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.