Pardes jewish day school full#

I left full-time education in 2015 to pursue a career in renewable energy, but taught part time at day schools and synagogue Hebrew schools for another two years. As with every piece of media in the course, the students had to use the principles learned from the Torah verses and commentaries to identify and analyze the root causes of that atrocity. One of the final projects was for the students to watch the YouTube confession that the Isla Vista shooter taped and uploaded before his 2014 deadly rampage near UC Santa Barbara, which ended with him killing himself. My students were stunned to find that kids like themselves could become вЂњevil.вЂќ The self-moderated, class circle discussions became even richer and more meaningful. I also showed вЂњThe Wave,вЂќ a short documentary about an experiment by a Palo Alto high school teacher that illustrated the willingness of even Bay Area young people to blindly follow orders. When asked to justify their choices, the girl, with tear-filled eyes, said to the others: вЂњHow can you justify such suffering?вЂќ Almost the whole class chose the вЂњrealвЂќ world of knowledge, but one girl opted for innocence. It was a pleasure to teach.ДЄmong many meaningful moments, I will never forget when the students were asked to choose between a world of innocence, with no sin and limited growth, or a world of sin, knowledge and unlimited growth. During my final three years, the students were transfixed by the course, deeply involved and really learning. I taught this course each of my six years at Kehillah, and each time, I built upon student reactions from the previous year to deepen engagement. And having Sunny speak to the class was an added bonus. These were true stories of violence, with names and places they knew in the Bay Area. I put this into the curriculum to provide real, contemporary stories of violent offenders, creating a living access point for the students. One of the first changes I made was to add a book to the reading list: вЂњDreams from the Monster Factory,вЂќ an honest look inside the prison system written by nationally recognized Bay Area expert Sunny Schwartz. Maintaining the general approach and the strong basis in the same eight Torah verses, I revamped the curriculum while recalling the parting words I had heard from Susan Wall, head of the Pardes Educators Program: вЂњRelevance, relevance, relevance.вЂќ Regardless, Kehillah slated the course for another year. That first yearвЂ™s class was really raw, rough and raucous. However, as a novice teacher with payes, a long beard and lots of nerves, I failed to focus on where and when my students were living. My first task was to hack it up into small pieces and make it relevant to 40 10 th-grade students I had never met.

Pardes jewish day school full#

The title of the red-bound booklet matched the name of the course I was to teach: вЂњThe Origins of Human Violence.вЂќ It was substantial, full of Torah sources, exercises, lessons and discussion materials. Only one course had a curriculum/reader of any kind it was developed by the brilliant Noam Zion and published by the Shalom Hartman Institute. On my first day at Kehillah, I was handed the names of the courses I would teach and left in a corner of a renovated building to figure out where to begin. In 2009, I started teaching at Kehillah High in Palo Alto, after seven years of learning Torah in Israel, including a masterвЂ™s in Jewish education from the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem. Since then, however, my continued journey to provide relevance in the Jewish studies classroom, and watching my kids go through Bay Area day schools, showed me why Steinhardt was right, and one approach to address it. I was a highly dedicated Jewish studies teacher at the time and was shocked by this. At his last appearance at Kehillah Jewish High School before his death, San Francisco Jewish philanthropist Warren Hellman quoted New York Jewish philanthropist Michael Steinhardt: