Although I am still an object of considerable bemusement and (slightly-veiled pity) at the primary school where I teach, my nacscent Hebrew skills and growing understanding of the school's rules and disciplinary policies have now been deemed sufficent to qualify me for a shift as recess monitor, a responsibility I was excused from last year on the grounds of what was referred to at the time as "unmitigated cluelessness" (yes, that is the exact translation from Hebrew).
All the teachers on staff take turns watching various quadrants of the sprawling school yard during the two daily recesses. Hahfsahkah gadol, or "the big break" takes place at 9:50 after first and second period and includes ten minutes to eat breakfast and fifteen minutes of outdoor/indoor free play. Hafsakah katan or the "little break" takes place from 11:45 to 12:00 and is reserved for free play only. The recurring, cyclical recess monitor duties are determined by the head "morah sport" (literally "sports teacher," or what American kids would call the PE teacher), an energetic blonde lady who walks around with a wireless microphone pac strapped round her waist and a headset microphone that gives her the air of a roving pop star, circa 1998. Only in Israel would a teacher employ a tool to make her shouting even louder than it is in its unaltered guise. The sport teacher composes the recess duty roster in a process that seems to rival the seeding of college basketball teams for the NCAA tournament, and renders this roster in an spreadsheet-like matrix that is printed out and tacked to the bulletin board in the teacher's lounge, where it is set upon at once by the other teachers and heavily annotated with the details of swapped days, adjustments to the schedule because of field trips or assemblies, and requests for clemency due to upcoming maternity leaves.
I typically do not even notice the new schedule's existence until its miniscule type has been smeared, crossed-out, and written over, whereupon it becomes nearly impossible to read. Consequently, I can frequently be found before 1st period stranded in front of the bulletin board, with my eyes screwed-up and an index finger tracing along the schedule's tiny boxes, reading the names out loud softly under my breath in the manner of a preschooler with "Hop on Pop" on her lap. My search for the three letters that spell out of my name-Bet, Koof, Yud--is complicated by the fact that often, although not consistently, my name is spelled as Bet, Tet, Yud (or "Betty") instead.*
Figuring out my alloted recess duties every week pales in comparison to the actual job. First of all, my school is comprised of several buildings on one central, large campus (the main school building, that also houses the principal, registrar, secretaries, and medic's offices, a freestanding gymnasium, art studio, and theatre classroom, two banks of classrooms, the school garden, and the school zoo. This is in addition to two small playgrounds with the usual assortment of swings, slides, and monkey bars, a soccer-field, and two basketball courts. There's also a security guard hut near the locked front gate and outdoor smoking area adjacent to the teacher's lounge, natch). Consequently, teachers are strategically scattered across the campus to ensure no area goes unmonitored. To minimize fighting, the athletic fields are each reserved for the students of different grades--the play areas are assigned from youngest to oldest in orders of increasing desirability. You have to pay your dues to move from the playground equipment to the second best basketball court and so on (as you might have guessed, the football field is the most coveted location). This means that each teacher can count on a finding the same crowd of kids in her territory every recess--a helpful asset when it comes to mediating fights, staunching tears, and other diplomatic efforts. For example, I'm always sent to the "Gimeleem yard," or the area where the third-graders play, so I've gotten to know a lot of the kitah gimel students who aren't in my classes, and become privy to the intricacies of their social ties and recurring conflicts.
The girls seem to be the ones with the perennial rivalries and problems. Noe is always upset with Shira for being too bossy, and Lior, Gaea, Heela, and Tamara are always incensed by the copycat choreography of their hip-hop dance rivals: Oren, Savion, Zoe, Roenni, and Corahl. The girls are also the ones who come up for advice, commiseration, and validation, and in my case, to teach me Hebrew necessary to fill in what they see as the most alarming gaps in my general knowledge--in other words, Hebrew riddles and jokes (these tend to require a committee of girls to provide a translation that is nonetheless nearly always completely incomprehensible), idiomatic phrases, and slang. A lot of the girls also like to cruise by to see if the breakfast *I* packed seems more interesting than their own, and if so, to cadge the majority of it with sustained, high-pitched whining.
