The Rampage The Newspaper of the Ramaz Upper School
New York • Volume 65 • Issue 7 • April 2021 • Iyar 5781• the-rampage.org
Project
Rebecca Kalimi ’23 This year, the Ramaz community welcomed a new project that encourages storytelling on a large scale. A group of teachers and students have been organizing meeting times to collect and record stories to post on a website and spread a feeling of inclusivity and comfort to the Ramaz community. Besides that, the other objectives of the project are to foster meaningful yet playful conversations based on the stories being told in a collaborative forum. The project started when Ms. Rabhan reached out to Dr. Jucovy, at the start of the lockdown last year to help quell her anxiety. He advised her to think of this time period as an adventure, and mentioned Boccacio’s Decameron, a book with a frame tale surrounding 100 stories that had been written during plague years. She began to think of creative projects that might help her and her students deal with the new reality. During the summer she read an issue of The New York Times Magazine, called The Decameron Project, and, remembering her conversation with Dr. Jucovy, decided to do her own version for Ramaz. During the late summer months, they started developing the project by reaching out to the administration, other teachers, and students they
thought would be valuable contributors and introduced the idea to them. The main concept they wanted to push for the most was for students to feel comfortable to take initiative and act on their own. Since the beginning of the project, they have gathered countless stories and compiled them all onto a website created by Levi Lesches ’21 and David Tarrab ’23. Each teacher was appointed with different responsibilities to take care of. Ms. Litwack was selected to create a portal called “The Glowfest”, based on “The Moth.” Rabbi Shiowitz was appointed to head a Judaic Studies sector of the project where people would share stories of times where they felt more connected to their religion. Ms. Litwack has been working on developing her portal. She gives mini-lessons to students who were asked to share stories at their respective grades moth nights. She meets with her team of students on Fridays to discuss their plan, and usually a half-hour before their sessions to make sure everything is set up. They start off the session
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with people who were planning to tell stories, then open it up to anyone willing to share a story within the theme. Although she thinks it’s helpful to set guidelines for the types of stories to contribute by instituting themes. Continued on Page 4
See Different? Another Approach to Learning
Harkness is taught with students in a circle, like the setup in the Beit Knesset was last year. Nicole Hirschkorn ’22 Ms. Litwack’s Harkness teaching style is well-known throughout the Ramaz student body for its unique and engaging aspects. In normal cir-
cumstances, when the limitations of COVID-19 protocols do not exist, Ms. Litwack’s junior-year students huddle together to form a tightly-knit circle where they discuss class material with little teacher intervention. One might assume that little teacher intervention in class discussion would mean little teacher involvement within the classroom; if so, they would be incorrect. While the students are involved in profound conversation, it is Ms. Litwack’s job is to observe. A major piece of the Harkness method is assessing individual student’s role in the class discussion to create a balanced discussion, where all student voices can be heard by their fellow classmates. To ensure that this balance in the
classroom is possible, Ms. Litwack creates a map of the class while students are engaged in discussion. To do this, she draws a diagram of the classroom and indicates where every student is sitting. As the class period progresses, she adds details to the map, like arrows signaling which students spoke to each other, whether they spoke to the whole group or to one person, or if they asked a question, etc. “Kids are very anxious to see the results of the maps,” said Ms. Litwack, in an interview. “It’s so interesting when kids are provided with actual data about what’s going on in the class. It requires a certain level of maturity.” The maps used in Ms. Litwack’s classes often altered how students participated in future class discussions; sometimes, students who had certain perceptions about how they participated were proven wrong by the data they were given. “It’s not all Continued on Page 5
Inside this issue... Appreciating Ramaz Essential Workers p. 7
Commemorating and Celebrating the Yoms p.
10
Ramaz Alumn in the IDF p.
11
Should Uniforms Be implemented
Ramaz? p.
16