Yesterday my high school daughter went to school ("Katza") at 700 and returned at 1730 (ten classes of 45 min.) and then went to night school for French. And homework. They have exams almost every week. She says that the students's school radio plays Beethoven. She is against the elitist Ashkenazi clique programming it. She has the right populist instincts to succeed in politics.
In the Colegio Nacional No.3 Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires, we learned from 0800 till 1200. Homework was unknown. Exams were at the end of the year. I spent the afternoons in the Velez Sarsfield club swimming and in public libraries. There were many communist and anarchist libraries in those times in Buenos Aires, but I most liked the Biblioteca Lincoln of the US Embassy and the Circulo Militar's reading room with dark wood, leather chairs and green lights.
12 comments:
This kind of thing leads people to amphetamine abuse.
Anon.
More likely to marihuana.
Well, that depends on the goal. If the goal is to keep that insane pace and level of work --> amphetamine abuse. If the goal is just to relax, well then, marijuana it is.
Katza's quality is overhyped, IMO. I've never believed its portrayal as some kind of "elite" high school.
All high schools in Kfar Saba are of roughly the same quality, ie, mediocre, but saved by an above-average student population.
IHTG
But sure they make work hard their students and teachers.
Wow, that's a long day. My daughter's high school, which is considered intense in the US, goes from 800 to 1430.
Re IHTG's comments - it is the composition of the student body that gives every school its character. The teachers and the curriculum are usually more or less the same , but the teachers either have to rise to the quality of their student body or stoop to them.
I am concerned by how hard they drive the high school students, am fearful that they will burn them out too soon.
K
K
I dont know who is driving whom. Jewish parents were always driving themselves and their children. Ours is a hard slavedriving culture. I remember in Argentina, people said that Jewish employers were honest and paid very good money but demanded too much. Argentine employers were dishonest and paid little if ever, but they were simpaticos. My parents never demanded any achievement from me, but my rich uncles were mercyless.
I don't remember really being pushed academically by my parents except in a loving way. I was self-motivated. My uncles were emotionally distant and offered no meaningful support, moral, financial or otherwise, so thank God I did not have to depend on them to encourage me.
I suppose they had problems of their own - I see know (as you must see) that living in a country that you did not grow up in, speaking a tongue that is not your native tongue, seeing your children grow up to be creatures that you don't quite comprehend, while at the same time struggling to achieve financial success, all of this, even if you do it and succeed at it, still exacts a toll. This would have been true even without the baggage of the Holocaust - their own miserable experiences of deportation by Stalin, then later the guilt they must have felt upon learning that their deportation had saved them from the fate of almost everyone else in their shtetl. They, with their superhuman Jewish drive (as you describe) did it, but it made them like turtles with a hard (and miserly) shell that could not be penetrated.
K
You call it drive, I call it slave driving. I resigned from TAHAL because of the uncessant pressure. My bosses organized elaborate dramas for motivating us, like fake deadlines, fake telexes urging the materials, fake contracts that established crazy punishments for each hour of delay, and so on. They played our sense of responsability like a fiddle.
There are 2 sides to every story - maybe your bosses thought that you and your colleagues were operating with Middle Eastern/Latin torpor and felt that they had to stir you somehow. You can have a society where the bosses are all simpatico but the GDP will be $7 or 8 thousand per capita.
This is the problem we are seeing now in France, Greece, etc. - you can have an easy going society or you can have a rich society but you can't have both unless your country happens to be floating on a huge pool of oil or can persuade the Germans to subsidize your lifestyle.
K
Bosses are always and everywhere dead sure that their employees are lazy and shirking their duties. They cannot sleep at night till they see their subordinates's blood flowing.
Bosses are always and everywhere dead sure that their employees are lazy and shirking their duties. They cannot sleep at night till they see their subordinates's blood flowing.
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