Stepping Through the Door Together - Now's the Time

“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!”  I feel like the white rabbit.  You know, rushing hither and yon, trying to figure out how to get where I need to go without being too distracted by all the tweets, network posts, and blogs I follow; not to mention the old technologies like the printed word and emails. There is so much information available to us.  If I miss a day of twitter, I feel it’s a catastrophe.

I’m not a technical neophyte.  I sort of know what’s going on.  Can you imagine being someone who has never tweeted, doesn’t know what a wiki is, thinks a glog is a type of fruit, and is trying to just stay afloat in this ever changing new world, let alone explore the Jewish educational cloud?  There are so many resources and new technologies that appear daily.  It’s easy to be intimidated.  There are probably fantastic teachers in the front lines who are so afraid of trying to figure this stuff out that they retreat into their old tried but true habits, becoming increasingly irrelevant in the classroom.  I know that there are folks who left both the JEA and NATE conferences with a sense of despair at not knowing how to proceed. Those who were unable to attend either conference are even more lost.  I believe that the time has come for us to help our teachers, especially those working in congregational/supplemental schools, break out of their shells to find a new comfort level in tomorrow.

We can lower the level of stress associated with learning new edtech skills by creating an accessible portal through which our teachers will learn to use the tools they need to move forward.  We are all searching for scrapes of knowledge wherever we can find them.  There’s too much out there that’s spread all over the place. We no longer have the one conference a year where we all came together to learn.  Now's the time to get organized again!

This is what I propose:  Let's create a new trans-denominational platform for Jewish educators of all flavors to gather virtually or, if practical and affordable, f2f  to explore the possibilities that tomorrow presents.  This collaborative cloud-based venue would be a forum that would promote dialogue, teaching and learning. It would be a consortium of all professional development providers that would “push” the opportunities to learn to us all.  I’m talking one-stop-shopping - a mall for Jewish education. It would be one venue that would offer educators and knowledge seekers ALL the opportunities and resources to enhance the field of Jewish education:  A 21^st century virtual Pumbadita, if you will - an on-line center for Jewish learning that would be comprehensive, all inclusive and easy to access.

This idea will be made real as a result of cooperation and collaboration between all Jewish education service providers, both those affiliated with a movement, like NATE and the JEA, as well as others like JESNA and PELIE. We all need to work together.  We need to move forward now.

I’ve started to have conversations about this vision with individuals affiliated with different groups and organizations. People are interested in seeing this come to fruition. I believe it is now the appropriate moment to widen the circle and have an expanded group of those who care about the future of Jewish education come together and brainstorm how to make a new Jewish Professional Learning Network happen.  Dr. Jonathan Woocher, the Chief Ideas Officer and Director of  the Lippman Kanfer Institute, has indicated that he is happy to host such a web meeting.

This is a concrete call to action. If you are interested in joining in the conversation and taking part in a virtual brainstorming session, email me, Peter Eckstein at terrapin@mindspring.com

If not now, when?

A Testimony to Jewish Educators

Robyn Faintich (@Jewishgps and JewishGPS) posted this piece entitled "Todah Rabah to our Educators!"on Davar Acher-On the Other Hand  blog on Sunday. In it she celebrates the profession of Jewish educators and their role in building the Jewish future. As a Director of Education in a congregational school, I would like to say Todah Rabah to Robyn for her words. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Todah Rabah to our Educators!

In the world of Jewish education, the people who run our synagogue religious schools are often the most under-appreciated and under-recognized. We often defer to the role our rabbis and cantors play when reflecting on the Jewish education of our children and certainly the role a child’s Hebrew tutor plays. But behind the scenes running the religious school is a director of education (sometimes known as the principal) who cares about the Jewish journey of the students and their families.

For the last two weeks, I have traveled across the country to participate and present at professional learning conferences designed for these educators. The Conservative movement’s Jewish Educators’ Assembly (JEA) and the Reform movement’s National Association of Temple Educators (NATE) sponsored the two events held in Philadelphia/New Jersey and Seattle respectively.

Collectively, over 450 educators gathered to learn about the challenges and opportunities that technology and social media offer us in education. (Yes, both conferences engaged in the same theme.) While together in their respective conferences, educators took the opportunity to network, collaborate, and engage in meta-level conversations about Jewish education in the 21^st century. If you want a glimpse at all they learned and toiled with, you can check out the twitter feeds for #jea59 and #nateseattle. 

