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?

The Apocalypse Nears: Yellow Skies and Grateful Students

It’s terrifying when the sky changes color. When you step outside to an ill, thick, dusty, yellow. It’s even scarier when that dust lowers slowly over the city, until everything stationary is carpeted in fine sand, and your very breathing feels labored. The sandstorm that has carpeted Israel came from Syria over the past two days (like they don’t have enough problems there?). I’m barely functioning, in a perpetually headachey, eye-stinging, runny-nosed, lethargic sort of way, even with the blessing of good air conditioning and solid walls. I like snowstorms. I LIKE SNOWSTORMS! And long walks in the rain. And am trying desperately to remember all the good things that happen in this dirty, yellow, soul-sucking climate.

Tel Aviv beach yesterday. The teens are all, #instagramfilter.
I'm all, #I'm_old,whyisthatclever?

But the eerie way in which the ground has taken to the air in little pieces isn’t the only thing that has me guessing Armageddon is on its way. There’s also the utter weirdness of my students here compared to last year. Namely, their eagerness to learn and their gratitude for being taught.

Last year, my students taught me things like how people behave under the pressure of lack of housing, or without medical care, or stable role models, or visas. They showed me that it is possible to thrive under adverse circumstances and how very easy it is to fall between the cracks of a racist, classist education system. This year, my students teach me about things like the consistency of the brain, and the beauty of Trieste, and quotes by Niels Bohr translated from Danish to Arabic to English.

My warm-up discussion in one class this week lasted twenty minutes, and got so heated that for the first time this year, I had to remind a student that we don’t use the F-bomb in class. But when a student says, “Of course Da Vinci was also a Renaissance man, but that doesn’t mean that intelligence is so F-ing holistic that every action acquires essential meaning for a person’s character,” and then, upon being reminded to be professional, claps their palm over their mouth in horror, you know you’re on a whole ‘nother level of classroom management.

Later in class, when students were challenged to consider what it looks like in a classroom when students are actually increasing their intelligence, they simultaneously agreed with the boy who said, “it looks like this, you know, with everyone challenging everyone else and changing their opinions. Except me. Mine are all right.” Gotta love the cheek.

Here, in their spare time my students don’t work extra jobs to make ends meet for their family—they’re mostly on scholarship and far away from their families, whatever their needs. They don’t hang around parks smoking or break into the school building (actually, they do, apparently, but to study, late into the night). Instead, they prepare for their Model UN sessions, and do immense amounts of research in their representations of their countries (until you’ve heard the Brazilian speak as the Israeli delegate, the Belarussian (sp?) repping Cameroon, China as France and Austria as China and Palestine as the UK, you really haven’t appreciated the words “Model UN”). In their free time, these teenagers look up issues like Boko Haram and the ways in which countries around the world react to them, and then role play. They are weird and awesome.

Here, we can assign homework, and the students actually do it. In fact, three students approached me after the weekend to thank me for the homework I’d assigned; they had really discovered something new about themselves, they said. Man do they take themselves joyously seriously. And this was the response to a piece of Seamus Heaney I gave a kid as part of my feedback on his essay:

Hello there, 
I just want to thank you for sharing the poem. I seriously have been LOVING all the poems you provide. Simply moving poems. 

Never have my students been so intensely invested, nor so grateful for my efforts on their behalf. I feel both immensely appreciated, and immensely guilty—these kids, who are so grateful, don’t need me half as much as my students from last year. So the gratitude comes with a bitter taste. While this fits my personality better, makes better use of my intellect and better matches my identity, a part of me yearns for the extreme nature of my work the past two years. The work-life balance in Israel is so much better for teachers, and yet I find myself missing the insanity of Title I teaching. I think it’s like coming home after traveling, or returning from a war; you feel as though the thing that was driving you is gone.

There’s also some next-level gratitude: the Vietnamese student, who literally springs up and bows as I approach. Every time we talk she inclines her head, and thanks me profusely after every sentence. As a fellow teacher and I passed her where she sat on a bench reading this afternoon, we wished her a good day, and then felt bad, since she’d jumped up and waited until we passed with her head bowed deeply, thanking us (for what?). The teacher beside me remarked, “I want to take a video of her and send it to my students back in London, so they can see what respect looks like.” For an instant, I entertain a vision of American students bowing as their teachers pass. Then I remember how teachers are treated in American culture, and laugh, and choke on dust, and laugh again.  

