playing with fire

The father wanted his son out of my class.

“Since he’s been in your class, he’s grown degenerate. He doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t listen to any of us — me or his sisters. He’s even less studious than before. I ask him about that dossier you gave him — what are you studying, and he can’t tell me a thing. He’s gotten worse this year, with your class. You’re not strict with them. Just now, when I came in, the boys were fooling around — punching each other, out of their seats.” I couldn’t deny it. “And sometimes, when he’s supposed to be in your class, I get calls from him. Four, five calls. What is he learning if he’s on the phone? And I don’t let my son out on the streets, then he comes to your class and hangs with boys who are a bad influence. I just happened to be driving past the other day and there they were — smoking. My son. Smoking.”

This was news to me, and sad sad news at that.

“I can afford to feed him and clothe him, but a pack of cigarettes — two packs a day — I can’ t do it. You see, I’m a smoker myself. I smoke. I can’t have him smoking, too.”

And I thought he was concerned about the boy’s lungs.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be taking my son out of your class.”

“If you really believe that your son is attending my class for the wrong reasons and that it has a decidedly negative effect on him, then I, too, think you should withdraw him.” Then, in what must have been an echo of my parents, “If education doesn’t make us more mannered, then what’s the use?”

Without taking book or pencil, the student trotted after his father.

I came back into the class feeling betrayed.

The subtle texting, the cluelessness about homework, the horseplay– I knew about those. I had been permissive to a fault. Bas hada kom ‘uttadkheen kom. But that’s a pile and smoking’s another pile.

I confronted them.

“You guys,” I didn’t know who I was talking to, so I addressed all the boys. “I know the pressure you’re under. I go to the University, and every guy who thinks he’s anybody smokes. [Except for the religious crowd, I should add.] Smoking is so prevalent, so casual, so sophisticated — wallahi (by God) the idea crossed my mind.” They laughed. “You might think that smoking is part of becoming a man, growing up, but you shrink in my estimation when you choose to smoke, because it’s self-destructive.”

“It’s killing yourself slowly,” one of the boys offered.

“Exactly. Imagine putting your face on a car’s tailpipe and breathing in. That’s more-or-less what you’re doing. It causes cancer, blackens your lungs. Why would you do that to yourself?”

“But, Miss, you’re telling us all this and over there [in the US], they drink.”

“And there’s drinking here, too. What others do doesn’t concern us.”

“And there [in the US], they do heroin.” The boys pushed back their chairs and shrugged their shoulders as if I was being hypocritical.

My reply here was a throwback to Anthony Quinn’s Omar al-Mukhtar: “They are not our role models. If they do wrong, must we also? I’m not telling you this because I want to point out your faults as a society or as individuals. I’m only concerned for your welfare.”

By this time, one boy was almost flattened on his desk and a couple others had slid in their seats.

I know that advising prudence and healthfulness is teacherly and motherly and that, at 14 and 15, teachers and mothers are not the hippest role models on the block.

Even so, I am a teacher, not a saint. In the name of leniency, I’ve been tolerating a lot of tomfoolery and that, in turn, has made it harder for the serious to stay focused.

There are a few kids, besides, who’ve been treating the class as a game. I’ll buy their analogy. This is a new playing season. We’re short on time for practice and we’re up against formidable teams. So, this semester there’ll be tryouts and, sadly, not everyone will make the cut.

caged birds

A couple years ago, I attended a MAS Tarbiyah and Ilm camp. Throughout the week-long camp, the leaders would periodically share their reflections and solicit ours. During one of the final rounds of reflections, one of my friends mentioned that she’d been almost invisible for the better part of the weak, because she’d lost her voice. Her silence taught her to pay attention to the marginalized, the silenced, the forgotten. Among the advantages of being silent, she said, was having a chance to listen and think about what others have to say.

I’ve been thinking a lot of that since, a couple days ago, the flighty weather snatched my voice and ran away. (I, in turn, snatched a ghost’s — a poor exchange.)

