I thought I became a teacher to give my students what I had missed. It turns out I was carrying more teachers into the classroom than I realized.

Yesterday, I became a mechanechet.

And since then, my brain has apparently decided that sleep, moderation, and reasonable expectations are no longer necessary.

Things I want to try. Conversations I want to have. Ways I want to structure the classroom. Ways I might reach one boy, and then another. And another.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I keep telling myself:

You are still an English teacher. You still teach what feels like a million other classes. You are still an event planner. You are still grieving. You are still trying to figure out how to live the rest of your life.

This is one small class.

Except I know myself well enough to know how completely useless that conversation is.

Once I decide that I am in, I am in.

There is no halfway version of me.

Until now, my official role in the yeshiva has been morah miktzo’it — a subject teacher. I teach English. My responsibility, at least officially, is the subject: curriculum, assignments, tests, grades.

But I have never really known how to teach that way.

From almost the first time I walked into a classroom as a teacher, I had a sentence in my head:

Be the teacher you never had.

For years, I believed that was why I taught the way I did.

I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

I went to Beis Rivka. I grew up with an incredibly strong Chabad identity, and with it came an almost unreasonable belief that I could do anything.

I don’t mean that metaphorically.

Somewhere very deep inside me is the conviction that if something needs to be done, I can probably figure out how to do it.

That came from my Chabad education.

I grew up learning that the Rebbe expected something from us. And the women I saw around me certainly weren’t taught to wait quietly for someone else to make things happen.

Schools. Programs. Organizations. Communities. Families.

They taught. They organized. They led.

I grew up understanding that men and women had different roles, but I don’t remember ever understanding “different” to mean “less.”

And yet, there was another part of my education.

Because in school, I often didn’t feel seen.

I didn’t feel like the adults around me saw my potential. Sometimes I felt the opposite. I felt underestimated. Diminished. As though people had decided what I was capable of before I had been........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)