On School Principals and a Selection from the Harold Arlen Songbook Lost in Translation

My principal, Schlomit, a warm but formidable woman who is always in constant motion and can say more with an arched eyebrow than most teachers can convey with five minutes of red-faced shouting, sends out weekly newsletters to the school faculty and staff every Saturday afternoon, prior to the Sunday morning start of the Israeli school week.

These newsletters are inexplicably rendered in a busy mixture of several different font colors and sizes, and punctuated throughout with emoticons and pixel art, making it seem like the sender is punching the missive out on her bedazzled pink Sidekick at the mall, rather than on a computer in a sober office decorated with a framed doctorate diploma in Educational Psychology. The newsletters are full of reminders of the week's upcoming events ("Please ensure participating students are adequately rehearsed for Tu Bshvat Tree-Planting Ceremony and Assembly on Thursday") , tell us about professional training opportunities (You are warmly encouraged to sign up for an educational seminar on Technology in the Classroom"), congratulate staff on new accomplishments ("A big thank you to School Medic Adam, for inoculating all of our children against influenza with a modicum of tears"), letting us know about meetings and parties, and generally relating all the other informational flotsam and jetsam that comes up week to week ("Reminder! Security Drill this Friday! Kita Aleph[Israeli equivalent of 1st grade] teachers and aides are reminded to adequately prepare their little ones for the exercise so that no one is frightened by the gas masks).

I should mention, also, that these newsletters are naturally written in Hebrew, so I cobble together the general jist of them using Google Translate, email forwards from the other members of the English department with hasty translations of items pertinent to me, and last and most definitely least, my own cursory Hebrew reading skills.

Every month or so, Shlomit also includes some pep-rally-style motivational content. It's a smart move, since Israeli teachers are a put-upon bunch, allegedly the third-worst paid educators in the first world, frequently besieged by strong-arming Israeli parents, subject to a constant 100 decibel+ din of screaming students, and victims to chronic soar throats and hoarseness as a sad byproduct of the dominant Israeli Primary Education Pedagogical Method.

The formal term for this teaching philosophy defies exact translation from the original Hebrew but can inexactly be rendered in English as "Screaming at the Top of Your Lungs with your Eyes Bulging and That Vein in Your Neck Throbbing Until You're Red in the Face and Your Students are Cowed into Submission or At Least Can Not Compete With the Volume of Your Voice, Whichever Comes First."

It's no wonder that even in the most prosperous, functional schools, such as Elhareezi, teachers must sometimes be forcibly herded from their break room at the end of recess time, and can often be seen before first hour double-fisting their palliatives of choice, a school-logoed mug of thick instant coffee sludge in one (shaking) hand and a unfiltered cigarette with an inch of grey ash in the other.

It's natural then, that Shlomit, like most successful principals, is not only a canny administrator and long-suffering bureaucrat(shackled irreparably to the whims and ministrations of the Ministry of Education) but also a weird amalgam of Doting Grandmother, Circus Ringmaster, and Drill Sergeant.

This week, with hopes of motivating her troops, she waxed rhapsodic about a series of web videos featuring a talented Louisville, Kentucky musician who was born blind and paralyzed. Links to two of his performances were included in the newsletter, one of which happened to be a piano rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Since "The Wizard of Oz" isn't quite the cultural touchstone in Israel that it is in the States, Schlomit included an off-the-cuff Hebrew translation of the lyrics.

Once I put the entire text of the newsletter through Google Translate, I realized to my glee that I now had a rendition of the inexpertly twice-translated song's lyrics as they would read if they went through a wood chipper and were carelessly reassembled. Please see below:

Far Over the Arch by Harold Arlen

Somewhere over the rainbow
Cloud
Country is a paradise
Like an old story

Somewhere over the rainbow
Heaven
Where all your dreams
In a moment Come True

If a star falls soon
It is the gold paint
Night
Then in Wonderland
It wishes again
Far above

Somewhere over the rainbow
Song Garden
Over the rainbow
If only he can fly

Over the rainbow
If only he can fly

Happy bird park there
Beyond the rainbow
He can fly !!!!!!!

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Schlomit concluded her letter with a somewhat perplexing, perhaps inadvertent twist on the "Lemons-Lemonade" maxim that seems to fit much better with the tough Israeli ethos than the original, and I will end this post with the same:

When Life Gives You Lemons
Accept Them and
Be Grateful