Cultural Confusion: Personal vs. Professional Spaces

I just sent the following email to one of the Ministry of Education’s district coordinators, and as I pressed send, I was perfectly aware that it would cause him enormous confusion. I wrote:

I do not have a work phone number, but you can reach me through the school office phone during regular work hours at -----. I will be reachable this coming Sunday between ---. If none of those times work, send me an email and we can sort it out. 

Looking forward to discussing this with you,

Now, to all you North Americans, that may seem like a perfectly normal email. But when he sent an email asking if he could call me to explain something, he surely expected my personal phone number, and he surely expected to be able to call me in the evening to sort it out.

Now all you North Americans are shocked. Give your personal phone number to a professional contact? What a breach of professional conduct! What an inappropriate idea! What a lawsuit waiting to happen!

I agree. But now I live in Israel, and the expectations here are completely different. People use their private cell phones for professional use. They get called at all hours of the night, and I’m not merely talking about doctors on emergency call. There’s a mingling between personal and professional life that happens here that seems immoral to an American like me.

One note—my life-work balance is a MILLION times better here than it was in the States. While I still work on weekends and evenings (I’m writing this blog post as a break from grading IA’s), my planning hours are flexible and much less taken up by data nonsense and mindless form-filling than in the States. Also, the general atmosphere of the staff here are much more like family than an American work environment. The principal walks around in sandals and sends me emojis, we make the custodian cups of tea to get her through the day, and we know each others’ families and hang out together after work.

But still, I feel my phone should be off bounds. I am not in the staff Whatsapp group, and I refuse to give my personal phone number to an outsider. I don’t want a call on my personal line for professional reasons. I don’t want to bound up from my chair to check a text, only to find that it’s from work. Our IB coordinator calling me is one thing—I know her and trust her and she only ever calls for urgent, time-pressing matters, or else because we’re friends and she’s calling non-professionally. This is something else.

Probably, I’m being silly. I’m certainly aware that my hopeless crusade to turn Israel into a written culture, instead of a damnably backwards oral one, means destroying some of its bonhomie in favor of cold efficiency. But truly, couldn’t the district coordinator just write an email instead of calling? Why must I waste hours of my time on personal contact when the written word is so much more reliable, and a nice, solid record, too?

Another Israeli cultural phenomenon to which I must accustom myself is my students constantly having absences for army draft interviews. The first time a kid told me they’d be gone because of their “Tzav Rishon,” I looked blankly at them.

“You’re missing class because of first turtle?” I translated poorly, and quizzically.

Since then, I receive at least one email a week titled “First Turtle Absence.” I’m thinking of storming the drafting office and demanding that Israel stop the churning of its military-industrial complex –or at least during English class hours.

In my end of year conversations with students, one of them told me she feels pretty good about our classes, because “everyone knows that a Wenger 5 is an IB 7.” I guess I was the only one who did not know that. Sometimes I wish I could just smush the IB markbands into their faces until they inhale the criteria and have them memorized like me. But probably best to avoid that as a teaching method.

On Monday, my colleague from East Jerusalem interrupted my grading.

“How’s it going?” he inquired.

“Good, how about you? Ramadan going okay?” I responded.

“Baruch Hashem!” he answered, and exited winking as I burst into startled laughter. Sometimes our school feels like the oddest poster-child for coexistence.

Ramadan Mubarak and Chag Shavuot sameach, everyone.