In February of 2001, preparing to relocate to Baltimore, I sent my resume to several area independent schools.  I was currently teaching second grade at the Harley School in Rochester, New York; I had previously been the Lower School Math Specialist and a middle school math teacher at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia.

Shortly after faxing my resume to Krieger Schechter Day School, though, I re-read the school's web site and experienced a moment of panic.  I saw that Judaic and general studies were integrated, and worried that maybe I would be expected to teach math in Hebrew.  I phoned the school and told Faye Pollack, then the Head of the Lower School, "I want to make sure I'm not wasting your time -- my Hebrew's not very good."  She laughed and assured me that the school found substantive ways to integrate Judaic and general studies even though not all the teachers had had the luck to receive a bilingual education like our students do.

A few weeks later, I visited Baltimore to interview.  My first day in town, the weather was in the 50s and sunny: springtime by Rochester standards.  "I could live here," I thought.

The next day, it snowed a mere four inches -- a daily occurrence in Rochester -- and most of the schools where I was scheduled to interview shut down.  You can guess which one stayed open.  Despite having fair warning that I would forever after come to work while the secular schools had snow days, I accepted a job at KSDS.

The opportunity to integrate Judaic and general studies has been a special pleasure of working here.  When my Parshat HaShavuah students study Shifra and Puah--the midwives who defied Pharaoh's order to kill newborn Hebrew males--we compare the midwives' choices with Martin Luther King's non-violent resistance centuries later.  In math class, we crunch the numbers behind contemporary social policy debates, such as where to set the minimum wage . . . and I might just slip in a quotation from Pirke Avot about fair treatment of workers. This week, in honor of Tu B'shevat, my fifth grade English students will read Carl Sandburg's poem "Buffalo Dusk," and discuss its environmental themes, as well as its reference to Native Americans losing their land after European colonization, our current social studies topic.

KSDS has also provided wonderful ongoing learning.  In addition to our faculty-wide professional development, I've been lucky to participate in two special cohorts.  Local storyteller Jennifer Zunikoff coached teachers on incorporating storytelling in the classroom.  Former KSDS teacher Michelle Frisby, in conjunction with the organization Facing History, trained teachers to facilitate dialogue about race.  I've also learned alongside my students, whether picking up writing tips from each year's visiting author or learning to design on TinkerCad for the 3-D printer.  And at what other job would I have started wearing tefillin in my 40s?  Alas, I still haven't picked up enough Hebrew to teach that bilingual math class--perhaps that's a goal for the future.