The joy of an Israeli elementary education
The girls should be starting school again on Sunday. I can’t believe the summer vacation is nearly over. It just flew by.

Of course, Israeli parents are used to expecting a teachers’ strike at the beginning of each year. Israeli teachers are notoriously underworked. They work eight months a year, what with all the religious holidays, which reach their peek with three weeks (!) at Passover . Why three weeks? Well, I’ve yet to understand it. The best I can do is to assume that the predominantly female teacher community needs more time than the rest of us for the traditional pre-Passover cleaning). Of course, on the top of all the religious holidays we mustn’t forget the full two months of the Summer vacation (two months and ten days for junior high and high schools). When they do work, they have a twenty-four hour week, nearly half of the working week of most Israelis. (You'll notice I'm not even mentioning the sabbaticals).

Now I don’t want to sound jealous. I do not envy the teachers for having to spend their mornings in classes overflowing with 37 to 41 nasty, noisy, undisciplined brats (My daughters, of course, are perfectly behaved, and are no trouble at all for their teachers, besides asking intelligent and thought-provoking questions, and thus enriching the studious atmosphere in their respective classrooms). But after all they only have to do it for four or five hours a day, five days a week (luckily for our kids).

Anyway, back to the annual first of September teachers’strike. Now that my girls are old enough to stay at home without me, I couldn’t care less. Let them strike! I’ve paid my debt to society. All those stressful years, having hysterics all summer trying to arrange solutions for my kids, while I worked, and then being hit with a strike just when I thought the summer vacation nightmare was over. So strike away! See if I care! They probably learn more at home, anyway.

Last year, the biggest teachers' organization suffered a severe blow. The militant head of the organization, a professional unionist and the bane of all parents, was arrested for fraudulently purchasing a university degree, assignments, examinations and all, from the Israeli branch of Latvia University. I’m afraid I stooped to a particularly malicious joy at this unpleasant creature’s downfall.

Hopefully, until they find a villainous enough replacement for the infamous Ben-Shabbat, they’ll be less audacious and unscrupulous with their strikes.

Update: Janice, who knows all about where to buy Israeli goods, says, "We can relate to teacher's unions. They are lefty, hell-holes in the USA, too. It sounds even worse in Israel, but you were once and maybe still are a quasi-socialist state".