Yeah, I think it’s a strange question coming from a principal, but I remember being asked the same thing by annoying but presumably well-intentioned adults when I was a teenager. It’s the kind of question I’d associate more with distant relatives or friends of my parents than a teacher or school administrator, though.
The kindest spin I can put on it is that the principal might have been concerned that she’d be especially depressed or angry about going to a new school if she had a boyfriend somewhere else.
As for the OP’s friend, since she’s a fairly recent Lubavitch convert I’m wondering if her unusual naivete might be due to parents who were extremely overprotective or controlling from the beginning. This is probably unfair to the girl’s mother, but I can’t help but be reminded of the psycho mother in Carrie who didn’t even tell her daughter about menstruation. It also strikes me as possible that the girl is willfully naive either as some kind of rebellion or as a self-defense mechanism. I’m not saying she’s lying about her ignorance of sexual subjects, but rather that she may have deliberately been avoiding such information for reasons of her own.
I was hardcore religious and I moved from private to public school in 9th grade.
I wasn’t as sheltered as she, knowing a bit about drugs and sex and kissin’ 'n such, so I didn’t have a really hard transitional shock.
Except that, for a good long while, whenever the kids would talk about drinking or sex or parties, I assumed they were joking; acknowledging the stereotypical teenage portrayal. Took me a while to figure out that they were serious; that they were doing drugs and drinking.
My only advice would be to not judge people. It’s easy to be on the religious side and look at everybody else as “the sinners” but it’s important to realize that she’s the one in the minority. If she tries to preach to people, or in any way seem to judge people for their to-them-normal behavior, she’s going to get ostracized pretty quickly. Remind her that the religious are supposed to integrate with the world, not stand apart from it with their noses thumbed.
Also important to know (this took me a while to pick up as well) that the “sinners” are not evil people who have shunned god and worship false idols. They’re just people who don’t see things differently. It’s OK to talk to them and be friendly with them. They aren’t going to lure you back into their dungeons and carve satanic incantations into your skin with sharpened goat bones.
Most vital, though, is the judging thing. Probably the main reason people are leery of the religious is that they don’t like to feel judged. If someone says something like “I made out with this guy last night” and the other person says “I THINK THATS A SIN!!!”, conversation abruptly over.
wierdaaron–Thanks for the perspective. That’s really funny that you thought your classmates were making some sort of meta-joke when they were just talking about their weekend!
Judaism is not Christianity, however. A lot of what you said is predicated on the idea that ultra-religious Jews have similar views, attitudes, and goals as ultra-religious Christians. They don’t.
An example would be the idea that Jews might look at other people and think that they’re “sinners.” First of all, Jews don’t think about “sin” in the same way as Christians. Secondly, Jews don’t give a crap if a bunch of goyim are violating Jewish religious principles. They’re not Jews, so who cares?
I’m not the slightest bit worried about this girl saying anything that might seem judgmental to a Christian. But she’s really going to have to watch her step with secular Jews.
The principal wasn’t being skeevy. He knew something was off about this girl, whose welfare is now in part his responsibility, and he asked some questions to try to get to the specifics of how she might have trouble adjusting to this new environment. He’d be remiss not to ask some uncomfortable questions.
Not sure how to help her bridge the gap, but she might want to see some movies along the lines of Mean Girls as a kind of heads up.
I don’t know how helpful it would be to watch all those high school movies. That’s like telling somebody who’s about to enter the service to watch Gomer Pyle, USMC.
Actually, the Lubavitch dress the least “Chassidishly” of all the Chasidim. They only wear long coats and black hats; the men do not wear a streimel (round, beaver hat) that most other chassidic groups wear. Nor do they wear the thin white socks that some groups wear, nor do they wear their tzitzit (four corered fringed garment) over their shirts. Also, adult Lubavitch men do not wear peyot, the earlocks of hair that all other chassidic groups wear.
I think it’s more accurate to say that most kids are judgmental by nature, because of the intense social pressure to conform at that age. Many of them are going to be judging her as a freak simply because she’s different, whether or not she says anything.
If the information in the OP is accurate, I think this girl is simply not ready for an American high school. It will be unpleasant at best, and quite possibly hellish. She should talk to her parents again about some other arrangement, perhaps even home schooling. Either that or she better have some really thick skin.
I’m also skeptical of her ability to make good use of advice in this circumstance. She’ll likely have trouble fitting it into context; there are going to be countless implicit assumptions attached to any piece of advice, things that everyone would be expected to understand without having to be told, but I bet that she would not get some of those things and would therefore have trouble assimilating any advice to improve her situation.
