Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that is come to pass (Luke 2:15)

Just in time for Christmas, Tim and I headed to the West Bank, the occupied territories of Jesus's birth. The main attraction, of course, is the Church of the Nativity, and even I had to admit that it seemed pretty holy upon first approach, what with the streaming light and all:

And it was pretty awe-inspiring to see how the events of this place sparked a faith that spread throughout the world. On this day, there were hundreds of what appeared to be Indians and Pakistanis worshipping at the church, including these two lighting candles for prayer:

But the serenity of this sanctuary was soon shattered as we descended into the cave that makes the city famous. It hardly seemed pious to be so pushy at this holy site:

The cause for the crowding was the Star of Bethlehem, an ornate plaque dating from the fourth century that marks the presumed place that Mary delivered Jesus before he was set in the manger nearby. The people in line knelt to kiss the spot, probably not thinking, like me, about the fact that afterbirth likely landed here, too:

After birth inevitably comes breastfeeding, so we continued on to the Milk Grotto, where legend holds that a drop of Mary's milk, which dropped as she stopped to nurse Jesus as they fled from King Herod's baby-killing soldiers, turned the rock unnaturally white. The custom today is for women to chip off some of the shrine's wall to give them luck in fertility. I kept my hands in my pockets, but I did see a member of this party scrape some off, for what reason I'll never know:

No Christmas visit would be complete without some consumerism, so our guide took us to a olive wood-carving factory and store, where we bought requisite souvenirs (a candlestick and a bell). I was able to refrain from splurging on this impulse buy:

After blowing our cash, we stand-shopped through the Palestinian souk, which intermittently included blow-up Santas and hand-knitted stockings. The most eye-catching store, though, had to be this one, smack dab in the middle of Manger Square:

Besides this sign, very little else about Bethlehem aroused the Christmas spirit. Workers were only just putting lights on the trees, to prepare for the Christmas Eve concert. Perhaps it would've been more festive when they were turned on at night. But we didn't stick around that late, because we had to get back for a true Christian tradition: the staff holiday party. So I settled for staring up at this one sad, small, strung-out collection of ornaments:

No one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him (1 Thessalonians 4:6)

The first word you learn in Hebrew is "balagan," which means chaos. A close second is "frier," which means sucker or pushover. Whereas the former is acceptable, said in witty jest, the latter is unacceptable, spoken as a staid insult. This reveals a lot about Israeli culture: They can deal with progressing amid chaos, but not being taken advantage of or taken for granted. Some natives have told me that the obsession with not being a frier comes from persecution in the past, especially the resignation during the Holocaust and the prorogation of the Israeli state, two things Jewish people have vowed to never let happen again.

However, the manifestations of the frier mentality seem much more banal. Not being a frier means weaving through lanes of heavy traffic just to get two car spaces ahead. Not being a frier means leaving your stuff on the checkout counter to keep your place while you finish shopping. Not being a frier means refusing to put up with foreigners' feeble attempts to speak Hebrew. Me, I'm a frier. I am not aggressive enough to nose up so another car can't merge in, to hold my spot with a gallon of milk, to continue to speak stilted Hebrew even when people respond in English.

Despite how hard the frier mentality is to cope with sometimes, I can accept most of these displays as the cultural differences they are. However, I find it hard to deal with others assuming that an honest mistake is an attempt to make someone look the frier. For example, my landlady has accused our dog of pooping on her lawn (which is really our lawn), even though he has never done so (and her mutt has). Just recently, she told Tim to make sure the newspaper was delivered on our driveway, not hers. We never had any intention of soiling her yard with turds or her driveway with ink, but she still issued a pre-emptive anti-frier strike. She wanted to win a battle of wills that we didn't even plan to enter.

I hate being accused of bad deeds I never even imagined (especially when true allegations of my villainy can be levied). I feel the two possible responses -- confrontation or oblivion -- are confining. I can barely call to order pizza, much tell someone face-to-face that their dog is the defecator, so confrontation is out. And unfortunately, my racing brain won't let me remain oblivious; seriously, I've lost sleep thinking about how I would have to call newspaper customer service (egad, a phone call!) to change the delivery location. So a third response, insecurity, results, sparking off a viscious circle of frierity (yes, I just made that word up).

Case in point, the other night, my landlady's boyfriend woke me up to move my car, which was blocking a neighbor from opening the gate to her driveway. I had no way of knowing that my car was in the way; there was no sign and therefore certainly no malintent. But after I backed up my car three inches so she could get in, she shouted from her car window: "Aren't you going to apologize?" Startled, I could only reply with a lame, "I'm sorry," sealing myself as the frier in this situation.

As with many similar cases, I later thought of better comebacks that would have made her the frier, and strangely, I wanted to seek some revenge so I could end up with the "win." Because I knew the former was impossible and the latter was immature, I vowed to not let the next person get the best of me. It was then I realized: My neighbor's insecurity about losing her last dispute had migrated to me, and I would pass the torch when I tried to win my next showdown; I was only a single stop in the spread of the frier mentality. And so it goes.

