Birthday Weekend in Ramla

As those of you who have been reading my blog for a while may have realized, the tightness of my schedule is indirectly proportional to the amount of time that I devote to writing about my experiences on my blog.  Therefore, I hope that you'll realize that the reason I haven't spent time blogging daily about my experiences in the Rambam school in Lod is not because I have nothing interesting to say, but rather, because I have a very busy schedule.  In addition to my position at Rambam, which is an 8:00-2:30 school day Monday through Thursday for me, I am participating in various supplementary volunteering opportunities, enrichment activities, and Hebrew lessons.  Also, to round out my Wednesday and Thursday nights, I am continuing chevrutot with two particularly cool people, and hope to have a third, very soon.

My job is, I'll admit, quite hard.  I have virtually no experience teaching, and I'm experiencing mixed results.  Part of this is due to my inexperience, part of it is due to the fact that my students and I share no language in common in which we can both fluently communicate, and part of it is due to the inherent difficulty of teaching.  I am teaching grade levels from 2nd to 8th grades, and many of the students are Special Ed (although none as severely so as some of the children with whom I have worked in the past).  I am not, as one of my close acquaintances suggested I would become if I became a teacher, simply a babysitter, although my job does border on this during a few of my classes with young Special Ed students.  Sometimes, I am in control of what I teach my students.  For instance, with one 6th-grade student, who is about eleven years old, I am essentially a private English tutor, and teach him what he wants to learn.  I had the idea of teaching him to tell time, and quickly realized that he had not learned the names of the numbers beyond ten.  So I set about teaching him eleven through twenty, and he showed remarkably good learning skills (this is after we set aside the textbook reading exercise about the Tower of London, interesting as this was).  While excellent at math, especially given the fact that I am quizzing him in a foreign language, this same student is almost illiterate.  When I played Memory with him the other day (in which he had to match the card with the English word to the card with the picture on it), he could actually remember the English word when he saw the picture cards than when he saw the English word cards, even though the words that he was trying to pronounce were printed on their backs.  Moreh Moshe, obviously, wants me to teach him to read, and I'm hoping to simultaneously do this, while also teaching him what he wants to learn.  To give another example, I have been trying to teach a group of 7th-grade girls how to distinguish between "same" and "different," and teaching them a lot of adjectives (big/little, light/heavy, hot/cold, sweet/salty, happy/sad), trying to get them to practice speaking aloud, and giving them the opportunity to draw the things that we are talking about on the whiteboard (this is a greater reward than I initially would have thought).  However, no matter how many times I repeat, and they repeat (willingly -- they're quite well-behaved, and genuinely interested in learning), they cannot yet either consistently correctly pronounce the words "same" and "different," or even remember which of these terms correspond to the Hebrew equivalents, דּוֹמֶה and שׁוֹנֶה.  However, they told me that they would very much like to learn the lyrics to a One Direction song (yes, Lani, you read that correctly!), so tomorrow, TZ will be teaching them a One Direction song of her choosing.  To give another example, on Monday, first thing in the morning, I sat down with an 8th-grade girl, and walked her through a worksheet on the present simple.  In the process, I needed to re-teach her how to conjugate and pronounce verbs "to be" and "to do" in English.  I think that she made enormous progress, but it was simply with the assigned textbook work.  Meanwhile, with the Special Ed 4th-grade class, TZ and I taught the English words for colors by playing Memory, and although by the end of the game, most of them could accurately identify the words and match them to the correct pictures, I am not certain if one such session per week is really enough to let such lessons sink in.  There is another 6th-grade boy who loves World of Worldcraft, and I am hoping to be able to craft some sort of game for him, in order to allow his interest in fantasy games to propel forward his studies in English.  I taught him a few words that I thought he would like to know, such as "magic," "wizard," and "fire."  He tried to ask me to define words like "Paladin" and "Worg," and I did my best to explain.  In all of these examples, I'm doing my best to try to find the best ways to teach students in ways to which they will be receptive. 

In all of this, TZ, my teaching partner, is absolutely integral.  When I was placed with her, I really, really felt as if I had won the ITF lottery.  TZ is one of only two participants with prior experience in teaching, is very sweet, very hard-working, and is the kind of person to whom young children will easily form a strong emotional attachment.  Every day when I see one particular 8th-grade boy during tefillat hashachar, he asks me, in the best English that he can muster, "TZ, she is coming today?"  Likewise, yesterday, when I was leaving the school, one of the Special Ed girls who had grown particularly fond of TZ asked me "איפה המורה, where is the [female] teacher?"  Really, TZ is phenomenal, and can control students much, much better than I can.  My Hebrew is slightly better than hers, at the moment, but in a few weeks, we'll both be equally capable of communicating with the students.

In fact, my slight advantage in (archaic) Hebrew is sometimes a disadvantage.  The students know that they can "cheat" with me, and slide into Hebrew to get their points across.  7th-graders habitually respond to my questions, posed in either language, entirely in Hebrew, and don't seem to understand that I am trying to get them to become used to pronouncing English words, not simply understanding my translations, and moving on.  The 8th-graders mostly haven't discovered my secret, but it's no secret among the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders, whom I realize would understand nothing of what I try to tell them, if I just spoke to them in untranslated, natural English.  When my Hebrew falls short with the 3rd graders, though, there really isn't anything I can do; how can I expect a student still learning the Roman alphabet to be able to understand the details of an activity?  Nevertheless, I feel deeply unsatisfied when, after a class, I realize that I have really just been speaking Hebrew until my face turns blue, without giving the students the actual benefits of having a native English speaker as their instructor. 