That said, if she’s really stuck in that school, I think she’ll have to do some research. The suggestion to watch TV is a good one, but it shouldn’t just be teen dramas and so forth. She should be watching reruns of Law & Order and The Simpsons. Or, really, anything that’s mainstream and reasonably popular, and not 100% G-Rated. She’s going to be an odd duck no matter what, but if she’s not at least partially conversant in the language that the outside world is speaking, there exists the potential for disaster. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that she doesn’t live in a big TV-watching household. Link her to Hulu.
When she can take 10 steps in her school without being gobsmacked, then perhaps joining an activity would be a good idea.
Has she perhaps looked into an online charter school, or some other home-based option? I grew up in the parallel universe that is modern Orthodoxy (I share the same media with the rest of America, but grew up surrounded almost exclusively by other Orthodox Jews, with the resulting very different social conventions), and I would have been deeply thrown by going to a secular high school, even having seen all the TV mentioned above. The only positive thing that I can see about her situation is that she probably won’t be looking for the approval of her classmates, in that on some level she likely doesn’t think of them as peers, so when she doesn’t get it, it won’t be quite as traumatic as it might otherwise be.
Does she even watch TV or movies? Most Lubavitch girls probably don’t. Anybody have a suggested reading list?
For what it’s worth, the Lubavitch movement is pretty different from other Hasidic groups, and one of the ways this manifests itself is that the women are actually encouraged to dress fashionably. They’re always modest (skirts below the knee, shirts to the collarbone and elbow, and always wearing at least sheer stockings and close-toed shoes), but they’re usually very well put together, and not at all dowdy in the way that women from other Hasidic groups generally are. She still wouldn’t fit in with the all-jeans, all-the-time ethos that seems to pervade in high schools (I remember noticing at some point well into college - at least my sophomore year - that nearly every young woman on the Columbia/Barnard campus who wasn’t an Orthodox Jew was wearing jeans), but the difference will be marginally less dramatic.
Do warn her against kiruv (literally ‘bringing close’ - outreach to non-religious Jews). It won’t go over well.
I would be happy to talk/email with her as well. PM me if you’d like my phone number or email address. I’m probably from a similar background to you, MIS, but older, married, and a total stranger who won’t judge her.
Why can’t she do both? Stick to her own principles, but recognize that most of the rest of the school is different.
I think that educating her re terminology is essential. Otherwise she might wind up inadvertently in some sticky or embarassing situation. For example the boyfriend discussion - I assume the Lubavitchers don’t date until they’re introduced to someone who is marriage material, if even then. If she were more familiar with the terminology / meaning of “boyfriend” among the gentile world, she might have known to say “no, I’m not dating anyone”.
It’s a little frightening that she didn’t even know “rape” - as that can happen to anyone regardless of their religious views or any steps they take to keep safe. It’s sad that she doesn’t know about condoms - at least the term, even if they’re not allowed by her religion (Catholics aren’t allowed them either but they know what they are!).
Well, considering stranger rapes are pretty rare and she’s probably not spending a lot of unsupervised time with guys, what exactly does she need to know about protecting herself? I know, I know, it can happen to anyone, but a lot of the common sense things that people say are things like, “Don’t go home with that creep–seriously…” or “Don’t get into a strange car with a guy you’ve just met” or “Watch out for roofies/don’t drink too much.” I get the impression that none of that really applies to her.
Oy, oy, triple oy, and oy[sup]3[/sup].
So, her school has no peer mentor system.
And she literally can’t understand anything they say to her. So she thinks they’re making fun of her by asking silly questions, and they think she’s making fun of them by not giving the right answers and she gets upset and starts answering them in Hebrew… oy[sup]3[/sup], indeed.
And I don’t know what is with the teachers there, but some of the things she told me sound borderline-sexual harrassment. An incident from her English class:
TEACHER: Today’s journal topic is “describe your first kiss”
HER: I can’t do the assignment. I’ve never kissed a boy.
TEACHER: So we’ll fix that now. Anyone want to kiss her?
(All boys ijn the room raise their hands).
HER: Uh, I can’t I think I have strep throat.
TEACHER: They’ll risk it.
HER: I don’t think my mother would like that.
I’m paraphrasing the wording, but what I just typed was exactly what she says happened. I hope I’m not the only one deeply disturbed here.
And no unofficial peer mentors for Friend, either. She literally doesn’t know ANYONE who isn’t all chassidishe like her. She doesn’t even know anyone who’s Modern Orthodox. And I’m thinking she’s not going to be making any contacts through her social circle.
