Today was my second Israeli school day.
Today was easier than yesterday, firstly because I knew sort of what to expect, and secondly because the lessons were less based on a rich Hebrew vocabulary. I had PE, science, math, English, and French. PE was, of course, PE - but in Israel, unlike in America, it's boys and girls separately. The school dentist came to look at our teeth, proclaiming that everyone's were in good shape. Then we had to run for five minutes...that was not my strong point, but I survived. We walked to cool down, then stretched and did a few exercises, after which class was over. During science I got paired up with a student teacher, who taught me about electrical circuits, half of which I already knew, but I reviewed it in Hebrew. Science was a double class - an hour and a half - and after it there was our long recess, in which you're allowed to wander the school and do what you want. My friend recommended a chocolate croissant at the kiosk in the school courtyard, so I bought one. She bought a doughnut. Not healthy in the least, but that's not of much concern here. She and another girl showed me around the school some more and informed me of the habits of the math teacher, whom we had next, and some extra tidbits about the school. I finished my doughnut and washed the excess chocolate off my hands, barely making it to math on time. I was relieved to find that the class is doing something that I have already done a bit of. I actually knew some things they didn't, which I was proud of. In that class I finally got it into my head that here you don't put your hand up, you put up your pointer finger. After math, in which the teacher assigned a fair amount of homework (which later gave me a headache from all the numbers), I had English class. The funny thing about that was that I wasn't put in the highest class. Even before the lesson, the teacher resolved to talk to the person who organizes the classes in order to move me to the "outstanding" class (that's the literal translation of what they call that class). During English, the teacher (who does have an accent in English) asked me to read a few sections. One of them, I noted very excitedly, was a paragraph on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the brilliance of J. K. Rowling. I found it funny when they called Voldemort (or as Peeves the poltergeist and I like to call him, Voldy) a "mean wizard" like he was some sort of elementary school bully. In another section, I read at normal speed, in my American accent. Half the class turned around to look at me. "You read so fast," they said. "Well, that's what happens when a person lives in an English-speaking country," said the teacher.
My last lesson was French. Most of the things they're doing are things I've done before, with a few words sprinkled in that I've only heard of but can basically figure out. We conjugated verbs that I thankfully learned this year and completed a page in our workbooks that my teacher in America would assign as a five-minute review. I completed it within five minutes and waited for the rest of the class.
After school, as we've been doing the entire time we've been here, I walked to my grandmother's and met up with my family, where we ate dinner. Dinner in its old-fashioned sense: the biggest meal of the day, which in this case is in mid-day. That's the way it is here. For breakfast and supper you eat bread with various condiments, salad, and eggs. After dinner and supper it is customary to drink, or at least offer, tea.
Today I was explaining American school to my friends. "It's so strict!" they exclaimed. Yesterday, when I told them about the no phones rule, they asked, "Well, what do you do in class, then?" "Learn." "What about the boring classes?" "Learn, talk, draw, do other homework." They looked at me like I was from another planet.
Cups of tea: 15
hahahahahaha
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