Tag Archives: Dialogue

Education

The Perfect School Day

8 Comments

It’s probably clear from this blog by now that education is very (dare I say “increasingly”?) important to me. I’ve written a lot about education in general, and more specifically on the purpose of education. Much of what prompted those posts came from reflection and discussion with a friend when I was working in Singapore. 

Here are some of my past writings on education:

We’ve also literally written thousands of unpublished words on the topic, including over 10,000 words in an unfinished e-book that has been on the back burner for months, but spurred on most of my education-related thinking over the past year or so. I’ve rethought a lot of what I “knew” about school, teachers, and students and I’m excited about the possibility of true education reform.

So with all the abstract philosophical thought on the topic and much reviewing of the educational literature, here is a complete “perfect day” of secondary school as my friend and I envision it.

The Daily Schedule
9:00 AM – Start of school. This isn’t super important, other than it isn’t super early. Many high school students naturally sleep in a bit later due to staying up later and there really isn’t any reason to begin at 7:00 AM.

9:00-10:30 AM – Reading. Ideally this is aimed at current local, national, international, or global problems with current events from the news or other texts. The goal is simply to be aware at the beginning of each day of the suffering that is taking place all around us. This is not done to instill pessimism, but to inspire compassion – the desire to alleviate suffering in others. Literature that deals with human created suffering such as Frankenstein make for good selections during this time as well.

Conversation. This is a time to discuss what’s been read and share what interests and engages us. There can be a specific topic for this first hour, say sex trafficking of women around the world, or more open-ended reading of current affairs and sharing issues of personal interests. The aim is simply to engage in meaningful conversation about the state of the world with the purpose of refining ever more acutely what causes suffering and understanding the variety of contexts that contribute to it.

Investigation. This is a time to investigate what solutions have been generated for the causes of suffering we’ve been reading and discussing and to figure out what we can do as individuals, a group, and a community (both locally and societally) to alleviate it. This should spur lots of insight and opportunities for the social entrepreneurship block to come later in the day as possible gaps are identified in current attempts to deal with issues. Students might investigate political, economic, social, or technological solutions that have been attempted to deal with world problems.

10:30-11:00 AM – Break. This is a time to simply relax, have a snack if needed and transition to the next phase of the day.

11:00 AM-12:30 PM  – Physical education. This is a time for strength training, cardiovascular training, mobility training, and other athletics. This is also an opportunity to meet in small groups or one-on-one to discuss nutrition, mental health, and emotional health in order to increase and monitor overall well-being. The aim is pragmatic, how do we take care of ourselves as humans?

12:30-1:10 PM – Lunch.

1:10-2:40 PM – Social entrepreneurship. This is a time to work collaboratively on projects that aim to alleviate suffering and improve the world. Creativity, service, design, innovation, STEM, and business skills are intermingled in order to develop projects and programs that would have the greatest possible impact in any particular area. All members of the school community spend this time actively engaged in social entrepreneurship work, which could also include supporting one another’s enterprises, meeting with community partners and facilitators, and working off campus. This is also an opportunity to attend roundtable discussions to present work completed so far and elicit feedback from others, as well as figure out collaborative partnerships.

2:40-3:00 PM – Break.

3:00-4:30 PM – Personal growth and well-being. This is a time to end the day on a positive note, examining personal strengths, goals, and psychological states. This is also time to follow individual passions, such as reading literature, playing music, learning languages, creative writing, playing sports, making videos, blogging, or simply relaxing. The rejuvenation that comes from this part of the day will help the following day to commence with similar excitement. Engagement and flow should occur often and students can leave for the day feeling charged and full of zeal.

A Day in the Life of a Student
“Air pollution increases amidst warnings.”
“Migrants face deportation.”
“Refugees seek urgent medical care”

Maia stretches and looks up. It’s nearly 9:30, the end of the half-hour reading block that begins the day. Maia, her peers, and their teachers have been together as a team for the past year and a half. While they don’t always agree on how to most effectively tackle the suffering in the world, they care for each other and about those around them.

