Education & Careers

Last spring I walked into a sixth-grade classroom where the girls welcomed me with squeals of delight, excited to show me the dance routine they had created to the rap song “Take It Off.” The lyrics include:

“Now we’re looking like pimps in my gold Trans-Am

Got a water bottle full of whiskey in my handbag...

There’s a place downtown where the freaks all come around

It’s a hole in the wall, it’s a dirty free for all

And they turn me on when they take it off...”

Adele Chabot’s first year of teaching seemed like a nightmare to her, says the 22-year-old educator at the Barkai Yeshivah, a school in Flatbush serving Sephardic Jews.

“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” she says, recalling that she faced not only discipline problems, but also the overwhelming nature of adjusting to a new job and a new environment.

Lindsay Ganci, 25, had always wanted to go to Israel, but never Lhad the opportunity.

Last summer, she joined other congregational schoolteachers on a Birthright trip that combined tourist hot spots with visits to Israeli schools and opportunities to network with Israeli teachers.

Jerusalem — When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced last month that the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, and Cornell University had won a bid to create a state-of-the-art technological campus on Roosevelt Island, it confirmed what Israelis already know: that the Technion, with its reputation for innovation and Nobel Prize-winning scientists, is as respected abroad as it is in Israel.