The Kid Who Ran Away from School and Children Books' Justice

This school year, twice a week, I have been reading together with a young friend. He is  9-year-old, very curious and intelligent, and has his own ideas about everything. He is also a new immigrant from Russia who needs some help with his Hebrew.

Since reading, even in a foreign language, is supposed to be fun we choose together enjoyable books and  take turns reading aloud. My friend reads one page and I read the next. We usually read like that for half an hour (about six or seven pages), and then as a reward, I read to him till the end of the chapter.

My young friend is resourceful and always looks for the shorter pages to read out loud. So we negotiate and exchange a long page, which I read, with a shorter one which he reads.

Reading together is not only about improving his reading skills or his vocabulary. Of course we talk about concepts and unfamiliar words that appear in the text, but it is mainly a  great opportunity to think of and develop ideas. We discuss our opinions and to share personal stories. This is how I learnt about a trouble in my young friends’ life.

Apparently, during the recess another boy hit him, and when my friend reported the incident to the principal, nothing was done. He was frustrated and the next morning, when it happened again, he literally jumped the high fence and ran away from school.

This is a classic children book story: in order to get the attention of the adult world, a child does something extreme. In real life it usually doesn't happen. Thus, my young  friend was punished for running away, his mother was called into the principal office, and he was suspended for one day. That was the arbitrary law

In books the outcome would have certainly been different, after the child was found he was reproached for making every one worried. Then the grownups involved, the principal, the teacher and the parents, apologized to him and asked forgiveness for not paying attention to his plight. This is poetic justice.

When we met to read again my friend was  troubled by what had happened. Children know instinctively what is fair, and as literature is a great training for understanding concepts, he understood very well the difference between justice and the law.

Poetic justice is important to everyone, but it is extremely crucial for  children in order to form a confident and positive outlook of the word. I am sorry that in this case the school chose to ignore it. Moreover, how is it possible that no one asked what made a little boy feel that the outside world was safer than the school, which is supposed to be the safest place for our children.

Reading literature is a great preparation for life, as it is made of examples, stories with characters and situations, it enriches the repertoire of responses and provides tools to analyze the world. Perhaps the grownups in the school: the principal and the teachers, should reread children literature in order to remember to treat children more fairly.

The essay appeared in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-kid-who-ran-away-from-school-and-children-books-justice/

The Curious Case Of The "P" In PTA -- Parent Or Prayer?

My daughters spent the last night in the US, in Iowa City, with a good friend. Later she told me that in preparation for the long journey back to Israel she had baptized the girls-- just in case.  I felt that it was a bit extreme but said nothing, I knew that it was an act of love and did not want to hurt my friend's feelings.

Less than a year later we found ourselves back in the US, this time my husband was hired sight unseen by a large company which moved us from Israel to Texas. His lab was outside Fort Worth, and we settled in a nearby town, in a good school district. Our daughters went to the elementary public school down the road and I, an involved parent, joined the PTA.

Read more in
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-curious-case-of-the-p-in-pta-parent-or-prayer/

Feeling The Teacher's Angst

 APR.01.2013 

The minute I leave my last class before the weekend, I experience pure joy. This is a state of sweet freedom when my heart is filled with carefree energy. I call this sensation, which lasts for several hours, my weekly mini vacation.  I have to say that I do like my job and I especially like my students, but lately when I teach on Sundays, the first work day  of the week, my Sunday blues starts on Saturday afternoon.

 I have always felt that I wasn’t meant to be a teacher, however,  reflecting on my life choices, I become more and more convinced that  teaching has always been my true vocation.

I have started teaching as a teen ager and have never stopped. When my girls were young and learnt to play an instrument in the Suzuki method, I was their home teacher. I practiced the violin and the cello with them for years. When my older daughter was two and a half  I started with another mother a Sunday school program for children and their parents so that they all enjoy some Jewish education.

Although I did well teaching in informal settings, where I usually volunteered, I was a complete failure when I tried to join the formal school system. When we returned  to Israel I started teaching high school English. I am embarrassed to admit that after only one week  I understood  that this was not a job which I could do.  I was never  good at disciplining and had to quit.

I have been teaching at a college for almost twenty years; I was lucky to find a good position and was happy that I could enjoy teaching without  worrying about discipline.

But in the last few years things have changed; different political priorities have led to budget cuts and those resulted in much larger classes. Class management, which is the polite word for disciplining has become a real challenge, especially when teaching a foreign language. I don’t want to be strict with my students, it is not their fault. Cramped 40 students in a small room they are the true victims of a changing system.  But as for me, imagining myself tomorrow standing in front of them and try to command their wondering attention,  I realize that, today more than ever, I have a good reason to feel a teacher’s  angst

Make New Friends But Keep the Old

 APR.11.2013 

 In Israel, I often come across groups of friends who have known each other since grade school/high school or the army, and have stayed in close touch. This kind of friendship within a group is common in Israel because many people tend to stay in their home town/ land and they meet on a regular basis both formally and informally. I have always thought that it must be reassuring  to go through life  surrounded by people with whom you could be comfortable because they really know you.  