Ironically, yesterday I taught my first English conversation class at UJ with this shadow of a voice and, this morning, I was back in Nuzha with my rowdy eigth graders.

But, with the eighth graders, the raspy voice was the least of my worries.

For starters, the copy machine ran out of toner. As a result, the vocabulary test retake didn’t happen (a retake because they all cheated on the first one), the lyrics of “The Everything Song” weren’t memorized and the cursive practice had to wait.

Then, there was the locked classroom. The key was misplaced, the assistant principal told me, so no class there. I found my students monkeying around in the school auditorium, among a hundred-some (formerly) white dining room chairs. This wasn’t going to work. I had to ask for another room.

Oh, but I hated to ask. You know how it is. When you’re someone who comes out of nowhere to give a hand, everyone puts you ‘al ras ‘u ‘al ‘ain (i.e. they like you), but when you’re someone who comes out of nowhere to burden them, well, then you’re a good-for-nothing. So, at the risk of being the volunteer who’s more trouble than she’s worth, I went back to the assistant principal.

“Is there an alternative classroom? Just a place with desks or tables?” The assistant principal shook her head regretfully. “No worries iA. We’ll — we’ll try and make it work.”

And aA we did. Making it work involved lifting a portable dry erase board off the stage and moving four wooden tables to the front of the auditorium. But what are thirteen year-old boys for, if not for lifting tables and dry erase boards?

Still, the kids were all over the place, literally. They were like gas molecules, actively diffusing to fill the bigger volume. (I’m embracing my inner-nerd.)

At least I learned a few things today. Like the fact that, a kid sitting in the back of the class studying for his upcoming science exam is an entirely different matter when the back of the class is thirty feet away. And, when you don’t have a backstage, students tend not to disappear into it. Better yet, when you don’t have a stage at all, it’s really hard for students to jump on and off — unless they have a wonderful imagination.

During break, after I returned with khuffay hunain (nothing) from the copy machine, I found one of the boys on stage, delivering patriotic poems by Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish. The stage can stay, kirmal (because of) Zaid’s performance.

What I also learned today is that, though the kids’ English reading is intermediate, their reading of human faces is advanced. “Sh. Come on, guys, the Miss is upset with us,” Amer whispered to his peers, when their thoughts strayed from spelling.

Then, there was Ahmad, who parroted my whispered instructions goodnaturedly (and a little sarcastically, I suspect).

Finally, as class drew to a close, my students packed their bags and made for the door. They came back with an announcement: we were locked in.

Oh, the hullabaloo.

“We have a computer exam today!” The girls wailed. “Our science test!” The boys whined. A moment later, a dozen hand were on the blue UNRWA door, slapping it and calling out for help — a scene reminiscent of pilgrims begging salvation along the Kaa’ba walls. Another bunch manned the windows. And I — I stood in the eye of the storm, trapped in my own mute stillness.

Eventually, one of the handymen at the school heard the S.O.S. calls from the window and came to our rescue. But until then, I had no choice but to listen.

What I heard was a cacophony of noises: shuffling feet against tile, the swishing of jackets against backpacks and the anxious breathing of students all aflutter with worry and excitement. I even thought I heard, in the background, the sound of a caged bird singing. Whatever I heard, I sure hope they pass their exams with flying — yes, flying — colors.

the timidity of hope

Abdulmoneim, the Gazan boy who told me last year that he wanted to die, is now in my class. But sometimes I can’t be so sure. His mind is off somewhere far, far away and, try as I might, I can’t seem to lure it back to the here and now.

It’s not like all the other kids are with me 100%. I know that Abed is dreaming of Hibah, that Iyad really wants to kick around a soccer ball and that Manal is preoccupied with the neatness of her pencil pouch.

But the Gazan boy is different. I know I don’t have the qualifications to say this, but I don’t care. The boy is depressed.

