I Heard Your Smile

There was a famous incident in which the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman explained to the Israeli Air Force why they were idiots. The officers had discovered that if a pilot flew exceptionally well and they praised him for it, he did not fly as well the next time, whereas if a pilot flew poorly and was criticized, he improved. This led them to conclude that they should criticize, not praise.

Every student in my Intro to Psych class is clamoring the same thing right now: “Where were the control groups?” They never tried testing criticism on pilots who flew well and praise on those who flew badly, or indeed, not saying anything at all. Kahneman noted that due to regression to the mean, pilots who had done particularly well or poorly in one round, tended to present a more average performance in the next round; everyone tends to do about average, after all.

This was in my head on Thursday, when I received the “Excellent Teacher” award of the year from my school. It was nice to receive the reward, but as I navigated the rows of clapping teachers, I worried that next year I won’t do as well. That I’ll regress to the mean or below it. Then I started to wonder what the mean is, after all, in teaching; what does that even mean? Have I ever satisfactorily defined good teaching to myself?

Today, while interviewing a teacher for next year, my principal asked the candidate his signature question, “what do you consider good teaching to be?” My immediate thought, that good teaching can only mean good learning, feels somehow both true and a cop-out answer.

While planning for next year, there are so many things that I am trying to balance: scaffolding skills for my students, while hitting every part of the curriculum, while differentiating sufficiently, while using culturally/gender/etc. diverse texts, while engaging them in relevant, thought-provoking inquiries… and yet through it all, I am aware of deep dissatisfaction with my own process. The truth is, I don’t know what good teaching is. I don’t know what students of 2020 should be learning in order to be equipped to live a good, productive life—I have no idea what the world will look like in 2030. If I really thought about it, I’d probably spend all my lessons on survival and ethics in a post-apocalyptic world. Well, we are reading The Handmaid’s Tale next year.

That's a lot to get right...

I know, sometimes, when there’s been a good learning moment. When the classroom is humming with students’ ideas and every corner is somehow generating a different form of creativity, or the students are pushing and pulling at some question that together leads them to a bigger truth. But that’s as much a product of the students as it is of anything that I do before class.

Today, when I came back to campus for the interview, it was silent with summer stillness. Most of the students have gone home; only those who cannot return have stayed. At one point, laughing with the other staff present in the teacher’s lounge, I caught sight of one of my favorite students through the door. He was fluttering there, waiting for me to notice him.

“Ah! Let’s go talk,” I approached him. He’s a writer, so there are any number of things we need to catch up on each time we see each other.

“I came down from studying upstairs. I heard your smile and knew it was you.”

“You heard my smile?”

“Yes, I heard your smile.”

I didn’t correct his English. It was too exquisite and unexpected. I folded away the loops of laughter that I knew he meant, and thought instead that he could hear my smile, and that his homing pigeon instinct to find me so we could discuss Tuesdays with Morrie and the afterlife and how to zero in on meaning in an essay is probably good learning. I don’t know what good teaching is, but as long as there are students like him (and there are, oodles and caboodles), I won’t fall too far below the mean—some students demand that their teachers live up to them.

The Four Students

At the end of the school year, report cards are sent out, eliciting varying responses in students. Some have worked hard and achieved superb results; others coasted and failed. It’s on neither of these that I lavish my attention. It’s with those who worked hard and emerged disappointed that I am most concerned. They are the ones in need of encouragement, in need of direction, in need (in short) of teaching. But their needs surface in different ways, usually in my inbox, after reports have been sent out. They can be broken down into four kinds of students, with four responses.

The first student, the wise one, sends an email stating that they are disappointed in themselves. They tried hard, and yet didn’t meet their expectations. What can they do to improve? Can they send practice essays over the summer for feedback? What kind of study schedule should they build?

I write these students back my most supportive responses. We can do it, I write (we are in this together), it is a process, and I map it out for them in meticulous detail. You’ve worked hard, and already come so far—I can see what you can’t, and it’s your trajectory to success. I write these emails carefully, because more than anything, I want them to believe in my belief in them—and then to transcend it, no longer need it, sustained in their own belief in themselves.

