Answers to some questions.

1.   Does everyone speak English?  Or do you have to learn Hebrew (or Yiddish) to survive?

I WISH I knew Hebrew. Most everyone has some English. Many folks have a lot/perfect. No Yiddish, as far as spoken as a language (a phrase here and there). There are many different accents on the English, as Israel has people from everywhere in the world who live here.

I feel­ embarrassed sometimes, because I am only fluent in one language. In the U.S., many of us never become fluent in a second language. Here, most people speak 2,3,4 languages. Arabic, Hebrew and English are taught in schools. I took 4 years of French in high school, a year in college and lived (as I went to college) in Montreal for 4 years and never became totally fluent in French.

I did try :)

I had the Rosetta Stone Hebrew course for three months. NOTHING stuck. I think growing up in Maine, I heard a lot of French so I had the “sounds” of the language somewhere in my brain. When I did a Spanish immersion experience in Costa Rica a few years ago, I could hold a basic conversation after one week. Again, I had some Spanish artifacts hidden away in my brain, also the similarities to French helped.

I've heard Hebrew only in my adult life, and only at the occasional wedding or bar mitzvah. Hebrew has some sounds to it I find very difficult to make. The Hebrew alphabet is different from ours. Text is read and written from right to left. In Hebrew, vowels are not present in the alphabet. Often written Hebrew just uses the consonants. Symbols denote a vowel sound. It's complicated.

For pronounciation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet

2.  Why do some boys at the high school wear the yarmulke and others don't?  (Maybe I shouldn't assume all of the students there are Jewish).  

The two pictures show a class from an Arab school and a class from a Jewish boys' school. To wear or not to wear a yarmulke really depends on the level of religious observance of the family. There is also a variation in yarmulke style. I've seen some for sale in the Souk with cartoon characters on them etc.

3. Are the classes separated by gender? No, in the pictures the Arab school is co-ed and the other class is all boys as their school is all boys.

4. Do the gals have access to the same amount of equipment for the sciences? Are the #s of gals as interested in the sciences as the boys?

So in the Arab class, I did a quick count and it did seem like the numbers were equal. This was a school that only teaches chemistry and physics. This school teaches all of the chemistry and physics for students taking those subjects for all TLV high schools. This school has everything- all the equipment. Any student going here, male or female, has these resources available. This school is not the norm in Israel. This is the best of the best. There is much variation in schools by location and by type of school. I spoke this weekend with a 10^th-grade student in a private Arab school, also majoring in chemistry, and their school had much more limited means.

Thanks for the questions! Any more my email is shardy@aos92.org.