No 'I' in 'Teacher'

To begin at the beginning, I will explain that Hanukah vacation interrupted the flow of my existential dilemmas. Seeing as I had already overcome, over the course of my raging 20s, the existential grief that wells up from those strange catacombs of personhood, which one must explore in order to fully come of age, I had apparently seen fit to move on to the existential nitpicking and mulling that has been the day's bread of our school.
However, as I have explained, Hanukah interfered with all that. It was not so much that I rested, per say, for had I done I most certainly would have found myself wandering through that same exasperating labyrinth of thought that characterizes my reflections upon the learning process. No, it was the put-putting of normal life that took over - there were chores to be done, a wedding to plan (such a regularized affair, nowadays), a grandmother to see, parents to visit - and aside from the painting of a small picture there was no depth to my holiday, no internal sight-seeing, even.
Upon returning, I found - not without a twinge of regret, oddly! - that much of my frustration with the school had disappeared. For this I blame S, to whose name I have rightfully tagged the nickname "light of my life", and who is the new English teacher for our non-readers.
I thought that it would make me happy to be rid of these kids who, seated in any given lesson, proceed to wreck it, leave it, or both: anything to refrain from facing the un-faceable English script on the board, and their stunted or absolute lack where others - their peers - wield huge, powerful phalluses.
Not that I am unhappy - elated even - to be able to teach in a classroom in which everyone at least knows how to put together a simple sentence in English. It's just that, well, I guess I miss those little assholes.
S received the task of teaching some kids their ABCs and others simple words and sounds. I told her of the heartbreaking jolt I received when O, who has been mentioned earlier in this blog, asked me in the year's beginning if I would be so kind as to teach him the alphabet. "No one has ever taught it to me before," he explained simply. To imagine all of the stern faces he must have faced, peering at him angrily after each school test or report, is to know true mental anguish.
So I am glad I found S, who somehow combines the compassion of a saint with the sternness of a British headmaster, and is perfect for teaching these children. They leave her classroom with a feeling of accomplishment, something that has not been bestowed upon many of them since they learned to talk. This has led to calm - actual calm!
But I am also jealous, an emotion that takes me by surprise even as I write the word. Jealous, because somehow I had developed a love for those faces I so often dreaded to look upon in my classroom. I had apparently come to cherish the brick walls behind their eyes. I don't know whether this feeling should be characterized as selfish and egotistical (only I can smash these brick walls!) or self-destructive (I must smash these brick walls no matter what!), but either way, every crack was a Trojan victory. Now these victories are S's, and I must reorganize my thoughts around my own.
For this, however, there must be an 'I' in the classroom, where there most certainly is none.
There is an 'I' at home, where my fiance waits on me hand and foot at the moment, his penance for dropping me on my back the day before yesterday. And as I remain here, rediscovering time and again the complexity of muscular power involved in each of our tiniest movements, I am utterly self-involved and totally incapable of focusing any mental energy whatsoever on the classroom, just as I will often come away from a lesson realizing that my finger is bleeding, or that I have not had a sip of the tea I made for myself prior to it. This has led me to see my self and the classroom as two separate but opposing features of a larger me, a yin-yang, if you will. It is rather odd to see oneself this way, as if encompassing a mass of people totally unconnected with me, souls with whom I am in contact just three hours a week. And I can see that I have gone too far - I have overstepped the boundaries of my self - and this cannot lead anywhere good.
Another example of the 'I' gone awry is our science teacher, M, who came to school with labor pains the other day. "I'm having contractions," she murmured, while having a brief cry over the lack of lesson plans, and just before rushing off to teach a class. The next evening she gave birth, two months early, to an infant now in intensive care.
So where does school end and 'I' begin? Or, to look at it another way, how do 'I' refrain from encompassing an entire school (for it is certainly the ego that knows no bounds getting us into such trouble)?
I know of no answers as yet, but for now it seems right to focus on my back muscles, which appear to know their responsibilities quite clearly. What they cannot do, they won't: A refreshing concept!

Farce

The art teacher walked into my classroom on Wednesday, just as I was preparing to go over the English homework with one of the (many) struggling students.
"It's happened," he said, with his irreverent smirk. "They've seen my stuff."
G is an artist who, in his words, "slaughters sacred cows and shatters taboos."
He especially has his work cut out for him in Israel, which, as the center of three different religions, is without a doubt the Mecca of all things sacred and taboo. One of his videos, the only one I had seen before all hell broke loose, features a snorting, cartoonish voice-over of Yitzhak Rabin's granddaughter speaking at his funeral. If you want to make an Israeli person cry, play them this speech. He told me people threw things at him when he showed the film at Tel Aviv's cinemateque.