The second student, the unethical student, sends an email much like the first. They tried hard, and didn’t meet their expectations. What can they do to improve? Is there a chance I might rethink their grade?

It’s this last question that differentiates them from the first student. The first is interested in learning and improving their skills, the second, in improving their score. I write a fiery email about corruption and ethics, and then delete it, and instead craft a measured email about how I grade blind (covering every student’s name with sticky notes, so that I don’t know whose work I am grading) and changing a grade simply because a student had the initiative to ask for it, would be morally wrong. I suggest ways to improve and offer feedback, but my focus is on the student’s personal ability to improve. This student will only be capable of hard work after accepting that improvement of their performance, not their grade, is what is at stake; that the change has to come from them, not from me. It’s moral education, rather than English or Psychology, that I’m attempting here. 

The third student doesn’t email me—their parents do. This student is enfeebled by parents who have kept them dependent. Rather than helping the student draft their email to me, these parents jump in on their own, cutting through the student-teacher relationship that I’ve worked so hard to build, and trying to achieve for their child instead of helping their kid manage for themselves. Sometimes, I get to respond that their child is wise, and has already emailed me. But often I am left with the sense that I am educating them, rather than their child.

The last student is the one that concerns me the most; the student who doesn't email. They receive their report, and their face drops, and then they leave the room, and I don’t hear from them. I know what they don’t—that with work, they can succeed—but they are so firmly entrenched in their belief that they will fail that it is difficult to reach them—they have stopped checking school email, or attending tutoring, or responding to reassurance. I wait for a response to my encouragement, and wish for a way to break through. And think to myself that, next year, I will teach better, clearer, more grippingly, the only thing that matters—that learning is, after all, a process, and the main thing is not to despair during the journey but to keep moving forward.

 I have two weeks until I begin teaching in Ashkelon. A good fortnight for a break from my regular IB teaching, during which I’ll do the things that teachers do on their vacations: grade, plan, study content knowledge, and spend at least four hours a day reading or at the beach. Ah, summer vacation-- when teachers work only as much as a non-teacher does during the year. I'm looking forward to it!

*Any resemblance to the four sons of the Haggadah is entirely coincidental.

A Return to High Stakes Teaching... and Blogging

This summer, I’ll be teaching English in the periphery of Israel. “Periphery” is used here the same way “underprivileged” is used in the US, since in Israel, anybody who doesn’t live in the center near Tel Aviv or Jerusalem has less access to, well, all the good stuff that masses of humanity can provide when they cram into urban centers. I am ecstatic to return to periphery teaching in a new place, to learn a new culture, different from the Tel Avivi mentality I've come to love. 

The program I’m working with is called TALMA, a summer English program connected with CHOTAM, the Israeli equivalent of Teach for America or Teach First. I like the CHOTAM model a million multiplication tables more than I liked TFA. Firstly, they’re educating teachers to be teachers, and they’re actually hoping that their members will stay teachers. Secondly, it's such a small country that there's less danger of a savior complex, less a sense of outsiders butting in, and because they’re laidback blunt Israelis, there’s no quid pro quo vulnerability or emotional abuse. 

This summer, I’ll be sent with two other Israeli mentor teachers and 33 international teachers (from the US, Canada, Ghana, Australia, etc.) to co-teach a population that I don’t generally see in EMIS, my current school. I’ll be co-teaching with one of the internationals in the mornings, and mentoring a group of them in the afternoons. The populations we'll work with have no access to native speaker English teachers, so this is an attempt to close an opportunity gap through summer programs.

I’m going to be down south in Ashkelon. I’ll likely be teaching in Kiryat Malachi (a development town with a large percentage of Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, carrying the baggage of Palestinian dispossession, maabarot, and current-day racism). Ashkelon is on the beach (woohoo!), 13 kilometers from Gaza (um…). I have lots of imposter syndrome about being one of the Israeli mentors, and lots of excitement about teaching new populations, and working with international teachers who can bring me up to date on teaching in the international scene, and the combination of the two has moved me to return to blogging.

The Israeli staff spent this past Shabbat in a hotel in Netanya, getting to know each other (there needs to be a word for “גיבוש’ in English). The teachers seem like incredible people, and I’m only sad that I won’t get to work with them all.

