I’ve generally found that middle school teachers are the hardest to hire. Teachers either train with their eye on elementary school, and learn to teach towards those foundational skills and early developmental ages, or focus on high school, with the emphasis on more detailed content and more mature relationships. Middle school can sometimes end up…
Category: Education
Feeling Like a New Learner
My new routine nowadays is to drive early to Brooklyn to miss the traffic; learn and daven; and then go to work. I tried out a few shuls, and settled on a wonderful, warm place that perfectly fits my hours, including having a learning program before tefilah. It’s a Syrian shul/Beit Midrash, and I’m the…
Saving Our Kids – A Reflection on the Tikvah Foundation’s Jewish Schools and Technology Summit
I love being able to come home from a conference feeling full from having learned so much! Sunday and Monday I was joined by Daniella Greenspan (President of the Board) and Orly Rachamim (VP and Director of Educational Technology) at the Tikvah Foundation’s Jewish Schools and Technology Summit. Over 50 schools and 200 lay and…
Mesilat Yesharim – Ramchal
Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzatto is one of the most interesting figures of Jewish modernity. Born in Italy in 1707, he was broadly educated, a prolific author who wrote not only Torah, but plays, and was deeply controversial. At the age of 20 he was exiled from his native land because he claimed to learn Torah…
Talking Sense by Barry Jentz
There are two experiences in my life that have helped me see how difficult communication can be. One is marriage, and the second is school leadership. No matter how clear I think I’m being when I speak or write (and anyone who’s sent an email to our parent community knows this is true), it’s never…
Seeing Myself Through My Teacher’s Eyes
I’m not a crier. I’d say I cry on average about twice a year – once on Yom Kippur, and on about one other occasion. Today was that day. I was at my parents’ for Rosh Hashana where they handed me a thick file folder of old documents, mostly report cards going back to SK…
Metaphors at Work
I’ve often heard school leaders, and even teachers, talk about their school’s as ‘one big family’. For a long time I thought this was such a beautiful way for someone to feel about the places they worked, and maybe also felt like something was missing when this wasn’t the case in my places of work….
Praise for Educators
Last year a senior member of the UJA asked me, “If you had a magic wand, what would you change to help day schools?”. I said that it wouldn’t be money (though that would be a big plus, and the one that comes up most frequently). Rather, it would be that the community truly valued…
Reading People
A big part of why I read (and learn Torah) is to make sense of the world. Fiction or nonfiction, both help me clarify what I see outside, or as often, understand myself and my inner life. And because of this strong inner-drive I have to ‘make sense’ of things, reading is something I turn…
My Charge to the Netivot Graduates
Over the last few months I’ve been part of a working group that’s trying to address the shortage of Jewish Day School teachers across North America. During one of the sessions, a person in school leadership shared that he was inspired to go into professional Jewish education because at his graduation, his principal made a…