Story #46: Houses

I was working on Sunday and while looking for something in a stack of papers on someone else's desk, I accidentally dislodged a set of flashcards that fell from the pile and fluttered to the ground like so many three-by-five-inch snowflakes. This card was the first I grabbed as I began to collect them from the floor and return them to the desk, rubber-banded this time. "Ah, batim," I thought to myself absent-mindedly as I plucked the word from the ground and reached for another. Surprised by myself, I paused for a moment. Holding the card in my hand I thought back to the time that I wasn't able to read it at all, before the symbols had any meaning or the letters made any sounds in my mind. Now בתים is a sight word, I don't even have to use the vowels included on the flashcard to sound it out but instead I recognize it instantly.

A small reminder of the way things change with time, I suppose. Years ago when I first taught with Jason in our fancy new building on fog-shrouded Brotherhood Way a flashcard like this would not have helped me learn anything because the only alphabets I'd had any practice with moved from left to right. Then there was my first Hebrew teacher: Mrs. Solomon, who let me learn along with the second graders in my class and even gave me my own workbook, and there was summer school at Hebrew University the July that the war raged around us and we took our final in a bomb shelter. There was ulpan at HUC in Jerusalem last year during my sabbatical, and there was the need to make myself understood teaching English at an elementary school in HaGivat HaTzarfatit. And now I know this word, along with countless others.

I spent seven years in a learning community where flashcards and posters like this were on display everyplace you looked, where sounds like ch and ts were on everyone's lips. But I do not choose to live in only that world, unlike many other people, and now there are new letters to learn and sounds to practice and words to read. Coming to a school where cultures different from my own are all around me, where I sat recently in a meeting and learned about Flores de Mayo all the while thinking about the fact that the night before had been Yom HaShoah, just made me so happy that as an educator I really do believe the world is my own classroom and that I can learn something from everyone I meet. Will there come a day when I can read Spanish and Tagalog as effortlessly as I could read this flashcard that says "houses"? Yes there will, and for that I am very glad. I love being a teacher but I love learning even more.