One of the undercurrents of the weekend was a really interesting relationship between the staff (mostly secular) and religion (four or five of us are shomeret Shabbat). I’m used to being the only Jewish person in a room full of respectful non-Jews; being religious in a room full of secular Jews, a couple of whom feel free to make disparaging comments about religion, is going to be more interesting. I was shocked when, during the group interview, teachers who were asked whether there was any population they didn’t want to work with answered, “charedim.” When I raised a point about the first mentor meeting plan (that every American coming from TFA has seen Adichie’s “Single Story” video at every MTLD meeting ever), another teacher responded, “yeah, but you read the same parshah every single year, over and over.” I was surprised by the degree of antagonism she expressed to a stranger. To be fair, I don’t think she understands the depth of difference between Americanah (which I do reread every year, along with HAYS—shout out to HL) and a Ted Talk. Anyhow, it will be an interesting dynamic, and one that I’m becoming more and more accustomed to in the past year as I continuously enter liberal spaces with my mitpachat stamping a label on me before I open my mouth.

At graduation with EMIS alumni;
I'm a little confused about how to selfie,
but my kids get it.

Last night, my EMIS alumni visiting for graduation made bug eyes at me when I told them I’d be teaching in Kiryat Malachi. A nice preview of how hard it will be. It reminded me that I need to gear up with memories of Harding… riding the bronco of classroom management while smiling the entire time to keep the kids feeling safe and happy. I’m excited to get into the game again, in an Israeli classroom—always my dream. Teaching starts at the end of June—we’ll see how it goes!

People Who Look Like You

“Ms. W, how do you feel about the fact that everyone here who looks like you is outside, calling us Nazis?”

My student looked from my face to my mitpachat (religious woman’s headscarf), and back down to my face. It was last year on Israel’s Memorial Day for soldiers and victims of terror, and my sister and I, as well as two of my students, had chosen to attend the joint Jewish-Arab memorial ceremony that draws hordes of protestors at its gates every year. The protestors were confined to the perimeter, but as we passed, I noticed that many more of them were dressed like me—in a skirt and head covering—than the people seated in the audience.

“It is possible to be a religious Jew and also to believe in peace. The fact that I look forward towards a solution and not backwards into hatred, that I can make room for others’ mourning even as I deal with my own grief, is part of my religious outlook that demands building out of the pain. It sounds like a contradiction, but that’s okay, I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Pretty words, Ms. W, pretty words… What other sins of skimpy thinking and bypassed paradoxes can you cover with a Whitman quote?)

I don’t think I actually said that. I remember pointing to the four or five kippot and mitpachot near us; “there are some other people who look like me in here.” There were, and they were all standing within hand’s reach of me. Perhaps mitpachot have a magnetic quality, and Beverly Tatum can write her next book on why all the religious people flock together during peace rallies.

I thought back to that moment this past Thursday. Once again, my sister and I and a bunch of my students stood in a rally for peace, this one by “Women Wage Peace,” which markets itself as a bipartisan, across-the-spectrum peace initiative that simply wants an agreement which satisfies both sides. As we drew near, we noticed that almost all the women were white and middle-aged and wearing the same t-shirts with blue sashes. Then I noticed something else. I was being noticed. 

“Did you know that lady?”

“No…” A woman in a mitpachat had come up to me and, smiling and nodding, said hi. She seemed to be the one other religious woman there… as we marched, I noticed a few more, but my observations were nothing to how people were watching me.

“I think there are more hijabis here than mitpachot.” In my head, I started counting. The people near us were giving me startled double takes, nodding approvingly, thanking me for coming… My sister noticed one and guffawed.

“That was a hard second look! She went up and down you with her eyes.” I edged away from the woman who had done it.

At one point, one of my students asked me about it.

“I’m wearing a religious headscarf, and it’s unexpected here.”

“But you always wear it at school, and you’re the only one there, too.”

“Yeah, but they know me there… and this is a very liberal rally.”

“Ah,” my student nodded in understanding. “So religious and politically liberal don’t fit together?”

