so i sent my first text message in hebrew today, and for that i will celebrate with a passion fruit and a cheese-less pizza.

I hate benchmarks more than I hate an 85-year-old Republican’s wrinkly, stenchy foot dipped in banana-flavored mayonnaise during Yom Kippur services.
Benchmarks are these horrible little anecdotes that we were supposed to tell during Otzma group meetings in Be’er Sheva, designed to provide inspiration and warm the soul. God, they suck. Deganit would ask for like three or four people to talk about an uplifting moment from the previous week, and it was always my dream to volunteer a five-word benchmark so we could move along more quickly and get the hell out of there, but the words never came to me. I guess I’m just not that creative under the pressure of such immense frustration with the kindness of humanity.
That being said, today was a very benchmarky day if there ever was one. Adrienne asked me to sit with a girl from her ninth-grade advanced English class who had missed a lot of school recently and had thus performed quite poorly on her last exam. First we read some crap about recycling and how every year Americans waste enough paper to build a 3-meter bridge from London to Tel Aviv, but I highly doubt the reliability of their sources. Bo-ring. Then we read a passage from To Build a Fire, by my all-time-favorite author, Jack London. It took us roughly 45 minutes to get through the one-page excerpt because we had to stop every other word so I could explain the contexts of Mr. London’s vocabulary, which is not easy for a non-native-English-speaking-14-year-old (talk about a mouthful) to comprehend with phrases like “licking his flesh” being used to depict the actions of a small flame.
Side note: I just found To Build a Fire online in its entirety, and the freakin British textbook cheated! The excerpt that we read bears little resemblance to the actual tale about a fearless explorer in the bitter Alaskan tundra. So maybe I’ll have to read it again over Shabbat.
Moving on. We dissected every word for nearly an hour until she finally had a sufficient grasp of the main concept of the story, which was a difficult task since she had trouble orally stringing together even the simplest responses to my questions, despite having the answers laid out on the page in front of her in plain English – her third language after Russian and Hebrew, I might add.
We still had about 20 minutes left, so I asked her some lame rhetorical questions about how class was going and whether or not she likes learning English. Suddenly, the girl spoke with outstanding proficiency. I could literally see the progression as she spoke faster and faster with each flawed sentence, gaining confidence in her ability to articulate. She explained that her teacher thinks she doesn’t understand anything, when in reality it is a matter of shyness more than anything else, and that she doesn’t get enough credit for being expected to master a third language while also learning the basics of a fourth (Arabic). She also complained that because the schools teach using British textbooks, spoken English with an American accent sounds like an entirely different language to her – whether this is due to the formality of the written word versus the vernacular on television, or simply regional differences in diction and syntax, I have no idea.
But by the end of our time together, I could hear a vast improvement in both her grammatical accuracy and her self-assurance, and for some reason I felt like I might have had something to do with it. Maybe it’s my gentle smile or my non-threatening head nod, or perhaps it’s that, unlike her English teacher, I don’t correct her every time she stumbles on a word. It was then that I realized – the students don’t need me to literally teach them English; rather, I’m there to boost their self-esteem, to overlook their mistakes and congratulate every correct verb conjugation, to pretend I understand their made-up words, and lastly, to remind them that Americans are taking over the world! And that, my friends, is my benchmark for today.
Also, apparently my picture is the only one of Otzma XXI to make it into next year’s brochure! It’s because I’m hot, isn’t it.