What is Missing? A Conversation on Social and Emotional Learning

[Music] welcome all to the unite to heal event we are here tonight discussing what is missing a conversation about social emotional learning i am here tonight with the darcheinu team of amudhim with mrshira berkowitz rabbi avi landa and rabbi yisrael grossberg and we will be having a conversation about what exactly is missing and why we need to be paying attention to the way that we develop and grow our children and communities i'm so excited to begin our conversation and i wanted to begin with a very basic question anytime you have a new initiative whether it is educational what is something that is involved with our children my first instinct is always to ask what's missing why on earth is this necessary so before we even jump in to any description of a program or an initiative i want to know what is the problem that your initiative and your team is coming to address let's begin with mrs shira berkowitz sure thank you so much what's missing we teach math in school we teach science we teach hamish we teach navi we teach everything that our children need to know from an academic standpoint who is teaching them to recognize what they're feeling to express their emotions in a healthy way to know how to deal with their stress when they get stressed who's teaching them to be okay being mindful being present and not having to be with friends or on their phones every second who's teaching them how to have healthy boundaries so they have healthy relationships so they say no when something feels uncomfortable what we're missing is what we need to teach our students to teach our children our tummy dose or tommy dim how to become healthy people healthy human beings healthy teenagers healthy adults and healthy marriages and be healthy parents i'm so happy that you brought that up because let me add in another layer you know you talk about this emotional growth emotional development boundaries aren't we already teaching this we have halacha curriculums we learn torah we have role models from our rabbi in from our local revenant community so why exactly is what we were already doing not enough to address this these issues meaning these are all very important issues but aren't we already addressing this with our limu de kodesh with our rabbanim with role models with our connection to torah why isn't that enough perhaps rabbi grossberg you can address that sure so i think that you know we live at a time where the struggles are are a little different than when at least definitely when i was growing up technology um busier appearance you know it's not only the fact that you know nowadays there's a parliament meeting every night there's yeshiva dinner the hasanas but parents are strapped you know two-income families are really necessary within the yeshiva system and parents are less available for their kids than they've ever been um and they're additionally we very often were brought up to kind of take our feelings and stuff them down not you know not to not to feel not to get upset about things not to allow ourselves just to kind of soldier on it's both an advantage and a disadvantage mostly an advantage that students are really feeling and parents are listening to their kids but now what do they do with these feelings where do they go with them some of the um you know to quote um the great rabbi is that you know we can't keep coming to the same nuclear war with the old bow and arrow we can't keep coming you know it's a new age and we have to have new tools to deal for dealing with that so rabbi lando maybe you could help me understand better because i'm not i'm not totally buying it maybe you need a curriculum and a program that addresses the parents meaning rabbi grossberg just mentioned the parents are at parlor meetings maybe you need a curriculum for the parents how exactly can you teach these very basic human skills from a curriculum don't you have to go to the proverbial school of hard knocks that's a great question and you're right the parents are strapped as rabbi grossberg mentioned they struggle tremendously trying to be able to maintain the home at a functioning healthy standpoint in terms of educating their children it can be strained and in many cases parents themselves will admit sometimes they won't admit that the school really is there nowadays more than ever to supplement some of that parenting to be able to supplement some of that education how can we only supplement some of the academic processes of children learning math and science as well as of course lahavda limu de kodesh torah and mishnah and gemara and navi how can we only supplement those but not supplement what's arguably just as important if not more basic and fundamental to allow learning in all the other subjects and that is that social and emotional learning piece many times in the past as rabbi grossberg mentioned there would be this encouragement this thought process may be a philosophy that emotions are more of an obstacle than actually a part of life to be embraced the gemaran soccer tells us that in this world we make a tovahammative on good things that happen and a diana amazon bad things that happen the gemara says in the next world when mashiach comes we're only going to make atova mate says that means that in the next world we're going to make atova native on everything we made a diana amazon in this world so i once asked my rebbe ribs v berkowitz so if we know we're going to make a tova made them on everything bad that happened in this world anyway it's just we're missing the information at this point why don't we make a tova may tamara right now we should we should rejoice over even the hard times because we know ultimately we'll figure out it'll be just revealed to us how it was really good the whole time and in our discussion the idea that came out was that emotions are something that hashem the rabona shalom wants us to feel and experience for real and with sincerity both the good the happy the joyful but also the difficult the sorrow the pain and hashem wants us to be able to understand those emotions be aware of them and have the skills to be able to process them in a healthy way to live in this world experiencing for real the sorrow at times as well as the joy in appropriate fashion and the social emotional learning curriculum is the vehicle to be able to teach our students and our children the next generation those skills that knowledge base and that understanding that is right grossberg mentioned in many ways we're missing from the parents being able to fully fully give that over to their children if i could i'm sorry if i could say it yes um just because you said a word that resonated the school of hard knocks um we can sit and debate as to the whys but i don't know if that's within the purview of this uh situation but the school of hard knocks is really knocking them down and not everyone is getting up we as you