Teacher-Bloggers

As a result of our recent in-service, we've had several more teachers join the ranks of our teacher-bloggers.  You can now find our teachers utilizing their blogs to share helpful websites with parents, challenging students to compare the Hollywood depiction of characters with their literary originals, linking to sources and questions relating to Nechama Leibowitz's interpretation of a passage in Chumash, and a slideshow of our Prek4 students acting out the story of yetziat mitzrayim.

You can find a complete list of our teacher blogs, as well as their recent posts, on the lower-right hand corner of this blog.  Be sure to visit them often and leave lots of comments telling them how proud we are of the way in which they are embracing new modes and methods of teaching for the 21st century!

Parents Guide to Technology

In an effort to help parents better understand and supervise their children's world of technology, Yeshiva University's Institute for University-School Partnership recently published a guide for parents with important information on social media sites, Facebook, the internet in general, and cyber-bullying.  You can access it by clicking here.  I encourage all parents to do so - it isn't long and it's well worth the read.

Auction 2011

This past Sunday night our talented PTA Auction team outdid themselves again with an evening that brought together food, friends, fun and funds, in a most enjoyable way.  Beginning with a silent auction that featured a wide array of items ranging from the practical and necessary to the pampering and luxurious, the evening then moved to a sit-down dinner and the evening's entertainment: eight married couples brave enough to participate in the Not-So-Newlywed Game.

To catch a glimpse of the fun, watch the slideshow below.  If you'd like an individual picture of your favorite contestant squirming, sighing, or rolling their eyes in disbelief, you can find them all here.

Special thanks again to the entire Auction team for a job incredibly well done.

Virtual Judaic Studies Program

Do you know a student in 6th-10th grade who doesn't currently have access to high quality Jewish education but who wants to know more about his or her Judaism?  Do you know a Jewish 6th-10th grade who'd like to meet other teens just him or herself from around the country?  If so, please let them know about JconnecT, the distance learning Judaic Studies program we launched this past Fall.  The program exceeded even our greatest expectations in its inaugural semester, with 20 kids from across the country - Nashville, Birmingham, Kansas City, Jacksonville, and New Jersey - enrolled in the program and the webcam technology working as we had hoped it would.

Students are now registering for the second semester so be sure to check out the JconnecT website and spread the word!

Facing the 21st Century

The following is the list of websites from which the facts in my newsletter column this week were taken.

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/

http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/39.aspx

http://www.i-cio.com/blog/august-2010/eric-schmidt-exabytes-of-data

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjJg9NfTXos

Here is a copy of the article, for those who haven't yet read it:

Last August our faculty jumped into a conversation that has been percolating in educational circles across the globe for several years now.   The topic is often referred to as 21^st Century Learning and its basic premise is that the world around us is so dramatically different than the world we adults grew up in that it behooves us to revisit and revise our curricula in all subject areas so as to ensure that our students are being best prepared for their world of the future, and not for our world of the past.

But is it really true? Are the times we are living in really so different than those that preceded us? Wasn’t society when we went to school dramatically different than it had been for our parents?  Wasn’t the same true for our parents when they went to school?  And even if times now are different, are the changes so dramatic that they justify tampering with an educational system that has served us so well for so long?

If you’re unsure of the answers, consider the following:

• Today there are 200,000 text messages, 34,000 Google searches, 700 Facebook status updates, and 600 tweets produced every second (yes, every second). Yet, the first text message was only sent in 1992.  The first Google search was done in 1998.  The first Facebook profile was updated in 2004 and the first tweet was only chirped in 2006.
• More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than was aired by ABC, NBC, and CBS combined since the day they began broadcasting over 60 years ago.
•  After only six years of existence, Facebook has over 500 million users.  If it were a country it would be the third largest in the world, behind China and India and well ahead of the United States.
•    It took radio 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million listeners.  It took television 13 years to reach 50 million viewers.  The internet reached 50 million people in 4 years, Ipods reached 50 million in 3 years, and Facebook hit 50 million in only 2 years.
• The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper, a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965.
•   According to the former US Secretary of Education, the top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004 and according to the US Department of Labor, today’s students will hold 10-14 different jobs by the time they are 38 years old.
• At today’s rate of change, technology will experience 20,000 years of growth over the coming century.
•   Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were approximately five exabytes of unique information created. We now create five exabytes every two days (an exabyte, if you’re wondering, is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 1 billion gigabytes). That means every two days we create approximately 250,000 times the amount of information stored in the Library of Congress.  The information in the Library of Congress took 200 years to collect.

