Sting Like A Bee

Over the weekend, one of my Arab students from East Jerusalem brought a Turkish and a Ukrainian friend home with him. They went to see the Western Wall Friday night, and as they stood there snapping photos, a Jewish man approached them.

“Do you want to come to my house for Shabbat dinner?”

“We’re not Jewish,” my students explained.

“That’s okay,” responded the man.

“I’m Arab,” my student told him.

“Come, it will be fun,” the man answered. So they went.

(Important Digression: The biology teacher and I have since had a talk with him about stranger danger).

Apparently, they had a great time, humming along to the blessings and eating yummy food. As I passed my student on the way back from lunch, I riffed to him, “I heard you converted to Judaism over the weekend.”

He nodded and grinned. “Yeah, Ms., um, konnichiwa.”

I guess he learned a lot.

To ward off the stress that is choking both me and the students as exams loom, I have started a trend: on sunny days I take a Frisbee outside during every class break and lob it at whatever student is an appropriate distance from me. Each time, a gaggle of kids joins, and we run around the quad with the sun beating down. At one point it landed on the roof, and as a student went up there to get it, I tackled the physics teacher on his way back to the office, turning him towards the Mediterranean to admire its beauty instead of seeing which kid was on the roof. After about five seconds of stuttered description he asked, “there’s something behind us which we’re not supposed to be seeing, right?”

I like teaching with smart colleagues.

My first-year class held a philosopher’s chair seminar on media ethics. Most fascinating to me was that when the Israeli Arabs were given the question of what the media should protect more: transparency or security (they’d read about Anat Kamm), they ended up, volubly, on the security side. They used examples from the recent Gazan war, where when Israelis found out about the tunnels being dug underneath their homes, they deserted their houses for fear of midnight attack, leaving Hamas open to digging more tunnels deeper into Israel without observation or disruption. I was surprised that even the most politically aggressive nationalist Palestinian kids still felt that Israeli protection was more important than Israeli media transparency.

Students are studying speeches in another class, and today they dressed up in suits, saris, and whatever other paraphernalia seemed to make sense to them as they pretended to be prime minister of India, dictator of Zimbabwe, and opposition leader of Canada, among other public figures. Their speeches were stirring. They used techniques we’d learned in class to make passionate cases for their cause, but more than that, I think they also really liked the dramatics. Each and every one of them has a flair for the spotlight.

I’ve switched my attention signal in my lower classes again. We’re doing call-and-response, and I chose Muhammad Ali. When I call “float like a butterfly!” the class shouts back at me, “sting like a bee!” and then falls gleefully silent. Once they get bored of it, I think I will switch to “You killed my father!” and have the class respond, “prepare to die!”

I closed out my second year class today. After this, they go into mocks, then optional review sessions, and final exams. It was our last time together as a full class, and I’ve come to love these kids; although they may manifest as the personified reification of the letter after “X”, they are also adorable. We stood in a circle outside, throwing yarn from one person to the next as each in turn delivered a goodbye, and then cut it apart and twined a piece around our ankles or wrists. So there’s a reason for the sloppy piece of thread around my ankle for the next few days: in the words of one of my students, it’s to show we’re all entwined.