He lost his mother a few years ago. His older sisters – outstanding college graduates – earned mediocre jobs, thereby proving to him that hard work leads to nothing but hard labor. He’s a boy who wants to be a man and get married. But he already knows he can’t work the job of his dreams (computer engineering) because Gazans just aren’t allowed to pursue that career, not to mention seventeen lucrative others. Without a decent job, he can’t make decent money which will make it very hard for him to woo the girl of his dreams. And that makes him sad.

For the first three weeks of school, Abdulmoneim’s eyes were vacant. He didn’t do his homework and never raised his hand. His peers mocked him but, unlike most of my other boys, he accepted the criticism as if theirs confirmed his lowly opinion of himself. I asked him to see me after class.

“What’s going on, Abdulmoneim?”

“There’s just stuff at home.”

“Okay. How can I help you out? You’re not doing your work. You’re not even trying in class. I want to see you improve. What can I do to help you get better?”

His eyes softened. “You care about me?”

“Of course, I do. But I can’t make you better at English by myself. So, will you help me out?”

He gave me one definite nod.

“I want you to do your homework and participate in class. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Then, in what I interpreted to be a recommitment to life and the fight they call living, Abdulmoneim smiled. He held onto the straps of his backpack and went on his way.

In our next class, Abdulmoneim raised his hand – twice. His answers, not unlike those of my other students, were mangled, mispronounced and grammatically faulty. But to me, they were perfect.

It took extra courage for this boy to raise his hand. That’s why every time I see that hand raised, it gives me a little extra hope.

man enough (to get rejected)

They say that some of the most important political decisions happen on the golf green. Well, apparently, some of the most interesting classroom gossip is revealed after class on the blacktop.

I was talking to one of my eighth-graders — a tall and skinny girl who’s about my height. She’s one of the most excellent students in my class except that, well, she’s not technically allowed to be in my class. For a while, she ditched her full-time school to study English with me (with her teachers’ permission, believe it or not), but school administrators put an end to that. So now she’s trying to switch to a different school so she can make it work.

As we walked together to meet with an administrator, I told her how I wished all my students were as eager to learn as she. “Some of the boys especially – they seem so disinterested, I sometimes wonder why they’re in the class at all. It’s not like I’m forcing them to attend.”

“Well, Miss, the truth is, a lot of the boys aren’t taking the class because they want to learn.” Even though I was a student a heartbeat ago, the teacher in me still felt the sting of that arrow. They don’t want to learn?

They’re children, I reminded myself. They’re not conscripts in your personal battle. Without students to bash, I bashed myself. Why hadn’t I given that a serious think? I guess I flattered myself that the kids were as attached to me as I was to them. But no. No a hundred times. “They come to see the girls,” Deema explained.

Images of private smirks among the boys, passed notes and shared pencil-sharpeners whizzed through my mind. It all made sense now. What a tyro I am.

“You saw how down Zaid and Ahmad were after recess?”

“Yeah.” I said diffidently, as if she were poised to throw another stone at my glass classroom.

“They were bummed because they tried to flirt with a couple of the girls and were rebuffed.” Oh my, the eighth graders are flirting and rebuffing. They’re getting right down to business, these little people of mine.

Now that I reflected back, I congratulated myself that I had noticed the change in Zaid and Ahmad’s dispositions. It was hard not to notice, actually. They returned to me after break with slumped shoulders and a heavy reticence – just when they should have been bouncing off the walls with a soda-induced sugar high.

In class, when I had asked them “What’s the matter?” they shrugged me off. After class, Zaid told me that he and Ahmad were cousins and that their grandmother was sick in the hospital. I had wished her a quick recovery. Now, I looked back at everything with a suspicious eye, like a cook who’d found an eyelash in her stew. Was their grandmother in the hospital? Was there a grandmother? Were they cousins?

Deema was still talking. I refocused.

“For example, one of the boys just gave me a scrap of paper with his number on it, but I’m mitdayna (religious) so I don’t call boys.”

The thought of one of my boys giving Deema his number made me smile because, let’s be honest, Deema is a few inches taller than the tallest boy in my class. Any fella who tries to court my Deema ought to be at least man enough to look into her eyes without having to cock back his head sixty degrees. Is that too much to ask?