Once a teacher…
Both my parents were teachers so it is not a big surprise that I became one too. What is surprising is that for the twenty five years I did it, there was not a day I did not wish to leave and do something different. And still in the same almost predictable way we fall into our different rolls in life I kept going. Holding on to something I was definitely good at but convinced was never meant to be my true calling.
Year after year I diligently performed what was asked of me. I invested my best in my students and the other responsibilities bestowed on me, as the years went by and I was perceived as someone who is dedicated, serious and highly qualified. The obvious irony of the situation seemed clear only to me. In those very long twenty five years I tried my hands in almost every facet of the educational system following, what I thought was a great advice, given to me by a career counselor I consulted five years into my teaching career.
When I explained my ambivalence towards teaching, my love hate relationship with the school system this counselor suggested that I will search the endless possibilities available in the educational field and find my niche. I did exactly that. Every two or three years I made a mini career change. Teaching different subject matter, teaching wide variety of ages, teaching regular students and special needs ones and when that was not enough I proceeded to counseling and from there to supervising. Almost breathless I arrived to the twenty fifth year mark and with my trophy, my early retirement, I immediately secured another teaching position this time in a small college in a nearby town.
It took something stronger, more potent, to shake the “school teacher” out of me.
The final push came quite surprisingly from my twelve years old daughter, our youngest, when my husband and I realized she was becoming increasingly unhappy and withdrawn. A short probe reviled that she, an A student and actively involved in school functions, perceived it as a threatening place managed by fickle adults. Those adults scared her due to their inability to control the chaos and aggression of their students. When she refused to go back to her school we backed her, knowing it was against the law but preferring her peace of mind and happiness. While she was sitting home awaiting a solution we were forced to search different alternatives to public education. It was the first time I came across the concept of homeschooling and found other families, who were homeschooling their kids in spite of the fact that homeschooling in Israel was not legal.
Legal or not it took over a month of her sitting home for the town educational board to go through the needed motions. Truancy investigation, psychological evaluation, some plain and not very subtle manipulations and when all failed and we managed to employ public opinion they caved in. She was allowed to go to another, new, experimental school and with that the homeschooling option was temporarily dropped.
It is a known fact that once you can see beyond a visual illusion you will never be able to return to your previous way of looking at things. Our experience of standing up to the “accepted “way of doing things and putting our interests and beliefs onward ,altered our whole outlook for good. With that many other supposedly established “truths” lost their power too. What started as a mutiny against one system quickly affected our entire vision.
It took few more months for us to fully grasp the extent of the change in us and be able to act on it. To this day I believe that when we pulled our daughter from her school the process of separating from our home town was completed. Soon afterward we left and began our journey that landed us six years later in Ellsworth. Home schooling while we were moving from one place to another became the obvious choice and most of this time I was the teacher.
So here I was completing a full circle and yet light years away from where I started. I became a one student teacher to my daughter but unlike my prior experience this one was rewarding and very satisfying. I will never stop marveling at our first year of home schooling. We clearly had no idea what we were supposed to be doing and so we did pretty much what we felt like. Surprisingly enough we were busy all the time. We rediscovered freedom. Not the kind where you think you are free just because you have no obligations , the one where you free to explore your world and invest as much time as you feel in anything that truly interests you. You can do it for an hour, two hours a day maybe even a week. The bell will not ring every 50 minutes; a new teacher will not appear commanding you to put down what you are doing because it is not the right time. As if there is a right or wrong time for math, biology or whatever. We explored our new environment, we planted a garden, we raised a duck, we looked for gold in our back yard, we performed scientific experiments while cooking, rode horses, ice skated, read books, did a lot of drawing and even some writing. We had no set schedule and no books, or tests and yet we worked at learning just as hard. In the years to come there were some changes and we incorporated a more structured way of studying, still, in essence things did not change much.
I was my daughter teacher till she went to college and then and only then I truly retired.
I read this with great pleasure in the writing, the idea, the performance and with great interest too--as someone who, although teaching for 39 years, is only at the 24 year mark in my possible-to-retire-from-at-25-years job. My interest is also great in your next-to-last graf because I helped found an alternative school and believe deeply in the educational philosophy you describe.
ReplyDeleteAnd the last sentence made me laugh with pleasure at the neatness and economy of the writing. Frankly, the only artistic beauty that ever really moves me is beauty in writing. I am more or less immune to art, music, and so on. That last sentence caused me to laugh, but simultaneously made the hair on my scalp stand up and my eyes prickle with incipient tears: that's an esthetic reaction.
I wondered as I read this if you read it aloud before posting, as an aid to composition or revision. I wondered if you are thinking in English or Hebrew as you write. And I wondered if I could focus today on something much smaller than my usual interest in content and organization.
I was thinking about your English, your prose style. It's a formal kind of prose, which is fine up to a point, as long as the writer is consciously aware that she is using fancy words in place of simple ones and is doing so on purpose because those formal choices are part of what creates her on-page persona.
In graf 2, for example, you use 'bestowed on' instead of 'given.'
They mean more or less the same thing, though 'given' is pretty much without connotation, while 'bestowed' is more formal, more ceremonious. I don't necessarily object to that formality but want to point it out. Writing in a colloquial way is a nice option to have but many writers do not care to dip their toes in that stream, and that is a matter between them and their readers.
I was also thinking about the difference between idiomatic English and colloquial English. Here is a case where you miss, just barely, the idiomatic: "I tried my hands in almost every facet..."
It's perfectly clear, but idiomatically it would be, "I tried my hand at almost every facet...."
Here's another example from the same graf: "following what I thought was a great advice...." It either has to be "following what I thought was great advice" or "what I thought was a great piece of advice."
I would be unhappy indeed to leave you with these minor fussy comments. Having nothing else to offer you this week other than undiluted praise, I thought to bestow these remarks on you as well.
I think in English when I write (my English that is…)I also print every piece before posting it so that I can see how it looks on paper and read it to myself to hear how it sounds.
ReplyDeleteHowever, no matter how much I am told that my English is good, it never really feels like Hebrew (my Hebrew is good). I need to think about word choice and sentence structure, while I am writing and later when I reread. That is probably the main reason that my writing appears somewhat formal or stiff (?)
Word choice, bestowed was actually a conscious choice; I thought it added a touch of double meaning being in the context the way it was. I am a real fan of rich language and sundry (here is another one) words, but I don’t want to overdo it on the account of the readability.
I am thankful for the remarks. It’s seems that no matter how many times I go over my writing I still miss small, or big mistakes. I find your remarks very helpful.
Readability is not a factor, I promise you! I can handle all the big words! Do you know the longest word in English with only one vowel? Or the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand?
ReplyDeleteYou might want to try reading aloud as part of your revising. I do--a lot of times things I don't see, I will hear.
You're quite right about 'bestowed' in the context you used it, but the pinch of humor there was so dry I missed it. My mistake!
I can tell you are just dying to know so:
ReplyDelete'strengths'--9 letters, one vowel
'stewardesses'--all lefty