The kids - every single student in the school, according to my homeroom - had apparently poked and rummaged through the Web until they lit upon a virtual gold nugget: A promo video, just four minutes long, of every provocative film G had ever made. There was gay porn (specifically close-up shots of rimming). There was G rubbing "shit" (actually chocolate) all over his face with a toilet brush. There was Hitler. For dessert, there were goldfish slowly choking to death in a bowl of gelatin.
Talk about taboo.

Additionally, and, I'm sure, as an example of Murphy's inestimable grandeur, it was two days before the school's first exhibition. All, literally all, of the parents would, in about 40 hours, be walking in the door to gaze at the splendors of Project-Based-Learning, at the wonders their children had accomplished with poster-board, art supplies, and (mostly) Wikipedia.
The meeting that followed was tense. It was decided that G would make himself conspicuously scarce the next day, while the staff attempted to mute the parental outcry with a particularly ingratiating email. To the children, meanwhile, we would explain that art exists in the world of make-believe and not within the realm of the real. Case in point: Not poo, but rather chocolate!
The next morning, after allowing for a deluge of disgusted faces, melodramatic squirming, and gasps so emphatic they would put Vivien Leigh to shame, I asked: "What if G were an actor? And what if you saw him, on screen, killing someone because he was playing the part of a murderer? Would you think any worse of him then?"
This gave them pause, and then, with the swiftness of emotional pivoting so idiosyncratic to seventh graders, they immediately changed their minds. Well, most of them.
"Make believe!" they cried with relief, trying to persuade those few who refused to budge. "It's like the blood in movies. That blood's not real, right? Well, neither is the poo! And the fish! The fish are plastic!" (Later G told me the fish were real, and probably suffered a horrifying death of mute strangulation as the gelatin hardened its gooey death-grip on them. But one of the kids has an aquarium at home, so I did not correct their mistake.)
I found myself warming to these kids, elated at the discovery that they could, when properly prodded, support art for art's sake. And Oscar Wilde was skeptical!
But the school had not yet reached the climax of its aptitude for make-believe - far from it. This achievement was to be realized on Friday, at the exhibition.
Now most of the students at our school are not what you would call over-achievers. Most of them would like very much to accomplish the academic bare minimum and then immediately immerse themselves for the remainder of the day in YouTube and some game called "Dead Island" (also "Sponge Bob", which I used to believe one ceased to be interested in after kindergarten).
Thus, until one day before the exhibition, many of our kids found themselves unfortunately without a project to display before their blissfully unaware parental units.
Luckily, there's Wikipedia, the articles of which I'm quite sure remained unread even as they were being marked, copied, pasted, and placed on (rather expensive) poster-board.
Their teachers, at least, received the gift of a day that revolved around "learning". 'Finally, they show some interest!' the teachers exclaimed. Thursday was a whirlwind of what was later termed "pedagogical activity" and "enlistment to the learning process". Mostly, what I saw was lamination, cutting, and pasting. But, well.
On Friday the show of learning reached its peak, as parents emitted a plethora of "oohs" and "aahs", and visitors from the Center of Democratic Studies revelled in an orgy of presentations (by over-exited kids and teachers alike), portraits hung haphazardly on string, and picture frames bought last-minute at Ikea. Rave reviews of a "pedagogical heaven" followed suit, upsetting my gag reflex.
Like chocolate on a toilet brush, the exhibition elicited the precise response we had set out to garner. But like the fake blood on a prop-knife, it was manufactured for show, a far cry from the life-giving blood of learning.
With a smile frozen on my face, I filmed the effulgent responses of the parents. They, too, were a part of the act, while behind the scenes flitted, like a phantom of the opera, the knowledge that their offspring could not care less about anything other than Facebook and soccer. Maybe, just maybe, he is starting to blossom, they must have told themselves. Maybe the "system" (of which grade school was representative) had just been oppressing his wonderful talents!
'We have sparked the fire of false hope, and it will burn us alive,' I told myself bluntly. Though it was the type of mute, suffocating realization that no plastic fish has ever felt, I take consolation in the fact that it was not make believe.

Savasana and Death

Originally written on Sunday, November 25, 2012

An interesting epiphany came to me as I lay in the Savasana pose in yoga class. It occurred to me as a solution to the conundrum I faced all this week and the previous weekend, a time of war in Israel.