What we are seeing today is unlike anything we have ever seen before.  We were raised in an age of linear growth, as were our parents before us.  Our kids, however, are being raised in exponential times.  In educational circles, the implications of this new reality has been summed up as follows:  The job of an educator today is to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist in which they will use technologies that have yet to be invented for the purpose of solving problems we have yet to identify.

That’s quite a tall task.  To give our children the best chances for success in this brave new world of exponentially accelerated change, however, we are going to have to find a way to accomplish it.  At our faculty in-service next week we’ll begin to map out the steps we’ll need to take to get us there.

Pastries With Parents

Thanks to our incredible PTA, we started Wednesday of this week off with another Pastries with Parents event.  Instead of just dropping their children off at the front door, parents and grandparents came in and sat down for a few minutes to enjoy danishes, coffee, chocolate milk and fruit with their children before sending them off to class. As always, it was a great event and a great way to start off the day!

Kohelet Fellowships Event

Our community enjoyed a historic moment last Thursday night.  Thanks to the Kohelet Foundation, 92 parents from both the Academy and Solomon Schechter - representing all three Orthodox shuls, Chabad, the two Conservative shuls, and the Reform Temple - gathered together for an evening of joint Torah study.

The program, which featured a two-part presentation by Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveitchik with group source study in between, was this year's first communal event of the Kohelet Fellowships program.  The Fellowships program, now in its second year and in its first year in Memphis, provides a tuition break to parents who enroll in and complete either the Partners in Torah or Jewish Learning Institute's adult education program.  We are proud of the fact that with only 102 families in our school, we have 97 parents enrolled in the program.

As one of the 97, I can attest to the fact that it has energized our parent base and is helping to foster a love for life-long learning throughout our community.

Steak Dinner 2010

The boys of our high school shined once again, as they wined, dined, and entertained some three hundred guests in their annual Steak Dinner.  The Steak Dinner is the major fund raising event which provides the high school with its student activities budget.  For weeks the boys worked on securing sponsorships, preparing their faculty tribute video (replete with comical advertisements for the dinner's corporate sponsors), practicing their solo (two pianists) and band performances, divrei Torah, programs, decorations, and - of course - the four course meal.  Under Rabbi Gersten's masterful guidance, the boys, once again, did not disappoint.

Here are some images from what was a very special night:

Chanukah PhotoStory

Just a few weeks ago we equipped our Early Childhood classrooms with webcams and introduced our teachers to ways in which they could incorporate Skype and PhotoStory into their teaching.  To say they jumped at the opportunity would be an understatement.  Our students have gone on a tour of menorahs in a neighborhood in Israel via Skype and helped to bring digital images alive with their own narration.

To get a sense for the way in which these tools are enriching the learning experience for our children, watch this PhotoStory created by our 4 year-olds in PreK in which they use pictures of themselves and their own words to share the story of Chanukah.

Much Ado About Nothing

Another Dr. Kutliroff production.  Another smashing success.  This time it was the Girls High School rendition of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and once again two-thirds of our high school collaborated in bringing the 16th century playwright's masterful writing to life on stage.

What made this production stand out in my mind, was the fact that no one girl stole the show.  There were so many outstanding performances from so many different girls -  9th through 12th grades, dormers and in-towners alike -  that it truly spoke to caliber, capability, and talent of our girls as a whole.  Thank you again to Dr. Kutliroff and his trusted assistants and congratulations to all of the girls for a job beautifully done.

The slideshow below provides glimpses into what was a magical evening.  Click here for a web album with all the pictures.

3rd Grade Tal Am in Action

The 3rd grade, under the leadership of Morah Yehudit, demonstrated the power of the Tal Am program this morning, when they performed the story of Avraham Avinu for parents and students alike.  The performance used a mixture of prose, pesukim, and songs, all completely in Hebrew, to teach both the narrative of parashat Vayera as well as the practical lessons it offers for our lives.

Have a look at the clips below and notice the content knowledge, the Hebrew skills, and the excitement for learning which runs rampant in our 3rd grade classroom.

