שיעורי בית a.k.a Homework

first day of school

So there are all sorts of new things with having Gabi and Alice in the public schools. First, there was the choice--not a hard choice for us--but the choice between secular and religious schools. I don't know what the school day is like for a religious school, but for the secular school, the day starts at 8am and ends sometime between 11:50 and 12:45 (it is different every day). Teachers have one day a week off, and school meets from יום רישון ("the first day") through יום שישי ("the sixth day"). And on the seventh day we rest, I kid you not. They go to school from Sunday through Friday. Classrooms are often left unattended and it's LOUD. Lots of shouting. There are two fourth-grade classes of about 27 students each.

Their days are shorter than in America and they get two recesses during that time. They have music once a week, art once a week, and physical education three days a week. The core subjects are English, Hebrew, Science, Geometry, and Mathematics. The public school we placed them in has ulpan, which is Hebrew class for non-Hebrew speakers. There are 45 ulpan students in this 1st-through-6th grade school, with English (North American and South African) and Russian being the most common first languages. They are pulled for eight hours a week (during Science), mostly to work in workbooks and on the computers.

Because our apartment is small and we both need to work past 1pm, we signed them up to stay after school for tzaharon, even though they are on the old side for this program. They feed them a heavy lunch that they love (lunch is the main meal of the day here), and have both structured and unstructured time until 4:30, when we pick them up. They are playing lots of כדורגל ("soccer").

a page of geometry homework

They don't get a lot of homework, but when they do, we do it (I think it's optional and parents have been encouraged not to force it and not to help). Here's our process:

(1) they give me their workbook -- each had about $120 of books to buy.
(2) I type the directions into google translate.
(3) we slowly work our way through it.
[I know parents are encouraged not to help, but this is more of a Hebrew/cultural learning task than anything else. We now know the names of the polygons, words for diagonals, vertexes, sides, and angles...]

Sounds easy, right? Nope. First off, there's the typing. I've worked hard at learning how to touch-type on a Hebrew keyboard. I'm up to 23 wpm, which is not bad. But Hebrew, like English, is pretty hilarious if you mistype a letter. So, first I have to squint at the print (or get the book a perfect distance away for my glasses to see clearly), then touch type, then look at the translation, then try to find my typos, then try to translate the translation. Google Translate is a godsend, but it is far from perfect. Then there's the fact that every third question is: explain why. We are learning how to express ourselves with lots מילים קטנים ("little words"), which is frustrating for our aptly named Gabi. The one time I got really stuck, I facebooked Josh's (our) friend Mort, who has done so many kind things to help us with this transition. He helped me figure out that they were looking for representation in something akin to scientific notation... (math, not geometry).

All part of our adventure! I know our Hebrew will get better and that it won't take as long to do the homework as our time here progresses. It sure will be nice, though, to do homework in our native language.

Here are some examples of translation fun courtesy of my typos and Google Translate's algorithms.

some cute typos in here 

Believe it or not, this was the result after no typos. Essentially, there was grid paper and two line segments already drawn for three examples. They needed to figure out which one of the three examples couldn't be completed into a rectangle.