know being on the front lines we see that and being at a mood and event at somebody apropos we're losing students we're losing students at a an alarming rate and i don't mean to sound like you know um a total alarm is that things are out of control but whereas in the past somehow there was a certain resiliency that people picked themselves up and whatever struggles they dealt with they kept moving on often people are opting out and if we can teach them the skills give them literally the toolbox to face that challenge and not just throw it all away then we've done a tremendous amount both for their emotional health but as well as their religious well their religious health as well so i want to get a little bit practical to understand this better you know in my own life and in my own home i'm not only a graduate of yeshiva day school and i learned in yeshiva i'm also a parent and in our home i think the issue that i struggle with the most is my emotional regulation i can get so frustrated dare i say i can get i can lose my temper not doing anything that i think is outlandish or wild but me and my son are working together my son is five and we both talk together about controlling and dealing with our temper explain to me a little bit about what a school could do and provide to help somebody with their emotional regulation what are you doing you have a mara makomo shoot oh i didn't if i would have known the mission in pirkei evo says it's bad to lose your temper i would have i would have gained control oh i didn't know that there were uh psychologists who said that it's important to be in control you know there's no sore sheet there's no textbook that makes this easier so what on earth are you doing in a classroom that makes this any better shira can you help me understand this sure i want to start by answering with a quick story i had a client i'm a therapist on the side i had a client come in in high school and she was describing some of the symptoms that she's having in her life and it sounded pretty much like panic attacks and i said to her do you have anxiety and she looks at me and she says what is anxiety i wanted to cry cry or scream and go back to the school she went to and say why like why didn't you tell her when she was in second grade in third grade in sixth grade what an anxious feeling is and what to do so she's not at the point where she's in high school and now she's having a panic attacks our curriculum is a complete comprehensive curriculum every single step for the teachers what are feelings how to identify them activities videos step by step for the students and every single skill that we teach we have the children act them out we call them behavior rehearsals we have them act out every single skill because research shows when you practice it in class you can leave class and then you're able to do it so in your example with anger ideally we start in fifth grade they're doing the feelings unit feelings 101 what is a feeling what are comfortable feelings what are uncomfortable feelings and notice we say comfortable and uncomfortable we don't say good or bad because you know what it's not always bad to be angry if somebody's being inappropriate with you or somebody really hurts you you should be angry so it's not good or bad we stay away from good or bad it's about healthy unhealthy comfortable uncomfortable we identify what we're feeling we talk about what are healthy ways of handling feelings what are our reactions what are the consequences of our reactions and that's fifth grade now we build from there in other grades taking from that and building on that in each grade level how to handle your feelings rabbi landa maybe you could talk a little bit about because i know pieces of this curriculum you know i'm listening to this now and i am a believer of that the foundations of your development of your sense of self is you used to be what we learned in kindergarten but for some reason it's not sinking in you have units on this that deal with matters of kedusha of holiness which i don't know if you're comfortable i don't want to use the euphemism though you do use euphemisms these are matters about sexual boundaries and how to be appropriate can you tell me a little bit when do you think this these conversations should begin and why would we be introducing this in a holy setting like a school or yeshiva to talk about such areas of like filth great question so first i would question one of the earlier premises in your in your question in terms of the natural absorption that used to take place in kindergarten i would argue that while it might be true in previous generations maybe even centuries ago that there seemed to have been less of these problems although it's always a question to ask whether we were less aware or there really was less of a prevalence but either way even if there was less of a prevalence it very likely is more attributable to the fact that there was less of uh in your face type of society knocking at your door and when you don't have some of the nucionos the tests the challenges under every s under every stone you turn over there's another nissan there's another test lurking in terms of a fight for for your soul and a fight for your value system how you conceptualize the world and your morality like we have nowadays the the game needs to change as rabbi grossberg mentioned we need to come to the battle with a little bit more of a thorough approach to help our children and moving on to the second part of your the main part of your question the kedusha curriculum is just that it's it's kedusha interestingly and it should be kind of striking to those watching the way that you describe this question in the same paragraph you could use the word kedusha holiness and filth at the same time and that's really where i think it strikes to the foundation of what the misconception is when it comes to these matters these matters may be very private matters but first of all they're certainly not filthy and dirty when approached and respected for the holiness that they actually contain and they're also not secret matters in other words they're not meant to be kept to yourselves they're meant to be shared albeit in private fashion in a more private and sensitive form so the kadusha piece of this curriculum which is one piece in a very large curriculum addressing all sorts of social and emotional learning topics is a part that has some potential group discussion touching on areas of self-control general self-control building of self-control which is important but also much more private one-on-one conversations where a basic level of education can be given to our students as they are approaching the years of becoming an adult the years of puberty why should any child go through the fundamental changes in their body and be confused why should they not be aware that what's happening to them is perfectly normal i've given many parent presentations on this