Remember the food pyramid? They still use it in Israel.

What responsibility do schools have to educate students about proper nutrition, exercise, safety, and how to be "healthy"?  And who should get to decide what constitutes "healthy"?

Each year, Israel's Ministry of Education picks a theme that all Israeli schools are supposed to focus on during the school year. This year the ministry picked the theme "healthy lifestyle." And this week at Amir was what you might call "health week." This week students learned about nutritious foods, exercise, and making good, smart, health-conscious (pick an adjective) choices.

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Geophagy: the practice of eating earthy or soil-like substances such as clay or chalk.  If you were wondering, this is something that some humans do. Geophagy is also a word that my study partner and I came across while studying for the verbal portion of the GRE.

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Trouble and Me in Tekoa

In order to explain how the world works, we continually tell ourselves stories (whether it be consciously or unconsciously) that help us understand what the hell is going on outside our window. Why American society is in decline/ improving, why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists, and whether the donut bacon cheeseburger is a delicious innovation/completely disgusting: all of these (minus the last one) are massively complicated questions which are hard to answer without constructing more easily understood stories to help frame them. In my communication classes back at Tulane we used to refer to these stories as narratives. Our friend Dictionary.com defines a narrative as “a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious” that can help explain just about anything – like for instance, the ins and outs of education in America today.

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Tel Aviv coast

Yup, it’s that time of year again. It’s New Year’s Day and people all over the states are writing down their New Year’s resolutions, nursing champagne hangovers, and readying themselves for the Mayan apocalypse. Here in Israel, New Year’s Eve isn’t a huge deal. Israelis call the holiday Sylvester because of some Saint Sylvester guy. After some doing some Google/Wikipedia research, I’m still not exactly sure why. But I digress. So it’s that time of the year when many people look back on what they did and experienced in 2011. And that’s what I’m going to do as well. Is it a cliché idea for a blog post? Yup, sure is. But since I’m not feeling too original right now, we’re going to run with it. One caveat: I’m only going to review what’s happened here in Israel in the last month or so. If I try to cover anything more than that, this post might turn into a short novel.

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Before I began volunteering as an English assistant at Amir Elementary School, I attended three weeks of teacher training at Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv. Many Israelis attend the Kibbutzim College of Education if they aspire to teach in the Israeli school system here. My master teacher at Amir is, for example, an alumna of the Kibbutzim College. During my three weeks of training, I attended various lectures and workshops where I learned about linguistics, teaching grammar, Israel's Ministry of Education, learning disorders, classroom management, and much much more.

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