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.