Principal Gives Teachers A Time Out
There’s always something hilarious when teachers — and I write as the husband of a teacher — get a taste of their own medicine. Well, the local press in Ramat Gan, Israel, reports that teachers at the Ohel Shem High School have been told that they aren’t allowed in the staff room until they learn to behave themselves properly.
Principal Shmuel Keinan, a retired Israel Defense Forces brigadier general who takes an atypically (for Israel) hard-line attitude towards discipline, found cigarette butts in the staff room and concluded that teachers had been surreptitiously smoking. He locked the room and put a sign on the door declaring it out of bounds.
But just as layers respond to insults in type, i.e. by threatening legal action, so do teachers. Staff members told off the principal, saying that his behavior was unacceptable — that a school isn’t the army and he shouldn’t treat it as if it was. After the sneak-smoking teachers apologized (perhaps by writing “I must not smoke in the staff room” 100 times?), he agreed to open the staff room again.
Less amusingly and more disturbingly, another Israeli principal is in trouble with the Education Ministry for using a textbook that looks at the events of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab perspectives. The principal of the Shaar Hanegev high school in southern Israel “has been told to report next week to clarify with Education Ministry officials is school’s use of an unapproved textbook,” according to this report on AP.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
