First Sunday in Haifa

1/25/15
     Every day feels like Sunday. I am hoping once our teaching schedule begins tomorrow, some order will return to my week!  Today we visited 3 schools and met with students and staff for a full day of orientation.  Fortunately 2 of the schools are the ones I am assigned to, so I got. a good preview of the school and a general idea of how to walk there.   Staff from the CJP Boston Haifa program accompanied us throughou the day and will go with us tomorrow to ensure we get to where we are supposed to be on time.
       The first school, Chugim, is a public high school.  We are working with sophomores.  We had a very structured program.  15 volunteers in a circle. 15 students in a second circle around us.  We faced each other, the leader offered a question for discussion and we had individual dialogues with our student for about 10 minutes, followed by some large group discussion.   Then the students moved one seat to the right, another topic was introduced and another dialogue began. We repeated this with 5 students.  Some were Native to Israel, others were immigrants.  Their English is pretty good and they were enthusiastic participants.  My favorite question was how did they get their name? Most of the Americans, followed the custom of being named after a deceased ancestor.   Most of the Israelis had names with meaning representing a holiday or wish or feeling etc.  there was a creativity to the way these children were named that reflected the creative energy of this young nation.
      The next school was an elementary school.  One of the first in modern Israel.  Senior volunteers go have donated numerous artifacts from the agricultural beginning of this nation, and have created historic displays showing the life of the pioneers on the grounds and within the school bulding.  Our guide was a retired teacher, who has worded for 15 years to create this display.  We also saw a secret room, hidden behind bookshelves where arms were stored during the British mandate period when they fought for independence.
    Finally the third school, Reali, was our longest visit.  It is huge, several buildings and a petting zoo.  It is a private elementary and middle  school focusing on science.  We will be working with the middle school age children.  We met with the principal and teachers, were given folders with bane sap and ages of our students and assignments for week #1.  This school utilizes project based learning and apse are expected to help students utilize computer as the research teir projects.   Added to the challenge are the 70 concrete sets along side of the mountain we climb down to get to the school campus.  Almost 1000 students at http this schoo!
   This may be more info than you are inrpterms tend in, so I will sign off.   The adventure continues...