I spent 3 years of my high school experience teaching people about Israel. I started out as a small, terrified sophomore who knew little about Israel outside of “Start-Up Nation”, rockets, the Kotel, and cherry tomatoes. A little embarrassing, but I didn’t really care. I just started reading.
This was my greatest strength. I found my favorite news sources and started reading headlines out ad nauseum. I hadn’t gotten much background, hadn’t taken a class about it, and certainly didn’t have much of a perspective. But I knew the headline and a bit of the story, and so I shared.
Much to my surprise, people started to learn. My updates started to become more cohesive, part of the continuous timeline of current events that reflected Israel’s political, geographical, and sometimes cultural happenings. It was picky-and-choosy, but people were starting to get something.
I started out with just a few refreshes on a couple Israeli news platforms and a minute or two in front of my peers, and it had already started making an impact. And thus, my first lesson as an educator was learned:
You don’t have to be an expert to be a teacher.
The next thing that I started working on was interactive education. Instead of just speaking about drip irrigation and water recycling, I played videos while people crafted their own water filters out of plastic water bottles. Instead of giving a presentation about Tu B’Av, I helped people write their own letters and throw our own “Tu B’Av” celebration (though, admittedly, a few months early). And instead of subjecting people to hour-long lectures, I gave them hour-long experiences that they carried for much longer than they ever would have remembered a speech. This was my second lesson:
Experience > explanation.
Through the next years, I discovered an issue: people didn’t really want me to do much. They didn’t want to hear a two-minute news update, and they didn’t want to spend their one night of programming a week doing anything remotely educational. Now, this made me pretty upset. After all, I was working so hard to make it fun! But then I started insisting, demanding space and time to help people learn, even if they didn’t think that’s what they wanted or needed. There was hesitance, there was pushback, and sometimes there were failures. However, I kept fighting for time, and the time I got continued to make an impact on my peers. Thus, the third lesson:
Always persist in the pursuit of educational opportunities.
Giving short moments, like a dinner-and-a-program or some music in the background, a little bit of extra attention made all the difference. I started turning quick meals of falafel and pita into an all-encompassing experience of the various shuks of Israel, filling transition time with Israeli pop music, and waving a flag whenever I could. Normalizing Israel was the best thing I ever did as an educator.
The more people see something, the more they want to learn about it.
So, as my formal position as an educator came to an end, these were the discoveries I made. Making people care is the most crucial part of being a teacher, and beyond that, it’s about putting your own style into it. Education is your own, and you can do it with whatever background you have as long as you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort. So go forth and teach!