I’m not denyin the women are foolish:
God Almighty made ‘em to match the men.
My mother-in-law’s general dubiousness about my work in Hebron meant I was very nervous to tell the family that I was going to be adding the class at the university to my schedule. Happily, I was surprised to see that she actually seemed impressed when I told her that I was going to be a “real teacher.” Palestinians are obsessive about education, and even though both she and my father-in-law are illiterate (forced to sign legal documents with a thumbprint like many of the older generation), she uses all her powers of grandmotherly guilt to push the family’s kids to cutthroat competition for the highest grades in the village.
So when I found out from Asya that she’d been bragging around Safa about her “son’s wife, the university teacher,” I couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction. If my job at the university could accomplish that miracle, maybe it was a good sign.
When I showed up for my first class a few weeks later, located four floors above the cafeteria in one of the newer buildings on campus, I was dressed in the unofficial uniform of the university: a long trench-coat like jilbab—a new one in the season’s ultra-fashionable corduroy, and a carefully wrapped rectangular scarf.
At first, nobody seemed to notice me as they assembled in the large room, perhaps assuming that I was just another student, until I plopped down my laptop on the podium and started talking—in English. Jaws dropped and the class quieted to a shocked attention. There was no question that this class wouldn’t be what the students expected.
Most of the students in the university, somewhere around seventy-three percent, were female, but in my class I would have placed it closer to ninety percent. Like me, they all wore Islamic dress. But that was where the similarity ended.
Whereas I’ve struggled for years to arrange my scarf in a way that does not make me resemble a Russian nesting doll, the Hebron students seemed to have elevated Islamic style to a whole other plane of awesomeness, wearing scarves wrapped and folded like origami, with matching makeup, shoes and bags in hues bright as tropical birds. According to the dean, most of the girls were majoring in marriage, an idea that I couldn’t readily dismiss—especially since the majority of them showed up to writing class without pens or paper. Even the few male students were all polished and shiny, wearing pointy dress shoes, polyester pants and gelled coifs reminiscent of Saturday Night Fever. It was certainly a far cry from the flip-flops and sweats from my college days, and I felt positively frumpy in comparison.
Still, the first class began well, and once the students recovered from their initial shock at my rapid-fire English, they seemed to be quite interested.
I was most pleased that my worst fears—that I would stammer nervously, or forget what to talk about—seemed to float away on the little white puffs of my words in the unheated building. This might be easier than I thought.
Sadly, Murphy’s Law is in effect in the Holy Land, too, and my bright idea of having the class go around and introduce themselves (after all, advanced composition is a bit like a Writing 101 class back home) hit the brakes on my dreams of being Awesome Teacher of the Year.
“And you…what’s your name,” I asked, addressing one of the four male students seated at the rear of the room.
“Mahmood.”
“Okay, Mahmood, tell us about yourself and what you hope to learn in this class,” I said, looking down at my class list, ready to pencil in his response.
“I don’t want to talk,” he grumbled, staring me down like a stubborn toddler.
Confused, I was about to move on to someone else when another student, a tiny girl wearing a peacock-colored pashmina hijab and seated in the front row, interjected, “It’s common for the boys not to talk much in class.”
Now, I’m sure the girl (who became one of my top students) wanted to help by acquainting the new teacher with the lay of the land, perhaps diffusing the sudden tension that everyone in the room could plainly feel. But there was just something about the boy’s offended air, as if I had breached some unspoken rule against calling on the boys that raised my hackles.
Bullshit, I thought, this is an advanced university class—and it was my class. If it had been a few months earlier, I probably would have let it slide, but not anymore. This little shit is going to learn a lesson, I thought. So, after giving him one final chance to participate (which he again refused), I kicked him out of the class and spent the rest of the period mediating an argument between the rival Hamas and Palestinian Authority affiliated students, giving my first lesson in “keeping it on the page” instead of arguing.
After class, I decided to walk over to the dean’s office to make sure Mr. Non-Talker would be permanently removed from my section. It was something I found particularly important to do, given that he had refused to leave the room until I threatened to call security. That I wouldn’t let slide!
I’m not sure what I expected—acknowledgment of the problem, maybe disciplinary action (after all, I don’t remember a particularly high tolerance for student disrespect in the universities I’d attended). However, when I sat across from the dean in his office and explained the problem, all I got was a blank stare, a cloud of cigarette smoke, and a smile.
Leaning back, he finally offered, “Well, it’s a writing class. Is it really necessary that he speak?”?
After taking a second to process the Dean’s question, I managed to stammer out that, yes, I did prefer that my students speak during class. At this, the Dean laughed, shook his head, and told me that they routinely allowed male students to change class sections if they were outnumbered by their female peers.
It was an idea that left me literally speechless. After all, how many times have female students been outnumbered by men, especially in technical fields? This was ridiculous. There was no way I was going to play that game. Still, I thought, maybe I was missing something, perhaps some kind of sexist favoritism, a nod to male pride. This isn’t my culture, I thought. Maybe I just didn’t get it.
“Oh, and Jennifer,” the dean added, “Here is the key to your office. It’s in the new building, and I think you’ll like it. It is a bit small, though,” he continued. “But your body is nice and slim…It should fit just fine.”
Nice.
Exhausted and more than a little creeped out, I quickly took my leave of the Dean and hurried over to the administration building to meet Beth in Public Relations. She was the only other American at the university, and I’d met her that first day in Dr. Atawneh’s office. She was a sweet American student studying Arabic and Hebrew in the Holy Land, but she’d never been to downtown Hebron. So I offered to take her.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the night we went would be when Hebron’s settlers decided to torch the city, and by the time we got to downtown we’d found ourselves in a melee—leaping flames, exploding percussion grenades, and intermittent gunfire. Together, we walked to the edge of the downtown market, and blinking through the remnants of tear-gas clouds, watched the neighborhood burn, hoping it wasn’t an omen of worse things to come.