Choosing Voices

After two years of teaching World History and Psychology, I find something odd: grading English Literature is enjoyable. Either the caliber of my students has increased so drastically that suddenly grading is fun, or else the topics are suddenly things I care about deeply. Or both.

The most difficult part of the English course thus far has been in choosing the texts. IB gives fairly free reign in some respects—while requiring basic variety in genre, period, and place, it offers no further stipulations beyond six texts used for various assessment styles. However, picking those six texts is incredibly difficult. They need to be similar enough in theme to be usable in an essay and rich enough that an average student can talk for ten minutes about several lines of the text.

Then there’s the joy of teacher’s preference. Never in a million years would I put anything by Isaac Bashevis Singer, V.S. Naipaul, or James Joyce on the syllabus. I also feel very little responsibility to expose students to the canon of high school literature I read. They’re going to meet Shakespeare regardless of me—I don’t have to introduce him. Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, and Brave New World are sufficiently common that they may stumble upon them by themselves. I chose texts that I love, or want to read again, or think that they cannot properly appreciate without an English class to drive them on. This is what I ended up with:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I’ve never read it, but it was highly recommended and sounds fantastic, besides knocking out both our genre and work-in-translation requirement. Taking a chance on this one.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. A choice perhaps influenced by her recent death and the similarity of her story to some of my previous students’.  I find myself eager to return to it.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I think this may be the contemporary teacher’s version of 1984. Dystopias are so appealing to the high school mind. Perhaps because they haven’t yet realized that our realities are so dystopian… or perhaps because they haven’t yet blocked that knowledge out of their consciousness.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Because I was going to get one classic feminist text in there, and it might as well be one I love like a sister.

How happy I feel at being able to teach her.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I read it last year and, after a lengthy love affair with Adichie’s voice from her Tedtalks, fell in love with her writing, too. I feel that this is one of my most daring choices, but perhaps will yield the richest harvest as students cannot find an abundance of other people’s thoughts on her—they’ll truly have to come up with their own.

Whitman. Because I am in a land far, far away from the America I love, and because his poems sang to my soul when I was a teenager, and because I think high schoolers will adore his sensuality and his pantheism and his permission to contradict ourselves.

As I look back over the list, I consider calling my old English and Gender Studies professors to let them know their message has sunk in; I have four women, four people of color, and at least one writer who joyfully sings homoeroticism in a list of six. My teachers would be proud. But mentioning it defeats the fact; I must present them to my students as though it is utterly normal to represent a range of voices in literature, and perhaps they’ll think that it is. If I can trick my students into believing that high school English literature adequately represents a range of experiences, their assumption of a range of voices will be more powerful than any tokenizing unit on gender or race could be. 

Syrians, Israelis, Palestinians, and Everybody Else

“So. You asked that we cover a current event each time we meet. You guys will pick them from now on, but for today I chose one right near us that is critical and I think one of the most important things in the world right now. Here are pictures of Kos, Greece, where 140,000 Syrian refugees have arrived since the start of the Syrian conflict.” I showed the class a picture of people waiting to be processed, of a young girl smushed in a crowd, of a circle of men protecting a young woman with a baby from the crowd. 

“What is the international responsibility for refugees?”

As students answered, they for some reason automatically identified their home country. In a conversation about borders, even the most sympathetic automatically became nationalists.

“As a German, I think we are inexcusably racist. Imagine it was your family…”

“In my country, where I am a Polish, I think they’re suffering in the refugee camps and shouldn’t come to countries where there aren’t enough resources for the citizens. They just want free money…”

“I’m Dutch, and I visited the refugees in my village, and believe me, if they wanted free money, they wouldn’t do it this way…”

“I’m Palestinian, and I think the world is pretty much based on capitalism, and the market won’t accept refugees, there’s no financial benefit, so people don’t care like they should…”

“I’m from Moldova, and people in countries where refugees are coming are suffering, like Turkey, the Turkish are suffering from the refugee problem…”

“I’m Turkish, and I’m not suffering. I’m proud of my country. I’m proud that we’re helping…”

“I’m Israeli, and Student X and I” (gestures across the room at a Palestinian student) “went to south Tel Aviv at the beginning of this week and helped with the refugees from the Sudan and Eritrea that are there, and we saw how hard it is for them but also people who live there are not happy to have them…”

It was difficult not to identify their opinions with their nationalities. I closed out the discussion with the questions from Hillel: If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? What are we as people if we see suffering and don’t reach out to help?