I had the opportunity to present at both conferences, which gave me the chance to learn with the participants in a unique way. These educators work hard. They work hard at their own learning. I only wish their students and the parents could see them hard at work. I wish they saw the role modeling in life-long learning these school leaders engage in. In addition to the core education components, each of the conferences included aspects of Torah L’shma (text study for the sake of study), offered t’filah, and community-building activities. A perfect dugmah (example) of what our synagogues are trying to offer the student learners. From sun-up at 8 a.m. until way past sun-down (sometimes after 11 p.m.) these educators gave 1000% of themselves for the sake of their own learning, for the sake of being better so that they can serve our people better.

These educators don’t make a fortune; they don’t do the work because of the first-class perks they get, or the year-end bonuses. They do this work because it is a true passion for each and every one of them. So the next time you wonder through the halls of your synagogue, take time to peak your head into the office of the education director, and just thank him/her for dedicating themselves to this sacred work.

Learning To Read All Over Again: Part 2

# 1. Our task as Jewish educators is to prepare and motivate students to use their power, talent, and passion to build their own Jewish lives, rooted in who they are and what they consider important. When through this individualized Jewish exploration, am’cha leads themselves into their own dreams, they will contribute in new and beautiful ways to the diversity of Jewish life. Even in these challenging times, there is no greater investment we could make. (Beth Cousens: http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/making-jewish-meaning/)

#2. The core of any mature tree is old wood. The old wood is crucial to maintaining the tree’s structure, its ability to withstand the changing winds, but no growth is going on there. The living processes that are the growth of the tree, its message to the future, take place only in the tree’s newest and outermost ring. We today are that outermost ring, and the growing is up to us. (Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, quoted in Contemporary American Judaism by Dana Evan Kaplan)

#3. One Book, One Twitter: What the hell do we do now, #1b1t? (@crowdsourcing)

#4. Chester Middle School Principal Ernie Jackson… challenged reading and social studies teacher Mel Wesenberg to find ways to use text messaging to teach poetry. The results were surprising: Kids who used their cell phones to boil down the main points of the stanzas got 80 percent of the questions about a poem correct on a state test. Kids taught the same poem in the traditional way – reading, reciting and discussing – got only 40 percent of the questions right. (http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100426/NEWS/100429736)

In my last post I pondered the concept of cultural and technological literacy, and how it applies to the craft of Jewish teaching. I just read an article written by Beth Cousens, (see #1, above) that articulated the need for personal ownership of knowledge. Learning needs a heart to be real. Without belonging to the student, it becomes sterile, and ultimately besides the point. But wait…there’s more.

I’ve just finished Contemporary American Judaism by Dana Evan Kaplan. It’s a fascinating read that describes how we ended up where we are today. Reb Zalman’s musings on the relationship between tree growth and the Jewish tomorrow (see #2) struck a chord in me, articulating the dynamic between the past, the future and today’s students. Jewish learning is a force that connects all generations. This linkage, by necessity, leads to an obligation. We are each responsible, one for the other – including teaching those who have not yet been born. The meaning we create leads to conceptualizations that have yet to be grasped. But wait…there’s more.

I imagine you’ve all heard of the concept of “One Book, One Community”, where a whole community reads and discusses a book - all in “the real world”. Wired Magazine’s Jeff Howe (@crowdsourcing) has gone one step further, proposing and making real an idea so simple in its elegance: a community in the twitterverse will read one book and then discuss it “one tweet at a time” (#3). Thousands of “tweeps” (denizens of the twitterverse) will exchange ideas about a piece of modern American fiction (in this case American Gods by Neil Gaiman). The kehillah, the community, is redefined, giving birth to new modes of interaction. A new type of learning community is born. The revolutionary Talmudic trans-generational conversations of the past have led us to digital discussions in virtual time. But wait…there’s more.

A New York State middle school has made a successful step in integrating the way 21^st century technology can be used in a language program, using cell phone texting as a teaching tool (#4). The initial results seem positive, the validity of state testing as a valid measure of student achievement being in question, notwithstanding. The implications of this lead us to consider the creation of a new form of midrash, reflecting new forms of realities and unthought-of technologies.

Where does this lead us?

The new language in which we need to immerse ourselves to reach our students is a tool that forces us to encounter a world in which poetry and novels can be interpreted in 140 characters. It’s a world where the mechanics of learning are newly defined in the contexts of digital brains and the ability to hyperconnect: to actively participate in an interactive virtual world where information from a myriad of sources is assimilated, translated and reduced to bits and bytes that are easily manipulated by these 21^st century minds. When we build our new models for learning and teaching, we need to understand the hardwiring in our students’ heads, taking advantage of its schematics as an opportunity to grant our students the gift of creating personal meaning as they initiate their own Jewish explorations.

