Dr. Rochelle Brand

Head of School

7th grade Chumash

Mrs. Sprung

The 7th graders made a siyum on Prakim כה/כד. The girls were fascinated by Bilaam and his insistence on defying the wishes of HaShem. They learned with the passion and delved into many interesting mefarshim and truly mastered the the knowledge in this Parsha.  Onward to continued learning!!!!

STEM FAIR:

Mrs. Englard

Congratulations to our courageous 9th grade students for beautifully representing our school with their innovative projects at the 2018 Young Engineers Conference sponsored by the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education. Each group conceived, designed, built, coded, tested, and debugged their projects, and then assembled creative boards to describe their processes. Projects included a device to de-fog mirrors, a sensor-driven water detector that sends a message when a desired water level is reached, a fingerprint recognition system to open a bag and prevent theft of personal information or materials, and wearable tech in the form of pajamas with an LED display to prevent falls in the dark. Congratulations to Chana J., Shira S., and Batsheva L. for their award from the judges. We are proud of all our students who spent the year learning science, math, and engineering principles and then applying them with perseverance and resilience in creating new products.

Bravery or Perfection?

Mrs. Englard

In 2016, Reshma Saujani, founder of the organization Girls Who Code, presented a compelling TED talk in which she offered evidence of how we raise our girls to be perfect while raising our boys to be brave. Girls are taught to avoid risk and failure, to smile pretty, to play it safe and get all As, while boys are taught to play rough, swing high, climb to the top of the monkey bars, and jump off. Boys are habituated to take risks and are continually rewarded for it. As a result, as psychologist Carol Dweck found when offering difficult material to bright 5th grade students, girls gave up quickly while boys found the challenge energizing and were more likely to redouble their efforts. This was true despite the fact that the girls outperformed the boys in all subjects, including math and science.

Saujani describes how instructors in Girls Who Code classes immediately see girls' fear of not getting it right. Girls will spend time writing code, not get it exactly right, and then delete it, preferring to show nothing at all rather then imperfect progress. She argues that by encouraging girls to be overly cautious and to take less risks, our economy is losing out on all the innovation and all the problems women could solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect. "When we teach our girls to be brave and they have a supportive network cheering them on", says Saujani,  "they will build incredible things...and a better world for themselves and for us all."

Shaarei Bina is home to girls with enormous potential to innovate and play their part in making a better world. As parents and educators, we need to catch ourselves when we encourage our girls to be perfect, to stick with what is easy, rather than to be brave, to challenge themselves, to struggle with difficult material and situations and to persevere. We need to help our girls and young women shift from "tell me what I have to do" to creating, designing, investigating, critiquing, reasoning, becoming comfortable with not-knowing, exploring, testing ideas, showing resilience in the face of setbacks, and learning from mistakes. We need to resist the urge to be too helpful, allow them to solve problems on their own and offer questions and discussions instead of ready answers. We need to help them see that they are capable, that their ideas have merit, that their thinking has value.

As we support our girls in climbing to the top of the monkey bars, may our reward be courageous young women with the confidence and skills to create a better world for us all.