This morning dd16 and I left the house together (with Yirmiyahu) early so we could catch the 6 am bus to Jerusalem.

The cause for our trip together was an interview for a seminary (located in Europe) that she is considering for the coming year.  I didn’t come along for lack of things to do at home, but because I was told that I also needed to be there.  I was wondering if they wanted to check me out to see what kind of mother the girl had?  But I was wrong, and the entire interview was so interesting that I have to share with you about it.

The interview began with dd being asked what she had heard about the school.  She was then asked if she had heard that they don’t like taking Israeli girls, and why she thinks that is?  The interviewer then said that although dd isn’t the typical Israeli applicant, they have to classify her somewhere so they’re considering her Israeli, and as such it was important for her to understand the concerns regarding accepting Israeli girls.  You’ll understand that when I heard all of the below that I wasn’t happy that they were considering her an Israeli applicant, particularly as the typical concerns are very much not an issue for her, because it framed her in a certain way before we even began.

Charedi girls from Israel generally are coming from the strongest religious backgrounds of all of their applicants, with very detailed guidelines that they’ve grown up with regarding all aspects of their behavior.  Schools are known for their takanons – school rules – they generally cover every aspect of their dress and activity.  As she said, if any girl does anything outside of this framework, it will take two hours – she then amended and said, maybe 24 hours – until everyone knows about it and it will affect all aspects of her future negatively.  So girls understand that they have to be very cautious about how they dress, speak, with whom they interact, etc.

This has a number of ramifications.  One is that girls won’t ask questions about philosophical questions regarding Judaism, because to ask would mean they would be labeled negatively.  The main issue that she discussed at length with us is something else.  Since they’ve had so much of their lives mandated by school and community rules, they have gone through life doing what is expected because that’s what they have to do.  They haven’t developed an internal desire to make good choices because they want to.  So why is this so problematic?

Once they leave the typical educational framework in Israel in which so much about their lives is mandated, they don’t handle freedom well.  At this seminary, they are very particular about the modesty standards of dress, though their general approach is to let girls grow spiritually at their own rate.  Students are accepted from a wide variety of backgrounds, and some girls come from communities with significantly more relaxed standards than others.  The main concern of the administration is that the students are growing spiritually, and they’ve found the Israeli girls tend to move down religiously.  The Israeli girls think that because others are doing something, it’s okay for them, despite the fact that other girls are making certain choices – in dress, for example – not as an act of rebellion, but because they’ve never learned any differently.

The students are given a lot of trust and freedom with their time; no one asks them where they’re going during free time or comments on how long they were gone.  It’s assumed that they have the maturity to manage their time appropriately and well.  This becomes a problem when they accept students who have never had this kind of freedom, who can become heady and even reckless in their choices.   She gave a number of examples and descriptions of the issues they’ve encountered, to explain why they are reluctant to accept Israeli girls.  This is why she wants mothers to be there for the interview – she wants them to understand the serious concerns for these girls, and the mothers need to be actively involved in the discussion about if/how their daughters will handle the more open and accepting environment.

Why did I find this so fascinating?  Because I agreed with every single thing she said from a philosophical and practical perspective.  For a very long time I’ve talked about the dangers of being overly restrictive when raising children (not only religiously, but academically), that there’s a very real concern that their intrinsic motivation and desire for growth is being erased.  They become more worried about externals than internals, because that’s what they see so much focus on.  This has been a big factor behind the school choices we’ve made for our children – we’ve avoided schools with extreme and detailed rules regarding every aspect of behavior during school and outside of school hours, not because we are unable to conform, but because we feel it’s damaging to have that degree of micromanagement of individuals and families.

I asked the interviewer what happens to these girls if they stay in Israel for seminary.  She said they do fine, because they continue to be in a controlled environment.  I pointed out that they may not be doing so fine internally, that they may be going through the motions of living a religious life without a lot of commitment or enthusiasm.  She agreed, and said there are definitely issues in raising children in this way.

