Teacher Hubris: Helping or Hurting?

Wednesday was the culminating event of my summer teaching program. It was an outdoor performance by various classes of ours from around the country, MC’ed by Tal Museri, and ending with a show by Eliad Nachum.

That morning, the newspapers and our group Whatsapp group were both screaming about the heat. It was set to go above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with fires and closed roads, and we were planning to trundle hundreds of kids across the country in buses to an outdoor venue.

As we sat in our classrooms, locked indoors by principals who warned us not to let the kids spend even a minute outside of the A/C, we waited for the message that the event would be cancelled. The situation room was talking… the CEO was in discussion… the news was overblown… the parents withdrawing their kids from the event didn’t know what they were doing… and voila, we received confirmation that the event would happen.

I’ll describe it, but first I’ll cut through the suspense and say that as far as I know, it went well. The ambulance standing by didn’t seem to have any customers, and the medics came to listen to Eliad Nachum. So I think all of the instructions about forcing water on kids and teachers worked.

But that said, I was amazed at the hubris that it takes to shove hundreds of people outside into the heat on the hottest day of the year. Nothing happened, but we were all ready for the worst-case scenario. In some ways, this makes sense. The amount of arrogance it takes to start any initiative is such that anyone who has that much self-confidence is likely to ignore heat warnings. Without that hubris, nobody would think themselves capable of groundbreaking educational initiatives. But that arrogance can also be dangerous.

A question that always pops up for me when I’m engaging in reflection about my teaching is a side effect of my days in Teach for America. I start with—“am I helping the children?” and inevitably also ask myself, “wait. Let’s start with, how might I be hurting the children?” Does being in my class waste their time? Drain their motivation? Make them angrier, harder, less kind than they would otherwise be? Or give them anxiety (yes, I know for a fact it does for some, and I’m working on this)? I work through my regrets with a focus on the future, but I know that sometimes I fail, not just as a teacher, but as a person.

The point is, in this program, I ask myself whether we are helping the children more than we are hurting them, and in general, I think we are helping. Kids who were terrified to speak English at the start now ask to go to the bathroom, or for supplies, in English.  But the program in general follows much of the same model as TFA—let’s drop people without expertise into a classroom on the assumption that students will learn from motivated people regardless of their training.

So teachers who normally teach 1^st grade are working with 3^rd, 3^rd with 6^th, high school teachers are in 6^th grade classrooms, and my co, who is a nurse in the US, taught for the first time this summer (she’s beyond awesome and the kids love her, but it did devalue the training and experience that teachers amass. Nobody would ever drop me in a hospital and assume I could do a nurse’s job). This echoes the TFA model—if you’re a tip top person, you’ll be a tip top teacher.

But that’s not always true. If you’re an incredible human being, you can learn to be an incredible teacher—but why should the kids have to receive less than the best education while you learn on them? The teachers in this program are generally wonderful human beings, but the swapping of grades means that they’re like Olympic basketball players, put into the gymnastics arena and asked to perform. They’re fit, and talented, but they really have no idea what they’re doing in this particular sport.

On that Wednesday, one of the American teachers came running into my classroom.

“There’s a fight in my classroom!” she told me.

I sprinted next door and pulled a kid off another. He backed away and out of the classroom as he looked down at his opponent: bloody mouth, bruised throat, crying fetal position. I cradled the hurt kid’s head off the ground and asked him if he could talk.

“He choked me!”

Okay, you’re able to talk, you’re able to breath—phew. Let’s go wash your face.

The drama made me grateful for the calm of my own classroom, where the kids were peacefully running their own Kahoot game. Later that evening, shepherding two of my sweetest kids and 20 of other teachers’ most rambunctious from bouncy castles to performance, buying them each ice cream to make up for the fact that the promised food was not available for dinner, and reassuring a crying, nauseous child on the bus back that she was going to be okay, I thought that we were prepared for much worse to happen.  

One more day of teaching. Here’s hoping it helps.

Violence in (and out of) the Classroom

Dear Galya,

So, you want to hear more about my adventures in Israeli periphery teaching? And Keren is glad I’m not at the school where she did sherut leumi this past year? I am glad, too (Although other teachers on my program are there, so I get to hear about it). Okay, I’ll oblige. Here’s a little more breaking of the distance…

Playing "Draw the tail on the donkey" with the
class shouting directions to practice "left", "right", etc.

