Getting in shape for the High Holidays

Ever wonder how your rabbis & cantor prepare for the upcoming holidays?  Check out this new video that gives you an 'inside look'!  (Note that the two young female rabbis are friends of mine from rabbinical school!!)

Rosh Hashanah is coming!

A new Jewish year must be coming, as there's a great YouTube video making the rounds... Shana tovah u'metukah, wishing you a happy & sweet new year!

Jewish Greetings

One of the things I learned in rabbinical school was how to greet people with appropriate Jewish / Hebrew phrases, depending on the day, the season, and even before / during / after certain life-cycle events.  Here's a little cheat sheet that would've been useful for me years ago:

Phrase - Translation - When to use it

Shalom (or L'shalom) - Hello, goodbye, peace - Anytime
L'hitraot - See you again soon - Whenever you're saying goodbye to someone
Shabbat shalom - Have a peaceful Shabbat! - Weds through Sat
Shavua tov - Have a good week - Sat night through Tues
Shana tovah (or L'shana tovah) - Happy New Year - Starting about a month before the High Holy Days and up until / including Rosh Hashanah
Shana tovah u'metukah - Have a happy & sweet New Year - Same as "shana tovah"
G'mar chatimah tovah or g'mar tov - May you be sealed for good (i.e. may you be sealed in the Book of Life on Yom Kippur) - Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur
Tzom kal - Have an easy fast - Before any day on the Jewish calendar when it's customary to fast (including Yom Kippur)
Chag sameach - Happy holiday! - Before and during holidays that are 'chagim,' which includes the first and last days of Sukkot & Passover, Shavuot
Moadim l'simcha - It's the season/times of joy - During chol ha'moed, which includes the middle days of Sukkot & Pesach (in other words, you begin the holiday saying Chag sameach, then you say Moadim l'simcha for about a week, then Chag sameach at the end of the holiday)
Chag Sukkot sameach - Happy holiday of Sukkot - First and last days of Sukkot
Chanukah sameach - Happy Chanukah - Before/during Chanukah
Chag urim sameach - Happy holiday of lights - Before / during Chanukah
Chag Purim sameach - Happy holiday of Purim - Before/ during Purim
Chodesh tov - Happy new month - On Rosh Hodesh (the first day or two of each Hebrew month)
Yasher koach - Great job - When someone accomplished something or did something great (i.e. 'nice job chanting Torah!')
Mazal tov - Congratulations - When something exciting happens, such as the birth of a new baby, a wedding, etc.
B'sha'ah tovah - In good time (also has a congratulatory connotation) - When you find out that someone is pregnant (in other words, you don't say 'mazal tov' until the baby is born since it's not a 'done deal' yet... rather, you say 'b'sha'ah tovah' to mean, may the baby come at a good time, i.e. when s/he is really ready to be born and no sooner)
Kol tuv / kol tov - All is good, may all be good - A generic greeting that closes letters / e-mails any time of the year
B'ezrat Ha'shem - With God's help - When you're hopeful and/or cautious about something
Baruch dayan ha'emet - Praise the Judge of truth - When you first hear about a death... The phrase is said in order "to acknowledge that the poignant mystery and tender thread between life and death is in God's hands, so to speak" (Rabbi Howard Ruben's beautiful explanation)

Let me know if you have other Jewish greetings / phrases you've heard and I left off this list... I'm happy to add more!

Must-Read Articles

Today I read two fantastic articles about re-inventing Jewish education that echo my views of what Jewish education can & should be.  I thought I'd pass them along:

Reinventing Jewish Education by Dr. Jonathan Woocher, eJewishPhilanthropy.com

Religious Schools add Family Programs, New Apps by Rachel Heller, JewishJournal.com

Summer turns to fall...

Hard to believe we are just a few short weeks away from the beginning of the school year!  Where does the time go?  Every summer I go through a similar pattern:

• May - Religious School ends, I frantically finish everything from the previous school year so that the summer months can be spent visioning and preparing for the following year. 
• June - "I have so much time on my hands!"  Haha, right.  I always think that the summer is long and I'll be able to get to all the things that I put off during the school year - clean my office, read the books that have piled up on my desk, spend a lot of one-on-one time with congregants, etc.  However, I start to work on the tachlis (logistical details) of the year to come, as well as visioning & curriculum development, and before I know it, it's...
• July - This month is the meat of my summer.  Other than taking a short vacation, I usually spend July working on teacher contracts, curriculum development, and adult education.  This is also the time I attend workshops, conferences, and generally have conversations that help me to plan out the 'big picture' of Religious School for the upcoming year.
• August - "WHERE DID THE SUMMER GO?"  This is usually my refrain for the month of August, as I become swamped with the details of getting our program up and running by September - finalizing enrollment #s and teacher assignments, ordering books/supplies, assigning classroom spaces, creating and mailing class placement letters, planning and leading a faculty retreat, recruiting and training teen TA's, preparing details for the year-long calendar, developing and working with teams of lay leaders, and of course, working with teachers to plan their programs.  It's a very busy month, and it always flies by.  We also have Camp Kefli in August at Temple Isaiah (which I try to attend here and there), and in some years, the High Holy Days creep up as well.  Then all of a sudden it's...
• September - Back to school!