Dd also found the entire discussion very interesting, and afterward told me that the examples that were given were very accurate of the kind of attitudes and comments that she hears on a daily basis among classmates.  Assuming she’s accepted, we don’t know if she will attend this school or not, but if she doesn’t, it won’t be because she can’t handle the responsibility of freedom or because of a struggle to make good choices when others aren’t telling her what to do.  She’s grown up with a high level of personal responsibility and has had many opportunities to exercise that.

By the way, dd’s homeschool past came up in conversation when she was asked where she attended school prior to moving to Israel.  At the end of the interview, I was told that we’ve done a great job with her and homeschooling was obviously a big part of the wonderful person she is.  It was a nice surprise to hear someone so positive about homeschooling!  I did have to correct her, though, and told her that who dd is, is because of her efforts, not mine.

Avivah

When my kids were growing up, we were regular visitors to the library- we always had lots of print books and books on cassettes (later that changed to cds and more recently to a little electronic device) that we checked out.  Most days the kids would sit around the cassette player (later cd player) at some point, listening to stories.  Long car rides were marked by audio books – when I reminisce about certain trips, in my mind I can hear the story that was playing when we were driving to that place!

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how much I missed audio books.  These stories and the togetherness they engendered as we all listened together was so much part of the fabric of our lives.  I bought an ereader months ago in order to access library books from the US – you can do this if you have a US  library card, which of course I do!  At that time I noticed that audiobooks were also available to be checked out but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I sat down to figure out how to access them.

Actually, it’s pretty simple. You visit your library website, and there’s a program available there to download onto your home computer – my library system uses Overdrive Media Console, maybe it’s different for other libraries.  Once you do that, all you do is checkout the audio book online and press the button that says ‘download’, then approve the download.  At our library system, you can only have six items out at a time on an online account, and books have a fourteen day loan period.  This didn’t originally sound too limiting to me, but then I found out that the audio books that are in the format that we check out can’t be returned – they expire after two weeks.  It’s a good thing that we have more than one library card!

The limitation of this policy is that is that when we finish an audio book in a day, it has to remain in our account until the due date and we can’t check out anything else. But far be it from me to complain when I’m so delighted that we can once again listen to audiobooks!  The audiobooks in our account right now are: The Secret Garden, The Magic Tree House (collection of eight books in the series), Charlotte’s Web, A Bear Called Paddington, The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh and a collection of Dr. Seuss stories.  We have some books on the Kindle as well, for dd12 and me.

There isn’t nearly the selection of ebooks available that you can get in person, but it’s a really nice option to have nonetheless.  When we lived in Israel years ago, I used to say that there were only two things I missed about the US: our parents and public libraries. While there are still aspects of public libraries in the US that I miss, this goes a long way toward mitigating my feeling of lack regarding public libraries!

Avivah

Today is Day 17 of 31 for 21, a blogging effort to raise awareness of Trisomy 21/Down syndrome.  Thanks to the recent birth of our baby who has an extra chromosome, this is the first year that I’ve been a participant.

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Yesterday morning I got a call from ds6’s teacher at Amichai.  After she told me how wonderful he is (nice when your child’s teacher appreciates him so much!), she got to the point of the call.  She heard about what was going on with the cheder giving us the runaround about not accepting our kids, and wanted to offer her support in advocating for us if we wanted it.  I thanked her and then spent the next half hour explaining why we’re going to keep the boys at Amichai.  Not just until the end of the year, but with the intent to continue there long term and we plan to enroll ds5 in Amichai’s first grade next year.   She kept asking me if I was really okay with this decision or if I was assuming this position by default because we had no choice.  I explained that we aren’t leaving the boys at Amichai because we  have no choice – the cheder will definitely take ds6 and it’s possible they’ll eventually take ds10 if we continue to pressure them.  But we decided that’s not what we want and to drop our pursuit of this school transfer – and we did it from a position of strength.