about the conversations that i was then going to have with their children ahead of time and countless fathers have come over to me and told me if only 20 and 30 years ago someone would have told me about this and i wouldn't have have to have to suffer in silence with the confusion of is this okay things haven't happened yet things are happening is there something wrong with me and there's no address to turn to and that's the beauty of having a dharjenu or an rpath scl teacher in the classroom because now that's a person our path s-e-l-t i've never heard so many letters right next to each other what exactly does that mean so our path is just the translation of our path oh our path yeah our our path um and scl social emotional learning okay you said that so quickly yeah i'm sorry intelligent life form so and our path scl our path seo so we have this ability to have the teacher in the classroom that that is could be a rebbe it could be a mashikia it could be a guidance counselor but now the children are exposed to them in in a whole new way already broaching a lot of these topics and there's an address for them to go to with any additional questions they might have which is a supplementary huge benefit to having such a curriculum in a school i think i let all three of you off the hook and particularly rabbi grossberg in trying to understand and conceptualize what the real issue and what changed is rabbi grossberg when you were describing it you mentioned the term you said and technology it became like the excuse for everything like supply chain issues so i showed up 20 minutes late to the meeting and to me it feels sometimes like this dismissive hand wave like we got to do things differently technology and if you mean pornography say pornography what exactly has technology done that makes our emotional development any different i i i generally want to understand better meaning is it because what technology gives you access towards so so is that what it is then say what that's what it is or is there something more fundamental in the way that it shapes the way our children and adults frankly develop right so i think it's an important question um pornography pornography is really just one small piece of the picture when we say technology we mean that the situations the issues that are facing i'll give an example and i remember linda mentioned the idea of having the teacher becomes a safe person right so i'm a teenager i have my smartphone my parents are clueless i'm now addicted to my smartphone all night long and that's that's rampant i'm on i'm not necessarily doing anything wrong per se i'm not going places that are inappropriate but i don't know who to speak to about that i'm not going to my rebbe about that because he's going to maybe be upset i have a smartphone i might not want my principal he'll give me a hard time i'll get punished or whatever the you know the appropriate consequence would be but this is a problem that i can't go to my parents with either so you know we mentioned technology the idea also that when we're busier with our phones than we've ever been then the social emotional growth that we used to have playing ball play hanging out with friends that is much less common than it used to be has now become something that is not just a given it's not something that we get through um our social social interactions with friends so technology itself is not necessarily the um we're not talking necessarily about the parts of technology that are inappropriate or us or but just the fact that it's changed the world that we live in whether we like or not we can say that we're just going to check directions because we're busier when we're on our phone we are not socially interacting when we're on our when we're on our computer even if we're playing one of the you know various different games that have now become an issue um i'm playing technically you know as a kid will say i'm interacting with friends you know if you look at that list of people that are playing world of warcraft or whatever with me there's quite a few friends that i have you know that i'm interacting with but that's not interaction that's not the social healthy social growth that people have and i can tell you working in a summer camp when kids are away from the technology some of them have no clue they're not they're just not used to all this time and all this the need to be with friends for so long it's just too much for them they don't know i mean it's you know if someone is listening to this and thinking that this is an exaggeration they either don't have teenagers or they don't know what their teenagers are doing i actually want to check my twitter account right now i'll be real with you uh shira can you can you do you have something yeah yeah i want to i just want to add to that this whole piece of technology that neither one of them covered because it is so huge it is affecting our self-esteem and our relationships in a huge way and leave the two issues they spoke they both spoke about aside i had a teacher in seventh grade and they were talking about body image none of their none of her students would ever think about forwarding a picture before editing it seventh grade she came to me and told me that again i was so sad that they can't send a picture without editing it they're looking up at what everyone is posting everything has to be perfect and i see the same thing in my generation with with the marrieds everyone only shows you know the perfect pictures of their families they and their husband always get along their kids always look perfect they post their their beautiful gourmet dinners marriages are falling apart because of this the the pressures people are having and then the other piece that i mentioned earlier to you is is the privacy factor there's no privacy there's nothing i don't today engagements even the most achieving world it just it boggles my mind it's a whole setup and people are waiting to video waiting to take pictures like i don't know back in the day 20 years ago when i got engaged it was like this was a moment between the two of us and that's how they're starting their relationship they're starting their marriage there's no privacy anymore there's no just us everything is like for the public so i i wanna i wanna add in some of the equation if you want to add to this uh you can after but allow me to add in a really important piece of the equation you know i'm still i'm a genuine skeptic of curricular efforts because you build this beautiful edifice and you go home and you'll never compete against the culture of the home you'll never compete against it and you even mentioned that you know you don't want to necessarily go and speak to your parents about this i don't know i think the parent should be the first line of defense so my question is how do you build a curriculum and help a child develop emotionally that begins as a school effort but brings in the parents as