As budget constraints force school districts to shorten school years, increase class sizes and reduce offerings, many families are turning to private schools to meet their children’s intellectual and spiritual needs. When it’s time for college, families and students again have a range of choices. The educators profiled here have found a home where they make a difference in students’ lives.
Elaine Chapman, who has been teaching for 42 years, is now in her 14th year teaching at Pardes Jewish Day School, where she teaches general studies in third grade. “PJDS allows me to cover the curriculum – and more – in my own way,” says Chapman. “I can be creative in my teaching, making sure that each student reaches his/her highest potential. I am not only allowed, but encouraged, to integrate the ‘real world’ into our studies. We can learn multiplication of 7 through football touchdowns and learn the important role Jews took in fighting for civil rights. We study the culture of different countries so that we can celebrate differences and respect everyone’s uniqueness. The children learn not to take their schooling for granted and understand the efforts they must make to become well-rounded and educated individuals.”
This fall her students heard an inspiring presentation from Scott Fifer, CEO of the GO Campaign, who visited Pardes after students contributed to his campaign through the school’s collection of box tops. After his presentation, her class decided to make rainbow loom bracelets to send with him on his next visit to Tanzania, along with a video demonstrating how to make them, so the African schoolchildren can make their own bracelets and perhaps sell them to raise money for a water well or books or other supplies for their school. “We are sending over 600 of these bracelets, all made during recess or on the students’ own time,” says Chapman.
Chapman says she tries to give the students a love of learning so that it will be a lifelong endeavor. “We laugh every day. Learning can be, and is, fun in my class,” she says. Chapman’s favorite subject, and the one she hopes has the most impact, is economics.
“I teach about resources (human, capital, natural), supply and demand and most importantly, the difference between wants and needs,” she says. “Each child must do a job at home, above and beyond their normal chores. This job must be done multiple (times) and they must earn $5. We then go to the Dollar Store, and the students purchase needed items for the Watkins Homeless Shelter. We take those items to the shelter and then serve the residents dinner. … The children learn an appreciation for the cost of necessary items. They realize they can’t buy diapers, because a box costs more than the $5 they have earned. This is tikkun olam put into practice!”
Megan Erdely
Tesseract School
tesseractschool.org
Megan Erdely has worked in education for 14 years and has been the college advisor at Tesseract School since 2011. Tesseract is an independent, non-denominational, co-educational private day school serving 415 students in early childhood through high school. Erdely works with the high school students to help them prepare for and evaluate college choices.
“I feel I make a difference in our students’ lives by providing them with unconditional support and a ‘road map’ to navigate the college process,” she says. “The process can be so overwhelming, and many times students are unsure of where to begin. It is exciting to know I can help them successfully achieve their college goals.”
Erdely works with students in three primary areas. She uses Naviance, a college and career readiness platform that helps connect academic achievement to post-secondary goals, as she helps sophomores through seniors navigate the college process. She also serves on the educators’ team for the students’ Junior Projects. This is a week-long project where juniors research five colleges, including one state school, in their chosen field. Students create three to five criteria that they will use to select schools and explain how the schools they chose fit this criteria. At the end of the week, they share their information in a 20-minute presentation. Tesseract has also created a class period where Erdely meets with juniors and seniors once a week to help move them through the college application process. “I enjoy working with students at Tesseract because I have the opportunity to get to know these kids very well,” says Erdely. “I meet most of them freshmen year and get to watch them grow and mature into seniors. When I write letters of recommendation about my seniors, I feel I can speak about them in a unique way, and I am able to share insights that other counselors are not afforded since they have so many more students. Our small class sizes allow me to cultivate strong relationships with my students, and that is important as our students enter the college world.”
Members of Tessaract’s inaugural graduating class in 2012 were accepted to Arizona State University, Barrett’s Honor College; Cal Poly, Chapman University, Coe College, Colorado College, Elon University, Emerson College, Kansas State University, Lycoming College, Miami University, Northeastern University, Purdue University, Santa Monica College, Soka University of America and Vassar College.
David Graizbord
The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies
University of Arizona, Tucson
Shortly after earning his Ph.D. in history (with an emphasis on Jewish history) from the University of Michigan in 2000, Professor David Graizbord joined the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona as associate professor of Judaic Studies. “I provide students with the opportunity to explore and analyze one of the world’s oldest, most unique, most diverse and most intriguing cultures – that of the Jewish people,” says Graizbord. “More generally, I contribute to students’ understanding of all culture – how it is built, and what it does for individuals and groups. In that sense, I build upon key elements of the students’ education in the liberal arts. Professor Todd Endelman, a former mentor of mine, once observed that the purpose of such an education is not to prepare students for professional or business careers. Universities are not trade schools, after all. Rather, the point is to learn how to read and think critically, and how to express complex ideas cogently. To that I would add that Judaic studies is really a fantastic vehicle for learning those life-transforming, highly practical and very marketable skills, the mastery of which is a basis for success in diverse fields of endeavor.”
Graizbord says that the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies is a nurturing place that promotes high-level scholarship and collegiality. “The faculty members of the ACJS know the difference between scholarship and politics, and strive to keep the two apart,” he says. Graizbord’s courses include Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History; Modern Jewish History; The History of Judeoconversos and the Iberian Inquisitions; Iberian Catholic Cultures of the Early Modern Period; The History of Judeophobia; Jewish Mysticism: History and Principal Phenomena; Jewish Identity in Historical Perspective; and History of Sepharad and the Western Sephardi Diaspora to 1810. Most of his published work concerns the history of Judeoconversos, the Christianized descendants of Iberian Jews in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“Recently, the questions of Jewish identity that drew me to Judeoconversos in the first place have taken me far afield, to the study of American Jews of “Generation Y” (18- to 30-year-olds) who identify
as Zionists or pro-Israel,” says Graizbord. “For over a year, I have been interviewing such people in order to get a ‘high-resolution’ picture of why they feel attached to Israel and what that attachment means to them. To speak to my subjects and to research American Jewish identities along the way has been fascinating. I hope to publish my findings soon.”
