Was it Abusive?

 My sister recently finished a leadership fellowship, and in her closing interview with the boss, he asked her, “did the program's emphasis on vulnerability and sharing ever feel abusive to you?”

“Yes!” I shouted when she reported the question to me. I wasn’t responding to his query about his program, of course. I was thinking about my tenure with Teach for America, and what they should have asked at the event they call, creepily enough, “alumni induction.” Of course, they might have asked it, I don’t know; at that point I was feeling sufficiently violated by the program to skip the free booze they offered to celebrate the end of two years of torturing America’s youth.

A word cloud of feel-good bullshitting TFAery

You see, what the boss of my sister’s program was aware of, and what TFA remains so priveligedly ignorant of, is that where most people may experience a call for transparent vulnerability as brave or cathartic, my sister and I struggle to find a word less vivid than “rape” to describe the quid pro quo style of invading privacy in the name of bonding that TFA demands. But rather than wax poetic on the sins of the beast that is TFA, there’s something more important I must do now that I am a teacher outside their slimy grasp, and that is to ask myself, “is my teaching abusive at any time?” In the same way that I squirm under forced disclosure, do I ever demand that my students be “vulnerable and transparent” (Jesus, Allah, and Shiva forbid!) and invade their souls with prying, authoritative hand?

Lately, my students have been sharing a lot. A lot a lot. Some spoke about their experiences with violence at our school’s recent international Memorial Day service. Beforehand, I wiggled through words as I tried to ask students to share personal stories without demanding that they bare their souls uncomfortably before an audience. One student and I met at least six times before she bowed out, confessing that we still couldn’t find a way to phrase her thoughts without feeling damaging in disclosure.

On Israel’s national Memorial and Independence Days, students and teachers alike struggled to express their identities without impinging upon others. How to celebrate or mourn properly, beside people doing the exact opposite from you, and to arrange a suitable atmosphere for all the students, without breaching their comfort zones? Some students, mostly Palestinians, spoke up, asking for certain treatment or exemptions; many of the Israelis stayed silent and in their silence left us wondering if we hadn’t made legitimate space for their voices. It seemed equally problematic to be delicate and blunt; both ignoring or engaging with the culture clash enacted in our hallways was difficult. The teachers fretted over what to do. Silence and speech could be equally abusive when coming from our positions of authority. We didn’t settle on anything, really. We have one year to get it right before the next Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut.

But sometimes you have to consent to silence

This same month, my students engaged in some in-depth identity work. I’d felt that our school is merely dancing around the edges of the peace work in our mission, letting students of different cultures live together, but not helping them to actually dialogue about the issues we’re meant to be treating together. So I created an identity project related to the autobiographies we’ve read, in which they submitted photographs that represented a certain set of words for them. They watched the video in which each of them defined “fear,” “faith,” “family,” etc. through pictures with widened eyes. After we screened it in class, they came up to thank me; “I know my class so much better now, Miss,” they said. I wonder if there was anyone who felt it was knowledge without consent.

Two weeks later, students partnered with a student from a different culture—or from the rival culture next door—to create slam poem duets on identity. The performances were deeply informative. Students leaned forward in their seats, visibly grasping after the visions shared by their fellows. They were flushed with pride and excitement afterwards. Some signed the disclosure forms I handed out to allow their work to be shown online, indicating a comfort with sharing. Others chose non-damaging things to speak about, spoofing the assignment with stand-up routines on the benefits of glasses, or merely reciting the places they’ve lived like a travel itinerary. It’s important to me, as a teacher, that they always have this out—that they can always satirize an assignment rather than bare their souls. Yet a surprising number choose to share, coming up quietly to ask me, “Miss, you’re the only one who will read this, right?” or even contributing their thoughts to class discussion afterwards.

Last week, a man I used to know in Toronto was murdered in the streets. He was an Aboriginal man who came to the university soup kitchen every week, sharing conspiracy theories about 9/11, banging on the piano in the church basement (not on the keys—on the wooden back of the piano), and harassing me to try the ham and cheese sandwiches instead of just serving the soup. His death was gruesome enough to make it into the newspapers, and leaves me wondering if my small intricacies of silence and speech matter at all when weighed against the abuse that homeless and mentally ill populations face daily.

But I also remember the insistency with which he, and the other patrons, sought our attention; the urgency he felt in explaining to me exactly how Aboriginal populations were treated in Canada by describing his own stories; the way he and other patrons asked increasingly personal questions about my life. I really didn’t like the way he and the others would take whatever facts they knew and then spin them into a larger story about my life, interwoven with advice that I’d better take or else. And yet I get it. The power dynamic was so unequal there, that they wanted some kind of power. And knowledge, of course, is power. 

