Return to School 2008

I know I said I wouldn't talk about the return to school but I just couldn't resist.

I worked Sunday so I was free for the 'Welcome to 1st Grade!' ceremony on Monday morning - both my son and daughter were playing in the orchestra. In addition my daughter and the other vavs (6th graders) taking part in the actual ceremony.

To start the ceremony there is the entry of the first graders to lots of singing, flag waving and clicking of camera shutters. They do a round of the basketball court, in the style of a mini-Olympics, either looking scared and tearful or waving happily to their parents.

Once they are seated there are the speeches (why oh why does every single event involves speeches?) by the Headmaster, the chairman of the local council and the chair person of the parents' committee.

Speeches!

Luckily it is election year so the chairman of the local council kept his speech to the bare, boring minimum. Normally he arrives half an hour late then spends forty minutes thanking his cronies and telling us all the wonderful things he is doing for our town, in general, and our children, in particular. Brilliant for insomniacs.

After the official speeches there is always a kind of rhyming prose poem, an Israeli specialty, about the delights of returning to school.
Each child reads a line or two, which involves some complicated shuffling of the microphone and a lot of unintelligible mumbling, until they reach the end of a row: about half a dozen children. Then there follows an interlude with dancing and singing to badly amplified music.
Lather, rinse, repeat four or five more times until all the participants have either danced or spoken.

This year participation in the entertainment was allocated according to gender with the boys speaking and the girls dancing. Although one group of boys from a lower class gave a short display of their gymnastic ability.

Throughout the ceremony the class teachers do their best to keep the lower classes quiet as they wriggle in their seats. But by far the greatest disturbance comes from the parents.

When the first graders make their entrance their parents are so totally overwhelmed with emotion they run amok, squeezing both cheeks and shutter buttons with almost hysterical enthusiasm.
After a few minutes of patient waiting the headmaster, a stickler for discipline, calls them to order. Setting a great example for their children the parents ignore him. After several more minutes, with the help of a few teachers and judicious use of the microphone, the parents are herded to the back of the crowd.

In my day, oh so many moons ago!, parents sat on chairs while children sat crossed-legged on the floor. Not so in today's Israel. The chairs are all reserved for the children while the parents must stand at the back, shuffling round in the semi shade, straining to hear what is being said and doing their best not to miss their progeny's 15 seconds of 'fame'.
As time wears on they become more and more restless until they huddle in groups discussing in muted, and not so muted tones, various subjects only marginally related to their children's education and bemoaning the waste of a morning's holiday from work. A few give up altogether and go to sit under a shady tree.

Finally it is all over, the children disperse into their classrooms, the mothers of the first graders blow kisses and shed a few tears and the rest of us hurry off to be getting on with whatever it is we get on with.

Parents milling around the school gates

Preparing For School

Since the day after the ceasefire my son has been concerned about when I was going to buy all the school supplies. We are lucky that we don’t need to purchase textbooks, instead we pay the school a set amount and they provide everything.
Even so we have an A4 long list of exercise books, pencils and other various equipment. I stalled for a while until, as I had suspected, a representative of the parents’ committee phoned to inform med that a school bag filled with supplies had been donated for every child in the north.

The last week of the holidays the Matnas had organised a proper summer camp for the children with trips and plenty of group leaders. After dropping them off I went to the school to collect the bags. They were piled up relatively neatly on the floor but there was a bit of a scrum as parents swapped items between bags to ensure that their son didn’t get a Bratz pencil and their daughter didn’t get a motor racing diary.

When I got home I checked through the contents of the bags. There were squared exercise books, which are useful though I think they gave us enough to last to the end of the decade. Unfortunately the lined books were with wide lines which the children haven’t used since first grade. They hardly cost a fortune but the pure waste pains me especially when you consider that thousands of these bags were donated. What really astounds me is that most people don’t understand why I even care. They just throw the useless books in the rubbish and buy replacements.
What shocked me most was the diary. It centred on a popular teenage star and was definitely targeted at teenage girls. Apart from the pages of coupons for feminine products the diary was liberally decorated with pictures of this girl in a bikini and other skimpy clothing. In addition the pages were peppered with boxes of beauty and dieting advice and there where whole page inserts with advice about relationships and other teenage concerns a in a that superficial ‘pop’ tone. And don’t get me started on all the advertising.
I would imagine it could be quite useful for a girl aged 14 but whomever thought it was suitable for primary school girls (grade 1-6) needs their head examined.
My daughter took a quick look at the diary and handed it back to me in bemused disgust remarking that it was no use because there was too much rubbish cluttering up the pages. She much preferred the Bratz diary I’d bought her. So did I.

Although the bags contained many useful items there was still a long list to buy.
On Friday I made a determined effort to get organised and we actually got out to the mall quite early. All the sales were in full swing and my children were very patient as I tried on some clothes and indulged in some successful retail therapy.
Next we went to the cinema to get tickets for Over the Hedge. The thought of being stuck in a cinema with hordes of chatty fidgety children gives me the heebie jeebies, which is why I don’t take my children to the cinema so often. I guessed the Friday morning show would be pretty quiet.

We had an hour left to brandish our school supplies list at the poor assistant in the stationery shop.
By the time we had finished I had a pain in the credit card and two heavy bags full of goodies.
I hauled it all back up to cinema where we had only a few minutes to wait. We were the only people in the cinema. At first my children sat in their assigned seats, eager for the film to start but in the break they ran up and down the stairs and between the seats in an effort to discover the optimal viewing position.
The film was fun, not a masterpiece but very enjoyable and when we emerged from the darkness my husband was just walking towards the cinema.

ES