Academics at the Academy

by Dr. Tammy Williams, Dean of Academics
Originally featured in HaGesher, American Hebrew Academy’s Monthly Newsletter

Academics at the American Hebrew Academy are complex.  We weigh best practices with student needs, against school demands, and in the constant shining light of our school’s mission.  Because of this complexity, we try things and we make changes, and we work together with each other – negotiating time with students and spending a great deal of time scheduling events – in order to maximize opportunity, but in balance with a manageable load for our students.  We wish to challenge students to the limits of their potential without doing them harm.

This year we altered the daily schedule to include every day classes because best practice tells us that this can improve student retention rates in the languages and in mathematics.  When we test such a change in the context of our dual curriculum of secular and Jewish Studies curricula (sometimes called a quadruple curriculum, if you include athletics and the arts), we learn that while it might improve retention, the toll that it takes on students, who have homework from some courses every night along with homework from a different set of classes every other night, is a cost which might be too high for us to pay.  Stay tuned for more information about the daily schedule for next year.

We believe that our students should learn to live a healthy lifestyle, so our students take Wellness every year, and learn safe and appropriate ways to work out and to attend to their physical fitness.  They seek less of this and more free time, but this is important to us and we persevere.

We also believe that our students should explore the arts, to venture into areas which might not be so comfortable to them (as some of our art students do every time they enter the gym), because we want our students to know themselves well, to discover all of their gifts, and to be informed patrons of the arts.  Students at the Academy must take art every year.  Some students try to dodge or squirm around this requirement, but this is important to us and we persevere.

Most importantly, we believe that we teach students when we aren’t aware that we are teaching them – when we are outside of class, at lunch, or at the track meet; when the school day schedule is confusing because of an assembly; when we recognize victories and successes; when deadlines are converging for us on all fronts; and in how we interact with students when we, too, are exhausted.  We teach students of the value of the minutes we share with them in the care that we take in using our time with them.  We model for them ways of interacting with others.  And because we are a boarding school, the opportunity for such teaching is increased.  So, because of this, at the American Hebrew Academy, academics IS school and relationships and partnerships and goals and struggles and athletics and successes and art and celebration and, well, life.

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