So when, in class, my students share, or don’t; when I ask them for insight or allow them to wiggle out of the literal meaning of an assignment; when they ask me about my personal opinion or after-school activities, well, there’s a balance there. A tricky tension between allowing for the human need to share, and respecting the human need for privacy. Most important for me is to give them choice. And what they choose will be of more than passing interest to us all.

“Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.” –Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

The Ghetto and Gaza

On Wednesday I stood on cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto, my head half-cocked for a particular sound. Sure enough, as the tour guide described the enclosure of Jews into tiny neighborhoods across Europe, I heard a loud thump from behind a picture of a wall topped by shards of glass. Before the stool had even rolled into the doorway, I was yanking a bag of chocolate from my purse and heading into the next room. I know the sound of someone fainting, and had all my bets on the Ethiopian student who had been steadily sagging as we moved through Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum. The museum is enough to drain anyone, and he is a particularly sensitive person.

But it wasn’t him. A woman lay on the floor, with some of my students making vague motions towards her. I fed her chocolate and got her to the water fountain. She was from Mexico, and her Hebrew was not that good, but I only realized afterwards that I might have tried English; neither of us was speaking our native tongue, but it didn’t strike me until I’d returned to my classes.

As we moved through the museum, the Israeli and Jewish students slid into silence. I was awed by the tiny minority of students who chose to giggle and chat their way through the museum. They weren’t from my classes, or I would have said something. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism. I don’t know; I’d rather not know what was passing through the minds of the students who came from near Babi Yar as they laughed in front of a picture of it-- rather not guess what was in the minds of some local students who chatted their way through scenes of murder.

I hate visiting holocaust museums, and I hate teaching about it. My tone becomes incredibly matter-of-fact as I reject any added emotion; one doesn’t need to read Eli Wiesel in anything but a monotone. And yet one needs to speak; moments of silence are only made significant by what precedes them.

My English classes have been covering autobiographies, so we read some excerpts from Anne’s diary. And then the students wrote their own diaries. “No,” I assured them again and again, “nobody will read this but me.”

I tend to ask for rather a lot of personal reflections in the course of my teaching. Texts which allow the students to connect to what we’ve read or what we’re learning. Answer Mary Oliver’s poem: what are you going to do with your one wild and crazy life? Copy Satrapi’s style to describe an event from your own life. Choose one of Anne’s themes to reflect upon in a diary entry.

So I read their diary entries about larger themes: diaries about identity, and morality, and loneliness. Some were wildly uplifting, and some punched little holes in me. Some I brought with me to the school counselor, clenched in both hands, and held up the ragged edges of a child’s life appealingly to ask her to sew them back together. But mostly I did the first thing I had to do, and protected their privacy. The notes I scribbled back in the margins felt like patching band-aids onto flesh wounds.

On Friday, schools from the region visited to attend a Seeds of Peace workshop at our school. I ended up talking to a social studies teacher from the American school in Gaza. It became clearer and clearer to me that I have no idea what it’s like there, and talking to him did not illuminate things for me.

"...about six hours of electricity a day, and the school has 24-hour electricity, so the kids are happy to come. Their parents pay a lot of money for our school, too."

“What do most of your friends work at?” I asked.

“Teaching, engineers, you know,” he answered.

“So do most people have jobs?”

“No, we’re the lucky 1%. Actually there’s about an 85% unemployment rate.”

“Do your students go to international universities?”

“Yeah, mostly. They have to pass from Gaza, to Israel, to Jordan, and then fly out—Egypt closed the Rafah crossing and now we can only get out through Israel. The soldier from this morning—I really give him credit—he was really human, you know? Helped us get out early even though usually it’s only the medical cases that get through before 10 am, and he even went out of his way to call and convince the Palestinian side to let us through.”

 

He kept using the words “open-air prison,” a phrase that reminded me of the exhibit I’d visited earlier this week. The principal of his school, at lunch, had talked proudly about how he runs his school with an ideology against politics, and I reflected that I had no clue exactly what he meant by politics. It was clearly a euphemism for something radical, some extremism, and yet it was totally out of my experience.

The social studies teacher suggested a one-state solution, since only when people live together, integrated, can we have peace. He spoke of the way international aid cripples Gazans by making it unnecessary for them to work or produce anything, creating a dependent system, but that they couldn’t do so anyhow without Israel allowing them to import resources. He spoke of how people cycle through anger and are content to sit and wallow in hatred, of the way religion can be coercive, and of projects he’s done with his students. Then he told me that he really wanted to interview people in Israel, to ask them this question:

“Why are Israelis afraid of Palestinians?”

