One small step...One giant leap...: Week 3: Yav Dashem, Haifa, teaching.

On Sunday, instead of teaching, I joined the 11th grade class on a field trip to Yav Dashem, a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.Overall it was a good day - I got to know a lot of the students better which is something I have been hoping for. But it was definitely a day that required a lot of patience - driving on a bus for 6 hours with crazy Israeli 11th graders is no easy task. It didn't help that I hadn't taught any 11th grade classes yet, so I didn't know any of the teachers or students. Since the students had never seen me in the teacher role, they viewed me with little respect/as their equal. They followed me around, translated everything for me (even though all the signs in the museum had English and Hebrew), and had me sit with them on the bus. The museum wasn't too different than the one in Washington D.C., just more from the Jewish perspective.

Monday was a regular day of teaching. However, now that its week 3, the teachers (who are Israeli thus they are disorganized and never really know whats going on), have forgotten when we are teaching for them. So its become more and more common to walk into a class and be a surprise to a teacher, which means we usually just end up observing the class. Not quite as fun, but not complaining too much. It is funny to watch teachers constantly switch from English to Hebrew and writing left to right then right to left as they work through problems on the board.

Tuesday was election day in Israel! Nothing has changed since Jesus' time - to vote, you still have to go back to where you are registered/live (that's why Jesus was born in Bethlehem and not Nazareth). So everyone gets the day off - which meant another day of exploring! I went to Haifa, a city built on Mt. Carmel, just south of Akko. I started my day by checking out the Baha'i Gardens and shrine (Baha'i is a religion that apparently has over 5 million followers, I had never heard of it before though). The gardens were absolutely beautiful. I then met up with Mika, the girl I teach with, and we went to the beach together. And because it won't be warm enough to go to the beach in Boston for quite a while - we both swam (ALL Israelis thought we were crazy). We then visited another church, and Mika headed back to Karmiel. I however went to a family's house for dinner that some friends, including Kathleen, had connected me with. I had never met them before, but they were MIT alums who moved to Israel after they graduated in the 80's (Mr. and Mrs. Coop, they didn't remember knowing you, but who knows). Like my short stay in a home in Tel Aviv, it was such a pleasure to be in a house, to meet their kids and their pastor (they had him over for his birthday), and to have a delicious home-cooked meal (with chicken even, and a grand dessert of brownies, chocolate mouse, whipped cream, and chocolate chip cookies that were almost as good as Oma's). It was interesting to talk to them about what being Christian was like in a Jewish state, something I have obviously thought a lot about since being here.