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 6th
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 6th
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 6th 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 6th 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 6th 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
No comments:
Post a Comment