OK, no, not really, but you get the idea. I haven't begun to teach English every day, as I will in a few weeks' time. But today, Monday, September 9th, 2013, I had my first time in any remotely official capacity as part of a regular teaching program.
But here I am, getting well ahead of myself. The last event I described was Havdallah following Shabbat (Saturday night). Sunday morning, the 12 ITF Ramla participants loaded onto a minibus bound for Achvah University. I, unfortunately, was the last one to arrive, an error I have been trying to avoid committing. Oh, well.
At Achvah, we met... the rest of the 154 Israel Teaching Fellows for the 2013-2014 school year! Yes, that's a lot of people, spread all over the State of Israel! To be honest, it wasn't such a stimulating meeting, but it was mandatory. On to the interesting part.
On
Monday morning, I got up at 7:00 am, and caught the bus outside my apartment at
around 8:50 am. Bus route 13 travels
from Ramla to the neighboring city of Lod in about 15 minutes' time. The bus interior was almost identical to that
of a TCAT Bus, but lacked the rows of advertisements that I'm so used to seeing
in the buses in my hometown. I kept
close watch on the digital screen displaying in Hebrew the names of the
upcoming stops. I stopped off at
Henrietta Szold Street, and from there, needed to find my way to the school,
which was rather difficult. I needed to
ask, in Hebrew, two passers-by for directions, and, once I had located the
building, needed to explain to the security guard, again in Hebrew, who I was
and whom I was meeting. Once past the
gate, I walked through the schoolyard, empty at the moment, and asked a man
sitting outside of the school building, whom I later learned was Yitzchak, the
school custodian, where I could find Moshe.
Miraculously, I understood enough to find Moshe, the English teacher (a
thirty-some-year-old Israeli man), and he was surprised to see me, having
expected me to come with Carmel, the director of Oranim in Ramla. He began to show me around, introducing me to
the principal and to some of the other teachers, when he received a telephone
call from Carmel, who told him that TZ (the other ITF volunteer at the
Rambam school in Lod) had missed the bus.
Moshe and I didn't want to begin the tour of the school without TZ,
but, thinking that she would need help finding her way from the bus stop to the
Rambam school, Moshe sent me with two students, a boy and a girl (both around
eleven) to the bus stop to wait for the next Bus 13. Both were quite precocious, especially the
girl, who was also very talkative. Her
English, in fact, was probably about as good as my French. She and the boy talked to me all about
themselves, their school, and their lives in Ramla, while we waited for TZ's bus to arrive. When the next
Bus 13 finally did arrive – TZ wasn't there! She called Moshe, and it turned out that she
had been severely misdirected, and was lost in Lod. Moshe went to find her, while the students
introduced me to some of their friends, in the schoolyard, some of whom were
too shy to speak English with me (or even to look at me), while others were
very excited to meet an American who spoke English. Several students hailed me with very
colloquial greetings, but then quickly became too embarrassed to say anything
more once I had greeted them back, and focused my attention on them. I always made certain to speak slowly and
clearly, to make eye contact, and to smile encouragingly.
TZ finally arrived, with Moshe, much to my relief.
The first thing that Moshe did was to make certain that both TZ and I
could find our ways to and from the bus stop on Henrietta Szold. Next, he assigned the same two students to
guide us around the school, although we acquired a few other enthusiastic
guides on our tour of Rambam's facilities.
The physical school building was quite modest, much smaller than even my
elementary school, although it had a separate gymnasium, as well as a separate
synagogue building, where the students pray daily at 8:00 am. As I toured around the school, I was more
popular than I have ever before been in my life; students asked me all sorts of
questions: Was I from America? Did I
really speak English? Was TZ my
sister? Was I Jewish? Would I be in school every day? I answered these as best as I could. Based on what several of the instructors had
told me, I guessed that it was better to feign worse Hebrew skills than I
really had, to encourage students to speak.