Her mother still flat-out refuses to pull her out.
In other words, she is truely well and up the brown creek, with nary a paddle in sight. I’m at my wit’s end here, and I can only imagine how poor Friend feels. Actually, I don’t have to imagine. She started the phone call with, “Save me.”
GilaB, I think I may take you up on your kind offer. Right down I’m going to sit down and panic.
As am I. Nothing about it seems plausible. I can maybe believe the teacher would assign that topic, but not that s/he would call for volunteer kissers and pressure the girl to go along or that every boy in the class would be eager to kiss the weird new girl.
If it really happened that way then her mother should complain to the school.
Considering that recently a football player who was on a trip (high school) got pressured into being baptised and that made the news, I’d be surprised if this happened and wasn’t considered newsworthy.
It’s not even a “religious student” vs. “public school” thing. I think any kid who was inexperienced in that way would feel really uncomfortable about it. And to be honest, do most kids want to write about their first awkward experiences in class? It just reads like the way someone very conservative would try to portray an evil liberal school. Sort of the way our BS meter went up at that kid who was fighting censorship by keeping banned book in his/her locker (books like the Canterbury Tales).
As a fairly recent graduate of the American public education system I can tell you, that kiss thing? Not plausible. She made it up or is grossly exaggerating.
Stuff happens, you know? There are plenty of shenanigans. A cheerleader got caught blowing two football players my freshman year. A bunch of seniors poured fifty pounds of manure on our rival school’s front steps. Kids smoked weed in the 2nd floor bathrooms, somebody made sulfur in the chemistry lab and dumped it all over the hallways, and the school had to be let out early. Guys sneak into girls locker rooms all the time. But a teacher encouraging two students to make physical contact with each other? No. They more likely spend half their day pulling them apart.
Considering her “translation” difficulties, she could have misunderstood the situation. Maybe the teacher was joking and she didn’t understand. But that only highlights how badly out of place she is there.
First of all, in unlikely event that she is the victim of a stranger rape–The issue is not so much learning to protect herself as knowing that it is a crime. That if it does happen, she doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) keep it to herself. It sounds like she’s naive enough to think that it was an isolated incident and that nobody would even know what she was talking about if she told them. She must know that it was absolutely wrong and that it was not her fault in any way.
Secondly, as you correctly point out, stranger rape is uncommon. She does have to know how to protect herself from molestation from acquaintances. She needs to know that she doesn’t have to submit to certain types of touching, regardless of what the molestor/rapist tells her. She needs to know that it is also a crime. She’s just as vulnerable to Uncle Ernie (Uncle Ehud?) as anyone else.
Thirdly, while it is unlikely that she’ll encounter a date rape situation if she sticks to her principles, it is possible that she will be particularly vulnerable to peer pressure and make poor decisions in a misguided attempt to fit in. Unfortunately, some people like to take advantage of others, and some teens can be particularly vicious. If she is manipulated into believing that her classmates will “accept” her if she blows some guy under the bleachers, then she just might do it.
Thank you for the term. It’s nice to know a more polite way of referring to the practice than “harassing random people on the streets of New York.”
As far as the kissing assignment–I also find it very hard to believe. But there are some whacked-out people out there, so it is just within the bounds of plausibility. The thing I find most unbelievable is that anybody with half a brain knows that many teens haven’t had their first kiss at that age, even if they’re “regular” kids. Unless the teacher was deliberately being hostile to the unpopular kids. That I can easily believe.
Something is very wrong here. The principal may have indeed been trying to probe to see if he could anticipate problems that she would have, as Krokodil suggest, but the questions about a boyfriend are still inappropriate.
For what it’s worth, a teacher at my high school was suspended for a year and required to have psychiatric care for making kids kiss each other. I think it may have been just on the cheek, and it was in the mid-1980s, which is probably why he wasn’t fired outright. That teacher also married one of his students. And he wasn’t a young guy. As far as anyone knows, the relationship did start after she had already graduated. They’re divorced now. He may have not done anything technically illegal or even really all that terrible, but something was really off about the guy.
I’d be very wary of any teacher who seems overly interested in the students’ sex or romantic life. And I’d be very wary of any school district that condones this type of behavior.
I think VarlosZ is quite correct in that she might not be able to put most advice to good use.
But you know what, Malleus, there’s too much here that’s just too hard to believe.
Are you sure she’s not messing with you?
(Though if she was, I’d have to congratulate her on pulling off a hell of a good whoosh!)