From Avraham play-11-24-10

From Avraham play-11-24-10

From Avraham play-11-24-10

From Avraham play-11-24-10

Celebrations in the CYHSB

These past few weeks have been chock full of celebrations in the Cooper Yeshiva High School for Boys. Starting with the Thursday night mishmar siyum by Mr. David Schlesinger, which, thanks to Jon Wogan, brought the community and our boys together to celebrate talmud Torah, to the weekend of celebrating our Torah MiTzion Kollel, to the most recent simchah - the birth of a baby boy to CYHSB principal, Rabbi Uriel Lubetski and his wife Shani, it's been one joyous occasion after another in our Boys High School.

Here are some pictures from the siyyum and the kollel weekend, including a special edition of our famed Friday afternoon chulent tisch:



And, hot off the press, here are the pictures from this morning's bris:

Torah MiTzion National Convention

Our school and community was privileged to host the national convention of Torah MiTzion Kollelim from across North America two weeks ago.  The shuls and school came alive with activity as 70 shlichim from Israel descended on Memphis for a weekend filled with learning, networking, teaching, and growing.  In honor of the event, our Memphis kollel created this video which offers just a taste of the wonderful work the Torah MiTzion Kollel does throughout our community.

Writing Award is Back!

The Dean's Writing Award is back up and running. Each month, one piece of student writing regarding Judaic Studies and one piece of student writing on a General Studies topic will be awarded the Dean's Writing Award.  The names of the nominees will be posted to our Dean's Writing Award Wikispace, and the work of our winners in each category will be posted as well, for all to see.  In addition, each of the winners will take a home a small gift card to Barnes and Nobles.  So, write away!

As we did not award the prize to anyone in September, I have selected 2 winners in our General Studies category for this month, and one in our Judaic Studies category.  The two General Studies winners are Lee Sauer (2nd Grade) for her story about firefighters and Alyssa Wruble (8th Grade) for her dramatic depiction of Middle Passage.  On the Judaic Studies side, the winner is Asher Finkelstein (8th Grade) who insightfully compared the lessons of  Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with those of the Talmud.  Look at the wikispace for the names of the other nominees.

Congratulations to all and keep up the good work!

Pilgrims and Poems

Though the word Pilgrims at this time of year typically conjures images of the 17th century English dissenters who first colonized Plymouth Massachusetts, we had a different sort of Pilgrim marching through our campus earlier this week.  Though also English, these were the Chaucerian Pilgrims of the 14th century, traveling the countryside and commenting on society in metered rhyme.

With her Girls High School English class in the morning, and then with her Boys High School class in the afternoon,  Mrs. Hasenmeuller led her Pilgrims through the drizzle to various spots on campus where they paused and offered their own Chaucerian poem.

Of course, Mrs. Hasenmueller joined in the fun, and offered these "comments" on her "society" to her Girls High School class:

Cooper Invitational 2010

Just when we thought it couldn't get any better... it did.  All week long emails have been pouring in from across the continent with feedback on this year's tournament.  Here's a small smattering of what we're hearing from coaches and chaperones who participated in last weekend's event:

"I think you have a problem. This year's tournament was so well done, I don't see how you can top it next year.  From the changeover to using vans to a wonderfully balanced field of teams, this year's tourny was great.

I am sorry that I could not experience the community's hospitality but everyone I talked to said the same thing, how nice and warm and inviting thier hosts were. It is truely a wonderful testament to the Jewish community in Memphis."


"WOW!!! That is all I can say.  The tournament was an amazing success and Daniella and I were both honored to participate.

The tournament’s high level of play, shabbos experience, and fabulous speakers would have been more than enough to make for a successful and enjoyable weekend, but you went above and beyond with your friendly smile and warm welcome. Thank you for your hospitality, hard work, and for making Daniella and myself feel like we were part of a team.

I look forward to speaking with you in the near future and visiting Memphis again soon."


"I just wanted to thank you for your most gracious southern welcome to the staff from Yeshiva University. Coach Halpert said that you made him feel like a rock star. Our reports were that it was a very successful tournament. I’m just disappointed that MTA didn’t win in the finals."

"I must say that because of you and the Cooper Yeshiva family, the athletes in general, and my players in particular, had the experience of a lifetime that they will never forget. Literally for the rest of their lives they will carry with them the warmest and finest memories of their time in Memphis."