I almost laughed. At lunch, one of the Palestinian students from our school had told us about the first time he saw Israeli soldiers manning the ice cream station at the cafeteria—he’d been shocked, since in his experience, Israeli soldiers only intimidated him and bullied him. I told the teacher that our student’s experiences had built his fears, and only extended interaction with Israelis had added nuance to them. Same thing on the other side.

“There have been ongoing attacks, every week almost, for the past half year. Someone I know was killed in October, and this is a tiny country—everybody knows someone. It’s hard, if the attacks are happening on the streets you hang out on, and to the people you know—it’s hard not to fear a whole group, until you start to meet the people who make up that group and realize that most of them are normal human beings.” I didn't add that he was the first Gazan I'd ever met; that our discussion about PBL was my Israeli soldier offering ice cream.

By the end of the day, I’d been offered an invitation to visit Gaza for a few days and see their school. The principal assured me that he could make it happen. And I am very, very curious about what actually exists there. Yet quite aside from the safety considerations that would make me almost certainly not go, I feel there’s a moral issue here: I can’t travel to Gaza on a voluntourism trip when there are people there waiting for medical permits to travel, for permission to visit family they haven’t seen for five years or for important business reasons.

And yet talking to the teachers today piqued a deep curiosity in me; a thirst to actually know what the reality is on the other side of the fence. I have always found it difficult to ignore banned spaces. I peek at the kohanim when they give birkat kohanim; I have visited men’s bathrooms after hours and stand on top of furniture just to make certain that I have experienced every space. So I want to go to Gaza and see what is there. I don’t want to use my ignorance as a shield, ever.

Love Thou Thy Land?

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought 

From out the storied past, and used

Within the present, but transfused

Thro' future time by power of thought;

I started my classes today with this quote by Tennyson. I’ve been thinking about nationalism a lot lately— in fact, ever since a Turkish student asked me in outrage why we are having a ceremony of international peace the week of Yom Hazikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. “Isn’t it an excuse to celebrate Israel?” he demanded. “Where’s the Turkish memorial ceremony, after all the attacks happening there? Why did we have one for Paris and not for Ankara?”

How some of my students see it.

An hour later, the Brussels airport and metro were bombed, and in the midst of sympathetic pain, I found myself locked in the question of who we care about and why. Why was Brussels front-page news, but not as big as Paris, why is Ankara a headline nobody clicks on, and why does nobody know about the attack on the Ivory Coast or the fact that there have been continuous attacks in Israel since October? Do we have a moral responsibility to have equal outrage for every country? Or at least to ensure that our outrage does not follow gradations of race and religion, but rather of personal familiarity? Yeah, that seems like a good idea.  

And so I plopped Tennyson on the board and asked my students, “how important is caring for your country to you as a value?” They wrote furiously. As I circled the room, I noticed that one of the desks had pen ink etched into it: “Free Palestine.” On another desk it was written in pencil, and I rubbed it off with my thumb.

An Israeli, responding to the prompt, dared to share that he is proud of his country, and glad it has an army to protect it, and an Eastern European raised his hand in response.

“You are proud of the army, but it is a bad thing. There is nothing good about it at all.”

I interrupted him. “It keeps ISIS out of the West Bank.”

 

He paused, then backtracked to an earlier point, and I sat down at my desk to listen, angry at myself for breaking the mediator role, angry at the Israelis for their deference to the reigning political rhetoric at our school, angry at whatever kid had etched their political beliefs into the desks of the oppressor who dared teach them math and physics and English.

Among the other students, the Arab-Israelis delivered themselves of the fact that they consider themselves Palestinian first, Israeli never. One said, “Nationality is so important; it’s the thing you fight for.” While I appreciate her sentiment, I wish I’d thought to ask her about her use of words—how about the thing you live for? Or am I quibbling with words because her national identity lies in direct opposition to my own, and I want to make hers seem violent to delegitimize it? I would fight for two out of my three nationalities, if it came to protecting their sovereignty. And nobody would ever bother attacking Canada anyways.

Two students walked into class with Hitler mustaches drawn on their faces. I paused, then remembered that they were giving the class presentation today. It must be related. I should wait and see what it is. But… damn, I won’t forgive myself if it’s something awful. I moved over to them.

“Gentlemen, are you aware you have Hitler mustaches on your face?” I asked them. They assured me they were.

“Is your presentation in any way offensive?” They assured me it wasn’t.

