This past Tuesday, Andy and I stared at each other with shocked looks on our faces. We had spent the past 10 minutes telling students they could not go back to class and actually barring the doors that enter the school. Students arrive to Pardes so excited to get into their classrooms and see their teachers that they are running down the hallways way before class begins. We try to keep our students in the lobby until 5 minutes before class in order to give our teachers time to set up their classrooms and prepare for the day, but our students are so excited about their class, they just can’t wait! What a wonderful problem, students eager to get to their classrooms each day (now, if only we can transfer that excitement to early Sunday mornings :) )

It has been an exciting first three weeks of school for me. Students are happy, parents are happy, teachers are happy and all this happiness is centered around the creation of excellent Jewish education and strong community! Our numbers are up from last year. This year we have students enrolled in 13 grades (K-12th) and I am still getting phone calls asking about joining our program. The number of students in our program is exciting because it means that we are touching many students and their families lives but the real excitement for me is walking into our classrooms and watching the dynamic learning happening. In every classroom I walk into, and I try to speak a few minutes in each classroom every day, I see students engaged in the learning process whether it is our 2nd graders playing a flashcard matching game or 6th graders studying a piece of Talmud about how we should treat our friends and those we don’t like, or 8th graders discussing the meaning of their B’nai Mitzvah projects as a basis for their study on Mitzvah Heroes, or 10th graders watching “The Lunch Date” as a trigger for a discussion on assumptions we make when we first meet people who are different then us. The bottom line is there is really exciting learning happening in every direction. If this is the first three weeks, I can’t wait to see the rest of the year.