A few weeks ago I quit my job and went back to school to get a degree as an English teacher. The first lesson that we had was in a course called “Dialogue and Thought in Education”. When introducing the course, the instructor told us that we would be writing quite a bit during the next few months. This happened as I was writing my first couple of posts for this blog and I saw it as serendipitous. It was a sign that I had made the right decision. During the second lesson of this course we were asked to write about a school experience we had that still causes emotions to arise. This post is based on what I wrote.

Culture Shock

In the early 1970’s, my parents had moved to New York from Israel. They had known each other growing up, but only became a couple after moving to the US. My mother says that when she called her mother to tell her that she was going to marry my father (who was friends with my uncle as an adolescent), my grandmother asked her why she had to cross the ocean in order to do that. My entire family lived in Israel. I had no real sense of extended family growing up, but we did have very close family friends with a similar background to my family. I remember that during my entire childhood my parents kept on saying we would be moving back to Israel “next year”. The years kept passing, but “next year” never showed up.

Until it did.

In August of 1995 I moved from Brooklyn, NY to Israel together with my Mother. My two sisters are older than I am and were in University at the time. My father had to stay behind for a few more months due to work obligations. I was 14 years old and was set to start 10th grade later that week. We didn’t even have our own apartment and for the first few months we lived with one of my uncles. It was a complicated time.

During those first few months of school, I had a hard time acclimatizing both culturally and socially. The school culture in Israel is completely different from that of the US. It is much more informal than what I had previously experienced. Teachers were called by their first names! I don’t even think I knew my teachers first names in the US! The classrooms were also so much louder than they were in the US. As far as school work went, I was always one of the top students in my class with very good grades. Because of this, I was initially placed in a very high level class. The class was set to learn physics, biology, chemistry and more at a high level along with the regular stuff like math, history, literature and so on.

Three or four days into the school year I stopped my homeroom teacher after class and told her that I had no idea what was going on. Within a couple of days I was moved to the “dumb” class because of the language barrier. This class had a much more laid back work load with significantly less demands. The school thought that they were doing me a favor. I can say now, 20+ years later, after working in education and being a teacher for several years, that the people who made this decision were a bunch of idiots. The kids in the “dumb” class were really loud. Behavioral issues were a daily occurrence in class and I found myself sitting in the back row and drawing in my notebook for days at a time, without actually learning a thing.

Winter Is Coming

That winter I got sick. It started out as an ear infection but a few days later there was an eye infection too. I was basically deaf in one ear and blind in one eye. Luckily, my aunt was the head nurse in the eye department of the hospital and got me checked out right away. The ear infection could be treated simply enough, but the eye infection was bad. The doctors said that they had never seen a case like it in someone so young. I was hospitalized for a couple of days and given an experimental treatment. I was only released after my aunt said that she would continue to administer my treatment at home. All in all, I missed around a week of school.

It is important to note that up until then I had barely even missed a single day of school since the year began. My absence was extremely abnormal for me. The entire time that I was home sick, no one from the school contacted my mother to ask where I was. I lived around a 5 minute walk from the school (we had finally moved into our own apartment), but nobody called and no teacher had come to visit. On my first day back to school I had a note from my mother in my bag explaining what had happened and why I had been absent the past week.

I got to school and waited for my homeroom teacher to ask me where I had been so I could show her the note. Homeroom teachers in Israel are much more dominant figures than they are in the US. They are the key liaison between the parents and the school. The homeroom teachers in Israel are the main caretakers of the students at school and are supposed to take care of any personal issues that arise in the students’ life that might affect their school life. She did not ask me why I had been absent.

None of the teachers that day had asked me where I had been!

The next day I still had the note in my bag and was waiting for someone to ask where I had been. Finally, during one of the private lessons that I had with a small group of immigrant students, a teacher asked me where I had been the past week. She was one of the younger teachers at the school and only saw me twice a week, but she saw me. This random teacher took an interest and was aware of my absence even when my homeroom teacher had not. She was the only one of my teachers who had inquired about my absence and in turn, she was the only one who knew about what I had gone through.

Supervision or Super-Vision?

When I look back at this incident 20+ years later it frustrates me and makes me upset. How could so many so-called educators be so oblivious? I was obviously having a hard time adjusting to the change in my life and a week-long absence should have thrown up so many red flares, but they didn’t see me. I was a quiet student and barely ever spoke in class at that time. My classmates on the other hand were consistently noisy and problematic. I am not even sure that they noticed I was absent.

To quote Amanda F. Palmers book “The Art of Asking”: “When you are looked at, your eyes can be closed. You suck energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open, and you are seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and you generate energy. You create light. One is exhibitionism, the other is connection. Not everybody wants to be looked at. Everybody wants to be seen.”

I needed to be seen and only one teacher in the entire school saw me. Today as a teacher I always try to keep this story in the forefront of my mind. As a teacher we always need to make sure that we actually see our students and to make sure that they know that we see them. When a child, or any human being in general, knows that someone else sees them and cares about them, they start to see themselves and their own self-worth. When we treat someone as if they are not even there, they will see themselves as unimportant and lose all self-worth. If nobody sees them, their inner light will go out.

As part of my current training to teach English, I am at a high school twice a week in order to observe the English teachers and to learn from them. The last time I was there, in between classes on my way to the teachers’ lounge, I saw a girl walking along one of the paths. Everything about her clothing, posture and behavior in general yelled “don’t look at me”. I wonder if any of the teachers at the school see her…

Rafie