I am encountering several additional problems.  One of the greatest of my recurring dilemmas is preventing students from being distracted by the computers in the English Room.  As someone who was once a preteen boy, I understand how incredibly captivating electronic games are (I still remember my first, magically-hypnotic glimpse of Super Mario 64).  In my opinion, trying to teach the students English with the computers in the room is like trying to get a young child to eat his vegetables (again, been in that position), while in the same room is a large batch of freshly-baked cookies, by promising him that he may have one cookie (and only one) after, and only after, he eats all of his vegetables.  Some children like vegetables, so this isn't an issue.  But others will simply ignore me (I have no disciplinary powers, remember), and, figuratively speaking, eat the entire plate of cookies.  I have tried to tell students that they may not play with the computers until after they are finished with their work, and the result is that they become infuriated with me, and begin shouting at me in Hebrew that I can't understand.  I tried hiding the computer mice, and, as a result two of the students figured out how to open game applications using only the computer, while another (Special Ed) student went absolutely berserk, TZ tells me, when I was out of the room.  TZ convinced me to put the mice back, and, at the end of the day, exactly the same thing occurred; students ignored me and their work, and played games, for the entire class period.  When I try to show them English-language sites, they immediately close the windows, and head straight to YouTube, Facebook, or, most commonly, gaming sites.  I have yet to find a way to solve this problem.  I am being lenient with students, because this is the beginning of the year, and if they decide now that they hate me, I won't be able to redeem myself, and be able to be an effective teacher.  I've already, despite all of my efforts to never show the slightest hint of meanness, anger, or annoyance, had one student call me a Nazi.  I just don't know what I've done wrong.  I even tried to correct his swearing (all students know the terms "F--k, M----rf----r, sh--, and b--ch, even if they can't spell their names; I blame the pervasive venomous cruelty of American culture for this), but even that didn't interest him.

That, anyway, are the joys and frustrations of teaching, as of right now.  Ulpan has finally begun, and, if we can convince the instructor to allow Coco and Veta to participate in the Advanced course, I will be at ease. The truth of the matter is, everyone gives me far too much credit for understanding Hebrew; I'm completely out of my league here in Ramla, and am struggling just to get by.  Obviously, this is the best situation (short of having Israeli roommates), but everyone around me seems to think that I'm some kind of Hebrew expert when, in fact, I can scarcely explain to a 2nd-grader how to fill out a simple English exercise.  It looks as if I'll need to re-learn how to make adjectives comparative and superlative, as well as the pi'el binyan.  And learn all five remaining binyanim while I'm at it.  Oh, man; I wish I were as good at this stuff as Peninah, or Avital, or Eli, or Lani, or Ilan, or Julian, or -- someone.

On the brighter side, for those of you in the U.S., my Oranim friends made a real effort to give me an enjoyable birthday party on Saturday night, after Shabbat had ended.  I had thought that there would be some low-key hanging out at the house on Haveradim, and that would be all; in fact, my roommate Ben, and the folks at Gil'ad, did a first-rate job of fooling me into coming to Gil'ad first, on the pretext that they needed me to walk them over to Haveradim.  So, in fact, the party was at the house on Gil'ad all along!  Noah had followed my date-buying instructions that I gave him during our recent outing to Ein Gedi and the Dead Sea, and the entire group had pitched in to buy me -- you guessed it -- about three kilos of dates.  I love these fat, chewy, flavorful Israeli dates, along with the rest of Israeli produce, and finished them tonight (I did share a lot with the others on the first night, but I still destroyed them incredibly quickly).  Devin even put birthday candles in a couple of the dates.  I had thought that that was all, but, later, my housemate Ben showed up with a (pareve) chocolate birthday cake!  Who would have guessed it?  There was dancing, etc., and nobody got sick (happy about this last one).  Some super-cool people who had been in Tel Aviv and elsewhere during Shabbat even showed up in time, which was wonderful!

The next day, Carmel and a local Ramla tour guide led us on a tour of notable tourist cites in Ramla, including the Ramla museum, the Pool of Arches, and the White Tower.  I had an enjoyable time, and only wish that I could give a fuller description; however, I took too long, and the memories are no longer so fresh in my memory...  The important thing is that I learned more about Ramla, and that Carmel continues to keep us all happy.  I want to see more of the museum, though; I only really saw a very small portion of the exhibits.

Also, Becky gave me a fantastic haircut on Friday afternoon, just in time for my birthday.  The students at Rambam admired it enough that they managed to tell me that they thought that it was a "good haircut" in English!  Great job, Becky!  Another person who deserves a special shoutout here is Carmel, who helped me overcome some upsetting incidents that occurred last Monday.  I'm really grateful, and think that I'm entirely back on track now, back in harness.

Thinking of you all!

~JD