Well. You were somewhat right. Teaching in the periphery is challenging, and part of me can’t wait to be done here, even though my kids are not peripheral kids so much as entitled ones—they get bussed in every day from wealthier areas because the municipality had to fill up another classroom. My favorite part of the program is by far the mentoring I get to do with the Anglo teachers—finding clever ways to present the Israeli history of education and the Danger of a Single Story to adults are much more up my alley than classroom management of 6^th graders.

But you want to hear about the teaching. Yesterday one of the boys kicked one of the girls during recess, and then told her he’d do it again, harder. She’d gotten hit by another boy accidentally in the previous recess, and I’d had success in getting him to apologize. But this second one stood by his word—he’d do it again, harder next time, if she took the ball, he told me, and then, ignoring my injunction to continue our conversation, he ran into the classroom and wouldn’t be budged.

Which raises interesting questions about violence. Because, you see, this boy was violent against another student (she’s fine, no marks, and forgot about it promptly even if I didn’t). It wasn’t a case of her being in continued danger—he wouldn’t do anything while I was present—but I still didn’t want him to simply waltz back into the classroom. As a little 6^th grader, I could easily have picked him up, tossed him over my shoulder, and deposited him in a corner outside by force. But that, too, would have been violence. And would have taught him merely that whoever has the greatest violence, will always have her way. A far cry from our high school classroom, eh? Remember when you guys wouldn’t even hit the piñata I made for developmental psych class because it was in the rough shape of a baby?

Five minutes later: "How do I spell twerking?"
Two days later: "Teacher, what does "twerking" mean?

At the end of the previous day in summer school, I’d stood in the doorway and waited until students showed me their chairs lifted onto a clean desk before I let them out. Afterwards, I wondered whether that was a form of violence. Standing between someone and their egress certainly feels like violence; when someone limits my ability to exit, whether in a lecture, or meeting, or gendered area, I experience it as a (limited) assault on my body’s autonomy. The fact that all of our bodies are somewhat corralled into spaces (onto sidewalks, through metal detectors, within lifeguarded buoys) perhaps makes my own forcing of the kids to clean before leaving more normalized, but I still have a problem with it. The obvious answer is to invest them in clean learning spaces, but since they seem completely unperturbed by the ants that are building an advanced civilization in our classroom, I’m not sure how to invoke buy-in.

I’m sure you read the news last week, and had fierce debates about it with everyone that you spoke with. You must have watched as massive protests ripped across the country as a response to a policeman’s shooting of an Ethiopian young adult (were you caught in the traffic jam? Did you feel frustrated, or sympathetic? I can see you feeling both, and then an intellectual reaction I haven't even considered). The Ethiopian community blocked intersections and set traffic in the entire country at a standstill for eight, ten hours. In some places, violence exploded and cars were tipped, burned, smashed.

Violence. Against brown and black bodies; against Ethiopian Israelis, Arabs, and African migrants; against police and 18-year-old bewildered drafted soldiers; against 1.85 million Palestinians corralled into 365 kilometers; against my 6^th graders who, when drawing pictures of their homes to show my American co-teacher, sketch the rockets that are aiming at them matter-of-factly… the shapes that violence has taken as it exploded across this land in the past year are both normalized and untenable. How to tell a 6^th grader that he shouldn’t kick, when an entire region seems to be kicking? How to get my students to clean when they don’t want to without barring the door, when they live in communities with series of gates to be unlocked by security guards and learn in buildings that are reinforced with concrete against missile attacks, when space is already so closed in upon them?

