat before pesach, we went snorkeling. I watched one of my students, a quiet girl, nervously dither on the steps, and I got back out of the water and held her hand.

“On the count of three. One. Two. Three. Jump!”

As we leaped through the air, a thought crossed my mind: if only all teaching were this easy. If only it was all holding your child’s hand, and leaping with them.

Well. Maybe it is. 

So Long, and Thanks for All the Dabs

I woke up this morning in a panic. I cast about me for my computer, and then calmed down and realized: it was not the day Extended Essays are due, the vivid mental picture I had of a student conducting her research on the actual due date was not true, her family was not gathered around me berating me for an extension, and the student I was visualizing was actually someone I’d gone to college with, not a real student of mine.

Phew.

A few minutes later and I was grinning. This is the stuff of which teacher dreams are made on, eh? But I have a newly formed resolution to re-check in with certain EE students.

I had the funniest interaction with a set of identical twins I teach. I really thought they were cheating and writing each other’s essays, but after checking through it with them, I realized, nope. Their writing is just as identical as their appearances. Whoops. They graciously forgave my misreading.

My 11^th grade English class has fallen in love with the Socratic Seminar. They’ve began a tradition wherein every time I enter the classroom after they’re already there, they’ve arranged the desks in a circle and all coo “Socratic Seminar?” at me. So I’ve rewritten my unit plans so that they get one at least every two weeks.

My psychology class learned about conditioning, and decided to condition me against using the word “like” inappropriately. So they clap every time I say it, in a loud, assertive way, and I’m starting to be conditioned to... clap about a second after every time I say “like.” Which is not exactly what we intended, but funny. Pavlov is chuckling.

My seniors had their final classes this week. They have about two months of self-study, mock exams, and final exams before graduation, but never again will we be gathered in the same room at 9:30 am, 11 am, and 2:30 pm every week. Being a teacher sucks. You pour your heart into educating and caring about and building relationships with these kids, and then it’s so long and thanks for all the dabs.

Two years ago, we started class by my giving them each half of a quote and making them find the other half. In our last class, I asked them to each give me a quote, to remember them by. I hung them on the wall by my desk, and looking at them gives me a deep satisfaction, as I remember what each kid said they learned and would take away from the course in our final circle.

I sent an 11^th grader the briefest of emails, asking the reason for his absence that day, and received back two paragraphs. The first explained that he was at a conference on neuroscience and brain technology. The second was a paean to my character and teaching. As I read through the list of fifteen adjectives that he was laying at my door, my heart sank. And then lifted again, buoyed by new purpose. Someday, if I try hard enough and don’t lose the thread, I’m going to become the person that my students think I am.