My winter break has been an odyssey through the depths of
the Misrad Hachinuch, or Ministry of Education (MoE), here in Israel.
First, I’ve been struggling with getting my degrees
recognized. In Israel, they pay by degree, so not having yours recognized is a
prime pain in the wallet that my school has graciously made up out of pocket. I
first sent my degrees to the MoE in June of 2016. They were returned to me four
times. Most recently, they asked me to send them notarized copies of my AP scores.
When I spoke to my contact at the MoE, I told him I didn’t have them—they were
from high school, forgossake. But they’re mentioned on my college transcript,
so the MofE needs original documentation.
“I don’t have it,” I told him. “My undergraduate university
recognized it, what are you worried about?”
“Well, we need the official score report,” he answered. “To
see how you did.”
“It says how I did. The scores are right there on the
transcript!”
“Hm, oh, I see. But all the scores are 5’s. That’s not very
good,” he told me.
“It’s out of 5!” I bit my lip to keep myself from screaming.
“Oh. Well, we’ll try sending them again.”
Lacking faith in his messenger capability, I took a bus up
to the Jerusalem MoE for the day and then sat in line, waiting to give the
sympathetic American olah sitting in a boring office my degrees in person. I
unfurled my degrees one by one and we forced them into the photocopier. After a
tortured half hour of copying, signing, and double-checking, I took the bus back to Tel Aviv. As I disembarked, I got a text from my sister.
“You got smth from the Misrad Hachinuch.”
Sure enough, three authorizations that recognized my three
degrees had been folded and forced into my post box, despite the loud letters
on the envelope saying that it should not be folded. I thought about contacting
the MoE to tell them they didn’t have to look at the degrees I just dropped
off, but then I remembered there’s actually no way to contact anything other
than an options machine in Jerusalem. Oh well. Their problem.
Simultaneously, I received a text from my contact at the MoE
saying I’d been exempted from the Hebrew course for my license. Super exciting, and it only took four months! He attached a
blurry, out-of-focus document to the whatsapp. I’m hoping I get it in the mail soon—probably folded
into the shape of a swan in my mailbox.
The next day, I went to my introductory day of MoE courses
on how to teach English for the Israeli curriculum. Although I’m not teaching the Israeli curriculum, I need it for my license. So I hopped a bus to Levinsky College, armored against boredom with five papers to grade, a kippah to crochet, and a book to read.
It wasn’t enough. I sat through five hours in which people
with increasingly pathetic command of the English language read and then reread
the syllabi to us.
We are English teachers. Why do they feel the
need to read things to us? Why are we not trusted to understand them on our own?
The woman who is going to teach our course on teaching
American and English literature started off this way:
“We’re going to use a particular critical method to study American and English literature because that’s what the misrad hachinuch mandates. Does anybody know
which method?”
I’m sitting here thinking about it, because this is actually an interesting question. One critical method, and only one method? What could Israel want? My gut says reader response theory because it's the best for high school, but maybe there's some kind of historicist Zionist agenda, or a postcolonialist reading against the British for making our lives miserable all those years?
“We use an important critical method in literature. It’s
critical thinking.”
Dafuq?
“We use critical thinking in literature.”
Wait! When do they not
use critical thinking? What is happening in the rest of the Israeli curriculum? Is rote learning ever an option? Jesus.
I’m three hours in and I might just commit murder so that I
get to go to jail, and relieve myself of the mind-blowing monotony of this
course.
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