Obstacle course: Following written directions

Which takes me back, Galya, to our conversation about distance between teachers and students. You say that teachers, of course, have agendas and personalities and objectives which we share with you regardless of whether we intend to or not, and I agree. But maybe the distance that you say I have comes not just from my personality of distance. Maybe it also comes from the fact that I don’t understand anything about this world that I live in—that I don’t know whether to embrace traffic at a standstill to protest the tragedy of a young man’s death, or to condemn the violence of preventing thousands of people from returning to their homes or worse, the hospital, because of blocked highways… I don’t know whether to force my values of cleanliness and shared responsibility on students, or to show them my values of freedom and free choice. I don’t have an answer about violence, beyond a general disinclination for it. I am still learning…

In short, the thing in which I am most confident as a teacher is the fact that I am still learning. I can’t shove too many of my values at students because I don’t want to—even if they’re right for me, I’m not positive that they’re right for everyone. But one that I know I want to share is this; curiosity and the relentless seeking for truth and knowledge that, even in the search, sees itself as flawed—if my students can figure out that they are always figuring it out, and that this process will never end, then perhaps someday they will figure out what the other is thinking, and how they feel upon being kicked.

So. This is a short experiment in 6^th grade teaching. Three weeks is not really long enough to learn how to teach these kids. But I’m glad I’ve got it—it’s the best PD I’ve had since my IB one—and most of the kids are using more English than before, too. Most interesting is the way it opens up questions for me about my year-long teaching. I have to say that the discussion we had about teacher-student relationships is one of the most thought-provoking I’ve ever had about my career. So thanks, and stay gold,

HW

Mischief Managed

My co-teacher and I walked into our Israeli classroom in Yad Mordechai this morning full of purpose. We set up the tables, organized the materials, and hung posters on the walls. At 8:30 sharp, exactly when we were meant to begin teaching, a teacher in the school’s summer camp came in and asked us to switch rooms, since we’ll have fewer students with her.

I taught my co-teacher the word “leezrom” and we flowed with it. As we were moving our stuff, a tall kid came into the classroom. I’d been keeping kids out of it until we moved, but he insisted. He dumped his bag on the desk.

“This is our classroom,” he told me in Hebrew.

“Sure, we’re moving. Can you wait outside until we move everything?”

“No. This is my classroom.”

“Okay, great. Here—this box—it goes in the room over there.” I watched as he instantly changed from confrontational to helpful (he was in charge of a box!) and ordered the smaller kids out of his way as he moved. Our classroom quickly got shifted, and I thanked him with a pump of joy at how quickly I’d remembered my TFA classroom management style—turn the tough kids into the helpers.

In our classroom, there were no students. I peeked into the class nearby and asked the school liaison… “Um, where are our kids?”

“They’re late. They’re coming from far away.”

“Okay.”

We waited, Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” playing on repeat, colored paper on each desk.

Two girls peered hesitantly into the classroom. One of them was covered in tears.

“I don’t speak English,” she told me in Hebrew.

“Not yet,” I responded to her in English, with elaborate pantomime, and finally eked out an understanding nod and a smile.

Signing our class rules

The kids eventually all showed up. We introduced ourselves and then had them create name tags, line up alphabetically by first name, share their favorites/ families/cities in response to my co-teacher's introduction, create a classroom set of rules to sign, make flags representing themselves, play around-the-world with colors, and finally ended by teaching them cheers that they had to use while in a balloon race (fill the balloon with air, let it out and see if it gets farther than your friend, and the two kids who cheered the loudest from each team get to go next).

There were many moments when the students declared that they didn’t understand anything, but we plunged ahead. I proximitied the heck out of the kids, used my quietest commanding teacher voice, and they haven’t yet gotten sick of bang-snap-clap as an attention getter.

The classroom has a strong core of serious, sweet learners. There are also some boisterous girls who protest in Hebrew at the top of their lungs that they can’t speak English, and quiet girls who refuse to. But both groups participated and got into the lesson eventually. Harder were two boys in the middle of the class who refused to participate most of the time. They took their phones out, and took pictures of the girls presenting, who protested. I ended up hauling one of them out for a private conversation. I made sure he knew it wasn’t because he was bad—he was important, and we couldn’t start class without him, so he couldn’t be on his phone. He came back into class and almost won the around the world game, so I’ve got hope.

At the end of the day, we let the kids out early-- the liaison teacher made a mistake about when the buses would pick up. Two of our students, including the one who'd walked in teary eyed, came back into the class from the playground. 

"We liked the class today. It was fun. It's boring now, outside. Can we write on the board?" 

"Can you do  it in English?"

They could, indeed. 