Last Thursday, precisely one week ago, the city of Tel Aviv came under rocket fire for the first time since the Gulf War, in 1991. Since I had not been living in Israel at the time, Thursday constituted my first encounter with the blaring siren, the sudden awe, the chills of the spine that accompany warfare. As a suitable coincidence, the siren caught me just as I was walking out the door to yoga class.

By Saturday I was a quaking, crying, jolted mess. My nerves were shattered upon the point of awakening, and for the entire day I could not bear to be left alone. When by some chance I was left to fend for myself for half an hour, I spent it whimpering in the bathroom, my soul feeling very much akin to the four white walls that moved to close in upon it: suffocating, and terribly, terribly blank.

It took all of the strength I could muster to step outside of the house and mount my bike on Sunday morning, for the drive to school. I knew that this structure we inhabited for the better part of each day was nowhere near being prepared for war. We lacked a proper bomb shelter, and our students were sure to be confused as to which building they were supposed to take cover in while they scattered over the grounds for break.

At 10:35, just as I was seating myself to devour the grapefruit I had peeled, ready to take full advantage of the short morning break we are allotted (15 minutes in all): it came. Within three seconds of the siren’s blare, students began rushing into the teachers’ lounge, where stairs lay to an underground shelter (I was informed of its existence that very morning). They barged headlong into the room, some yelling obscenities, others laughing hysterically, all of them running much too fast to safely descend the staircase at hand. Immediately I answered the call of duty, relentlessly repeating, “No running, no running, no running,” in a monotone that calmed me more than it did them.

From within the bumbling, fumbling crowd emerged one of my favorite students – a girl so shy she is often painful to behold when embarrassed – her face streaming with tears. She was breathing hard when I grabbed her, her wide body expanding and contracting wildly within my supporting embrace. “Shhh, shhhh, shhh,” I whispered into her ear. “Everything’s okay, don’t worry, everything will be okay.” Meanwhile, as my right hand continued to smooth her hair and rub her quivering back, my left hand was up, in the straight-laced position of a traffic cop, warning students not to run. As I whispered to her, I looked meaningfully at them, my eyes willing them to slow their bestial stampede.

When the alarm had died down, the girl sat beside me at the teachers’ table, still shaking, her jaw working unstoppably, unable to speak. I slowly, calmly, and perfunctorily devoured my as yet uneaten grapefruit, my mind a total blank.

It was only later, when I returned home and the siren blared once again, that I remembered I had forgotten to feel fear during this moment of wartime insanity at the school. Certainly, having handled that alarm with such finesse, I could not feasibly return to my own state of shaky nervousness. That part of me was gone – it had unceremoniously detached itself from my being and blown swiftly away, like a spore from a scattering groundsel.

Well, and?

Just this: As I assumed the Savasana – or corpse position – in which one lays as if dead – palms up, mouth slightly ajar, tongue resting softly against teeth – I thought of the position’s very dissimilarity with death.

And I was reminded of my poetry instructor’s explanation of a simile, which she demonstrated upon Madonna’s hit tune: Like a Virgin. Like, she explained, means that the subject is precisely not the thing he is likened to, otherwise, why the comparison? Madonna (in this case very much lacking in virginity) is likened to the chaste state in order to illustrate the chaste feeling she receives when with a particular bloke. But apart from this sense of virginity, nothing of its essence survives between her shapely legs.

Take, then, the Savasana: A state that simulates corpse-hood, but is, in effect, rather the opposite. One lays in Savasana, generally with one’s heart racing from physical strain, in order to focus all consciousness inward, on the self, which becomes one with the body. 

Death, very contradictorily, implies a scattering of the self, a singular end to its oneness. At what strange variance, therefore, is it with the Savasana, in which one is made to feel very much alive, to center in on the vessels pumping blood, to take note of the thumping of the heart, which resounds in the ears, and to massage the muscles with the breath. Therefore the corpse pose, as its name suggests, is really and actually no more than a pose.

Contrarily, let us examine the act of teaching. The teacher standing, back arched, eyes sharp and probing, examines her students with the utmost attentiveness. She deliberates on their every move, sounds them out to predict trouble, warns them to stow cell phones away. Those two girls should not sit together, she thinks, and that one, he doesn’t seem to have taken his Ritalin this morning. Finally, she wonders whether her throat can handle any shouting this morning. She doesn’t have to wonder long, for within moments she is shouting: “Quiet!” and her throat feels fine (that’s the adrenalin – she will pay for it after the lesson).