Next week, the Polish student will lead a discussion on body image and models. I am looking forward.

So, my school is a small model UN. The largest contingents are of course Israeli and Palestinian, since the mission of the school is peace here, but students come from Albania, China, Brazil, the Sudan, Yemen, Vietnam, Morocco, Austria, Afghanistan, etc, and there’s even a Ghanaian student from Denmark who got incredibly excited when I spoke to her in Norwegian.

The one American approached me today for a heart-to-heart conversation about retaining her values in the midst of so much cultural chaos, and in the comfort of our conversation I was reminded of how much ease cultural knowledge provides. My sister gave me an example from a Palestinian writer who moved to America and said that when he enters a restaurant there, he feels blind—in Israel he would immediately understand all of the subtext of the workers and words. Living internationally I feel muffled at times, as though I’ve lost one of my senses—all of the intuitive culture knowledge I have in America is suddenly gone. But that’s the point, and slowly but surely I’m becoming culturally literate here.

I’m the personal mentor for about twenty second-year students. Their issues are both your typical teenage issues, and also unique. There’s the student who thinks he’s too cool and so has nobody he can confide in, the student who hasn’t seen his home or family in a year because flights cost too much, the student who came to Israel from Palestine thinking he was going to get the education Israel owed him and now says his views of Israelis are complicated and softened, the other kid whose family can’t tell the secret of where he is since if it was known he was in Israel, they’d be in danger, the kid who speaks every language and quietly straddles peer groups, the kid who spoke for a solid half hour about school stress, and the kid who wanted to know whether he could eat the food in the teacher’s lounge.

The staff here are a delightful motley. Our principal has masses of positive energy—today she left the staffroom and then returned a second later to wish me a good weekend with more force—she felt she hadn’t said it with enough heartfelt strength the first time. I’ve buddied up with the British biology teacher my age who made aliyah at the same time I did and whose dry British common sense is like an oasis in the midst of Middle Eastern emoting. I eat lunch every day with the Palestinian economics teacher whose son is in my English class and who has a rare soul of genuinely kind humor. We’re planning the Christmas pageant together; who better than a Jew and a Muslim to organize it? There’s also the conservative American expat, the blended Israeli+insert nationality teachers, the wise IB grandma, and the bubbly Israeli natives. It’s odd to work in such a functional environment.

My classes: I’m teaching a second-year English Language & Literature course in which the students are beginning to subside from panic to appreciative trust. Today they started to review their course texts through the lenses of historical methods of literary criticism. They are very, very intelligent and driven, and while I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor suckers who picked post-structuralism, they didn’t go into it blind, and listening to one explain it to the other in a pedantic Israeli accent gave me mad kicks.

Our campus

I administered a diagnostic to my higher-level class. Around 30 kids crammed into a room that used to be an office, and scratched out essays on an excerpt for an hour. In my standard level, students jumped up to figure out who had the other half of their quote, and I was delighted to watch them milling and meeting and trying to guess. As they went around the room introducing themselves and explaining their quote, I was also able to do some basic gauging of their English verbal and reading skills: highly varied. We had a good talk about what respect looks like and what they’re going to do with their one wild and precious life (Mary Oliver as first writing assignment for the win). At the end of the class, we were all energized. Man, but I’ve missed teaching.

I still really miss my students in my old school. I miss the strength of their personalities which shine forth on the first day, and the battle of classroom management, and the sense of every single second mattering. Here, it’s a different sort of challenge. I’ve been given the gift of the most intelligent, highly motivated students ever—my shot to see how far they can go. But I miss the urgency.

Excitingly, my school is sending me to an IB extended essay workshop in Warsaw this October! The other option was Dubai, but unfortunately it was in April, and thus too late. I’ve already been to Warsaw. Still, travel is travel, and I’m grateful both for the chance to figure out this EE thing from the experts before I attempt to coordinate it for my entire school, and the chance to pop over to Europe on a funded trip.

It’s going to be a good year.