“I’m assuming it’s along the lines of a Charlie Chaplin act.” They looked crestfallen.

“How did you know, Miss?” Call me psychic.

After their presentation, another student had to make up a missed presentation. She chose to discuss how ISIS recruitment videos compare to traditional advertising. The Arabic speakers in the class cringed visibly as they heard the chants in the video. Another slam right in the identity for our class.

Finally, I asked the class, “are you uncomfortable? Does talking about nationalism make you uncomfortable?” About two-thirds of the class raised their hands. I raised my hand.

We have come together here, at this school, with all our various fascinating intersections, and we spend a lot of time in class talking about our respective languages, and foods, and even sometimes religions, but when it comes down to it, we can’t talk about how we love our countries themselves. The Russians and Ukrainians are buddies, but there are topics they carefully skirt; the Quebecois and Canadians are best friends, but ignore the topic of separatism; the Israelis and Palestinians feel most comfortable together, but talk carefully around their nationhoods.

I fit somewhere in between here...

Well? What’s the answer? How do I, as of yet uncomfortably wriggling between my three nationalities, help passionate teenagers make sense of the fact that their nations may be mutually exclusive, that the existence of their identities seems to demand the cessation of others’ (but this I don’t believe), that we grew up taught that the Other is dangerous and morally bankrupt, and are politely ignoring evidence that seems to indicate that this is so as we move quietly around each other through the corridors of the high school? 

I guess, for now, I’ll just follow Tennyson’s advice:

But pamper not a hasty time,

Nor feed with crude imaginings

The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings,

That every sophister can lime.

…

Make knowledge circle with the winds;

…

Cut Prejudice against the grain.

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.

A Sunny Day for a Missile Drill

Giving my Tedx talk

My students objected to how I arranged sticky notes on our venn diagram to compare two texts. I arranged them by the order I wanted them to address each topic in: theme, audience, structure, tone, etc. They wanted me to arrange them by colors of the rainbow, and were quite vocal about it. So I paused class and led them in a cheer:

Give me an O!

O!

Give me a C!

C!

Give me a D!

D!

What does that spell?

Short pause, then: Ms. W! We do not have OCD!

Student responses to the TedXTalk

Mebbe not, but you’re hilariously easy to lead in a cheer even when you don’t know where it’s going. Cute little mindbots.

Doing the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge

We held a siren drill to practice in case of rockets. It was funny to watch the reactions of the different nationalities. The Chinese kids gathered in a corner of the room, looking worried. The Italians strolled in casually just as we were closing the door. The Germans and Austrians were already in the room before the alarm sounded. And the Israelis, to a man, walked in discussing where they’d been last summer when the sirens had been real, and that in Tel Aviv, Iron Dome shoots two interceptors to every one rocket, so really they could stay outside.

I tried to close the shutters on a window, but wasn’t totally successful, and as I leaned out, one of the Israelis called: “Hey, Ms. W, watch out, you’re dead!”

“If she’s dead, we’re all dead,” responded a Ukrainian. He would know.

The weather was so beautiful yesterday, the Mediterranean was so flush with azure in the distance, the sky deep, deep cerulean, the breeze barely ruffling the papers I was grading, that I sat outside to work. And the parade began:

A student who’s writing a story about his Russian childhood in Hebrew and wants me to read it.

A student pops down beside me to declare that she’s skipping math class, and then talks to me for an hour about why she skips class and goes to TAU libraries to study instead. Um, we need to do something about that.

A student who is having trouble with her Extended Essay topic in global politics and wants to shoot ideas past me.

A student who stops to share the song he’s listening to for a minute.

I came two minutes late to class one day and all my students
were crammed in the window, waiting for me.

A student who, no matter how I try to dissuade him, insists on showing off his newly finished math IA to me. The most interesting sentence was at the start, when before showing his way of calculating population growth in Oman, he explained, “because we Arabs don’t know about birth control.” The conversation that I wanted to have about his identifying with people in Oman even though he’s Israeli, about sex ed in the Arab world, and about population control education, was skipped in favor of a long mathematical explanation. But he was so proud—I couldn’t cut him off.

Student work on Caged Bird

And a student whose interruption of my grading I genuinely welcomed, because she wanted help deciding between two topics for her literature paper: how women are connected to home in the Earthsea novels, or the ecology of Earthsea… fascinating topics both.

I cut the parade short at the end of the day and headed to the Yarkon, to grade by the side of the river for an hour. My life-work balance is so much better here, the Israeli climate so much more calibrated for a relaxed teacher life, and even when I’m at work, I often feel like I’m on vacation.