As a tree grows it adds new rings on old; its roots grow deeper and its branches longer and higher. It expands in all directions, taking nourishment from the earth, the air, and from itself: old wood feeding the new. Reb Zalman is right: We are currently the outermost ring; it’s up to us to provide the sustenance that will nurture the next one.

Learning To Read All Over Again

It’s that time of year again. I’m not talking about Yom HaAtzmaut, or Shavuot. I’m not even referring to end of the year progress reports, Hebrew evaluations and confirmation services. This is the time that my thoughts focus on the next few years. What will my school look like in a year or two? How can I, in partnership with my school parents, initiate and implement constructive and transformational change?

There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around the cloud these days. One I just discovered can be found at Yerusha (here: http://www.yerusha.org/index.html and here: http://www.forward.com/articles/127124/). This new model of Jewish education aspires to returning parents to the role of primary educator through learning experiences that integrate technology and homeschooling. I would love to know how and if it works. I do know that there is much to learn from this program. This is just one proposal – one way that we can reach our students, whoever they are.

I recently attended the 2010 Technology Conference hosted by the Palm Beach County School District. There, I explored how the iGeneration (or whatever you want to call folks born in the last decade or so) speak a different language. We educators need to adapt to shifting notions of literacy, adopting the concept of “Transliteracy”: the ability to read, write and interact across an array of platforms and tools. This doesn’t just mean that we need to integrate the iTouch and Google Earth into our lessons. What it demands from us is that we must re-learn how to read. It is incumbent upon us to develop the ability to understand the new alphabet that our students are embracing. At the same time, we need to learn to listen to the language our school parents are speaking, as they strive to find ways of connecting their kids to a Jewish future.

Jason Ohler defines literacy as “being able to consume and produce the media forms of the day. The default media form has shifted from the essay to the multimedia collage.” (http://www.jasonohler.com/storytelling/beyondwords.cfm). What this means in the world of Jewish educational engagement is that we need to reset our defaults. These new modules may vary from cell phone texting as a classroom tool to a community oriented spiritual experience by a lake. It doesn’t matter if the learning is electric or organic. Labels are irrelevant. What matters is not that we can decode a language – reciting a string of symbols without comprehension - but that we can really read - ascribing meaning to the words written in those symbols. It means immersing ourselves in a new literacy that will shape how the future will be perceived. It means that maybe, if we become fluent enough in these new languages, we too can become writers, reaching the readers, opening doors to Jewish tomorrows.

But first we need to learn to read all over again.

One Way or Another

I just read a depressing column in last week’s Forward ( http://forward.com/articles/120123/). It was written by Rabbi Irving Greenberg and it was entitled “There is No Alternative to Day Schools”. In the piece Rabbi Greenberg spelled out his case for massive funding for Day School education, declaring that that there is no other alternative in the fight against assimilation. He calls for the organized Jewish community to “muster its will to live and step up to pay the price – whatever it costs – for the highest level of Jewish education for its young.” Great sentiments. I agree with Rabbi Greenberg. Unfortunately, the solution he is proposing marginalizes most American Jews. That’s why it’s sad.

The majority of those getting any Jewish education in the U.S. do NOT attend Day Schools. Most of them have chosen the path of Congregational education. There are a lot of reasons, cost being just one. The point is that this is where most of the kids are and, I believe, where they will be in the future. So to declare that the Jewish Community needs to invest its education resources primarily in Day Schools ignores the reality of American Jewish life.

Congregational schools (Hebrew Schools, Supplementary Schools, whatever you want to call them) have gotten a bad rap over the years - in some cases deservedly so. Many of us “of a certain age” recall with shudders our Hebrew School experiences. Ironically, some of us have chosen, davka, to work in Jewish education to make it better. That’s the point. There are many Jewish educators in North America who are working very hard to recreate the Congregational School, reformatting it if you will. We’re experimenting with technology, experiential education, off-site learning, service-learning, camp-like experiences. You will find us at conferences, or in the cloud on Twitter and Google Wave. Those of us who work in Jewish education and are affiliated with Synagogue schools understand that the reality of the Jewish community is expressed in its diversity. There is no ONE way. We need to reach the kids however we can. This means that Day Schools, by definition, are definitely NOT the only alternative.

