"After The Holidays": University Towns And Christmas

If you want to get something done in Israel during September and October you'd probably hear that it will have to wait until “after the Holidays.” I never thought about it before, but like us, Americans have their own "after the Holidays." The period from Thanksgiving till the New Year is one long holiday with few working days in between. This is the time when people get together, have parties, remember their friends,  and get ready, at least in the cold climate, for those long lonely months of winter.

Spending this season in the US, I have already observed a familiar quality of the holidays which is unique to university towns. During last Thanksgiving weekend, and even on Black Friday, New Haven became deserted as students who usually filled the stores, coffeehouses and restaurants went back home to their families. I remember other empty towns throughout the holiday season from the many years we spent in this country. Last Christmas season I wrote an essay titled, “Home Alone: University Towns And Christmas.” After last Thanksgiving in New Haven I expect a very quiet Holiday season here too:

In the small Midwestern university town where we attended graduate school the dominant calendar was not Gregorian but Academic.

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/after-the-holidays-university-towns-and-christmas/

The Customer Is Always Right, Or Meaningful learning?

At a time when our Education Minister, Rabbi Shay Piron is trying to bring about change in the schools with his concept of “meaningful learning,” I have to wonder how he reconciles this lofty idea with the last incident concerning  the  suspension of the Israeli teacher  in Ashkelon.

That teacher  was suspended by her principal  after a  student had hacked into her private email, and published  in the class’ Wattsup his findings-- intimate photos of that teacher in the nude.

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel 

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-customer-is-always-right-or-meaningful-learning/

Reading and Reading Skills

- FEB.18.2013 

I have been teaching EFl to college age students in Israel since 1995. In my country children study English for about 8 years and have a matriculation examination at the end of 12th grade. Yet many  students still have problems reading and comprehending even a simple text. Often when I ask my students for the topic of a text they have difficulties pointing it out, and they find it much more challenging to formulate the central idea of the text or to restate what the writer says about that topic.

Although some students have serious problems with the language, I feel that this is not the reason for their difficulties. I believe that my students are having problems reading a text in English because they  do not read at all (in any language) and thus have no clue on how to approach a written text.  The fact that books are not part of my students’ life has many unfortunate consequences for their future life but it also makes my job as their teacher more challenging.  Since they do not read they know very little about the world; consequently when I assign an article I cannot presume that they would get references text that require a certain level of general knowledge. Also since reading is not part of their world when encountering an unfamiliar term or a name in the assigned reading they would not look it up as it requires more reading. Thus when assigning an article for homework I first have to find those terms and insist that they’d look them up and write down the definition.

We all know that reading sharpens the mind, it teaches the reader to distinguish between fact and opinion, to generalize,  to pay attention to what is not stated in the text,  to make assumptions about it--to  infer, and to recognize different tones and purposes . My students are lacking those abilities and when they do read their level of comprehension remains basic and they do not grasp complex concepts.

My students are already grown-ups;  I can no longer sit them down for a daily silent reading like the one the third graders in Ramona Kirby’s class do. What I could do is to motivate them by introducing interesting articles and to hope that the reading skills that we do teach them will compensate somehow for those abilities that they lack.

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

Home Alone: University Towns And Christmas

Published on  DEC.12.2013 

 In the small Midwestern university town where we attended graduate school the dominant calendar was not Gregorian but Academic. Around December 18th our town became a ghost town— everyone disappeared. It was as though the town's sole reason for  being was its university. We were surprised to see that not only the undergraduates' dorms were empty, but all the American graduate students left  as well. Moreover, it was quite unsettling to discover that most of the faculty members went away on the last day of the semester.

At the beginning of the school year, one of my favorite lecturers, a young assistant professor, invited us to his home and showed us his study. It was a  scholar’s dream: beautifully lit, hardwood floor, bookshelves up to the ceiling, and next to them stood an elegant ladder, like the one you could see in old fashioned libraries, or in the movies. I remember thinking that he was the luckiest man on earth to have such a study. When I heard that he too left town during Christmas, I couldn’t fathom why  anyone who owned such a study would choose to spend the holiday away from it. Those two and a half weeks at the end of December seemed to me a perfect opportunity for doing lots of reading and writing in that exact study.

