#What Matters Most

These are heady times for our school.  The inevitable anxiety and excitement of the open enrollment period.  The gathering rush of a 50th Anniversary weekend.  The powerful reflection through impending re-accreditation.  The tidal wave that is becoming edJEWcon.

I write a lot.

And when I do, I tend to use lots of words. This is not so very different from how I speak.

And I speak a lot.

A lot of my speaking comes with the position and some of it from my natural proclivity to be wordy.  (Anyone familiar with this blog or with me is likely nodding their head.)

One side effect of producing so many words – and between conversations, emails, blogs, letters, etc. I put out into the universe a lot of words – is that you run the risk of losing the forest of what matters most through trees of verbiage.

The blogging platform lends itself to endless writing for those so inclined.  One interesting (and almost poetic) byproduct of Twitter is that it forces a 140-character structure onto the writer.  As someone who cannot text in anything less than complete words, sentences, proper capitalization, grammar, etc., Twitter becomes an exercise in self-discipline.  I almost never get the first or second tweet to fit the space and I wind up having to edit and edit to get a thought down to its essence.

With two liminal rites of passage to celebrate this weekend (our annual Kindergarten Shabbat Service & Dinner on Friday and our First Grade Consecration on Shabbat) in the heart of all the planning for the major events to come, I want to take a moment and engage in what I hope will be a collaborative exercise.  Beginning here, I am going to encourage y’all to express #WhatMattersMost about @MJGDS and @JewishDaySchool.

[I am putting it “Twitter-speak”  both for those who already utilize Twitter AND to use Twitter to solicit responses.  I am going to offer some of my own thoughts here.  I am also going to tweet out the request.  And I encourage you to add your own 140-character suggestions either on Twitter using the #WhatMattersMost OR as comments to this blog post.  I will update the post with responses I receive (both from our school and the field) from Twitter.]

#WhatMattersMost @MJGDS from @Jon_Mitzmacher

Each child deserves a floor, but no ceiling…

No one will know your child better or work harder for their success than we will.

We may not get it right the first time, but we will partner with parents until we do.

The audience for student work was once the teacher; now it is the world.

21st Century Learning is not a slogan, it is a revolution.

The future of education is happening at a Jewish day school.

Having a child with special needs should never

preclude an inclusionary Jewish day school education.

A parent should never have to choose between the

best secular education and Jewish day school.

We are proud of our graduates, not because of what they

know and what they can do, but because of who they are.

 

Your turn!