The organized Jewish community (i.e. federations) doesn’t seem to get this message. They are proud of the amount of money they give their community Day Schools, but when asked about how much they give to synagogue schools, in many cases the sound of silence reigns supreme. Amending Rabbi Greenbergs dramatic call, I believe that community organizations must “muster their will” to promote ALL Jewish education, embracing the diversity that is the strength of Judaism. It is time for synagogues and other non-Day School entities to have a seat at the community table when the discussion turns to funding the education of the next generation.

I’m not sure if Rabbi Greenberg will ever see these words. If you do, Rabbi, please understand that I wrote them with only respect for you and your message. I hope that you can understand that the future of Judaism that is embodied in our young people is rooted in more than one type of learning. During the Pesach seder we embrace the four sons, reveling in how they come to us with different questions (even if we don’t like the way they are asked), looking for answers that speak to them. We must remember that they are our children. We cannot turn them away.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?

San Francisco - an incredible city. I just returned from what I thought would be a 5 day respite from my “real world”. I explored, what was for me, a new corner of the globe. The food, the climate, and the tourist attractions – all were unforgettable. And so was the real world I crashed into - the homeless denizens of the Bay Area: that community of rootless individuals living in doorways, panhandling, living their lives – if that’s what you can call it – the best they can. I kept asking myself “Why?”

While on my vacation, I kept up, as best I could, with my on-line life (much to my wife’s chagrin!) A theme that popped up was about the individualistic nature of today’s Jewish young people. They, it seems, want to know what Judaism and the Jewish community can do for them as individuals. What can the “we” do for “me”? Okay, in the context of the American ethos of hyper-individualism (sort of an extension of Ayn Rand’s concept of selfishness as a virtue), American Jews seem to strive for individual fulfillment in their Jewish identity. How does this inform the work we do as Jewish educators? How do we teach that “us” matters?

We’ve been mulling over the apparent failure of contemporary Jewish education. We’ve been trying to figure out how to make being a Jew in the 21^st century meaningful to the individual. Maybe we are focusing on the wrong thing. I’m not sure if the Jews of the future who are growing up today hear God the way we or our parents do: through ritual, B’nai Mitzvah, Hebrew, Israel. We need to find new hearing aids.

The lost souls of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district got me thinking about how holiness and community can be found by supporting the fallen, raising them from the doorways that are their beds. Perhaps creating Jewish schools of conscience, schools where mitzvot bein adam l'chavero – obligations relating to human interactions - are taught as being the essence of Jewish community, is a direction that we can take to help students hear God again. Maybe through teaching that together we can make a difference in the world, we would be providing the key that would help the one student join with the many, creating a compelling reason to be part of something larger. Conceivably, the concept of Klal Yisrael may need to be redefined as the Jewish path that starts with study, leads to action, and ends with a new and different world. Jewish, because inherent in this old-new Halacha is the word tzedek – justice.

Who knows? Maybe our children will find God living on Market Street.

Jewish Bifocals

My kid, the youngest, Keren, is going to college tomorrow. I’ve spent the day helping her pack, buying last minute electronics (how can she NOT have a good speaker system hooked up to her MacBook?) and printer cartridges. I’m doing what I can to get her ready for the next chapter.

And I wonder – does she have the tools she will need to make choices about the world? Through which lenses will she observe and judge what is happening? How will she meet the future?

It got me thinking about how other kids are prepared to deal with the vicissitudes of society. What do we teach them, especially in religious/Hebrew school? What kids learn in many Jewish congregational schools today seems to be linked to religion. God. Holidays. Thou shall and Thou shall not. I’m not sure that’s what Judaism is all about. I think it’s more about how we live our lives. What we do. These are the lenses through which we see the world. Our job as Jewish parents and educators is to teach our kids how to see what goes on in the world from a Jewish perspective. Jewish bifocals if you will.

We need to find ways of teaching that acting Jewish doesn’t end with kashrut, or t’fillin, going to services or wearing kippot. These are the means. The ritual we teach, the way we celebrate and mourn; all serve as spiritual signposts pointing the way towards having a positive impact on the world. I call that Jewish Attitudinal Learning: Teaching Jewish values that touch our students’ lives today. Copping a Jewish attitude to help us decide how live. We need to supply our kids with the skills to confront the issues of the future.