If they knew that they couldn't "cheat" on me by saying what
they wanted to say in Hebrew, and assuming that I'd understand. Most of the teachers and the rest of the
staff were too shy to communicate with us in English, if at all, something that
we had been warned against. Teachers who
don't ordinarily speak English will be hesitant to risk embarrassing themselves
in front of their students who speak better English than they do. When it comes down to it, if you asked many
of your Middle or High School teachers who taught subjects other than math or
one of the sciences to calculate the area of a circle or the volume of a cylinder,
how many of them would willingly risk showing that they probably don't know
some of the material that their schools expect their students to know? Regardless, we only met one other teacher,
Chani, who also teaches English, whose pronunciation is very good. In Israel, students address their teachers as
Moreh (for a man) or Morah (for a woman) X, X being the teacher's
first name.
I
should take a moment here to describe the student composition. First of all, these students are adorable;
there is a higher Cuteness Factor in this school than in any I've visited in
the U.S. or in Europe. The girls wear
skirts and shirts that fully cover their shoulders; the boys wear kippot. All of their t-shirts have the name of the
school printed on the breast. If an
American teacher walked into this school, they'd give it an A+ for
diversity. I'd say that around half of
the children are Ethiopian Jews, and more than a third look as if they have
Middle Eastern background, and are probably Mizrachi Jews. Only around one-eighth look as if they have
European ancestry (note: as far as I know, all of them, in terms of tradition,
are Sepharadi, regardless of skin color, again in defiance of the stereotype
that all Sepharadim are dark-skinned).
However, in reality, this is arguably more homogeneous in composition
than any public school in the United States: every single student is
Jewish. In Israel, the social divides
simply don't run across color-lines the way they do in the United States. An Israeli Ethiopian Jew, though he shares
more in common with other Ethiopian Jews than he does with, say, Israeli Syrian
Jews (for example, the Israeli Ethiopian Jewish community observes a special
holiday in the Jewish calendar), he will have far more in common with an
Israeli Syrian Jew than he will with an Israeli Sudanese Muslim, despite
sharing skin tone. The students at
Rambam do not associate significantly more with students of the same skin tune
than they do with any of the others.
Also, though this is a religious school, it is not Charedi, and boys and
girls learn the same subjects together in the same classrooms.
After
the tour of the school, TZ and I observed Moshe's 7th-grade
English class. We introduced ourselves,
loudly and clearly, and then began to help groups of four or five students with
their work. Some of the students in my
group were struggling very hard. It is
constantly surprising to me to see Israelis struggle with the English language,
because all of the Israelis with whom I am friends speak excellent or even
beautiful English. Even though these
students were in the same class as the semi-fluent girl I met at the beginning
of the day, some of them were scarcely capable of sounding out English-Hebrew
cognates written in English. However,
most of them were trying at least moderately hard to understand the
lesson. After this first class
observation, we did the same for an eighth-grade class, with somewhat different
results. I was with an incredibly
hard-working group of two very talented girls, a very talented boy, and a
somewhat less talented boy who nevertheless worked very hard, and clearly liked
me. All around us, though, chaos
reigned; any student not working in a small group with TZ or me, or on whom
Moshe was focusing his attention, was cutting up. Don't get me wrong, these are sweet,
friendly, social kids; however, they cannot sit still. Many of the members of this particular class,
Moshe divulged to us later, come from particularly difficult homes: some need
to work a few hours every week in order to help support their families; others
live with their grandparents, because they are orphans. It's a sad story, really, but I have faith in
their ability to learn this coming year.
After
class, TZ and I caught the bus back to Ramla. Perrin and Natalie, two other awesome people
who are on our program, were riding the bus, and also on their way back to
Ramla. I had a meeting on the Ramla campus to discuss the plans for Hebrew
Club, a weekly club for non-Hebrew speakers to practice speaking in Hebrew with
native Israelis. Unfortunately, most of
the meeting's content went over my head, on account of it being conducted
almost entirely in Hebrew. Later in the
evening, my three housemates and I attended the Underground Club on the campus
in Ramla, as did many of the other Oranim participants. The Underground Club is a weekly club in
which Israelis can learn English from native speakers. I ended up giving my e-mail address to an
Israeli man interested in practicing his English writing by exchanging
e-mails. At one point, we played a game
in which we answered questions about ourselves asked by others: I was later
accused by someone of asking Dolly Dickson questions, i.e. easy questions meant
to accentuate the answerers' strong points.
Gamar chatimah tovah, v'tzom kal, l'kulchem!
~JD
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