18th of January…it was my birthday, coincidentally it was also the day I received an offer from Gan Shalom Preschool to start working as a Director. It has now been more than two weeks I have been co-directing the school with Laura – the outgoing director. I will start directing the school on my own from March 1st!
When I arrived in the Bay area, I interviewed for a number of jobs as a school Director, but when I arrived at Gan Shalom, I was very captured by the beauty of the space, the atmosphere and the team. I remembered leaving each one of the interviews I took for the position being slightly more excited every time!
These past two weeks have been filled with a lot of learning about the school; we also went as a Gan Shalom staff team to the Jewish Federation Early Childhood Conference, which lasted one day. Here, I want to share with you one of the insights I took with me from going to the conference. This insight can be summed up as: ‘the importance of sharing a message of affirmation’ with those around you. This insight came from a workshop that Rabbi Adina Allen – a spiritual leader, writer, Co-Founder and Creative Director of The Jewish Studio Project, and mom of one of the children at Gan Shalom – run during the conference on ‘Art for the Educator’s Soul’.
During the workshop, we talked about the challenges that teachers working in a school can face. We also talked about the affirmations – the encouraging words that other staff, parents as well as community members can say to teachers as encouragement and to show their support and recognition of the important work that teachers do. Rabbi Allen then asked us to engage in the artistic practice of making some ‘artist trading cards’ – essentially making some small cards that we could exchange with each other with kind words that teachers might like to hear as a form of affirmation.
A number of teachers from Gan Shalom took the workshop, we all made cards, and decided to take them back to Gan Shalom to hang them in the school to remind us every day of the importance of the work that we do and the strength of our team! Click here: CardsGanShalom to view some of the cards we made and we received!
After this experience, I am ever more excited to embark in this journey at Gan Shalom!
Pensieri di Bea 