We spent our first Christmas in Columbia Missouri together with the other foreign students who could not go home; most of us did not celebrate Christmas. The locals stayed in town as well since this was their only home. At that time we  have been in the United  States less than six months, and watched the reality of our new life through the prism of our old culture. As universities in Israel were only in the cities, we were not familiar with the concept of a university town and the Academic calendar.

Two years later later my husband got a teaching position at the University of Iowa, another small university town. We already had our first baby and Iowa City was an ideal place to raise a family. But there too we found that the ruling calendar was the Academic one; every Christmas break, together with the students, our friends and colleagues left town .

It is clear why university students would go home to their families for the holidays, but I used to wonder why our faculty members fled away at the end of the semester. Today we often see people sitting together supposedly having a conversation, but instead of talking each checks his /her smart phone. It is as though they are in two places at the same time, emotionally they are not committed to being where they physically are.

I feel that this was the case with many young faculty members in those small  communities, they could not commit themselves to the town. They were devoted to their job, and had obligations to the institution, thus they gladly stayed there during the semester. But as they viewed their stay in town as temporary, they had no ties to the community: it was not their home, their “real” life was somewhere else.

At this time of the year I usually remember our Midwestern experience, we were also young but viewed both towns as our home, and also we had no where else to go. That was a while ago, I can only hope that today when it is much harder for PhD graduates to obtain a university position, they would regard the [small] town where they land a job as a prize rather than an exile.

Could You Please Put Your Phone Away

For several years until my daughter moved to the US, we had enjoyed a joint custody over our beloved Pomeranian Sophie. We started this happy arrangement the moment we brought her home when she was only one month old. As she grew older, it was clear that Sophie’s two mothers used totally different educational approaches. I was the strict disciplinarian, and my daughter was much softer. Sophie, a very intelligent dog, adjusted: in my home she ate only dog food and at my daughter’s she shared all her meals with her mother, all the while barking and making her wishes known.

Since I believe in “live and let live,” I said (almost) nothing, but the problem arose when my daughter and Sophie sat together for dinner at my place. Then Sophie would stand by my daughter, bark tenaciously, and demand food. Suddenly she became that anxious and dependent dog, and forgot all about the, much calmer and happier, arrangement at our home.

I was reminded of Sophie’s anxiety when I saw the difficulties that my students had in controlling their smartphone use during class. Schools all over the country forbid the use of phones, and it seems to be a necessary rule for high school students. However, until recently I had believed that it wasn't needed for college students. I assumed that grown-ups who have been making such an effort to finance their studies ( At my college a yearly tuition is over 30000 nis, while a working student would earn between 2000—4000 nis) would focus on getting the most out of their money. Sadly I was wrong, in class, instead of learning, my students were using Facebook, and Whatsup (in Hebrew of course) constantly keeping in touch with their friends.

To help them see the light, I tried first the educational approach, I reminded my students how hard they work for their degree (I often see them working at the different restaurants around town), they agreed, but kept on checking their messages.

Because of Sophie I understood how the smartphone, which was lying right in front of them, made my students anxious. I realized the difficulties they had in controlling the urge to check their phones, and how this dependence negatively affected their ability to learn. Moreover, it finally dawned on me that the smartphone with its dictionary, and the other useful learning devices could ultimately destroy my students’ concentration.

I have to admit that I am as addicted to my smartphone as my students, but of course I never take it out of my bag during class. I concluded that this would also be the best solution for my students.

It took some time and practice, especially since I started enforcing the no phones rule mid semester. At first I had to personally remind each student to put the phone away. I hope it is not only my imagination, but I see some improvement in my students' engagement in the lesson.

My daughter would probably disagree, but I am convinced that my approach to Sophie’s education was correct. It was beneficial to her mental well-being, and in my home Sophie was a calmer and happier dog. I know better than to even hint that humans are in any way similar to my little Pom. But I testify that I sense a new yet familiar calmness in my students. I hope that now we could finally go back to learning.