Speak My Language!

The strugglers among my students will often, in moments of sheer frustration – cry out: “Speak Hebrew!” (sometimes, funnily enough, in English). I generally choose to placate them with a translation and, often from sheer compassion, continue to direct them in their native tongue. I realize that the ability to understand me when I speak English, within the ruthless social hierarchy of “smart” and “dumb” that is so overwhelmingly common in middle school, belongs exclusively to the student-body elite. Those who struggle with it (and, more often than not, with school in general) employ their haughtiest voices when mimicking the English speech, elongating the vowels in the manner that the slaves must have employed when mimicking their masters.

Recently, a new teacher joined our forces as a replacement for one on maternity leave. After witnessing a few staff meetings in which we discussed the teacher’s place in disciplining the students, she came away with a single phrase that resonated with truth: “These students don’t come from the same world as you,” she told us, “and you are not speaking their language.”

This complex sentence, separated by a comma, brings up two separate issues. The first is that of "world" - and it is no secret that our school embodies a clash of worlds, or cultures. The staff, on one hand, consists of learned academics who have had every advantage in life (including that of knowledgable, upper class parenting and education). Now these stringent ideologues find themselves disembarking on the shores of a new world, in which a different culture reigns. They have come to spread the gospel of democratic education, and, much like any "enlightened" invader of barbaric lands, they expect to be applauded by the locals as they roll into town. 

But immediately they find that this is not the case. The barbarians who rule this new world insist on clinging stubbornly to the social norms, morals and values passed down to them for generations, rather than immediately adopt those written so floridly in the scrolls of the enlightened ones. They make attempts, but find themselves sermonized at every turn - their instincts no longer apply, every step is judged and found lacking. They become frustrated, and turn to violence.

This has been the case throughout history, the most recent instance of which was carried out - ever so naively - by George Bush (that poor schmuck).

The clashes that ensue necessarily hang on the variance in language - in our school's case, the language of discipline, which can be spoken in words or, as I see it, in action.

It is no secret that our students (like the archetypal barbarians) favor the latter of the two. Even their spoken language is fraught with action – “Fuck your mother”, “Go fuck yourself”, “Jump for me” (the Hebrew equivalent of “Bite me”, I guess – or, as Bart Simpson would have it, “Eat my shorts”) – and this restless verbiage often leads, as a matter of fact, to physical restlessness: A clenching of fists, a threatening look, a sudden shifting of the body towards violent action against the offender, or worse, fights that have ended in bloodshed or other injury.

The "enlightened" staff, on the other hand, retreats from action in the manner of rabbits frightened by a gunshot. To each violation of our values – and I would like to stress the word our – we respond with speech: inflated, often convoluted preaching, from the students’ point of view. The conversation that emerges is not even called a “disciplining” talk (in fact, the word discipline does not exist in the school’s lexicon) but an “inquiry” or “clarification”, depending on the chosen translation.
There have been countless examples. The students enter into the inquiry with fire in their eyes, eager to tell their side of the story. They lean forward, gesticulate, and appear notably serious, recalling facts in the order in which they occurred with the grave manner of a statesman facing a tribunal. But as the talk wears on and it is the staff member's turn to pass judgment, their eyes become dull, their manner languorous. They rub their eyes, lean backwards or forwards heavily, and adopt much the same the posture as a sack of potatoes. The effect is very similar to a child to whom a parent has chosen to read Marx's Das Kapital before bed.

What little absorption of information I have seen during this stage comes at the end, when punishment is (sometimes) doled out. Often it is a warning, or a promise to pass the occurrence on to the parents. A few times it has been suspension. But the reasoning leading up to the punishment – what can be called “the preaching stage” of the inquiry – has never, in all of the inquiries in which I have been present, registered a single flicker of understanding.

This is not to say that we should adopt the model of the bloody crusades - in which the choice was to convert or die - but perhaps there is a middle ground. I have heard somewhere that 90% of language is non-verbal. This may just mean that we, the "enlightened", have something to learn from the locals.