partners unless you're telling me that the parents are being painted as enemies i mean they are definitely contributing to the problem i contribute to my kids problems i'm sure all of your problems were contributed by your parents and it goes on forever so how do you contain actual growth in a classroom and compete so to speak against or figure out a way to integrate with whatever culture is going on in the home so yeah i think it's important to point out that when we talk about you know the issues of the home we're not saying that the home is against social emotional learning they're just not necessarily giving it so it works together with the home the home is willing i see skepticism but you didn't call yourself a skeptic but um meaning that many parents are just like i said they're busy they're powering they're not either they're clueless they really don't know what's going on well i see you know students all the time so clap on the bema and stop having so many parlor meetings so instead of an initiative for schools tell parents enough enough one wedding a week that's it and you have to be home meaning if you were to ask me where should we be focusing our time and attention should it be again obviously in a perfect world we could do both and get both but i want to understand better it sounds like you're just saying okay look the p they're busy what are you going to do who has time to parent their children so we'll do it instead i think there's an important word here and curriculum the idea is we're it's not just a contest it's not just you know a nice um you know for a parachute about this media it's really taught and that happens in school we we're we're taking a a given that this is not something that we can just tell a nice story about a guttal and there's all beautiful things don't get me wrong but it it's it's really taught and you know i wish we had the curriculum in front of us you'd see that it's taught in a way that really it's school you know we encourage the teachers that we work with give give a mark on the report card um give homework do things make it real now i know in your mind that might be so also they probably hate it but if it's taught exactly what happens i read your face but if it's taught right if it's stored by the right person and told correctly and this is you know the proof is in the point we're seeing this they look forward to this part of the day they look forward to you know and granted every teacher decides homework may or may not be appropriate depending but this is for some of these kids it's a breath of fresh air they're being given a green light to feel the things that they've been feeling and not really knowing how to identify them that it's okay to be feeling this way and what to do where to take those feelings once you have them rev avi do you have something you want to add yeah i'd like to i'd like to comment on the whole curriculum piece that rabbi roseberg was mentioning i think there's a lot to say on that but to more directly address your question let's be real we owe all the good parts of ourselves to our parents just like we owe the bad parts of ourselves and we owe all the good and bad parts of ourselves to ourselves also so it's not all on the parents and we certainly can't just blame all the bad stuff on parents we have to attribute the good stuff too to parents in generally healthy situations we work with the parents the parents are an integral component to this curriculum working i am involved in ta in baltimore of actually being a dharkeinu teacher of implementing this curriculum and a key component in what we do it's not the 40-minute class that we're giving to the students but a key component is that we send a letter out to the parents letting them know here is the new curriculum that we are launching now parents are excited multiple parents reached out to me saying can you tell me what are some of the topics that you're going to be covering i'd like to try to help reinforce some of those at home speak the same language i said you read my mind we are in fact going to be doing that we will be sending out updates every few weeks with some of the key terminologies some of the key concepts some of the activities we did i recently did a poem that's out there with the boys it also speaks to some of the stigma where you can't do certain types of classes and topics with boys but if you come in there with confidence and you do it the right way you can do it really well and the boys really appreciate it and participate in it especially if you start them out young in fifth and sixth grade and you continue it throughout the grades so there's this poem where for when read many of you might have seen it when read from top to bottom it describes everything extremely pessimistic but the same lines when read from bottom to top it describes everything very optimistic just the opposite and it's a cute way of showing that we can have we can shift our perspective the same set of words can give us two wildly different messages i got a text later that night the day of the class from a father who said my son came home and excitedly showed me this poem that you gave out and did with them in class and as a family we sat around the table and took looked at it read it together and we liked it it was cute it was interesting there's a certain funny part to it but it was just eye-opening to us as a family and we talked about it as a family that is a 100 success rate in terms of uh implementation of this curriculum we do not see it as 100 it's better than nothing for sure but we do not see it as 100 or the preferred method to exclude the parents not at all we would prefer the right way to do it is to have the parents involved included informed and thankfully a lot of parents are really excited about it for those that aren't and that are so absent you can do all the clops on the bema you want they're going to continue to be absent with whatever else is going to be going on and bar hashem thank god those children are still going to get something from the curriculum that we're providing to them and i would argue they're going to get a lot from it and they potentially can then be the vehicle of change even in their own homes as they get older amudin receives many different calls almost all the cases are due to some sort of trauma be sexual trauma be it childhood trauma physical abuse we will get a lot of cases just calling for a therapy referral we will get a lot of cases calling for what we call psychoeducation they want to understand their loved one or their difficulties and they don't even know how to help them so they're starting just with tell me more about their mental health and then um we get calls from people in crisis they just found out their child their sibling was abused either recently years back and they're just they're at a loss sometimes they're sobbing sometimes they are whispering they can barely speak someone who is thinking