My husband and I do a lot of talking about the education of our children and the values we hope they have, but this has been seriously ramped up in the last six weeks, as we’ve been deciding where the best elementary school for our elementary aged boys is.  We had decided to transfer them to the local cheder from the school they are currently in, then ran into trouble when we were told our kids wouldn’t be accepted.  But because it wasn’t a real ‘no’, we were in limbo for a while.  This provided us with more opportunities to think again, and again, and again about if this was really the best decision for our boys.  (I wrote about the differences between the two schools here.)

To recap, we thought that making the transfer would assure their social transition into our community and that being in a different school from everyone else in the charedi community would be a big strike against them.  We also felt that the boys in the school we wanted to transfer to have a more carefully guarded home atmosphere, which is similar to ours in many ways.  And yet the school they were in- Amichai – still had all the positives that we saw when we made the initial decision to send them there.

There were so many  issues involved in this – the macro and micro view both religiously and socially, which are intrinsically intertwined.  Religiously things are much more stratified here than in the US, and the boxes you need to fit into are much narrowly defined.  If you don’t choose your box, others will do it for you, but you can’t stay outside of the box.  A big part of this decision was about choosing our box.

There was a strong emotional pull towards and away from both choices, and the more we talked the less clarity we had.  Finally, we sat down and wrote out a list of what our values are.  Decisions this big aren’t based on little things like how long summer vacations are (actually, that can also be a values decision since a longer vacation can mean more family time), but about how well your values match the institution where you send your child.  And to be fair to our children, the school we send them to and ourselves as parents, I think it’s important that we’re consistent in the spoken and unspoken message we project. I don’t want my children caught between different world views and feeling they don’t fit anywhere.

Writing out our values was important because it took the emotion out of the discussion. We looked at each value, as well as the advantages of each institution.  When we did that, we were able to clearly see that the main value in sending to the cheder was social and that our desire to transfer the boys to the cheder was motivated by fear: basically, fear of doing something different.  I’ve never believed that fear is a good place to make a decision from.  But we are looking at the realities behind those fears in order to address them.

When we looked at the positive values we have, we were able to clearly see (once again) that Amichai came out ahead in almost every single category.  One factor we discussed at length is the long term view: what do we want our children to be like religiously and spiritually (those aren’t the same thing!) when they’re adults?  These decisions are being made when you put your children into elementary school, because the schools are tracked and once you’re in one track, it’s not so simple to transfer your child to a school that is in a different religious track.

One issue in which our thinking differs from the charedi community is that we see a positive value in our children learning secular subjects at the high school level.  However, secular subjects not being taught during the elementary years wasn’t a major concern – this is something we could and would supplement on our own.  I know quite well as a homeschooler how little time it actually takes to teach these subjects once a child is ready for them.  So we would have been fine sending our boys to a school without secular subjects for the elementary years.

What I was more concerned about is how this attitude towards secular subjects as well as towards those outside the charedi community would influence their long term choices and their self-image if they chose to make decisions that were different from their peers. I felt it would be unfair of us to have expectations that our boys would get a certain kind of high school education, but put them in an elementary school that had different definitions for success.

We’ve talked a lot about how to walk this very fine line – how to affiliate with the charedi community while not going along with the party line in some areas.  This was a tough, tough decision that requires a lot of independent thinking and willingness to walk a non-mainstream path.  You can see how hard this was since we were initially so clear about what we wanted but then we still got off track after hearing opinions from others.  This won’t be an easy thing to do (nor would it have been easy to deal with the challenges we would have faced at the cheder), but it resonates with us emotionally and intellectually.

This decision follows over a decade of homeschooling.  For years, we had to walk our own path and believe in what we were doing without any positive feedback from others; certainly in the very beginning we would have been strongly dissuaded if we had asked for advice.  But as the years went by and the kids got older, people started to see how our kids were turning out and they started telling us how lucky we were, that hey wished they had the courage to do what we did, and asking us how we had the strength to swim upstream.