Soon, there’s enough movement to indicate that the readers are ready to talk. They readjust themselves around the room, remaining comfortable, but better able to see and hear each other.

“I’ve been reading a lot about climate change today.” The comment comes from a student perched on an ottoman next to a stack of books with titles like The Age of Sustainable Development.

“Did you see the New York Times article on the summit?” Maia asks, still sitting against the wall. “There’s a picture of the Doomsday Clock in my head.”

“I thought Canada put up a particularly strong stance, actually, and that might push other countries to follow through with caps on emissions.” A student new to the group states, sitting at a desk.

“That’s pretty broad, though,” says a student on the floor near Maia. “Yesterday, I read a lot of this book on the Copenhagen Consensus and there are real proposals that real people are working on, but it’s hard to tell whether emission caps are actually more effective than other suggestions, like bioengineering. On the one hand, it’s an easier sell. So maybe that’s better than nothing.”

The conversation continues for about thirty minutes and covers a range of topics from climate change to micronutrient deficiencies in small children. As always, the focus is on understanding why suffering occurs. Gradually, students return to their laptops and put in headphones, ready to move on from discussion.

Feeling agency to act is important. Maia and several classmates have lately been investigating vaccination efforts in Africa. They read Half the Sky together earlier in the year, which prompted questions about sex trafficking due to poverty, leading to a foray into tropical diseases. When they come across a new report on Ebola, one group member calls over a teacher to ask about virus mutations while others gather around a YouTube video explaining the science.

After about thirty minutes, it’s time to stop. Maia has learned to monitor her body for fatigue and tries to pause in her work before reaching a point of frustration. While some stay to continue working, Maia needs a half-hour of relaxation and maybe some frisbee. She takes an apple out of her bag and joins a loud group of friends on their way outside.

Frisbee leaves Maia feeling warmed up and ready to keep moving. She has a meeting with a nutrition counselor at 11, the beginning of the physical education block. After a long exploration of ethics and sentience, Maia has decided to become a vegetarian and wants guidance on her new diet. If she can’t take care of herself, she can’t make the world a better place. A guidance counselor taught her that last year after she experienced a series of anxiety attacks. After her meeting, Maia joins a group of classmates for a trail run in the woods on the edges of campus.

When they get back to the gym, Maia heads straight to her favorite coach. She wants to add mobility training to keep her hips mobile for the barbell squats she already does with the hope of squatting one and a half times her own body weight. She found a series of exercises online and asks for help with her form. The gym begins to clear out around 12:30 as students freshen up before lunch.

The afternoon campus is unrecognizable from the calm of the morning. Teachers, students, and community members are everywhere, all working on a myriad of social entrepreneurship projects. Maia’s group is putting together an education campaign about vaccination. They’ve partnered with another group focusing on fundraising efforts to implement the campaign. Each group takes a turn updating the other on what they’ve accomplished since their last check-in two weeks earlier. A teacher joins the groups to ask whether they’ve contacted any humanitarian aid agencies, which Maia’s group adds to their task list. Across the room, a few students and teachers are gathered around a whiteboard with a series of questions: “How do we create vaccines? What are they? Are there vaccines we don’t have, but would like to have? What’s been done to create them? Can we try making one?” Pointing this out to her group members, Maia joins in the discussion. This could be another good partnership.

It’s 2:45 by the time Maia’s group decides to stop for the day. They have a “next steps” action plan that should get them through the rest of the week. Other groups have already paused in their social entrepreneurship work and gone back outside to take a break.

Maia returns to her locker for her yoga mat and makes her way to an open studio space. After learning about yoga and meditation from a friend last year, Maia started an afternoon yoga class during the personal growth block. At the beginning of class, she invites each person to check in with themselves and set an intention for their practice. They’ll be in this space for an hour so she encourages them to focus on altruism, approaching each person with the goal of enhancing their overall well-being in every interaction.

