Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Penina writes a Petek

Today's ulpan lesson for blog readers: the word petek means a note, ie the kind written to a child's teacher (or, in our case, some sort of odd variant of this).

To give a little background to "Penina Writes a Petek": I didn't realize when I walked into ulpan this September that my same teacher from last semester was now teaching dalet, a higher level course (which isn't even usually offered in our city); I had planned to take gimel one more time.  The course is almost over and they haven't sent me back to gimel yet, but I work really (REALLY) hard to even remotely keep up with the class.

So here is what a typical evening looks like in our home: between dropping off/picking up the girls at various extracurricular activities, I do my ulpan homework.  And pretty much every night we go through the same routine:
Me: "after I bring you home from dance, I need to focus on my homework"
Beloved Daughter: "You work too hard on that.  You don't need to do it even!  Just skip it."
Me: "I can't skip it.  I need to do it so that I can understand better what on earth we're doing in class"
Beloved Daughter: "She gives you WAY too much homework!  It's not like there's even a test.  Just skip it!"
Me: "The test is every time I open my mouth to say anything.  Now shush.  I'm trying to do my homework.  By the way, do you know what this word means?"

The other night I was *really* struggling with workbook page after workbook page (to the point that Shalom Shachne kindly took a long dinner break to be my personal tutor, after I almost threw in the towel and called a paid tutor to come help me).  When I finally finished over two hours later, Penina decided she'd had enough: "THAT'S IT!  I'm writing a petek to your teacher.  This is a ridiculous amount of work she expects you to do each night".  And she took a paper and wrote:

"To Morah (Teacher) Irit:
I would like to request that you not give so much homework to my mother.  It takes her too much time--hours sometimes.  It also makes her cranky when there is a lot of homework.
Thank you,
--Penina (age 15)
daughter of Ellen
p.s. this is also permission for her not to do all her homework"

Well, Irit had a good laugh over it .  And then (as perhaps could have been foreseen) corrected it.  Penina got a ✔➕, with some suggestions for grammatical upgrades.  Irit kept the note to share with the head of the ulpan.


And on class break (or "recess", as Ilana calls it), Irit wrote back to Penina:
"Dear Penina--Hello to you,

Your letter was very nice and caused me to smile a lot.  
Homework is not against your mother!  I want everyone to make progress and your mother is a serious student.  

How fun for your mother that she has a daughter like you!

--Morah Irit
Who gives a lot of homework"

At the end of class, Irit announced, "With apologies to Ellen's daughter, here is your homework for tonight" and gave us several workbook pages and the challenge of translating a page of text into our native language and then coming prepared to re-translate live in class and read it out loud in Hebrew.

Gotta go do my homework....








Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Take Two of Batsheva's Blog Post....

Hello Dear Readers,
I am doing the heretofore never-done and republishing a blog post, since Batsheva's photos didn't make it in the first time (the tech support elves here have worked hard to fix the problem and would like to take full responsibility for the techno-goof.  And the photo of her first day at Microsoft--the mix of excitement and nervousness in her eyes--is just too good to miss).  --Ellen

Hi everyone! Batsheva here with a special Seattle edition of We Made Aliyah

As many of you know, I moved to Seattle just over 2 weeks ago to work at Microsoft as a program manager (aka technical product manager). I'm working on their developer documentation, docs.microsoft.com, which recently underwent a huge transformation to become an awesome modern open-source platform backed by Github . (If none of that made sense to you, just replace it with "everything is shiny and nice now".) I'm specifically working on the user experience and user interface of the site, which is really exciting because it gives me a chance to use my visual creativity and design skills. 

Me on the first day of work. Orientation started at 7:30 AM! 

I've had a really busy 2 weeks since starting. After a half day orientation, I had a little bit of time to start setting up before jumping into a 2.5 day team training on how to use customer interviews to build and refine products. Then this past week was quarterly planning, which meant that the part of the team based in Shanghai flew in for a solid week of meetings trying to figure out what we're going to do for the next 3 months. 

In between all the meetings I have had some time to do "real work". I've written 2 small specs so far (detailed documents that specify how a feature should be built) and am gearing up to start work on some really big and cool things soon. :) 

I'm also still adjusting to working at such a big company (my previous company was about 300 people [which already felt "too big" to me], Microsoft is 124,000!). The Redmond campus right outside Seattle where I work is 500 acres. 


