As someone who gets bored very easily, the routine of sitting at a rickety desk in a stuffy classroom all day has always been a challenge. I often find myself with Desk Anxiety (anxiety from sitting at a desk for too long) and feel the urge to sit on something else or get up and move around. Thankfully, this is not the case at Alexander Muss High School in Israel. Here, Israel acts as my classroom. The grass is my chair, the rocks are my desk and the mountains are my white-board. This fosters a connection with the material we are learning that sitting at a desk could never do. The stories and messages of heroes who dug tunnels to win a battle or political figures who created Israel all come alive when you are actually crawling through the tunnels on your stomach, dirt all under your fingernails, or when you visit their house and see the way they decorated their study. Being able to physically experience the things we are learning about in class cements the information in our brains and provides invaluable experiences we will remember for the rest of our lives. One of the first things we learned about in Core was Masada. We talked about Elazar Ben Yair who was the commander of the fortress and how he led the people of Masada to mass suicide rather than be captured and enslaved by the Romans. We learned a lot from this lesson, but our interpretation changed once we were actually sitting on the mountain. Within a cistern built by Herod himself on a steep slope surrounded by desert, we once again were faced with the same debate we had discussed in class. Is it better to commit mass suicide and die as free people, or fight to the death with the risk of being brutally killed, or surrender to certain slavery? This situation was the same one that the people on the fortress were faced with almost 2,000 years ago. We all went in a circle and shared our answers (most of us said we would rather fight). Then, we went to the edge of the mountain and screamed “Masada will not fall a second time” in Hebrew as loud as we could, proclaiming it to all the world. This is something we could have never experienced sitting at a wooden desk with stale gum stuck to the bottom of it within a small white cement room at home. I never thought school could be like this, yet every class is an experience like this. My whole life, I have wanted adventure. Here, I have a new one every day.