After class, Maia steps over a robot whizzing down the hallway and follows the sounds of yelling and cheering to a room at the end of the hall. Someone mentioned a new virtual reality video game and maybe these are the people to ask about it.

At 4:30, Maia joins the waves of students leaving campus. She feels content, optimistic about the work she’s doing, and already looking forward to meeting with her project group again tomorrow. She makes a mental note to see what the team of teachers has been working on; she hasn’t really talked with them this week. Maia flips through her phone to a podcast recorded daily by a group of students.

“Good afternoon,” the host begins. “Thanks for joining us on What to Be. Today’s special guest is the executive chef at a local restaurant that provides job training and childcare for mothers.”

Maia smiles. That chef is a friend who graduated two years ago. Cool.

Final Thoughts
The actual blocked timing of much of this day ought to be more flexible than is written out here. It’s important that students learn how to manage their time and what is important. If they are fully wrapped up in a project they are working on involving social entrepreneurship, it is in no way urgent that they stop so they can move onto the final chunk of the day focused on personal growth and well-being; they are almost certainly already feeling a sense of personal growth and well-being if they are truly engaged in the project and feel a deep sense of meaning and purpose. Let them continue on.

The shape of this day is designed so that students can be exposed to problems early, work hard on thinking about and reflecting on them, take a break to physically recharge with exercise and food, move onto solving problems and creating value in the world for others, and then finish with some personal “me” time that explores what gives each of us pleasure and a sense of well-being. They will be prepared to act as responsible citizens who can think critically and participate in civic debates while also being ready for employment that is purposeful and creative. When not acting as citizens or employees they will understand how to relax and enjoy themselves in personal activities that contribute to a sense of rejuvenation and flow.

Learn, exercise, connect, create, be. Do our students really need to focus on anything else?

Education

Just a Number

Leave a comment

Being You Isn’t Enough
I overheard a conversation between two young women in the subway earlier this week that provoked a reaction that was at once horror, heartache, and shock. The conversation went like this:

Girl A: How do I get nice skin like yours?
Girl B: Girl, you gotta wash your face twice a day. Do you do that?
Girl A: Ugh no. That’s so much work.
Girl B: But you’ve got to do it. Otherwise there’s no hope.
Girl A: Well, I think if he’s going to like me, he’s going to like me.
Girl B: Yeah, but you need to be realistic. I mean, if you’re a 7 shooting for 11 . . . you have to be realistic.
Girl A: Yeah, that’s true. I think I’m probably . . . well . . . what would you say I am?
Girl B: Haha um maybe 8?

Wow.

Wow.

As the girls got off the train, I was stunned. Since when do women refer to themselves not as people but as numbers on a rating scale, where 1 is presumably synonymous with “troll” and unattainable 10 isn’t even high enough if we’re suddenly including 11? (Not to mention that Girl B clearly needs friends who value all that lies below the surface, which is everything that actually makes a person beautiful.)

Exploring Language
I wonder how we’ve gone so wrong. Have we forgotten to tell our girls to care about who they are rather than what they look like? Have we forgotten to communicate that being a good person, whether male or female, is what actually matters?

Perhaps we have forgotten.

Perhaps we have been so caught up in trying to understand recent world events that we lost track of what’s happening right in front of us. Perhaps we need to take a step back, look at ourselves, and make changes to the ways we talk to and about each other, and interact with each other.

I wonder if this conversation would have taken place in such stark terms (“you’re probably an 8 so wash your face and maybe there’s hope that he’ll like you”) prior to Donald Trump’s election. I wonder if this conversation would have taken place if the popular vote actually decided the next president. There has been a steady devaluing of diversity in this country over the past few months. Reducing any person to a number is just one example.

As an educator, it is my responsibility to model behavior that I want my students to emulate. The way I talk about people matters. The way I talk about world events matters. I want my students to live in a world that is more peaceful than the world they have lived in thus far.