Similarly, this isn’t a decision that we’re going to get much support about and in the short term I think very few people will be able to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.  It’s just too different a way of thinking about education and the goals of education. This decision was really hard but we’ve learned again and again that you get the best results when you act in line with your deepest values and conscience.

Our family is in a unique position to be a bridge for others who may want a choice within the charedi world that allows for more appreciation of diversity, and I hope that more families moving to Karmiel will seriously consider Amichai.  I’ve said before that I really think it’s a much better fit for American immigrants than the cheder in a number of ways.   However, regardless of what anyone else chooses to do, we’re glad to have gotten clarity and realigned our actions with our beliefs.

Avivah

Today is Day 13 of 31 for 21, a blogging effort to promote awareness about Trisomy 21.   The potential of children with T21 is amazing and you can click here to find other bloggers sharing their experiences!

>>do you know anyone from the US that successfully homeschooled their children in Israel? I am feeling more and more like homeschooling is right for our family, and now it is one of my greatest fears of living in Israel. I’m nervous my kids will always feel like outsiders and not integrate properly.  Are you kids missing homeschooling?  do you think the transition would have been harder for them had they homeschooled?<<

This has been a long overdue post since I told the person who asked this back in January that I would answer it a week later.  Yes, that’s embarrassing- I did start writing this then – but at least I’m getting to it eventually!

There are absolutely native English speakers who are successfully homeschooling in Israel all the way up through high school.  So if homeschooling is important to you and so is living in Israel, they aren’t contraindicated.

Homeschooling has been something I’ve been passionate for so long, and continue to feel is the ideal option when the factors are right.  I didn’t have the factors in place in Israel to provide my children with the kind of homeschooling experience I wanted to give them, that I was previously able to provide for them.  I haven’t changed my beliefs about education, but since my circumstances have changed, I’ve had to decide in what framework I can now give them those things that are most important to me.

I’ve been hesitant to write about this because I’m the last person to discourage someone from homeschooling.  Realize this decision was personal and specific to me and the ages/stages of my children, as well as to our values.

Linguistically – Speaking the language of the country in which you live at a native level is something I value.  When we were in the US, I expected my children to know how to read, write and speak at a level that would allow them access to higher levels of learning.  Now that I’m in Israel, Hebrew is the language in the country in which I live and my expectations for my children in acquiring the language it to communicate at a native level, again with the ability to integrate into higher levels of learning.  I know a lot of Anglos are okay living in an Anglo area and if their kids don’t learn Hebrew well, that’s not problematic for them.  And there are Anglo homeschoolers for whom this likewise isn’t a priority.  That would be very problematic for me.  I don’t want my kids to be immigrants here long term.  I chose to move to a part of the country that doesn’t have a lot of English speakers, knowing this would make our short term adjustment to living here harder but it would be easier for my children in the long run.  Although my spoken Hebrew is good and my reading and listening comprehension is very good, I don’t have the ability to teach them Hebrew as a native could.  Though I don’t believe school is the only way to learn a language through immersion, it was an easy way.

Being put into a school environment as an older child who doesn’t speak the language is very challenging.  I had children in mid elementary and high school who had to deal with this, and  saw even my social and confident five year old in kindergarten struggle with this in the beginning.  As much as I would have loved to have homeschooled my younger children until at least first grade here, I decided against it due to the language factor.  After a lot of thought, I put my ds3 into gan this year.  It’s so much easier to learn the language at this age when even some children from Hebrew speaking homes aren’t yet speaking well than a year later as a four year old and I felt it was the kindest thing I could do for him.  (This wasn’t the sole reason or even the most important reason, but this is what I see as the main benefit.)  He enjoys going to gan but would prefer being at home, as would ds5, and I could certainly teach them much more.  But the quantity of what they learn wasn’t the issue.