This was parked outside my building one morning. I asked the driver about it and he said he'd always wanted one, so he went out and bought one. :) Never let it be said that Microsoft doesn't pay well.

There's a ton of amenities on campus, including a makerspace with all sorts of tools and machines, a shopping mall, shuttles between buildings and to the city, arcade machines, restaurants, sports fields, and more. The coolest thing of all though, is…a treehouse! (3 of them, to be exact.) My team went and visited one this past week as a fun activity after our meetings. 





Outside of work, I'm still looking for a place to live along with my friend and future roommate. We're investigating the Lower Queen Anne and Capitol Hill areas and will probably wind up in Capitol Hill, which is an area very much like where I was living in Chicago. Hopefully we will find somewhere next week! Despite what "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" led me to believe, living in a hotel isn't that much fun.

I've also been repeatedly blown away by how beautiful the Pacific Northwest is. I had never visited before my interview in October, and the first thing I thought after landing at SeaTac was that I had never seen so many trees before. The city is on the small side, but there's plenty of cool things to see and do. And the rain isn't that bad. :) (It's actually been pretty sunny the last few days!)





So far, I really love my job and the Seattle area. I'm looking forward to getting settled here!

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Guest Post by Batsheva ;)

Hi everyone! Batsheva here with a special Seattle edition of We Made Aliyah

As many of you know, I moved to Seattle just over 2 weeks ago to work at Microsoft as a program manager (aka technical product manager). I'm working on their developer documentation, docs.microsoft.com, which recently underwent a huge transformation to become an awesome modern open-source platform backed by Github . (If none of that made sense to you, just replace it with "everything is shiny and nice now".) I'm specifically working on the user experience and user interface of the site, which is really exciting because it gives me a chance to use my visual creativity and design skills. 

IMG_20171127_074321.jpgMe on the first day of work. Orientation started at 7:30 AM! 7:30 AM

I've had a really busy 2 weeks since starting. After a half day orientation, I had a little bit of time to start setting up before jumping into a 2.5 day team training on how to use customer interviews to build and refine products. Then this past week was quarterly planning, which meant that the part of the team based in Shanghai flew in for a solid week of meetings trying to figure out what we're going to do for the next 3 months. 

In between all the meetings I have had some time to do "real work". I've written 2 small specs so far (detailed documents that specify how a feature should be built) and am gearing up to start work on some really big and cool things soon. :) 

I'm also still adjusting to working at such a big company (my previous company was about 300 people [which already felt "too big" to me], Microsoft is 124,000!). The Redmond campus right outside Seattle where I work is 500 acres. 

IMG_20171204_081145.jpg
This was parked outside my building one morning. I asked the driver about it and he said he'd always wanted one, so he went out and bought one. :) Never let it be said that Microsoft doesn't pay well.

There's a ton of amenities on campus, including a makerspace with all sorts of tools and machines, a shopping mall, shuttles between buildings and to the city, arcade machines, restaurants, sports fields, and more. The coolest thing of all though, is…a treehouse! (3 of them, to be exact.) My team went and visited one this past week as a fun activity after our meetings. 



IMG_20171206_164316.jpg
IMG_20171206_163717.jpg

Outside of work, I'm still looking for a place to live along with my friend and future roommate. We're investigating the Lower Queen Anne and Capitol Hill areas and will probably wind up in Capitol Hill, which is an area very much like where I was living in Chicago. Hopefully we will find somewhere next week! Despite what "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" led me to believe, living in a hotel isn't that much fun.

I've also been repeatedly blown away by how beautiful the Pacific Northwest is. I had never visited before my interview in October, and the first thing I thought after landing at SeaTac was that I had never seen so many trees before. The city is on the small side, but there's plenty of cool things to see and do. And the rain isn't that bad. :) (It's actually been pretty sunny the last few days!)

IMG_20171126_141235.jpg
IMG_20171130_213649.jpgIMG_20171130_220953.jpg

So far, I really love my job and the Seattle area. I'm looking forward to getting settled here!