As 2016 draws to a close, I’m thinking about how much more work there is to do and how far we have to go. I’m comforted by the feeling of inclusiveness and community at my school and the way students rally around each other when difficult circumstances arise. Cultivating these behaviors will go a long way in a world that desperately needs a collective spirit.

We are, at the end of the day, all human. We are all responsible for the world we live in and the world we’re building.

Let’s make it a better one.

On My Mind

Building Peace by Waging War

4 Comments

Disclaimer: I attended a Jewish day school from kindergarten through grade eight and then went to public high school. I grew up celebrating Jewish holidays and going to synagogue Saturday mornings. My siblings and I had to negotiate pretty hard to miss a Friday night Shabbat dinner at my parents’ house and I spent nearly every Friday night at Hillel throughout college. I attended Hebrew School on Sundays throughout high school to keep my Hebrew in reasonable shape and taught a grade eleven Hebrew School seminar on the Arab-Israeli conflict for two years after college. I am currently teaching at a K-12 Jewish day school. The following post reflects my personal beliefs and not necessarily the views of my school and governing bodies, our curriculum, or Conservative Judaism.

An alumnus came to speak to the eighth grade students at school last week. After graduation, he had moved to Israel and joined the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. He spoke briefly about the experiences traveling in Israel that led to his decision but most of his talk centered around cool drone technology for gathering intelligence. The kids were understandably impressed and excited. They asked all sorts of questions about the mechanics and uses of the plane. The speaker showed photos of his army unit and explained the challenges of basic training.

I listened to the presentation with my mind racing. I was very aware of the conflicting narratives running through my head. Over the summer, I wrote about the search for congruence in my personal life. Over the course of the presentation, I realized that my views on Israel have historically been highly incongruent with my current conception of the necessity of peace for the sustainability of the planet and humanity.

The following is an attempt to trace my views of Israel and how they have changed over time. These ideas are very much in flux and I’m writing this post to demonstrate that – the changing nature of ideas we hold dear as new evidence and experiences force reevaluation.

High School
When I was a senior in high school, I took a contemporary issues class in which we spent each week investigating an ongoing global conflict in preparation for a discussion, debate, or Socratic Seminar at the end of the week. I remember being really excited when the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared on the docket because I had visited Israel for the first time over the most recent summer break.

During our weekly computer lab session I was sitting next to the boy I’d just started dating. I don’t remember the conversation we had at the time, but I do remember that he later told me, “The look in your eyes when you were talking about what Israel means to you – I couldn’t decide if it was beautiful or terrible.”

Likely, it was both. I felt a deep sense of ahavat yisrael, love of Israel. I was certain that Israel was the place where the Jewish people belonged. To my thinking then, it was the place that had been promised in biblical times and therefore had to be defended at any cost.

For the eight and a half years our relationship lasted, that boy in the computer lab and I managed only a few conversations about Israel without arguing. This is mostly my fault. Israel was usually a topic I would either refuse to discuss, or would only entertain under very limited and specific circumstances. Those were few and far between and largely occurred after an attack in the region made global headlines.

Though I am very much a promoter of dialogue, I was concerned that if I showed anything less than complete devotion to Israel, that would leave room for him and all non-Jews to question the validity of all of Israel’s land claims. Underlying this was the fear that people I knew and loved would not rally behind Israel’s right to exist.

College
The university I attended had a sizeable Jewish minority, which played a huge factor in my initial decision to apply. However, it was during my time in college that I encountered real opposition to Israel and Israeli policies.

My nine years of Jewish education, four years of Hebrew School, and lifetime of synagogue participation had not prepared me to respond to any criticism at all. As I had been taught, Israel was the Jewish homeland. Everything anybody did to defend Israel was good. Everything anybody did to suggest that Israel was misguided in some way, either in policy, laws, or land claims, was bad. All of my experiences with and about Israel had not prepared me to fact check myself and those around me, nor was I able to satisfactorily articulate my personal beliefs on Israel because I’d never engaged in real dialogue about it. I had always shut off those conversations and did not know how to respond when turning away was not an option.

