A Sunny Day for a Missile Drill

Giving my Tedx talk

My students objected to how I arranged sticky notes on our venn diagram to compare two texts. I arranged them by the order I wanted them to address each topic in: theme, audience, structure, tone, etc. They wanted me to arrange them by colors of the rainbow, and were quite vocal about it. So I paused class and led them in a cheer:

Give me an O!

O!

Give me a C!

C!

Give me a D!

D!

What does that spell?

Short pause, then: Ms. W! We do not have OCD!

Student responses to the TedXTalk

Mebbe not, but you’re hilariously easy to lead in a cheer even when you don’t know where it’s going. Cute little mindbots.

Doing the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge

We held a siren drill to practice in case of rockets. It was funny to watch the reactions of the different nationalities. The Chinese kids gathered in a corner of the room, looking worried. The Italians strolled in casually just as we were closing the door. The Germans and Austrians were already in the room before the alarm sounded. And the Israelis, to a man, walked in discussing where they’d been last summer when the sirens had been real, and that in Tel Aviv, Iron Dome shoots two interceptors to every one rocket, so really they could stay outside.

I tried to close the shutters on a window, but wasn’t totally successful, and as I leaned out, one of the Israelis called: “Hey, Ms. W, watch out, you’re dead!”

“If she’s dead, we’re all dead,” responded a Ukrainian. He would know.

The weather was so beautiful yesterday, the Mediterranean was so flush with azure in the distance, the sky deep, deep cerulean, the breeze barely ruffling the papers I was grading, that I sat outside to work. And the parade began:

A student who’s writing a story about his Russian childhood in Hebrew and wants me to read it.

A student pops down beside me to declare that she’s skipping math class, and then talks to me for an hour about why she skips class and goes to TAU libraries to study instead. Um, we need to do something about that.

A student who is having trouble with her Extended Essay topic in global politics and wants to shoot ideas past me.

A student who stops to share the song he’s listening to for a minute.

I came two minutes late to class one day and all my students
were crammed in the window, waiting for me.

A student who, no matter how I try to dissuade him, insists on showing off his newly finished math IA to me. The most interesting sentence was at the start, when before showing his way of calculating population growth in Oman, he explained, “because we Arabs don’t know about birth control.” The conversation that I wanted to have about his identifying with people in Oman even though he’s Israeli, about sex ed in the Arab world, and about population control education, was skipped in favor of a long mathematical explanation. But he was so proud—I couldn’t cut him off.

Student work on Caged Bird

And a student whose interruption of my grading I genuinely welcomed, because she wanted help deciding between two topics for her literature paper: how women are connected to home in the Earthsea novels, or the ecology of Earthsea… fascinating topics both.

I cut the parade short at the end of the day and headed to the Yarkon, to grade by the side of the river for an hour. My life-work balance is so much better here, the Israeli climate so much more calibrated for a relaxed teacher life, and even when I’m at work, I often feel like I’m on vacation.