about reaching out to mudim when they get assigned to their case manager they should expect warmth no judgment i like to think every person who calls i think like if this were my family member what would i be saying what would i be recommending i think that on every call because that's the only way to do this job [Music] so you've developed these two curriculums one is called our path one is called target one obviously being the translation of the other and this isn't obviously the wild wild west this is under the auspices of rebellion rodney and this is in conjunction and partnership with torah masora so i understand this in the wild wild west and i underst and i hope that you receive my questions with the love respect and curiosity with which they are stated my question now is almost to get a little bit more personal to get to highlight some examples of what exactly we're teaching here and i would ask each of you and we'll start with shira and go all the way across tell me something from this schedule of learning from this curriculum that you wish you were able to have when you were growing up tell me the grade tell me what you were struggling with and why this piece of this curriculum would have benefited you i'm very much a relationship person so i definitely choose something in that realm i'm thinking about ninth grade i came from a small school and joined a high school that had girls from other schools in a much bigger class and i just kind of remember floundering i became you know those the best friends really quickly was somebody that totally fell apart after a few months didn't know how to handle it until i found my place i think specifically and i think i mentioned before boundaries but i'm i'm known to be a little bit obsessed with healthy boundaries i really feel like that's the foundation of how to be a healthy person i work in a camp and i'm known as the boundaries police in the camp that's like my thing i feel like understanding where i end and where you begin what my role is in different relationships how to handle situations how to solve a conflict use i statements all these things relating to relationships i feel like i would have gained so much had someone taught that to me i just want to follow up because you said that so quickly you said using i statements what exactly do you mean by that okay it's one of the things i love teaching we teach it first in sixth grade and i tell them this is the secret i say guys i'm now going to teach you the secret to having healthy relationships if you can get this formula down pat you can have a healthy relationship with your friends your parents your teachers your boss one day your husband one day your kids this is the key to conflict resolution so i statements are basically that instead of a you statement when you're upset with somebody typically you would go on attack you call them names you start with you you did this you are this and instinctively when somebody attacks us and they start off with you we either get defensive put our shield ups nah no it didn't or we attack back and we say well you did it to me last week and the conversation is a non-starter immediately it escalates and there's no conversation so we teach them this formula starting with i feel and i tell them you don't have to sound nerdy when you say it you don't even have to use the word feel but focus on i i was upset i was hurt you can't say to me no no no i'm hurt you can't tell me i'm not hurt wait a second why are you hurt all of a sudden she's listening to me she's not attacking she's not getting defensive she's listening because she cares about me and i'm hurt that's an ice statement and we teach them it's i feel because and i want that's the formula we teach it in sixth grade and then in seventh grade in the friendship unit we teach it in twelfth grade in dating a marriage unit and a few times in between i absolutely love that avi tell me something that you struggled with when you were you know in this fifth through 12th grade where the curriculum really addresses development that you wish you could have had when you were growing up in school okay i think my elementary school that i went to through eighth grade did a really good job of using the available resources to them but there was no until very recently with the advancement of this project dedicated curriculum comprehensive curriculum towards these important social emotional topics and i think when it comes to something that you mentioned before basic emotional regulation the ability to have techniques and skills to be able to properly vent process emotions as opposed to being the guy who emotions don't really bother them at all and they can simply rub and shrug things off and move on and obviously i did that to an extent but i think i would have benefited greatly from having a more full curriculum i just want to digress for a second on the previous point from urban grossberg in terms of it being a curriculum to me sel the most important word in that acronym social emotional learning is not in the acronym it's that last word curriculum much to your dismay and your criticism or cynicism of curricula i would argue that when it comes to math if we would want to every once in a while have a project from the math foundation that would come in and do some cool math exercises and that would be like one month of school or one week or maybe one day we would not have children educated in math it would be something that they're kind of aware of so the same thing when it comes to bullying or when it comes to conflict resolution or when it comes to basic social emotional regulation when it comes to being able to properly vent your emotions if you don't have a weekly class or a bi-weekly class where there's a regularity to it and then not only within that grade is their irregularity but it then builds the next grade on a foundation that you established in the earlier grade much like we teach the secular subjects and much lahavdo like we teach to all the mu de kodesh we don't jump into the intricacies of a katsoa senenosivis and arabikive eager when we are first teaching the children the building blocks of reading a piece of gemara of learning gemara of understanding how the torah works so so too here making it into a curriculum gives it not only a certain kashivish in the eyes of the children and the teachers and the parents but it also appropriately builds from the foundation up those skills so while my elementary school might have done a pretty good job utilizing certain projects and opportunities rebaim and muras all the time utilize opportunities that come up in parsha and come up in mishna to teach a lesson to teach a skill but it's much more project based as it comes up as opposed to it being a full thorough repetitive building block curriculum and i think that's something that i could have benefited from greatly and it would have enormously helped me moving into high school where it