In contrast, since we moved  around  a lot, and lived 15 years in the US, we  wcould not maintain our friendships with school and army friends and thus were never part of such a group.

In the last few years, thanks to  social networks, all kinds of events have started to take place and old  friends who have lost touch throughout the years have been reunited. Due to an unusual  turn of events  I have recently gained a high school  group which, strangely enough,  is not my own.

My late husband attended Boyer high school in Jerusalem; it was a special institute, both a regular high school and a boarding school for gifted and talented students from developing communities in peripheral areas. The boarders, many of them new immigrants, came to that school from areas where educational opportunities were limited. The vision of the school, which was founded by the Society for Advancement of Education, was to bring together promising young people to give them good education and leadership skills and thus to create a pool of future leaders who will eventually either go back to their home towns or contribute to the community as a whole.

My husband’s class graduated in 1970, at that time many of the new immigrants came from north Africa and Eastern Europe. I know of one boy who immigrated to Israel a year earlier, when he was 13; without any help he applied by himself to the school and of course, was accepted. The school was looking for resourceful students like him. In the 4 years that the students attended the school, they learnt values of community service, humanity and pluralism. Boyer high school has been around for almost 50 years and has produced many socially involved leaders

During the high-school years, there was a rivalry between the two groups of students: the day school students from Jerusalem and the boarders from in Israel's periphery. After graduation there was almost no interaction between the two groups.

But in 2010 the  1970 class celebrated 40  years to graduation and soon after the class started to meet on a regular basis. Because of my late husband, I was invited to the reunion, and  later my partner and I were invited to join the group and attend its different activities..

Naturally I don’t not have shared memories with the members;  in my repertoire there are only  stories that I have heard from my husband about his happy years in school. But even without personal experience of "being there” I feel  reassured, and happy to finally be part  of such a welcoming  and inclusive group.

P.S    This is the link to the Jerusalem school      http://www.kidum-edu.org.il/en/education-campuses/boyer

Childhood Under A Magnifying Glass: Over-Parenting Revisited

JUN.20.2013

When another mother told me that I had to make sure that my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter knew how to read before she started kindergarten that fall, I knew that I was in trouble. She explained that in the event that she didn’t read she would be put in the lowest ability group, and that would be the end. I was sure no mother in her right mind would risk ruining her daughter’s future and teaching her to read seemed like a small price to pay. But that was only the beginning:

We lived in Iowa City, a small university town in the Midwest; at that time most of the husbands worked at the university and the wives, all university graduates, were stay-at-home-moms partly due to ideology, and partly because of the limited employment opportunities in town.

With so much time on our hands and so little to do, our children became the focus of our attention, our prime preoccupation and a way to channel our creative and intellectual energy. They were a source of happiness, pride but also an endless cause of motherly concern.

Other children talked earlier, read better, ran faster (or in the case of our community in Iowa City: played soccer, danced, played a musical instrument, sang in a children's opera). The accomplishments of one child became her mother’s personal achievement and the direct cause for jealousy and anxiety of other mothers.

Luckily, as an Israeli living in the US I missed many cultural cues involving raising childen in a competitive environment.  I didn’t understand, for example, the reward system in the American school. I was oblivious to the grave importance of soccer, and didn’t see why in such small classes some mothers were always present at the school.

What I did not miss was the tension is the air. I felt that the outward politeness of some mothers could not mask the pressure and competitive subtext of every interaction.

I am sure that most of the mothers were kind and care-free prior to having children; their new responsibility meant that they believed that the stakes, even at the elementary school level, were so high that everything in their children’s life was of the outmost importance. That solemn attitude did not leave much room for fun and light-heartedness, and being with other mothers became boring and exhausting.

While I was still in Iowa City I sensed that the energy in that small community was unhealthy for me and my family.  I know that competition is a motivating force, but for me it became contagious and even poisonous. In theory I could have chosen to disengage, to have done things my own way, but still I did not see a way out from the ubiquitous competition outside the home. 

The marriages of several parents among our friends did not survive those early years of child-rearing, and I am sure that the anxiety surrounding their children’s achievement did not add to the well-being of their relationship. I am also aware of some children who did not respond well to the pressures of their mothers’ over-parenting.

Being under a magnifying glass is not only hard on the child; it is draining for the parent. I feel that in a way I was saved by returning to Israel; my daughters enjoyed much more independence and became solely responsible for their success and their failure.

For me it meant that  I was free to go on with my own life.