I started to do a lot more reading and a lot more questioning. Everyone I encountered had a lot to say. As the adage goes, “Two Jews, three opinions.” The narrative among my Jewish friends, though varied, was limited. We collectively felt responsible for defending Israel around non-Jews and weren’t entirely comfortable with criticism among ourselves. If we didn’t steadfastly support Israel, who would? And of course, it is very difficult to be the member of a tight-knit group with a specific cultural narrative who starts questioning the narrative.

Hebrew School
Two years after college, while I was both a graduate student and a teacher, I was asked to teach the required grade eleven seminar at my synagogue’s Hebrew School. The Hebrew School model had evolved since I was a student, so this was not a class I had taken. Sure, I figured, how hard could it be?

Topic: Arab-Israeli Conflict
Goal: Explore the Arab-Israeli conflict in context with primary sources and evidence from both sides to help students think critically about Israel in order to deepen their understanding of and connection to it.  
Curriculum: The David Project

According to The David Project’s website, in the new curriculum that I was teaching:

Issues, especially those in the Historical Dimension, are addressed in a more chronological fashion, as opposed to reacting to common allegations or claims against Israel. We hope that this method will allow students to trace the evolution of the conflict and gain a wider perspective of key events.

There are no direct advocacy elements in this curriculum. While we believe Israel advocacy to be a worthwhile enterprise, the goal of this product is to engage students in thoughtful exploration of the conflict and to encourage future study and involvement.

The history of the Palestinian national movement is interwoven with the Israeli history and that of the conflict in general. While we do not take political positions, no study of the conflict could be complete without examining the Palestinian component and gaining a deeper understanding about how Palestinian identity, politics and terrorism, have shaped the conflict with Israel.

There is a greater emphasis on interactive learning, with each unit containing several suggestions for classroom activities that go beyond discussion questions. These activities are designed to produce a more experiential environment and one where students have to engage with the material on a more individual level and at a greater depth.

I learned along with my students. Almost every lesson I prepared involved a learning curve. Throughout the course, we encountered Israel’s founding documents; maps of the Middle East throughout history; statistics about Israeli settlements; political struggles in Gaza and the West Bank; legal documentation of the development of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO); position statements on one-state, two-state, and three-state solutions; academic texts about the refugee problem; and the moral dilemmas of Israeli policy that exist today.

This is what I had been missing throughout my own school years. I am confident that after completing the course my students were better prepared to articulate and defend their personal beliefs about Israel than I was at their age.

Back to Israel
I visited Israel for the second time over the summer of 2013, six years after my first visit. I had grown a lot and learned a lot, and had a completely different experience as a result. Israel had changed, too. There was more government-supported cooperation with Palestinians and Arab-Israelis, but also an increased number of controversial Israeli settlements. Our guide (who I cannot say enough good things about) constantly emphasized the need for multiple perspectives, multiple narratives, and the necessity of seeing all people as simply people who are trying to make a living and a life. Humanity is often forgotten in a fight for the right to exist. Most people, if given the option, would choose peace in order to live their lives and raise their families.

It is one thing to love Israel because of its history, culture, beauty, and people, which I do. It is quite another to agree blindly with every government decision. I had started to understand that in my first year teaching Hebrew School and grew to believe it during that summer.

I grew to love and understand the nuances of Israel far better than I had previously. And it’s really impossible not to love a place that looks like this:

Akko
Makhtesh Ramon
Jerusalem
Akko
Akko
Makhtesh Ramon
Jerusalem
Ein Gedi
Megiddo
Tzfat
Tel Aviv
Akko
Dead Sea
Jerusalem
Metula
Metula
Jerusalem
Ein Hod
Jerusalem
Ein Gedi
Jerusalem
Har Adir
Negev
Jerusalem
Makhtesh Ramon

Hebrew School Again
When I taught my Hebrew School course for the second time to a new group of grade eleven students, I had the background of the first year of the course as well as a foundation that came from my discussions with our guide, Ilan, over the summer. I’d spoken to him about my personal struggles to understand various elements of Israeli policy that did not match the narrative I had been taught during my own school days, in which there were no questions and no moral dilemmas.