was difficult as i became in that mindset of between child and adult what we sometimes call teenager or young adult and there's that transition happening it was challenging for me to both be able to handle the emotions that i experienced when there were adults in my lives the way i perceived it as still treating me like a child and i would have wanted a certain level of autonomy or independence afforded to me being able to handle some of those emotions in a healthier way would have done me great benefit personally and i think i read this recently much of what we want to accomplish in our youth is actually going to happen in the middle school years and then taking them through the high school years but if you just start in high school you've started too late you can argue you got to start in elementary school already in kindergarten but once they get to those middle school years if they're not already developing some of these skills it's going to be they're going to be way behind in their development once they just enter into high school and they're thrown into that environment without these skills robert grossberg tell me a skill that you wish you could have learned when you were in this developmental stage okay going with the theme of uh confessions with codolum stories first um i was far from the perfect high school bar and being you know our curriculum was basically a we learned best case scenarios constantly in other words don't be do you should be doing this you shouldn't be thinking about that you shouldn't have any thoughts concerns etc about the movies television central all these other things and all of a sudden they say well well i'm really not living up to who they want me to be does that make me a bad person you take that and it just it segues right into a lack of self-confidence so all of these things that are again it's all in the curriculum i think that everybody who's in high school facing the challenges and we're not talking about crazy challenges we're not talking about you know things that are off the wall but just simple growing up in 2021 having just an understanding that you're you're not evil you're not mad and yes of course the rebate are shooting high because that's what verbatim do that's you know they want the best for us and maybe in a you know best case scenario a rebbe will understand it won't but the bottom line is understanding that there's a place for growth without guilt growth in a healthy way that i think myself as a teenager would have been would have taken away a lot of angst and a lot of you know uh feelings of inadequacy that um i'm so sorry what specifically in the if you have to pick one aspect of the unit that would have helped your younger self what would that have been dealing with guilt dealing with guilt in a healthy positive way fantastic i wanted to transition with maybe a few rapid fire questions to understand a little bit of your own development you can weave in some of the topics and ideas that you've been speaking about but i wanted to try to begin to move a little bit quicker i'm curious from each of you and i know i have my own answer what was your favorite grade in your development through through 12 and why for me it as i said i had a more difficult time going through high school i imagined that i could have in a more positive environment for myself i could have had a lot of amazing experiences there and i did have some but for me eighth grade was an amazing year for me i was captain of the basketball team which which did which was amazing for me um david and i grew up a little bit in nary's thrill but i'm not sure if we ever played against each other on the court so we're there so so what's interesting to me looking back on that is that one of the highlights of my educational career is an element of the school that's not part of education it was part of call it the outlets or the extracurriculars the sports in this case and what i see in the students is that many of them get a feel for these classes because the rules are a little bit more relaxed obviously as a good teacher you have to have basic classroom management skills you can't be devoid of that but with the basic classroom management skills if you're able to give over these these skills and these activities in a fun more interactive way the kids actually relate to it more like what you might call an outlet as opposed to just your typical class shira favorite grade k through 12 and y twelfth grade i feel like i was settled i was confident i had a group of friends i had good grades i got into the seminary i was choir head like i had my place wow it's more than captain basketball team i don't know it's prestigious rabbi grossberg favorite grade k through 12. feeling a little inadequate over here um no never choir ahead definitely not on the basketball team but um i would say fifth grade but it's interesting it wasn't so much the grade as it was the rebbe and that it had a profound i would say to this day profound influence on who i am and even you know the profession that i chose so you know that just showed me just what the right positive influence in life can do for you my favorite grade was 11th grade it felt like i was seeing the destination of my own personal development and there was something very beautiful about that i'm curious to hear just from your perspective as an educator growing up what was your most difficult grade where did you feel like you struggled the most what grade let's start from rabbi grossberg so it's funny just quite the opposite 12th grade i was very unsettled you know it was that question college yeshiva cola track business track you know where i was going and it was kind of like this tremendous pressure i felt that somehow at 17 years old i needed to decide the rest of my life and probably it would have been great maybe to have a dark new curriculum telling me that i didn't have to worry about that but um i was just the whole entire time i went and i i was a um you know a roller coaster up and down i would you know go from short haircuts and very white shirts and everything to the next day said no that's not for me it was a very unsettling year for me avi i would say 9th and 10th grade are kind of blurred together for me that transition like i mentioned before being what i felt was unprepared in contrast to the wonderful preparation we're offering through this curriculum i felt less left me less equipped to be able to healthily transition into that particular high school shira i said before ninth grade i just want to say like just quick thing about like the units that get address all these things that you all just said and what you said about 11th grade like knowing where you were going um eighth grade transitioned to high school a whole unit about it dealing with change ninth grade transitioning into high school what are your expectations have your expectations been met how do you handle your expectations not being met 