Throughout the hour she must make sure everyone works (or they will never learn) so she travels round the room in sporadic jumps – explaining, warning, encouraging, marveling, criticizing – every word she says is weighed with special care, and she dislodges from her aching throat only those that she feels will enlighten one person – one world – even for a moment. Her brain aches from the strain of caring so deeply about all these worlds that have been implanted in her universe. 

Her soul? Her self? These are nowhere to be found. 

All is engulfed by these other souls placed under her charge, these yawning, ravaging voids gathered before her to learn, to learn her teachings – each world a hungry, consuming, vacuum of consciousness.

There is no me, there is no self. There is only a merging with a universe of other worlds.

This is why teaching is death.

Each day I die for six hours or more. If I’m lucky, I can resurrect myself at the day’s end. If I am lucky, I retain the strength to gather up the scattered pieces of the puzzle as the sun sinks into its cold, orange death – as it is simultaneously reborn somewhere else in the world.

If not – well – I don’t really know.

You see, there is no remembrance in death.

Leaving School At The End Of A Day

There is a moment
That rectifies,
When the sun lingers
Just above the rooftops
Draping its rays
Upon the rosy clouds
And lining them with gold,
Like a halo round the city.
And the sparse palms stand pointedly
At the edge of the tired, grimy field
Like sentences spoken long ago and
Forgotten, yet tall, upwards-reaching;
Channels to heaven.

Oh, the Places They'll Go!

              Waterfall by Dr. Seuss

"Hey, wait a minute, this picture is about sex!" commented one of my students, whom I will refer to (rather appropriately) as O, not because of said appropriateness but rather, lamely, because his name begins with this so aesthetically round, but perfectly empty, hole of a letter.

To say that O is "not the sharpest crayon" would be to put it mildly. On every occasion I have had to look into his eyes, which are roughly the color of said sexually-charged waterfall, I have met with the unresponsiveness one would expect to receive from a goldfish. Yesterday, he asked if I could teach him the ABC's, as no one had ever taught them to him before. Obviously he is a failure of the system, and if my school allowed me to give grades there is no doubt I would give this system an O for O. 

But that is neither here nor there.

What was interesting about O's comment, though, was that it could have been the central claim of a term paper written by any bachelor of the arts, and, properly supported, the paper would have received an A. The orgiastic burst of color in the background confirms this analysis of sexual subtext within the art of a writer known, worldwide, for his almost magical adeptness for connecting with children. It appears Dr. Seuss has drawn an orgasm even a child can understand.

Granted, O has sex on the brain. His comment sparked a class-wide free-for-all scream-fest, accompanied by hoots, foot-stamping, and plenty of shrieks and giggles, as well as an atmosphere of embarrassment so hormonally-charged I practically had to mop up afterwards. He went on to regale his classmates with stories of two Asian women in the shower, which were immediately picked up by other hyper-sexed males with plenty to say about what was, apparently, the infamous Two Girls One Cup, as well as an obviously photo-shopped picture of a man swing his member over shoulder like a purse.

Discussing the hullaballoo later with the art teacher, I learned that his main concern was with the possible raising of excitement thresholds implicit in watching such jolting footage at a young and impressionable age. Time will tell whether he is justified in his reading of the Internet generation. 

What is certain, however, is that the kids of the millenium (did I mention all of our student were born in the year 2000?) are growing up very differently than we. I didn't need my fiance's childhood stories of stealing into his father's bedroom to glimpse a Victoria's Secret magazine, hiding under the bed, to tell me that.

A child like O, however, with, shall we call it limited brainpower, may be less susceptible to manifestations of the darker twists of the mind available in online streaming. These serve as inspiration to a select few, including a certain child we will call A, who circled a video this week that chilled me to the bone. His feat of cinematography, a burst of evil genius, as some may say, features himself swinging a board at the head of an alley cat, who limps off, assumably to die in some dark corner of the world. A second scene centers on scissors cutting the cat's tail - actually a caterpillar of the type I, at their age, affectionately called a "Fuzzy Wuzzy" --- and Fin.

What so disturbs about the video - which, by the way, none of the teachers have seen, but rather learned about from students' chilling recitation of events - is its glimmer of ice-cold, cruel intelligence. It was performed as an act of cinematic triumph, and I can imagine A plotting the scene, perhaps baiting the cat with a piece of his lunchbox salami, searching among the smooth, green blades of grass for the perfect specimen of caterpillar, running his finger along the board for splinters. Is it just child's play, or are we witnessing the birth of psychopathy? And if the latter is true, can it be a consequence of over-exposure to the violent and sexual content so implicit in the Net (A has already been caught with porn on his phone), or merely the reaping of seeds sown long ago, generations ago, perhaps? After all, psychopathy has most likely existed since man drew waterfalls on cave walls. It is certainly not the Internet's offspring.

