Being an English Teacher is Way Harder Than I Thought

It seems that the conflict is ever present here. It’s on everyone’s mind, all the time, even if they prefer not to talk about it or try to forget. Sometimes it’s hard to initiate a conversation about politics or the conflict with people here, but people’s thoughts often come out in the unlikeliest of circumstances or situations.

So I teach English classes here. Mostly to college students, but there is the odd 25 or 26 year old, as well as the odd 16 or 17 year old. I teach six classes in all. One on Thursday for 3 hours, one on Saturday for 3 hours, two on Tuesday and Sunday for an hour and a half, and one on Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday for an hour and a half. There are about fifteen to twenty people per class, a mix of boys and girls, ranging from 16 to 26. Some are English majors looking for improve their skills, and others are engineering or IT students looking to gain English skills so they can get jobs.

On the first day of all the classes, I did a quick introduction/icebreaker thing. I asked the students to go around and say their name, age, school, major, and hometown. Lastly, I asked them to say something interesting about themselves, like a hobby, or a cool they’ve done, etc…This is a super common question in the states when doing some kind of icebreaker or “get to know each other” exercise. But apparently, it’s not all that common here. People were confused. They didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” they said. I said say anything, just not the first five pieces of information. Literally anything. Do you like football (soccer)? Have you ever traveled anywhere cool? (I later found out that question was a mistake. Palestinians can’t really travel or go anywhere.) Whatever you want. It seems that Palestinians don’t have hobbies or something. Half the people thought for a while, then kind of gave up and said football. The rest of the people either said “I don’t know” or said “the internet”. I thought it was really strange. You’re telling me no one here does anything except go to school and take English classes? Impossible, but I guess it’s true. Without fail, this happened in every class.

What I’ve been doing with my classes is having them find 2 or 3 words they don’t know, define them and use them in a sentence, then present them to the rest of the class. After we’ve gone over the meaning and usage of all the new words, I have them do either a conversation exercise with each other, or an individual speaking exercise. I say that I don’t care what they talk about, as long as they use a specified amount of the new words (usually about 8) in their conversation or small speech. Then I give them time to prepare, either alone or with their partner.

Since each student brings in a couple words, the words are usually a grab bag. There are generally a few key words that define the course of conversation for each group. Last week, one of the words was ‘catastrophe’. Almost every group got up and talked about the conflict, saying things like “the occupation is a catastrophe” or “what the Israeli soldiers do to us is a catastrophe”. Another word last week was ‘allegiance’, for which I heard things like “we have allegiance to Palestine even though Israel occupies our land”. Some words will obviously lead to conversation about the conflict. For example, in one class one of the words was ‘oppression’. Most students got up and said something like “Israel is oppressive”, or “we are being oppressed because of the occupation”. Other words, however, are more benign and unlikely to bring up thoughts of the conflict. But I often find that even the most far-flung things remind them of the conflict. The best example: In another class, one of the words was ‘vigor’. I didn’t expect to, but I heard a range of things about the conflict. “We must resist the Israeli occupation with vigor”, “The people in Gaza are vigorously defending their land against the Israeli attack”, or “The Palestinian people should unite to resist Israel with vigor”. Let me remind you that these were all worked into longer conversations between two people, which means the rest of the conversation was also about the conflict.

The craziest one I’ve heard so far was a story one girl prepared and told as part of an individual speaking exercise. It started like this: “Once upon a time there was family that lived in a calm, beautiful village in Palestine. And then the Israeli army bombed their house, and their house collapsed” (collapse was one of the vocab words). I mean, Jesus Christ, that’s not how you tell a story. I was shocked. Not only by the violent nature of the story she was telling to an English class, but mostly by the crazy twist the story just took. She went to talk about how the Israeli soldiers forced the family to watch the destruction of their house, left them in the street homeless, and then took the father to jail for some undisclosed reason. She ended with “Even though the villagers tried to fight the soldiers with vigor” (vocab word), “their weapons were inadequate” (another vocab word).

These are the type images, stories, and memories that come to people’s minds here when they think about the conflict. When they have a chance to be creative and talk about anything that they could possibly want to talk about, they choose to talk about the conflict, and often express it in a fucked up, crazy way. Unfortunately, that is the nature of the conflict between these two ill-suited neighbors. And anything, even the simplest of words, can get them thinking about it.