Evanston, IL, 1978

Last night I got the cleaning bug and found my first grade report card!

We moved to Evanston, Illinois, from Israel, in the summer before first grade (in case it wasn’t clear from my name… I am an Immigrant). I didn’t speak a word of English.

To be honest, I don’t remember much from that first year except snow, LOTS of snow…taller than me snow.

I also remember living in a very large apartment building – so large that my brother and I would ride a tricycle on our floor. It was graduate housing: a building full of immigrant PhD students and postdocs who were studying at Northwestern University. Various delicious smells from all the different apartments mingled in the hallway at dinner time.

So back to that report card – we had separate report cards for each subject. The science teacher noted that I loved doing experiments (no surprise there).

More importantly, she noted that she sensed I understood what was happening even though I couldn’t speak English.

Yes! This is why we do what we do and work with the kids we work with at SiE…because you can do science and understand science before you have the language to describe your observations. You get excited about science and *in the process of doing it* you learn the language.

Science is a universal language.