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.