"I want to thank you and all of the people who helped you with this year’s Cooper Tournament. The Flatbush team truly had an experience of a lifetime and not just from a basketball perspective. The messages delivered by all your speakers are those that I hope all tournaments will strive to deliver to all kids in the future. You and all the people associated with the tournament should be very proud of this great accomplishment."

"Once again let me tell you how impressed I am with the quality of this tourney. Your leadership has turned this into the best Jewish tournament in the country bar non! Not even N. Y. Can compete now that you went streaming! Congrats on a job well done.......again!!"

Our deepest appreciation again goes out to Tournament Director, Josh Kahane, for his remarkable efforts in putting the event together. 


Below are some highlights from the weekend.  For all of the pictures from the tournament click here: Album 1, Album 2. 

Mazel Tov!

Exciting news!  In this week's parasha Yitzchak takes Rivkah to be his wife and thanks to the creativity of our Early Childhood Morahs, all of our Early Childhood children were on hand to watch!  Not only were the chatan and kallah there with their families, but so was the band, the photographers, the bride's maids, the mesader kiddushin, and a whole host of well wishers.  The chuppah was followed by a scrumptious reception.  Special thank you to Morah Debbie for all her help in putting it together!

Fall Festival 2010

Our Third Annual Fall Festival was a smashing success.  Parents and children from across the community came together for a fun-filled morning of moonbounces, hayrides, story-telling, and much more.  Click on the slideshow below to see some of the Festival's most precious moments.




You can find all of these pictures and several more on our Fall Festival Picasa web album.  Enjoy!

Speakers Galore

We've had a steady stream of experts and activists in various fields present to our Middle School and High School students over the past few weeks.

On October 6th we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Rona Novick, whose groundbreaking bullying prevention program called BRAVE, we are piloting in our Middle School.  As part of the Azrieli Graduate School's Institute for University School Partnership, Dr. Novick visits our school several times over the course of the year to collect data regarding the implementation of her program as well as to lead related programs with our Middle School students.  A recognized expert in Child Psychology, Dr. Novick, also graciously offers to give a parenting workshop to our parent body each time she visits.  This time, her topic was "Trusting our Teens:  The Balance Between Adolescent Independence and Parental Supervision" and over fifty parents came out to participate in the evening workshop.

This past Tuesday, our Middle and High School Girls had the privilege of hearing from Ms. Rochelle Shoretz, founder of Sharsheret, an organization which supports Jewish women with breast cancer.  Ms. Shoretz, a Columbia trained attorney who clerked for the Supreme Court and is now battling a second round of cancer, shared her remarkable story with our students.  To get a sense for what they experienced, watch this incredible Fox News interview with Ms. Shoretz:

To cap things off, thanks to the Baron Hirsch Congregation, both our Boys High School and our Girls High School had the pleasure of hearing words of inspiration from Rav Ronen and Mrs. Pnina Neuwirth this past Friday.  The Neuwirths, who serves as Scholars In Residence at Baron Hirsch over the weekend, are heavily involved in the Tzohar Organization which is trying to bridge the secular and religious divide which currently tears at the heart of Israeli society. From Speakers

Technology and Hebrew Immersion

Our separate school-wide initiatives in Hebrew Immersion and in Technology came together today as our 3rd grade class took a new document camera for a test run.  The document camera functions much as an overhead projector did in the past, except that now one need copy or write onto transparencies in order to project something for the class to see.  In fact, with a document camera, one can project just about anything - from a textbook or student work to a piece of art or a biological specimen, and anything in between.  

The document camera, coupled with our new wireless slates and the SMART Notebook software with which every class has been outfitted, is particularly useful in our lower school classrooms where we have introduced the Tal Am Hebrew Immersion program.  As the Tal Am program produces all of its books and notebooks, many of which contain visual stimuli critical to teaching our children without having to translate into English, and as they are not yet available in digital form, the document camera allows the teacher to simply place the workbook under the camera, which projects an enlarged picture of it onto the whiteboard, and then the class can use the wireless slate to analyze the work and fill in the correct answers

Here's a quick video we took of our 3rd grade doing exactly that this morning:

  

As part of the Max Cooper Business and Technology Program we hope to purchase two document cameras.  If you're interested in sponsoring the purchase of additional units for additional classrooms please let our business office know.