Of Illness

It is when I sit idly in my garden that I view the clamoring bedlam of the school as something of a break in reality - not exactly a nightmare but a show perhaps, a stage on which dramas of Shakespearian proportion are enacted on a daily basis and then immediately retreat to that area of the mind reserved for fictional events one has witnessed. The children have often reminded me of a mob, a rabble, the townspeople in a village square crying out for this and that, understanding nothing, desiring only that which will currently bring them pleasure and, having requited this desire, swing off to the next with the forgetfulness of moths.
Immediate gratification is the most likely cause of their disease - termed ADHD by specialists and treated all-round with whatever zombifying medication is prescribed.
Not that I make light of ADHD. Studies show it is the root of many drug addictions (and one may wonder at one's leisure whether prescribed drugs fit this bill, perhaps nevertheless arriving at the conclusion that they are somewhat less destructive than heroine or cocaine), crimes leading to incarceration, and a swath of other adult malfeasances. I do believe, however, that a sizable chunk of ADHD-ridden kids owe their symptoms to learned, rather than pathological, causes.
In the second category, I speak of nearly all of the 12-year-olds attending the school who do not belong to the first category. They are the students who, never having faced a problem which the click of a button could not solve, sit down to a task eager to place it behind them. Discovering, however, that it is a task requiring more than ten minutes of patience, they declare it "too hard" and aim their discontent at me, for being so vulgar as to make the suggestion they perform it. Most recently, we did a "cloze" - the term for a paragraph in English with missing words to be filled in. The word bank was, of course, comprised solely of the vocabulary we had learned over the past month, and I wrote it myself (which took a good hour), making sure they would not encounter too many unfamiliar words in the text itself. It was, however, a task that I had prepared to take around half an hour - the maximum time span (as my Practicum professor informed me in college last year) for which I could expect students to concentrate.
Someone must update the good professor that this time span has been drastically reduced, cut in half, even, and then rounded off downwards for the truly impatient.
There have been a number of studies regarding the Internet's affect on our attention span, branching out into evolutionary predictions about the next stage of mankind (cyborgs and the like, Google glasses, chips lodged in our brains to make calculations and Web searches - what have you). But I wonder, have we evolved yet? Because if not, we are simply producing a lot of very stupid and impatient children, who value click-of-a-button, immediate gratification above learning. Granted, the latter is often accompanied by a limbo-like, often frustrating, grey area of cognitive wheel-turning which may or may not bear fruit, but to forgo any pursuance of it for want of an immediate shock of pleasure to the limbic system is, to my mind, too bad. That a Facebook farm can be planted and harvested within a few days, with no more than a few clicks, is all well and good. But its vegetables, unfortunately, cannot be digested. This is a realization that my students have not exactly, well, digested. (Just a few weeks ago I asked them to write instructions on how to get to their best friend's house, a fun way, I thought, to teach them the correct use of necessary words and phrases like "at", "on", "take a left/right", and so on. There was hardly a child who did not retort, "Why can't you just use a GPS?")
I hardly mean to sound as though I thumb my nose at technology. It does, however, seem that if we raise children in a world in which everything is so simple and "no-brained", we should also be offering them challenges. These do not have to be precisely the same challenges we had as children, getting lost without a cellphone does, after all, entail dangers as well, but this sense of immediate entitlement must not be the norm.
As it happens, I am currently ill at home, which affords me the time to wonder about this ADHD epidemic. Who can solve it, I don't know, for I fear my generation's epidemic is laziness brought on by the new invention of that time - TV. Now, especially, in my feeble state, I find myself craving its blithely soporific effect, its magical storytelling abilities. I understand the hypnotist's hold our technology has upon us - especially children witnessing their parents' awe at these new, time-saving devices. I also understand our need for our children to grow up in a world made simpler, safer, easier, by these new devices, and I can certainly sympathize with parents desiring to give their kids an entire world packaged up neatly in an iPhone. I do not seek to preach morality.
Still, the number of kids who write their assignments in Hebrew and then enter the text into Google Translate is scandalous, in my opinion. Luckily for me I can still tell the difference, but in a few years, when the technology is perfected, kids will have to decide for themselves to take the more difficult track of actually learning English.