11th grade self-knowledge unit we talk about goal setting i have the girls do like a vision board or like a whole like values collage of what they see for their future 12th grade life after high school we go through and talk about the skills you need after high school just if you think of all the things we're saying we literally address each of these topics for me it was without a doubt 10th grade 10th grade to me was gam gates al-maves it was the shadow of death because you're really rootless you're not just starting something you're nowhere close to finishing it and i felt unmoored from any sort of sense of self of where i was and that's really where i began to struggle the most you had already mentioned shira a part of the curriculum you spoke about i statements that really resonated most with you and it resonated a great deal with me i want to go through each and maybe you could have another shot at it what is one thing from the curriculum of you had previously mentioned that poem that could be read both top to bottom and bottom to top one thing from the curriculum that has resonated with you personally in your own home um i i can pick it exactly it's in 10th grade in the life pressures unit we have them write out all the different roles they have so i'll start for them and i'll say i'm a female i'm a from woman i'm a mother i'm a sister i'm a we talk about all the different roles we have and then we flesh out all the different responsibilities that come with those roles and then we talk about prioritizing compartmentalizing for me this goes back to boundaries again like if i try they know i see like i don't answer my phone between four and eight like that's my time to be with my children i do work at night i work almost every night after my my little ones are in bed if we're trying to do eight things at one time we're not doing anything properly you know everyone says oh i multitask i multitask okay so you do three things ineffectively my role right now is i need to be a student you know for the kids in high school i do the best i can right now i need to be a babysitter that's my job i'm on the basketball team if we can compartmentalize and focus on each role and prioritize see what's most important i feel like we can be so much more effective so much more productive so much less overwhelmed and handle all of life pressures because for boys and for girls in the firm world there's just there's a lot of pressure there's a lot of pressure so if i could break it down help you break it down and figure out how you're going to handle all of it i just feel like we're giving them such a gift and i use that sorry you asked how i use it i use it in my life every minute when i'm working on working when i'm a mother i'm a mother avi i would say in sixth grade we have this great exercise where we we draw a black dot on the board or we give out a document with a black dot in the center and we ask in my case i'm teaching the boys we ask the boys what do you see and they focus on the black dot and i challenge them as a way of making a little tricky is it a black dot or a black circle what do you guys say and they'll fight with each other and get all philosophical about it and then ultimately i'll explain to them that you're all missing all the white all the white that's around that black dot and it's human nature for us to focus in on those things that stand out to us pain sorrow difficulty challenge those stand out to us the fact that our heart continues to beat and our eyes can see and we can breathe and we have people with decent good relationships that we can share life with the fact that we have yiddish kite that we have judaism all of these things can easily fall by the wayside in terms of our attention so we use that activity in order to show that it's so easy to miss all the white which is much more in terms of how much space it's taking up than just that little black dot in the center we institute gratitude journals with the boys talking about such great people like robert victor miller who was the master at every little tiny thing that you can see and feel and look at and pay attention to is another area of hakara satov of gratitude to hashem for life for the fact that we exist etc i actually have an interesting situation this year where my son is in sixth grade in ta where i'm teaching the curriculum and i get to kind of listen in on some of the conversations at home and once i heard him telling one of my daughters i don't know necessarily i would argue that that's the smartest way that one sibling should tell the other sibling it's great for the parents to be to hear about these messages and then transmit it but he was telling one of his sisters that's so pessimistic you're looking at the black dot you're not looking at the white space and a little nachos point there maybe he knew out of the corner of his eye that i was watching but that's really a powerful idea that i think everyone should know and i love that the kids bring it home to their parents as i mentioned before also so i i know that takreno is used sufficiently at home because it officially gets the eye roll when i say well in the dark curriculum and you know right away because here he goes again but i think that in the relationships the unit on relationships there's a lot of talk of being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes to understand where they're coming from before we right away jump to they didn't invite me because they're you know they're obnoxious they hate me they said but really putting yourself into such an important thing in all relationships like it's a little bit older we have some some married some single and you know there's a lot of different dynamics and you know this one didn't call this but if we can train ourselves through all of our relationships to always have that ability to see things globally to see things that you know not just you know from our angle but from the other person's angle um we're really arming them with the you know the ability to have positive relationships despite some bumps along the way now i could just add to whatever was saying we we utilized sources in torah as well to be able to bring those points out so like groceries mentioning empathy the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes will bring various experiences and incidents from tanach from hazal to be able to make those points so that there's this very seamless connection between those very special judaic holy sources connecting to these very important human talents and skills that we want to teach our kids short of going through the entire darkreinu curriculum as we mentioned so many times before this is a dialogue of our children's emotional development between our school system and the parents the parent comes to you and says i want direction it's a in order to help my children grow emotionally what is a piece of advice or a book or an article that you would recommend