As I drive the SUV we’re renting with all the boxes and refrigerator we’re putting in her dorm room, I’ll think about the choices she’ll be making. What will she do with the Jewish knowledge she’s garnered over the years? I’m hoping she’ll make the right choices – whatever those are. If you are into Harry Potter, you’ll recognize the image of portraits of wizards past, looking benignly upon the students of Hogwarts. I’m hoping that the images looking upon Keren and all our students are Jewish wizards who’ve laid the foundation for a future based on Jewish vision.

We Jewish educators – teachers and parents – are our children’s ophthalmologists. Hopefully we diagnosed correctly and wrote the right prescription.

Of Parking Meters and Particle Colliders

At the beach I was flummoxed by technology. Once upon a time we’d go the shore, find a parking spot and deposit whatever loose change we had into the parking meter. There has been a revolution, though. The old fashioned parking meter was replaced by a computerized one, which now handles the entire lot. We keyed in our parking space number, deposited the requisite amount of quarters, and the meter remembered how much time we had. Cool! For some reason however, the-powers-that-be determined to revert to a hybrid system: No more parking numbers. We deposit our quarters and then (are you ready for this high tech solution?) we receive a paper receipt that we must place face-up on the driver’s side dash. It seems that the technological innovators of South Florida didn’t totally get what they were doing. It’s the old 1 step – 2 step shuffle. Backwards.

Recently I’ve read about the problems facing CERN’s Large Hadron Particle Collider - a piece of super advanced science equipment that was felled after only 9 days of operation by essentially an electrical short. So far it’s taken a year to figure out how to fix it. Sometimes I think modern technology is enthusiastically embraced without fully understanding the ramifications or consequences.

I’m not suggesting anything as luddite as to slow down. We need to progress. My question is if we’re moving too fast for everyone else? This morning’s NY Times had an article about the move into digital textbooks. You can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?scp=4&sq=tamar%20lewin&st=cse. It’s not that it’s a bad idea. I embrace it, but the question (raised in the article) is what to do with kids who don’t have computers. Will the technology we need to utilize to move forward have an unintended side affect of creating a class of people who don’t have equal access - the educational haves and have-nots? We need to think this process through to its logical conclusion.

So how do we not repeat the mistake of the Delray Beach Ministry of Parking or CERN? How do we take control of the use of technology in our classrooms without paying a price? The particle collider costs something like $10 billion. The cost of our misusing technology or (worse) misunderstanding the ramifications of using these tools in the Jewish classroom is much higher. Yes, we’ll make mistakes and pay good money for them. This will not make our congregational funders pleased – they already have limited tolerance for trial and error anyway. But it’s the kids that concern me the most. I don’t think we want to lose an entire generation because we didn’t totally understand what we were doing.

As we travel into the yet uncharted void of the digital universe, it seems to me that we need to make sure of three things: That we are comfortable with the technology, that the teachers who will be the front line practitioners, understand how these tools work, and that the students don’t suffer from OUR growing pains. The kids will have no patience for our fumbling. On our journey, we need to tether our teachers and students with us. But the line needs to be short. We need to be able to reel them in quickly. We can’t lose them. The worst sin of an educator is irrelevance. It’s a price we can’t pay.

The point of teaching Hebrew is...?

It’s been awhile since I’ve last written. I’ve been focusing on the tachlis of creating a meaningful learning experience for my students – the kids who will be attending the religious school I’m running.

I’ve been obsessing on Hebrew lately. What’s the purpose of teaching decoding to kids? Remember, reading implies comprehension. My guess is that most kids, despite our best efforts, really don’t understand (or don’t care about) the meaning of the Hebrew they’re reciting. They just mouth the sounds: ergo decoding. At the risk of sounding really cynical, I’m going to guess that a large chunk of the parents who send their kids to a congregational school do it for one main reason – to prevent performance anxiety. They want their kids to shine at their 13-year-old-coming-out-party. Is this the really the point of what we Jewish educators are doing?

The other day, my friend Adrian Durlestor sent out the following tweet: “how far over prevailing synagogue suppl sch rates can independent jewish suppl school reasonably charge?” It got me thinking about the purpose of congregational schools. It’s certainly NOT supplementary. The idea that our schools “supplement” what our kids learn at home became irrelevant probably in the 50’s or 60’s. Nowadays Jewish education is contracted out to Jewish educators. And the failure of the “supplementary school system” is that successfully performing at one’s bar/bat mitzvah is the definition of a good religious school education for many of the parents.

Where did we go wrong? I’m not sure the answer really matters. These parents who grew up in the congregational school system of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s are just passing on to their children what their experiences taught them. It’s more where we go from here - which is what I’m struggling with.