There is no answer to these questions, and even if there were, the thundering train of progress halts for no man. Certainly less so in a school modeling itself after Hi-Tech High, with a mission to prepare its students for the "real world" (now so intermixed with the virtual world the two are inextricable). I believe the term "mission impossible" has already entered my notes. But oh, the places we'll go!

Tabula Rasa

Every person is born a blank slate.
This I learned in a class on Behaviorism when I was engulfed (albeit, willingly) by that behemoth of the academia, The Department of Psychology, which churns out an annual product of fifty-some dull, dogged, and overeager "psychologists" ready to reap hard-earned cash from depressed hi-tech employees and parents to sugar-addicts with "attention disorders".
I excused myself, rather unceremoniously, from that department a long time ago, exclaiming that it was very singularly the least likely place in which ever one could learn about psychology (unless one were inclined to examine the minds of lab rats and first year psych majors, which are indeed the basis for all important psychological study today). I foreswore the entire discipline, and vowed never to look back.
Imagine my surprise, then, when, seated before one of my seventh-grade charges (a member of my homeroom), I suddenly spewed up a huge, steaming heap of psychobabble I had imbibed in that dreaded dungheap of academia!
The child, a rather inscrutable young man whose mohawk is only exceeded in shock value by the various pieces of metal that protrude from eyebrow, ear, and tongue alike, arrived at our school, like so many others, "to turn over a new leaf". He came, however, to find this leaf rather weighty upon discovering that it included schoolwork. The boy had spent the greater part of his six official years of schooling romping round the hallways, setting up small, indoor campfires, and generally raising hell. The only skill he had developed, aside from the ability to utterly ignore the implorations of every living human above the age of 13, is to set up a rather mean domino rally, which he proudly displays on YouTube.
Now, I won't lie. Some of the kids I teach are recognizably dull-witted (they would do well to apply to the Psychology Department, if, that is, I ever succeed in teaching them to read English). This child, however, is bright - exceedingly lazy, granted - but bright. It is a trait not yet quantified in him, perhaps, but this is precisely what attracts me - intelligence intertwined with laziness... maybe he reminds me of someone.
As I sat down before him, my only thought was to get him to want to learn - something, anything, that we are teaching. "What are your favorite subjects?" I asked. But he had none, never had he so much as picked up a book! "You must try to find a subject you like," I added, simultaneously berating myself for telling him the same thing every other teacher had, throughout his formal education (or lack thereof).
'But why?' I asked myself? 'Why should he want to learn?'
And perhaps I hit upon some unconscious memory of my time in that despised department, a memory of those silly psych students absorbing, like stinking sponges, every bit of mundane knowledge leaked to them by halfwitted professors, later to squeeze it out, with one pungent splash, upon an examination paper, retaining less, perhaps, than they had been endowed with before the process even began.
"You haven't learned anything, you say, in six years of school?"
The child nods.
"Well, then, I know what you are."
The child furrows his brow.
"You're a clean slate."
The child raises his eyebrows questioningly.
"There is no knowledge written on you yet. That's what makes you a clean slate."
The child nods apprehensively.
"Now, who would you like to decide what gets written on you? Will it be you, or will it be any guy that comes along, and decides he'd like you to know certain things, and have certain opinions? Would you like to be the master of your own knowledge, and therefore your own destiny, or will you let just anyone have that privilege?"
The child watches me, stirs, appears interested.
"I've seen what can happen to people when they don't know enough, and have to buy whatever anyone sells them cheap. I've seen what happens to people when they don't know enough to have an opinion, and they have to go along with whatever the loudest person says. They are not masters of their knowledge, and therefore not masters of their destiny. You don't want to end up like that, right?"
The child shakes his head, frowns.
"Find one thing you like to learn about. One thing, for now. Get interested in your own knowledge, get interested in your own destiny. You decide what you write on your slate, no one else."
The child nods, promises.
He leaves, vowing to learn one new thing each day.
I will not say that this child is currently my best student. On the other hand, he attends class, and pays the sporadic attention comparable to a newbie marathon runner, who must take long pauses for breath. The thing is, he's there, and he's listening (sometimes, on a very good day, he even writes a few words).
And one day, maybe, with enough psychobabble lobbed at him, he may even write something of great value on that slate.