Overall (and unsurprisingly), the attitudes of Israeli kids and teachers towards recess are markedly different than those of their American counterparts. First of all, there is a more cavalier, less stringent regard for child safety, with the attitude that the kids need to learn to avoid dangers by themselves, rather than simply obeying a passel of rules blindly without context.
So, unlike in my childhood elementary school, no one is halted from scaling any of the tall trees that dot the campus, or from attempts to shimmy up the poles of the basketball court baskets. No teachers intercede in arguments among students, no matter how heated they become, or how outnumbered one side might be, unless the kids are on the brink of blows. Industrious kids can be found digging massive holes, and attempting to booby-trap playground equipment. Requests from students for arbitration of athletic disputes is met by most teachers with the trenchant (well, in Israel at least) and deadpan hypothetical, "Ma lehsoht?" (literally "what to do?" or "What can I do?") or its cousin, "Ehn mah lehsot" ( literally, "there isn't what to do" or "Nothing can be done about it"), and even serious offenses like purposeful hitting, kicking, and the like, still do not rouse the other teachers to move from their benches. Instead, the emit a strident "Boh!" or "Buena!" ("COME!") to the offending party, who is compelled to separate himself from the herd and slink shamefacedly torwards the teacher for his commeupance. Just like David Caruso in CSI: Miami, teachers will puncuate a particularly pointed remark by removing their sunglasses for emphasis. The offenders tend to respond to punishments with sullen silence and aqcuisence or, more commonly, with heated invective and finger-pointing, sort of like tiny acolytes of John McEnroe.
Children are let loose in the school zoo during both recesses, under the capable, but far from constant supervision of the "nature teacher," Daphna (she teaches the kids about, basically, life science: i.e. botany and zoology, environmentalism and ecology, and animal care. she also manages the zoo and cares for the animals (along with two assistants). As some of you know, the "teaching and touching zooological garden" at my school is sort of an amalgam of a children's petting zoo and a home for the typical classroom pets you see in any elementary school. So, there are the usual suspects like abundant bunnies, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rats, turtles, crabs, and fish. But there are also ferrets, a very depressed and dyspeptic looking fennec-fox (native to Israel), one sheep, five goats, a family of ducks and a pair of geese who share a small pond, several parrots, a terrarium full of stick bugs and another full of praying mantises, newts, two large aviaries filled with finches, parakeets, canaries, and doves (one in the zoo, and one in the main school building), and two extremely grumpy peacocks. Students are allowed to help feed the larger animals and clean their homes, and that's done with Daphna or another adult. They are also allowed to play with any of the smaller animals they can clutch in their grubby little hands.
Therefore, I'm sorry to say that the school's guinea pigs, bunnies, lizards, hamsters, and every other living thing small enough to be held or cradled are all subjected to two brief but probably dreaded fifteen minute periods daily of the loving, well-meaning, but not always especially gentle minstrations of the schools apprentice zookeepers. Though the animals are supposed to stay in the zoo area or around its perimeter, I will occasionally be visited by enthusiastic students who thrust bunnies, hamsters, or guinea pigs into my laps, or who visit me toting a plastic box full of mice and play equipment (you know, tunnels, wheels, those sorts of things) or with a parakeet on their shoulder, affectionately nibbling the child' ear.