Tomorrow, we’ve got a seating chart—it’s a tiny room, so we experimented a bit before coming up with L-shaped clusters. But because there were only two disruptive kids, our first day of class mostly flowed. It was exhilarating to return to a class that needs behavior management, but dang—sixth grade is exhausting. I’ll be happy to return to my thoughtful, motivated high schoolers who can self-manage their behavior at the end of the summer. And I now understand the Israeli students so. Much. Better.

 

So to all y’all of my alumni who came to graduation and looked goggle-eyed when I told you I’d be teaching in the periphery: Guess what? Mischief managed. Um... so far.

On Teacher-Student Distance and Disclosure

Carlsberg Brewery: My favorite PD

So far, the summer teaching program I’m working with (TALMA) has simply wined and dined the heck out of its teachers. The orientation was held in a gorgeous hotel in Maale Hachamisha, on a hilltop overlooking Abu Ghosh. We were plied with wine, information, food, information, more wine… and then taken to Ashkelon and given a tour of the Carlsberg Brewery. Tomorrow we start to teach, and put to use all that we’ve learned during orientation. Mostly: planning while inebriated is more fun than planning sober. It’s going to be a good summer.

The sessions were varying degrees of helpful. Most fascinating was the Israeli teacher of the year speaking to us about Israeli classroom management. At one point she had all 200 teachers on their knees, quietly drumming a beat on the floor. Another interesting session was the one on abuse and neglect, because teachers started sharing stories and tips for reporting and working with students who are abused. It was empowering to sit there with so many experienced teachers arguing about the best ways to help a child in these situations.

Walking out of that session, I thought about the natural distance I keep from my students, and how it’s based on my deep fear of abusing the teacher-student relationship. I worry that the imbalance in the student-teacher relationship is one that can almost naturally lead to abuse of a student’s privacy as soon as a teacher starts to inquire, and so I maintain a strict distance unless a student approaches me first. As someone who greatly values my own privacy, and resents when authority is used to make me disclose, I try not to ask students to share things that they may regret afterwards, or use my relationship with them to make myself feel like an emotional savior. But does that mean that some students have one less adult in whom they can confide? I need to do some self-reflection over the summer.

My regular school (that I teach in during the year) is currently dealing with a student’s accusations of inappropriate handling of her report of a serious problem (not a student whom I teach or know well—this isn’t about her accusations). So much goes on at a boarding high school, and I’m aware of only a tip of the iceberg, but when I think about the way my colleagues lean in to work with students through heartbreaking problems, I shake my head in awe. They, like the teachers in the TALMA abuse PD session, step forward, they hug and they question and they invite kids’ confidences in a way that, while it doesn’t feel right for me, means that students at our school have many safe adults to whom they can turn. I know barely any of the specifics of individual situations, but I have been called by sobbing teachers late at night or sat behind the school building with them as they cried for hours, overwrought by their pain at what their students are experiencing and the complexities of the situations that they are attempting to navigate. And at the end the teachers soldier on and return to lavish as much love and care as they can on teenagers who are trying to survive, with all of their joy and their compassion and their health and their bodily autonomy intact, to adulthood.

Although I understand that there’s been lots of social media outcry about these recent accusations, as the student posted them online, I’m luckily shielded by my lack of contact with social media. What I did see was a letter composed by alumni, requesting that the school clarify its policies, its support in these situations, and how both are disseminated. I’m proud of the alumni for continuing to care about EMIS, and for working to protect future students that they have not even met. While the request for confidential information about her case didn't take into account the ethics of confidentiality (most of the staff doesn’t—and shouldn’t—get access to individual case information, and it would be inappropriate to publish it to alumni), the push behind it was full of the strong passion for justice and transparency which I remember from them when they were at EMIS, and hope they continue to push for.

Ashkelon TALMA teachers hit the beach

Tomorrow I begin teaching sixth grade English in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. My main goals for teacher-student relationships is to provide the students with a safe space in which to learn English, a positive school experience, however short, and to not allow my Hebrew to overshadow their relationship with my American co-teacher. I have three weeks with these students, and I come to them with a renewed sense of the urgency of building close student-teacher relationships—I’ll work my best with them, and then return to my regular school with some new ideas.

Wishing all TALMA teachers luck tomorrow!