Even though they are learning Hebrew at school, I still do some things at home with them to help them enhance their language acquisition.  The main thing I do at this point is that I read books to them in Hebrew – I read a sentence in Hebrew, then translate, then read the next sentence, etc.  This enables them to hear a range of vocabulary and to learn what it means in a safe environment when there’s no consequence to not understanding it.  It’s low pressure and we all enjoy it.  The key to this is to get books that are at a high enough level to be interesting.  The one that so far worked best was a novel in comic book style, so there were lots of illustrations to hold the interest of the younger ones while they listened (ds6 is the youngest for these books, I read simpler books with ds3 and ds5) and the plot line was sophisticated enough that one day even dd16 was sitting in on it!

The other thing is that we work on Hebrew reading – we took a long break from this but this past week we got back to it.  Reading well is a big part of academic success and though it’s normal for kids who are olim to take a while to catch up in this, I’d like to help them minimize the time that they’re academically struggling.

Socially – When we arrived, I saw that my neighborhood had very few children, which meant that meeting other kids at the local park just didn’t happen.  I quickly learned that social connections happen almost exclusively through the schools – meaning those who aren’t part of the school aren’t part of the social group.  There were almost no extracurricular activities where my kids could meet other kids in the charedi community.  I spent years building a social network for my homeschooled kids in the US, and there was no way that I could create something overnight for kids who were already in middle and high school.  While I think that peer socialization is drastically overrated, raising my kids in a new culture in isolation wasn’t something I felt was in their best interest.  I also live in a community where even very small differences make a big statement – big differences put you outside of the community altogether.

It’s interesting how many teens have told my kids they don’t seem like homeschoolers.  Why?  I don’t know where they got these perceptions since most of them hadn’t met homeschoolers personally and I’d like to think if they had, they wouldn’t have made this comment.  But the response my kids have gotten is that, “You’re not a nerd/you’re so with it/ you don’t dress like homeschoolers” etc. I am bothered the assumption that homeschoolers will be social misfits because it’s just so inaccurate.  Sure, there will always be quirky kids who won’t fit into the standard peg of society, regardless of where they are educated.

The assumption that kids who are homeschooled are losers or their parents are losers and that’s why they homeschool is just flat out wrong.  My kids had – as do most homeschoolers – a variety of experiences with people of different backgrounds and ages, and I felt very comfortable that they were socially integrating in healthy and appropriate ways.   However, when moving here they needed to learn not only a new language, but a new culture.  This is something I absolutely can’t teach them because it has to be experienced.

Now you could tell me, but there are other homeschoolers in Israel – your kids don’t have to be isolated or removed from Israeli society!  That’s true, but without a car and with a limited budget, getting together with other homeschoolers would be difficult and expensive.  There are no other homeschoolers in my city of over 50,000, certainly not any in my religious community where our children would most naturally seek out peers.

I didn’t want my childrens’ only social contacts to be with other kids that they could see – at best – once a month.  Since those contacts would be with English speaking children, it wouldn’t help them learn the language or culture.   And once again, without a car and a large budget, I knew I couldn’t provide them with the many enriching activities that were an integral part of our homeschooling for over a decade.  If I had a very different budget, this would shift things dramatically but I don’t and that’s my reality.

I miss homeschooling.  But I feel that I did the right thing for my kids taking into account the limitations of where we live, and they agree.  One thing that’s good about the school day here is that it’s much shorter than in the US.  Now that we’re over the first year of our aliyah, a question that I’m actively working on is, how to provide my kids who go to school with what I felt were the bigger advantages of homeschooling?  I’m working on this but probably won’t share about this for quite a while since it’s obviously going to be experimental!

(Edited Aug. 2019- we began homeschooling ds5 and ds10 towards the end of the 2012 school year; they were joined by dd12 and ds7 for the following school year and all have been homeschooled since. Clearly my position on homeschooling in Israel as an English speaker has changed!)

Avivah