Recently, a massive tractor with a cherry-picker like attachment was driven into the school yard by a cadre of tree-trimmers (to the fascination and excitement of all male students in grades one and two). They stopped their work to take a coffee break during the first recess and watch unfazed as several of the boldest students clambered into the cab of the tractor and mounted its huge back wheels. The kids uninterested by the heavy equipment instead occupied themselves by collecting the felled branches (ranging in length, girth, and weight from "appropriate for roasting marshmallows" to "can not be physically lifted without the help of two additional buddies"). Now, in my culturally-myopic, quaintly American view, I was horrified to see the kids let loose on the tree trimmings. In fact, combining a bunch of hyper children (rooted in a culture that is not known for an emphasis on reserve or restraint) with a bunch of pointy, long, sharp, spear-and-bayonet-shaped objects in an outdoor free-for-all is basically my idea of a complete clusterfuck. I was not alone in this view: Trevor, one of ny newest and sweetest students; a butterball of a first-grader who (not coincidentally) recently emmigrated from South Africa, huffed and puffed up to the bench where I was sitting two minutes after recess began. He plaintively asked me, "Why are all the big boys playing with the sticks?" I told him that I didn't know, and he looked at me quite seriously while echoing the dire prediction that no doubt both he and I (decades earlier) had heard from numerous sources--teachers, moms, and grandparents included:
"They could put their eyes out!"
Of course, I concurred, but the general consensus from the adults in power seemed to be that a few detached retinas, a handful of minor puncture wounds, and innumerable wicked splinters were all a judicious outcome to risk in exchange for the pedagogical and social value of allowing the kids the chase, hit, poke, and whack each other with tree branches.
And that, for both better and worse, seems to typify Israeli-style recess!
*This is not an isolated event. "Becky" isn't an Israeli name, although Betty (don't think "Betty Draper" so much as this phonetic rendering: "behh-TEE") is, albeit an uncommon one. Nearly every time I introduce myself, in spite of special pains to really spit out what one of my first-graders winningly refers to as the "Kih, kih, kih, kay!" sound, the receiving person squints a little and asks, "behh-TEE?" Then, I repeat myself, and explain that it is the nickname (literally "small name") of "Rebecca," which I usually have to also translate from its anglocentric form back into the original Hebrew, or "Reevkah." Reevkah, of course, while one of the oldest female names in the Jewish tradition (remember Yitzak/Issac's wife?), is not currently very au-courant, nor has been for decades, making it somewhat incongruent to an Israeli meeting me for the first time, in the same manner that an American might stop short upon being introduced to a 25-year old named ""Estelle," "Evelyn," or "Lenoir"). All lovely names, to be sure, but ones more readily associated with a member of the AARP.
All the teachers on staff take turns watching various quadrants of the sprawling school yard during the two daily recesses. Hahfsahkah gadol, or "the big break" takes place at 9:50 after first and second period and includes ten minutes to eat breakfast and fifteen minutes of outdoor/indoor free play. Hafsakah katan or the "little break" takes place from 11:45 to 12:00 and is reserved for free play only. The recurring, cyclical recess monitor duties are determined by the head "morah sport" (literally "sports teacher," or what American kids would call the PE teacher), an energetic blonde lady who walks around with a wireless microphone pac strapped round her waist and a headset microphone that gives her the air of a roving pop star, circa 1998. Only in Israel would a teacher employ a tool to make her shouting even louder than it is in its unaltered guise. The sport teacher composes the recess duty roster in a process that seems to rival the seeding of college basketball teams for the NCAA tournament, and renders this roster in an spreadsheet-like matrix that is printed out and tacked to the bulletin board in the teacher's lounge, where it is set upon at once by the other teachers and heavily annotated with the details of swapped days, adjustments to the schedule because of field trips or assemblies, and requests for clemency due to upcoming maternity leaves.