Welcome

Welcome to the jungle

We take it day by day

If you want it you're gonna bleed

But it's the price to pay

- Guns and Roses


Welcome to the blog of an educator in this great state of Israel.

Modern Israel is, as you know, the Zion our forefathers dreamed of, the sweet aftertaste on their tongues when they awoke, soul-battered, to the icy social tundras of the diaspora - the world in which they were never welcome.

Tomorrow is Rabin Memorial Day, and our school is to pay tribute to this state symbol by attending a ceremony thrown together by a few youngsters, who will no doubt be trembling in awkward teenage shame, in white shirts. The hall will swell with hormonal sweat, the deodorant meant to cover it, and noise, noise, noise - a bubble of sound so huge it seems to challenge to a duel the concrete walls of the basement chamber where we have, time and again, attempted to hold school-wide assemblies.

It is only the second month.

Allow me to introduce myself: Approximately 93 days ago, I decided to leave the cool, quiet, eager hallways of higher learning for its junior, and rather not-silent, counterpart - the seventh grade.

My age: 30.

My status: Recently engaged.

My goal: To educate younger minds in a way not remindful of the Pink Floyd music video.

Also to keep my sanity and at least a small portion of my skin's elasticity.

My true, only recently recognized goal: To prove that Israel will somehow, someday, prove capable of relieving itself of at least a fraction of its third world habits and tendencies.

But imagine, if you will, a scenario: It is the second week of school. Twenty-two children are seated before you, absolutely refusing to shut up. Some of them finger smart-phones coolly under their desks, oblivious to your presence. Others throw pens, folded-up papers, and various other objects across the room, or braid each others' hair. You tell them (just as you learned last year in your practicum course), that you are waiting for quiet, trying to appear equally unmoved. You do this for 35 minutes, until finally, your head a boiling, bloody bunsen burner, you slam your hand down on a desk - forgetting, for the moment, that it is made of flesh and blood rather than fortified steel - and succeed in eliciting only a heady gush of laughter from the offending parties. As the pain percolates slowly, throbbing in a growing circumference from the center of your hand to the tips of each finger, you eject three students from the class and threaten to call the parents of three others. You spend the rest of the lesson hating yourself, and in the evening neglect to call said parents.

Or picture this, rather more mundane, scenario: You teach a class on Yitzhak Rabin, a man whose name is stenciled on at least 100 different government-owned properties, the only prime minister assassinated in Israel, who was shot just 17 years ago. When you begin the class, you discover at least 4 students are not aware of this assassination at all. They have been members of the Israeli school system for 6 full years.

Our school is a "democratic" school (just why I have fitted this word with quotes will essentially become clear throughout this blog), which means we do not have acceptance requirements. Ironically, this factor has kept us from being able to fulfill, even to a moderate extent, our democratic vision, because many of the students accepted have proven to be rather singularly, well, democratically-averse (meaning, basically, that they interpret characteristics inherent to the democratic school, such as fewer rules and invitations to participate in modeling their learning environment, as encouragement to stay out of class to play soccer or engage in the occasional, whimsical fistfight - generally to run wild). It also does not help matters that the school is located in one of the least reputable neighborhoods of Holon. By the way, the phrase 'one of the least reputable neighborhoods of Holon' is somewhat on par with the phrase: 'One of the hottest areas of hell'.

"I don't know if this is working," I told my principal after a particularly discouraging day. It had begun with a fight between two of my homeroom students, one of whose mothers had yelled at me for calling her to take her still-fuming offspring home, and had concluded quite dramatically with another student (also in my homeroom) breaking his ankle. Interestingly enough, this latter student had also been in a brawl earlier that day, but had sustained this particular injury by tripping over a chair.

"If this doesn't work, then what are we doing here?" she answered with a sigh. My principal, we'll call her Shelly, had spent the day at the Ministry of Education, a place that makes one actually yearn for the labyrinthine hallways in which Kafka trapped the naive and unwitting K.

"We could always just shut down, tell the parents of these delinquent chimpanzees we're fed up, and go work in high-tech," I said, only half-joking. "I hear they have fresh-squeezed orange juice..."

"Not here - here," she insisted. "Here, in Israel. What are we all doing here in Israel? If we can't turn these kids into educated, moral members of a democratic society, then, truly, what are we doing here?"

Mission impossible? Possibly.