The water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life (John 4:14)

Here's the biggest thing I learned from my photos from Prague: I don't like to take pictures when it's cold outside. Even when I took outdoor landscape photos, I did it from indoors. For example, this shot of the famous Charles Bridge is from a window in Prague Castle:

Prague Castle was about the only obligatory tourist site we visited. Mainly, we hunted down train stations and outdoor markets, sometimes in vain; we missed the Holesovice Market, over 100,000 square meters full of flea market and fake designer goodness, by a day. But the castle was worth it, if only for Vladislav Hall of the Old Royal Palace, where I caught this picture of Tim, indoors of course:

I couldn't avoid the outside as we walked from the castle to our hotel, which was a bit of a hike. Tim was stopping about every minute to take a picture, so I got in on the act to keep myself warm. These swans didn't seem as concerned as I was about the cold:

By this time, I was getting pretty hungry and thirsty, so the taverns started looking pretty appealing, especially this cozy, packed one with the sign for Gambrinus, which Tim and I agree was one of our favorites of the many available Czech brews:

The day before, our first day in the Czech Republic, we tracked down the warm interior of U Flecku, one of the oldest beer halls in Prague. The waiters were forceful with the drinks, thrusting lager pints and Becherovka shots onto your table without request. But the entertainment was accommodating, even playing Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say 'I Love You'" so the Asian tourists could sing along karaoke-style:

We were thankful for Becherovka the day we took a day trip to Karlovy Vary, also known as Carlsbad (yes, it is the California burg's sister city), a high-end spa city known for its healing hot springs. You can drink from many of them as you walk through the city, but they are so sulfuric that the liquor is needed to drown out the chemical taste:

Unfortunately, you are not allowed to bathe in the springs, which would have been nice to cut the cold bite of the valley wind, so we settled for toasting our insides with sips from the springs instead, although not at the main one, which shoots up like a geyser:

We took a remedy of a different kind when we took the bus on to Plzen, home of the Pilsner Urquell brewery, where drinking is allowed, even encouraged. The Brewery Museum admission included a coin voucher for a draft at the restaurant next door. The museum itself was a bit hokey, but I like that it gave me the opportunity to take this cheesy photo of Tim:

Our last night, back in Prague, we did the real-life version of the painting in Plzen, drinking the original Budweiser, Budvar, at U Medvidku, one of the oldest beer halls in Prague. We also ate traditional dishes: a potato pancake full of bacon for Tim, and sirloin stew with dumplings for me:

We started with the oldest hall and ended with the biggest one, a nice way to bookend a beer-filled trip that provided many good excuses to get out of the cold and to the bottom of a glass.

Your sons and your daughters whom ye have left behind shall fall by the sword (Ezekiel 24:21)

I can't believe I am about to do this. I am going to point out something good in the "No Child Left Behind" act. As a teacher at an international private school, my current position is not governed by any federal legislation regarding testing and funding, so I have spent six months on the flip side, and I am beginning to see why this law came about.

First, let me say that I am not going to defend the testing of students in an inconsistent and unattainable way, in my opinion. But I am going to praise one of the intended side effects of such testing: a focused curriculum. Without standards-based testing like in the States, the teachers at my school are left to create their own curricula without any overarching guiding force.

Basically, my school's English curriculum is a map by each teacher explaining what NCTE standards she (they're all women) meets with what assessment. However, since these standards are so broad (see for yourself at NCTE's Web site), teachers must break them down into more specific benchmarks. But because of the generalized standards and individualized control, these benchmarks end up being whatever the teacher can cook up to match what they want to teach, not an identification of skills that students should learn. At my school this means the education has become content-driven, based on what books or texts the teacher deems worthy, which to me is an outdated notion. And therefore, skills-based instruction is overlooked and definitely not aligned from grade to grade.

This, in part, is why my English students are freaking out by my arrival. All of sudden, I am asking them to exhibit skills, without emphasis on knowledge of a book. In no high-school English classroom before my own did they examine nonfiction in any way. So as should be no surprise, my students are frustrated by trying to analyze essays and speeches at the same level they can with literature. Likewise, they are not used to having to write in a nonfiction style that focuses on synthesis instead of reader response. Now, I'm not claiming that nonfiction is something that should be a benchmark necessarily, but I think it's something an objective group has to determine without the influence of subjective preferences. And if the school is going to revere Advanced Placement, then the tenets of that program should be reflected throughout the high school curriculum, not just in a single class.

So, you ask, what are you doing about it, Ms. English department chair? Well, smarty pants, I am starting by merely introducing the idea of a holistic writing rubric based on skills. Many teachers still use rubrics giving points for the inclusion of particular formulaic writing pieces, say 1-10 points for a thesis based on how effective it is. Once again, there is no problem with that, but the only way to start aligning instruction across the grades is to identify the skills that all of us hope to see in our students' writing, without breaking it down into parts, some of which might not be relevant for specific writing assignments. The translation of that to numbers for the gradebook can stay individual.

It's not an easy change to make, considering the teachers are resistant to change their lessons and I feel like I might be inflicting my bias upon them. If there were an assessment, for example, that was developed from the outside and that governed what skills were most important, then we'd all be united under a common goal: making sure our students knew those skills so they could pass the test. "Teaching to the test" might not be fun, but it at least ensures an objective impetus for what happens in the classroom.

Now, now, now, don't start with the red herrings and non sequiturs. This is the ONLY good I find in the act. The tests themselves are often invalid, required passing rates are unreasonable, the consequences for failure are inexplicable. Indeed, one of my British colleagues was explaining to me about how schools in England are put on watch if they don't meet standards criteria, which by the way are based on more than just test scores, including in-house observations. But when this happens, schools aren't threatened with less funding; they are given money to help them improve. Still, she said this had a negative consequence: The diversion of funds to lower-performing schools prompted some borderline schools to lose money and fall into the watch category.

It seems, there is no easy calculation of school success (certainly not one that includes a 100 percent pass rate!). But a deeper look at the necessary variables to manipulate is valuable. Maybe those Impact Games people should make a simulation of running a school under "No Child Left Behind." After all, education isn't a bad place to start in making peace.