In Tel Aviv, they often do. Among parts of my friend circles, we manage to make it work. But he was right. It was odd enough that everyone around us was startled by me. It’s odd enough that at moments, in my work, I wonder how my students see me. This is the first year that I’m starting already “out,” already clearly identified as a religious Jew to anybody who knows the dress code. What do the students in our peace-driven Israeli-Palestinian-International school assume about me? Will I become as close with my Palestinian students as I have in the past? Will they feel as safe in our classroom? The way my identity plays out as a teacher is something that I’ve grappled with privately for a long time, but its new visibility has me processing more urgently.

This year, my teaching has launched with a solid start. I’ve taught both my curricula several times before, and if occasionally I shake things up and teach some new material, it fits into a framework of confident experience. Now that the first few hectic weeks have ended, I’m looking for more edge. How to push the classes beyond simple English and Psychology into world-building.

Paulo Freire wrote, “reading the word is reading the world.” Spurred by some of my family, friends, and community members who, during Trump’s election, voted for him without understanding the effect it would have on minorities, I reviewed our class booklist. My students can choose to privilege their comfort above others’ survival, if they wish, but it will be a choice. They will know what they are choosing. They will not be able to claim financial incentive or party loyalty or foreign policy as reasons, together with a complete ignorance of how identity-based oppression operates. They will have to consciously choose their own advancement over someone else’s survival.

 

We will read Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, to remind them that Mexicans are writers, cooks, and revolutionaries, rather than rapists. We’ll cover Satrapi’s Persepolis and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to jog students out of a complacency in which the only history that matters is their own country’s, and for the richness of characters that uncloud some stereotypes about people living in a Muslim country, or an African one. We’ll do Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and track the historical basis for every dystopian detail. We’ll read Auden’s poetry because every gay student deserves to read a gay poet who challenged societal norms with ruthless witticisms in perfect verse.

I am flooding my students with books about and by people who look different, each to the other, so that they will read the world with all the complexity it holds. So that at their next rally, they attend without assumptions about who belongs. So that when they write the world, they don’t forget to include people who look different from themselves. And perhaps, together, we will figure out how to write ourselves, and read each other truly.

There are Days (Ode to Expat Living)

It’s been two years, this month, since I made aliyah. Mostly, it was a very good decision. But there are days.

There are days when I stand in the middle of my living room, arms upraised, and declare, in my best Scarlett O’Hara accent, “Canada. I’ll go back to Canada.”

There are days that start out in the Canadian consulate for a pleasant fifteen-minute wait, where the only rude person in a fifty-foot radius is the Quebecois who complains that the Israeli security guard doesn’t speak French.

There are days that begin with an efficient Canadian government worker looking at my documents, stamping my passport renewal form and asking if there’s anything else she can do for me within three minutes of my sitting down at her desk.

There are days where I manage to completely fudge both the Israeli healthcare system and Israeli banking, and think that perhaps I’m just too much of a provincial idiot to live in a foreign country.

There are days when I tramp home through the Tel Aviv heat, sweat slicking every inch of my skin, and think to myself that even if this is the Holy Land kissed by G-d Himself with blessing, it would be nice if He would stop slobbering on me and drooling down my back every time I step outside in summer.

There are days when I can’t even look at people’s faces as I pass them, and the urge to knock over the person who seems to be INTENTIONALLY blocking me on the sidewalk gets so strong that I bite my lip and draw blood.

There are days when I realize that the person blocking me is one of my old students, arms spread wide, grin spread wider, literally bobbing up and down on the sidewalk with joy that we’ve bumped into each other.

There are days when I return to the bank and the teller takes one look at my face and refuses to do anything until I have taken several deep breathes with him and practiced some calming yoga moves in the middle of the bank, and we are both laughing.

There are days when the bank teller wishes me Shabbat shalom not once but twice in lieu of an adieu, refusing to say goodbye when he can say something that places us as part of the same tribe.

There are days when my healthcare representative calls me just because that’s a service they provide, and is thrilled that she can actually give me information. 

There are days that I sprawl on the floor of my living room under the fan, arms under my head, and declare that I'm not going anywhere. 

The ceiling fan responds, "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."