I typically do not even notice the new schedule's existence until its miniscule type has been smeared, crossed-out, and written over, whereupon it becomes nearly impossible to read. Consequently, I can frequently be found before 1st period stranded in front of the bulletin board, with my eyes screwed-up and an index finger tracing along the schedule's tiny boxes, reading the names out loud softly under my breath in the manner of a preschooler with "Hop on Pop" on her lap. My search for the three letters that spell out of my name-Bet, Koof, Yud--is complicated by the fact that often, although not consistently, my name is spelled as Bet, Tet, Yud (or "Betty") instead.*
Figuring out my alloted recess duties every week pales in comparison to the actual job. First of all, my school is comprised of several buildings on one central, large campus (the main school building, that also houses the principal, registrar, secretaries, and medic's offices, a freestanding gymnasium, art studio, and theatre classroom, two banks of classrooms, the school garden, and the school zoo. This is in addition to two small playgrounds with the usual assortment of swings, slides, and monkey bars, a soccer-field, and two basketball courts. There's also a security guard hut near the locked front gate and outdoor smoking area adjacent to the teacher's lounge, natch). Consequently, teachers are strategically scattered across the campus to ensure no area goes unmonitored. To minimize fighting, the athletic fields are each reserved for the students of different grades--the play areas are assigned from youngest to oldest in orders of increasing desirability. You have to pay your dues to move from the playground equipment to the second best basketball court and so on (as you might have guessed, the football field is the most coveted location). This means that each teacher can count on a finding the same crowd of kids in her territory every recess--a helpful asset when it comes to mediating fights, staunching tears, and other diplomatic efforts. For example, I'm always sent to the "Gimeleem yard," or the area where the third-graders play, so I've gotten to know a lot of the kitah gimel students who aren't in my classes, and become privy to the intricacies of their social ties and recurring conflicts.
The girls seem to be the ones with the perennial rivalries and problems. Noe is always upset with Shira for being too bossy, and Lior, Gaea, Heela, and Tamara are always incensed by the copycat choreography of their hip-hop dance rivals: Oren, Savion, Zoe, Roenni, and Corahl. The girls are also the ones who come up for advice, commiseration, and validation, and in my case, to teach me Hebrew necessary to fill in what they see as the most alarming gaps in my general knowledge--in other words, Hebrew riddles and jokes (these tend to require a committee of girls to provide a translation that is nonetheless nearly always completely incomprehensible), idiomatic phrases, and slang. A lot of the girls also like to cruise by to see if the breakfast *I* packed seems more interesting than their own, and if so, to cadge the majority of it with sustained, high-pitched whining.
Overall (and unsurprisingly), the attitudes of Israeli kids and teachers towards recess are markedly different than those of their American counterparts. First of all, there is a more cavalier, less stringent regard for child safety, with the attitude that the kids need to learn to avoid dangers by themselves, rather than simply obeying a passel of rules blindly without context.
So, unlike in my childhood elementary school, no one is halted from scaling any of the tall trees that dot the campus, or from attempts to shimmy up the poles of the basketball court baskets. No teachers intercede in arguments among students, no matter how heated they become, or how outnumbered one side might be, unless the kids are on the brink of blows. Industrious kids can be found digging massive holes, and attempting to booby-trap playground equipment. Requests from students for arbitration of athletic disputes is met by most teachers with the trenchant (well, in Israel at least) and deadpan hypothetical, "Ma lehsoht?" (literally "what to do?" or "What can I do?") or its cousin, "Ehn mah lehsot" ( literally, "there isn't what to do" or "Nothing can be done about it"), and even serious offenses like purposeful hitting, kicking, and the like, still do not rouse the other teachers to move from their benches. Instead, the emit a strident "Boh!" or "Buena!" ("COME!") to the offending party, who is compelled to separate himself from the herd and slink shamefacedly torwards the teacher for his commeupance. Just like David Caruso in CSI: Miami, teachers will puncuate a particularly pointed remark by removing their sunglasses for emphasis. The offenders tend to respond to punishments with sullen silence and aqcuisence or, more commonly, with heated invective and finger-pointing, sort of like tiny acolytes of John McEnroe.
