Watson and the Case for Educational Reform

In case we need any further proof that we’re guiding our students into unchartered territories, see this piece in the Science Section of today’s New York Times.  The educational implications are those which Daniel Pink argued several years ago in A Whole New Mind: that the leaps and bounds by which computer processing power is expanding, and by which the relative costs of production are contracting, means that the future of meaningful human employment is going to be in places which – to the best of our current knowledge – computers can’t go: creativity, aesthetics, empathy, interpretation, deep meaning – what he calls “right-brain” areas.  So we then, as educators, have to ask ourselves to what degree is our educational system built to nurture these “right-brain” processes?  How much of what we do is focused on memorization, computation, and “getting the right answer,” and how much is focused on promoting ingenuity, recognizing multiple perspectives, cultivating a sense of aesthetic appreciation, or nurturing empathic development?  Said differently, how much of what we are teaching our students to do, can – and will – be done by the next generations of Watsons (read the article) and how much will remain in the human realm?

They are weighty questions for sure and no one has definitive answers.  Some have argued that our educational system can’t afford to take the risk.  More and more, educators are arguing, though, that we can’t afford not to.

Maddie Strikes Again

The accolades for 12th grader Maddie Tavin continue to pour in.  First she received a full academic scholarship, worth well over $100,000 to Stern College's prestigious S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program.  Then we received notice from the National Merit Scholarship Program  that Maddie was selected an one of only 15,000 finalists across the nation for their highly coveted Merit Scholar award. And in case that wasn't enough,  at this week's Model UN in Stamford Connecticut - an event that included 47 Jewish high schools and close to 500 students - Maddie was awarded Best Delegate for her work on the Security Council.

Of course, we know that Maddie is just getting started and we look forward to hearing about her accomplishments for many, many, years to come!

Science Wiki

If you haven't yet seen the wikispace created by our elementary school science teacher, Mrs. Hunt, be sure to check it out.  You and your children will find lots of links to sites and enrichment activities which correlate directly to the material they are covering in class.  Each subject area is clearly marked with the grade for which it is appropriate.  It's a great place to foster your budding scientist's passion for exploration and discovery!

Follow Us on Faceshuk

A number of months ago, a program called Faceshuk picked up my blog.  Faceshuk is designed to give certain Jewish bloggers greater exposure over the internet.  In addition to reposting my blog posts on Facebook, it sends the link to it's 3,737 (and growing) followers on Twitter.  Thanks to them, Jews all over the world are now learning just how special a place our school really is.

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Siddur Presentation

Sunday evening was Kitah Alef's moment to shine - and shine they did. With beautiful songs, hand motions, and lines recited in both English and Hebrew, they celebrated the receiving of their very first siddur.  As has long been the custom in our 1st grade, each of the parents came in to school in the weeks prior to Sunday's festivities to work with Morah Chany, our art teacher, in designing a personalized cover for their child's siddur.  The children, though, only got to see their parents' artwork for the first time when Rabbi Greenblatt handed them their siddur at Sunday's performance.  Doing so only adds to both the anticipation and the excitement of the event.

Once again, Morah Chavi Katz outdid herself in preparing our children to showcase the impressive first steps they've taken on their journey into the world of Jewish learning.  The video below will give you a taste of the sights and sounds of the performance.  All of the pictures are available for download here.  Enjoy!

CYHSB Gatlinburg Shabbaton 2011

Last week our Boys High School returned from another incredible Gatlinburg Shabbaton. The weekend, spent high in the Smokey Mountains of East Tennessee, featured spirited ruach and meaningful conversations, Rabbi Gersten's famous moral dilemmas, plenty of "hang out" time, the hike and it's annual meeting of the high school Polar Bear Club, as well as a new-for-this-year mountain-top football game, and the always popular day of skiing. There is nothing that brings our boys together - with themselves and with our rebbeim - than this one-of-a-kind retreat.

Dorothy's Place

One of the facets of our high school program that we are most proud of, is their emphasis on community service.  Students in both schools are consistently reaching out to those in need in the broader Memphis community and giving of themselves to help make the world a better place.

Thanks to the efforts of Rabbi Noam Stein, in the Girls High School, every Rosh Chodesh has become a service learning day.  After davening, the girls have a special Rosh Chodesh breakfast and then head out to one of three community service opportunities, depending on their particular preference.  Student choice is a key element of our community service program as not all students feel comfortable in all arenas of communal service.  As our goal is that these opportunities foster a life-long love of social service, it is imperative that our students have the opportunity to channel their efforts into something they find meaningful and in which they feel comfortable.

Below are some pictures of one group of girls last Rosh Chodesh at Dorothy's Place, a local home for Alzheimer's patients.  As you can see, wherever they go, they ensure that their presence is felt and that they are making a difference in the lives of others.

MHA 3rd Graders Skyping with Jacksonville

Over the past week there have been Tu Bi-Shvat celebrations in all of our divisions. Perhaps the most innovative, however, was that of our 3rd grade who shared a chagigat ha-nilmad (a celebration of what they have learned) with a 3rd grade class in a Jewish Day School in Jacksonville. The two classes came together via Skype. In the video you'll see our kids performing their songs and lines in front of our class webcam, and a projected image of the Jacksonville class behind them as they listened, watched, and enjoyed our children's performance.

High School Chumash

Oops!  It seems that in yesterday's post about our newly blogging teachers, I forgot to include one of our most active teacher blogs:  Rabbi Lubetski's 9th and 10th grade honors chumash class!  This is a must-see for it exemplifies the way in which a blog can be used to spur spirited conversations about learning well beyond the four walls of the classroom.   Be sure to look at the comments on each post to see just how engaged our students are with the material and just how powerful a class blog can be.

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