By the end of the second year of the course, I thought I knew where I stood on questions about security barriers, settlements, and refugees. I did not agree with every decision the Israeli government made, but when do I ever agree with every decision any person, body, institution, or government makes?

Now
As all of my recent writing on peace should suggest, I am very concerned with the state of our world. I am concerned with the lack of discussion given to peace not only in social studies classrooms, but in our contemporary and historical narratives. We are inundated with news reports and media glorification of violence, aggression, and war. We have not developed school curricula that emphasize peaceful dialogue, interactions, relationships, or cooperative efforts towards compromise.

When we talk about Israel, we focus on defense. How are we trying to protect Israel’s right and ability to exist when surrounded by neighbors who have sworn to annihilate it? How are we trying to maintain a distinctly Jewish identity in the tumultuousness of the Middle East? How are we honoring the legacy of those who fought and died so that Israel could exist?

While those conversations should take place, it is the glorification of the fight itself, the wars for independence and existence, that dominate the narrative. The speaker who presented to the eighth grade class at my school last week did not once explain what Israel is fighting for, or who, or why. There was an implicit message that fighting is the only choice, the only option, the only reality simply because it has always been that way. There was absolutely no context for why there’s war in the region or the need for continuous military intelligence. This is due to a prevailing view that Israel needs to fight to literally stay on the map.

While there certainly is ongoing conflict in and around Israel, we need to rewrite the narrative that only emphasizes war. We need to expose today’s students to context. We need to talk about why and who and how, as well as explore peaceful solutions to the conflict. One of my favorite examples is Seeds of Peace, which operates all over the world and has special programs that bring Israeli and Palestinian teens together. These initiatives need to be part of the conversation, too.

Discussions of peace must be far more nuanced than a simple lack of violence. At the moment, the narrative does not go that far. We absolutely need to emphasize peace as an attitude and state of mind if we are going to build a world where sustainable well-being for all is attainable.

Conclusion
I have attempted to convey the evolution of my views about Israel, particularly in relation to my goal of building a better, more peaceful world that is sustainable for all. Likely, these ideas are still in transition and will develop further as I continue to read and learn.

As explained above, the vast majority of my learning began when I was ready to see the other side and wanted to understand perspectives inherently different from my own. All I know for sure at this moment is that dialogue and honest conversation were integral to the expansion of my ideas about Israel and what it means to support Israel in today’s world.

I firmly believe Israel’s fight is worth fighting. If cessation of violence were presently a viable option, the Israelis would stop fighting tomorrow. Since it isn’t, however, they fight to protect their families and lives against those who have sworn that Israel will be destroyed at whatever cost to innocent human life. Ironically, this is the more peaceful option. Protecting human lives and promoting peace in Israel means fighting Hamas and its supporters, who use children as human shields and launch attacks from schools and hospitals.

I believe that Israel’s fight is necessary because it emphasizes that human life has value. If we lose that perspective, we have lost humanity. We can’t build a world that increases sustainable well-being by destroying human life in the process.

Supporting Israel means valuing and protecting the innocent person’s right to live.

Our world is struggling to cope with increasingly advanced AI, increasingly devastating climate change, and a variety of global issues that are far bigger than the conflict in one region. If any nation at all wants to survive, priorities around the globe have to change. We have to decide that innocent human lives are worth protecting and worth a reevaluation of our time, energy, and efforts. Israel is fighting to do that within its borders. This fight to protect humanity needs to be part of the way we discuss Israel’s history, politics, and efforts at conflict resolution.

For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic. – Shimon Peres