Do we teach Hebrew so that the kids can decode their Torah portions without error, or because the Hebrew language is that which defines the Jewish people? Remember – back in the 3rd century BCE (!) the Torah was translated into Greek by 70 rabbis for the Greek speaking Jews of the Diaspora. I wonder if back then they were having the same conversation we’re having now about Hebrew education. What does this tell us about the goals of teaching Hebrew? Where do we put our energy? What should be the focus of whatever Hebrew instruction we implement? Given the realities of the amount of time we have the kids, what should we be aiming to accomplish?

The Tony Awards made me think...

When I started out in Jewbiz back in ’93, I was hired to run a Reform-Conservative supplementary school, serving the needs of two neighboring synagogues separated only by three city blocks and one religious movement. The experiment was born out of financial need, and died for the some reason. The powers-that-be decided after 6 years that the combined school was no longer financially beneficial (the idea of creating community be damned) so the time had come to create separate schools.

What this teaches us is that in the current reality many think it is easier to make our own Shabbat. And you know what? Sometimes that works. Sometimes collaborating with another synagogue doesn’t work. Is that intrinsically bad? Torah Aura recently tweeted a link to a piece on cooperative schooling – which I guess is another way of saying community school. The referenced article waxed prosaic on sharing resources. Great, if it...works. But one size doesn’t fit all. Which means that making my own Shabbat doesn’t negate your Shabbat, and in fact may help you light the candles.

That being said, on the Tony awards one of the winners talked about the concept of Fine Arts – how that means that the craft of acting is constantly being tweaked and modified. That’s sort of like what we, as Jewish educators and passers-on-of-traditions, are doing, or should be doing. Looking at what we are transmitting and making sure it makes sense to those receiving our message.

Which brings me back to the question: how do we create meaningful opportunities for Jewish engagement in each of our communities? And what does the concept of engagement mean? What is Jewish Fine Arts?

The Fifth Child - the first question

As a lurker in the Jewish blogosphere, it’s taken me a while to get the courage to stop being a voyeur, and to start getting into the thick of things - virtually speaking. So here goes:

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present my first foray into blogging: “The Fifth Child”.

We’re familiar with the 4 sons of Passover: the wise, the wicked, the simple and the one who doesn’t even know how to ask. These characters are meant to teach us that we must recognize the different types of learners that cross our paths. I think that many of us (including yours truly) fits into a fifth category – a combination of all of the above. Sometimes I know something and want to find out more. Sometimes I revel in questioning authority. At times I really don’t know what’s going on. And then every once in a while I don’t even know how to ask. Ergo “The Fifth Child”.

I’ll be writing about questions I have that touch upon how the modern world interfaces with the Jewish past, present and future. With answers that you can provide, together we can explore ways that will enable us to transmit what we know (or think we know) to the next generation.

I start with a couple of (my) "givens":

1) Technology, such as twitter, Second Life and iPods, is poised to be the connective tissue that links tomorrow's Jews to Judaism and the Jewish community today.

2) Learning and teaching need to be experiential. The effectiveness of what has been dubbed “formal education” has been exposed to be a myth, especially in supplementary Jewish education. We understand that learning must involve doing, experiences.

Does anyone out there have other "givens"? Anyone disagree with mine? Let's start the conversation.

I think it’s time for tachlis…what works and what doesn’t. As a Jewish educator in a congregational setting, I am fascinated by how we can engage our students with their Jewish heritage. I’m not talking about ideas that can be applied the day after tomorrow (like my friend, Adrian Durlester’s idea of divorcing supplementary schools from synagogues. Check out his blog at migdalorguysblog.blogspot.com.) I want to know what we can do this afternoon, and tomorrow. What can we do to keep our students interested? What can we do to get the parents to park their cars and to come into the building? What works? What doesn’t?

The next question, of course, is what I mean by the concept of “our Jewish heritage”? Well, that’s the 64 thousand shekel question. I maintain that it is time for us to reevaluate what we are teaching. What (if any) role does the modern State of Israel play in the lives of 21^st century American Jews? Do denominations matter? And when you get down to it…what in tarnations IS a Jew anyway? In a world made up of what Joey Kurtzman of Jewcy.com called “Frankenjews” (www.jewcy.com/dialogue/2007-06-11/joey1), what does it mean to be a Member of the Tribe? How does it impact what we teach about ourselves and about the idea of Klal Yisrael?

I’ll stop here for now. If anyone is reading this, please respond – let’s start a discussion about what are the practical steps in creating a meaningful Jewish future.