Thank You

At my school, we do something at the end of the week week called "acknowledgments". We go around and reflect on something that each person has done for one of us, or someone else, during the week, and thank that person for their positive participation in our community.

This week, after what feels like a long, hard winter of hard things and often negativity in my world and life, I finally feel like spring has come and I have something to acknowledge.

To my school:

Thank you for letting me leap headfirst into a million different things every day until I learned that my greatest strength is being able to imagine the classroom as a world I can endlessly re-create in the students' image, and for the thousand mistakes I was allowed to gleefully make along the way. Thank you for this year of helping me get from potential to actual teacher, and for knowing that I have awesome people here that continue to watch me grow into my teacher-self and look forward to a future doing great things I haven't dreamed up yet. Maybe it's been really hard to have a first year teacher on board, but I appreciate every day all the learning I've done with you this year."

Amen for all of you too!

I am a teacher

And that is why I am sitting, at 6:30 pm on a rainy weeknight, and trying unsuccessfully to bake matzah in my sandwich maker.

My kinesthetic learners in my lowest level class complained that we haven't done anything "hands-on" for a while. (They're right--as long as you don't count the Purim movies we made two weeks ago, the bracha posters all over the school that we drew the week before, and the Ta'anit midterm shoebox dioramas of Mishna ceremonies from two weeks before that. But who's counting?)

Couple that with a model seder that was just cut and now won't have food, the teacher who has done it for the last million years going away conveniently that week, and the idea of the people in charge to make Mishna more important by having a Roman-themed event sometime this year, and you have it.

My Do-It-Yourself Mishna Model Symposium Seder-like Thing. lol.

Obviously they ate back in Mishna times (they were Jewish, y'know) and we've been talking all year about how their daily life was different from ours.

So when we read the Mishna about the seder plate, and they asked if we could make our own Mishna matzah, charoset and chazeret, I said I would try to find a way. That was before I knew the kitchen would have long since been cleaned, supplies put away, and we were totally on our own. Hence the sandwich maker.

What I've learned in the last (precisely) 18 minutes:

1. Flour and water (iced tea, actually, since it will be erev Pesach) together have no taste, even without the cardboard corrugations.

2. What comes out is rubbery, and only like a laffa if you mix in a huge dash of imagination.

3. Chummus definitely helps.

4. A sandwich maker cooks just like the 'tannur' we say at the donkey-riding kibbutz two years ago. Well, almost.

5. Mixing flour and water takes 30 seconds. So actually 18 minutes is a huge amount of time unless you're making enough matzah to feed a house full of starving Korban Pesach-eaters. Which I will be in 2 weeks with 50 7th graders who aren't getting lunch that day.

6. This is not the first time I've learned by cooking, but I am thinking really hard the whole time about how to teach that way. (And how to do this with a whole class with no one getting burned.)

7. That matzah is the least of my Mishna seder worries. Because now I'm on to fabricating a Korban Pesach.

7pm, and my roommate wants to know when I'm going to be done making a nightmare out of the kitchen. I tell her it's better to set off the smoke alarm in our home than in my classroom.

Yup, I've totally morphed into a teacher.