Kids are the same wherever you go. It doesn’t matter whether you are sitting in Las Vegas or in Budapest, teens all want the same things: to hang with their friends, to be on their phones, and to engage in worthwhile discussion. This morning, I sat in on Inbar’s Judaics class because we are teaching the same students and because we are intentionally teaching connected content related to Avraham Infeld’s 5-Legged Table and the ways that we connect to self and establish identity. I watched a master teacher come in to a class where she knew no one and connect with students and draw them out of their comfort zones. And she worked. Hard. But doing what great teachers do, she learned from that experience and made changes for the next class.
Knowing that I would see these same students after our speaker, I also learned and started my next class building on what Inbar had begun. We circled up and established the norms of classroom discussion and engagement. With the agreed upon norms in place, we could continue the discussion Inbar had begun: what are three legs with which each student can connect. From there, we moved into a poem about longing and loss and the idea of home being where the heart is. It was great to see how they could take this poem, “My Heart Is in the East” written by Rabbi Yehuda Levi living in Spain in the 12th century and connect to the feeling of yearning that flows through the lines of his poem. One student likened this feeling of homesickness to the feeling of missing his love interest because that is where he feels most himself. I look forward to continuing this lesson with this class and can’t wait to see how they tackle writing their own poems modeled on Rabbi Levi’s.