Children are let loose in the school zoo during both recesses, under the capable, but far from constant supervision of the "nature teacher," Daphna (she teaches the kids about, basically, life science: i.e. botany and zoology, environmentalism and ecology, and animal care. she also manages the zoo and cares for the animals (along with two assistants). As some of you know, the "teaching and touching zooological garden" at my school is sort of an amalgam of a children's petting zoo and a home for the typical classroom pets you see in any elementary school. So, there are the usual suspects like abundant bunnies, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rats, turtles, crabs, and fish. But there are also ferrets, a very depressed and dyspeptic looking fennec-fox (native to Israel), one sheep, five goats, a family of ducks and a pair of geese who share a small pond, several parrots, a terrarium full of stick bugs and another full of praying mantises, newts, two large aviaries filled with finches, parakeets, canaries, and doves (one in the zoo, and one in the main school building), and two extremely grumpy peacocks. Students are allowed to help feed the larger animals and clean their homes, and that's done with Daphna or another adult. They are also allowed to play with any of the smaller animals they can clutch in their grubby little hands.
Therefore, I'm sorry to say that the school's guinea pigs, bunnies, lizards, hamsters, and every other living thing small enough to be held or cradled are all subjected to two brief but probably dreaded fifteen minute periods daily of the loving, well-meaning, but not always especially gentle minstrations of the schools apprentice zookeepers. Though the animals are supposed to stay in the zoo area or around its perimeter, I will occasionally be visited by enthusiastic students who thrust bunnies, hamsters, or guinea pigs into my laps, or who visit me toting a plastic box full of mice and play equipment (you know, tunnels, wheels, those sorts of things) or with a parakeet on their shoulder, affectionately nibbling the child' ear.
Recently, a massive tractor with a cherry-picker like attachment was driven into the school yard by a cadre of tree-trimmers (to the fascination and excitement of all male students in grades one and two). They stopped their work to take a coffee break during the first recess and watch unfazed as several of the boldest students clambered into the cab of the tractor and mounted its huge back wheels. The kids uninterested by the heavy equipment instead occupied themselves by collecting the felled branches (ranging in length, girth, and weight from "appropriate for roasting marshmallows" to "can not be physically lifted without the help of two additional buddies"). Now, in my culturally-myopic, quaintly American view, I was horrified to see the kids let loose on the tree trimmings. In fact, combining a bunch of hyper children (rooted in a culture that is not known for an emphasis on reserve or restraint) with a bunch of pointy, long, sharp, spear-and-bayonet-shaped objects in an outdoor free-for-all is basically my idea of a complete clusterfuck. I was not alone in this view: Trevor, one of ny newest and sweetest students; a butterball of a first-grader who (not coincidentally) recently emmigrated from South Africa, huffed and puffed up to the bench where I was sitting two minutes after recess began. He plaintively asked me, "Why are all the big boys playing with the sticks?" I told him that I didn't know, and he looked at me quite seriously while echoing the dire prediction that no doubt both he and I (decades earlier) had heard from numerous sources--teachers, moms, and grandparents included:
"They could put their eyes out!"
Of course, I concurred, but the general consensus from the adults in power seemed to be that a few detached retinas, a handful of minor puncture wounds, and innumerable wicked splinters were all a judicious outcome to risk in exchange for the pedagogical and social value of allowing the kids the chase, hit, poke, and whack each other with tree branches.
And that, for both better and worse, seems to typify Israeli-style recess!
*This is not an isolated event. "Becky" isn't an Israeli name, although Betty (don't think "Betty Draper" so much as this phonetic rendering: "behh-TEE") is, albeit an uncommon one. Nearly every time I introduce myself, in spite of special pains to really spit out what one of my first-graders winningly refers to as the "Kih, kih, kih, kay!" sound, the receiving person squints a little and asks, "behh-TEE?" Then, I repeat myself, and explain that it is the nickname (literally "small name") of "Rebecca," which I usually have to also translate from its anglocentric form back into the original Hebrew, or "Reevkah." Reevkah, of course, while one of the oldest female names in the Jewish tradition (remember Yitzak/Issac's wife?), is not currently very au-courant, nor has been for decades, making it somewhat incongruent to an Israeli meeting me for the first time, in the same manner that an American might stop short upon being introduced to a 25-year old named ""Estelle," "Evelyn," or "Lenoir"). All lovely names, to be sure, but ones more readily associated with a member of the AARP.
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