to a parent to help get them on the right path shera my favorite parenting book is how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk totally change the way i see everything validation i think validation i i think is huge again it's just a really quick story but i had a client in therapy and i just she had a lot she really had a lot a lot of symptoms and a lot of a lot of suffering and she was describing through some of her symptoms and i said to her wow you must have been in so much pain she froze she froze and she she started crying and she says to me no one has ever said that to me i didn't use any fancy you know i'm trained in emdr act i didn't use any fancy skills there all i did was validate her if her parents had validated her when she was two and three and four would she be here would she be in therapy now avi that's a good question one of the pieces of advice or a little tip that i offer parents all the time it comes from my clinical work and counseling but it also comes from the curriculum is the idea of looking at time as an ally time is not your enemy it's your ally and what i mean by that is we never we almost never unless there's some type of imminent physical threat to someone's safety outside of those much more rare circumstances we almost never need to react to anything immediately it's it's almost always appropriate to react within the next few minutes and even with the next few hours or days if you simply say to a child who might have crossed the line this is something that needs to be addressed but i want to cool down i want to relax i want to think about this and then we're going to have a conversation about it i love you no matter what i know you love me and this was a mistake but give me some time to think about what the right next step is going to be those types of messaging to children i think can be extremely powerful and time is not your enemy you can utilize time in a way in which it is extraordinarily helpful and when we view time in the opposite as an enemy and we need to jump in and quickly fill in the blank it almost always results in failure and destruction so that's one of the main main ideas rabbi grossberg i don't know if i can call myself a tamil the revolver but i did learn and heard manchester using from him so it's really field building and planting translating into english to me is is the bible it's really the premise is that parenting takes two different roles there's the building which is the direct meaning the parent is directly involved in building up the child and the zeria which is the planting is where you cultivate you do what makes sure that it's watered properly but then leave it to grow as it needs to grow and it's that balance and that ability to balance if someone would read it and not know who was written by they would think it's you know a forward-thinking modern-day psychologist it's um there's so much in it and i uh i suggest it for every parent you address very early the ills of technology i'd like to hear from each of you what are the internet and technology policies in your own home shira sure my brother-in-law's director of tag and passaic so i really get a lot from him i ask him for guidance all the time i think they have a thing like prevent protect like there's like whole thing um try to push it off as long as you can what age did your kids get cell phones so i think a lot of things also depends on the school they go to like for for us a priority was a school that doesn't allow smartphones and i really i spoke to the principal and i said you know at what age i want i want to push off as long as i can i said at what age do they need to them cell phones she said by 11th grade they all have cell phones so that's what we did but in their school they only have dumb phones they're not allowed to have smartphones so that took you know that took the battle away from iberochem we have filters i go with the tag rules so the kids can use the computers on the kids computer that's heavily filtered in a very public space only while we're home avi technology is a magnifier it's nothing more than a magnifying glass if you want to do something good technology explodes it potentially into doing tremendous amount of good if you want to do something bad it can explode how much bad you can do this curriculum teaches that we are supposed to helpfully integrate technology into our lives it's not something that we just try to shelter ourselves from there for the way that i think it makes sense and the way that we do it in our home is we absolutely do have elements of technology in our home our children use these devices they do not my children are still pretty young my oldest is only 13 or 14 so we do not we have not gone into the later years of teenage hood yet and we'll cross that bridge when we get there but at this point they do not own their own phones or smartphones or dumb phones there's no need from our perspective that they should need to own any of that but certainly in our home there is usage of technology in smart ways in safe ways we filter the router so that every device that's automatically connected through the wi-fi and the internet in the house is going to be automatically filtered and we look at it as this is our opportunity to train our children the the essence of is to train children to be able to when you're not around to tell them what to do and what not to do to make those right decisions and if they're first encountering things that they most likely will encounter and you're not around and that's when it's happening they may be in trouble i always use the muscle technology is like a power tool it definitely is necessary it has its place you just have to know how to use it properly and that's a discussion we have we talk very openly about it um basically my kids my boys do not have smartphones my girls at a certain age 11th 12th grade we'll get a smartphone that's heavily filtered and you know but technology we we're a family that uses technology i guess as a whole but carefully you know somebody haven't found a way to find a filter that takes out amazon and some of the other shopping sites but for now that's good mrs schur berkowitz rabbi avi lando rabbi swell grossberg thank you so much for the conversation today really helping address and illuminate what indeed is missing this conversation about social emotional learning can really help individuals children families and communities help build healthier lives and futures thank you so much to united to heal for organizing this incredible event and thank you so much for the darren team and amudim for bringing this conversation to the foreign important conversation that helps us reflect not only in what our children are struggling with but how parents communities families are all partners in helping build a healthier jewish community and a healthier future for ourselves and the next generation thank you so much for joining us tonight [Music] you