Hopefully this little overview gives you a sense of what I usually do all summer.  I'm guessing that some people wonder what rabbis and educators do all summer long when families go on vacation and kids go to camp, when Religious School is out of session and our regular cycle of programming is quieter than usual.  For me, summer is a wonderful time to get things done in the office, continue to build relationships with teachers, colleagues, and parents, and do the visioning that can sometimes get muddled during the year. 

Now here comes the school year....!!

"This is Your Brain on Summer"

An article in the NY Times today addresses the major problem of what happens to learning over the summer (i.e. it disappears, or rather, gets backtracked).  The title of the article is 'This is Your Brain on Summer," and it specifically challenges the notion of a 9- or 10-month school year and 2-3 months of nothing but fun and R&R.  While I love the idea that kids need a couple months a year to re-group (as do teachers!), I also recognize as an educator that summer break significantly (and detrimentally) impacts student learning and achievement.  I call this phenomenon, "This is your (Jewish) Brain on Summer." In Religious School, the learning drop is particularly significant with Hebrew.  We spend the school-year trying to help all our kids reach a certain baseline knowledge of Hebrew (or rather, we help them learn to 'decode' Hebrew, to sound out words by identifying letter and vowel combinations).  It's an educational challenge all year long, but by the end of the year, we do see significant improvement.  Most of our kids feel reasonably comfortable with Hebrew decoding by May.  However, we then go on break for the summer, and when they come back in September (almost 4 months later!), many kids have lost much - if not all- of what they learned the previous year.  One of the main reasons for this is that a large percentage of our kids do not see or encounter Hebrew at all over the summer.  If they do not attend services, go to a Jewish summer camp, visit Israel, or have Hebrew books at home, then they are in a Hebrew-poor environment (i.e. one that lacks any connection to Hebrew).  It's parallel to the kids from less affluent backgrounds described in the NY Times article, who spend their summers in environments without a lot of academic / reading enrichment.  For our kids, without an environment over the summer that supports ongoing Hebrew or Jewish learning, they backpedal significantly.  I'm not sure how to address this problem, but I do think it's something to consider when we take a look at our goals for Hebrew education and what's reasonable to accomplish in a supplementary educational setting!

What makes a good teacher?

I'm finally back!  I planned to re-start a blog last year, but then never got around to it.  So, here we go again, hopefully with more success this time... :)

A significant component of my role as Director of Education at Temple Isaiah is to spend time thinking about what makes a good teacher.  How can we find, train, and keep outstanding teachers in our program?  I like to say that there are three key things I look for when I'm hiring someone to teach in our community:

• Jewish background & commitment - Does this person have a strong Jewish / Jewish educational background?  Does this person have a strong Jewish knowledge base?  Does this person live a committed Jewish life?  How does this person express his/her Jewish identity? 
• Pedagogical skills - How will this person deal with classroom management?  How does this person plan lessons and implement them?  How might this person create differentiated instruction so that it meets the needs of all our children?
• Personality - Is this person a mentsch?  Is s/he loving, kind, fun, energetic, engaging, and warm-hearted?  Will our parents and kids love this person?

Of course, there are all kinds of other things I look for, but these are the basics, and I have to say that it's incredibly challenging to find Religious School teachers who are strong in all three categories.  It's more common to find people who are strong in two of these three areas and significantly weaker in one of them (the area of weakness varies from person to person).  So then the question for me is... can I help this person improve in the areas where s/he may be weak?  Or connect the teacher to resources or mentors who will help him or her grow?  Sometimes the answer is 'yes' and sometimes the answer is 'no.'

The question of what makes a good teacher is a hot topic in the world of (secular) education right now.  What kinds of programs train people to be the best teachers they can be?  What skills do people need to learn / develop to be outstanding teachers?  Can educational schools really provide those skills, or are the ed schools themselves falling short?  There's a movement underfoot to make significant changes in the way that teachers are trained, and an interesting article in the NY Times this week examined some of the new teacher training programs.  I'm always curious to find out what's happening in the broader world of education so that we can adapt from best practices to make our teaching staff as strong as it can be. I wonder how professional development at Temple Isaiah can give our teachers the skills they need to do their best in our setting, which is admittedly different (and with different goals) than a public school setting...

Do any of you have thoughts on what makes a good teacher for your children?  What kind of Religious School teacher do you want for your children?