Tag: learning

HUNDRED DOLLAR LAPTOP: ONE PER CHILD – AN UPDATE

Peru_one_laptop_one_village
The One Laptop Per Child project is an exciting one; I’ve written about it before; that November 3rd post garnered a remarkable level of traffic.  On Christmas eve, another story appeared.  Here’s how it starts: 

Laptop Project Enlivens Peruvian Hamlet Dec 24, By Frank Bajak  [this is also an AP photo]

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) – Doubts about
whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the
morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children
got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families
whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops – people who can ill afford pencil
and paper much less books – can’t get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they’re already powering
up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At
night, they’re dozing off in front of them – if they’ve managed to keep older
siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It’s really the kind of
conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian
backwater up a precarious dirt road.

You can read the rest here.  It’s popping up all over the place.  The state of Maine has had wonderful results in its efforts to distribute laptops to junior high kids, too.  You don’t have to go into the developing world to see the value of universal access, even in places where it may seem far-fetched unless you know the machine and its capacity.  Here’s more.

More resources:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)        http://laptop.org/

OLPC Wiki                                  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home

Nicholas Negroponte at TED          http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41

60 Minutes piece                          http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/69/one_laptop_per_child

 

A PLACE FOR EVERY JEWISH GIRL

Judah6_girls_blur_croppedThis weekend was a special one at our synagogue: our semi-annual "Makom shabbaton." Makom means place, and the program, initiated by someone I greatly admire and sponsored in part by a local Jewish women’s foundation,  works to help young girls find a place in the complicated world of Orthodox Judaism.  Clearly, given the divided seating and prohibitions on certain kinds of participation, it’s a difficult undertaking, but the concept, and execution, of this project are exemplary.

Today girls in the third, fourth and fifth grade stood before the entire congregation and delivered commentary on the Torah reading for this morning, which was Va-Yiggash, the story of the reconciliation between Joseph and the brothers who sold him into slavery.  It’s complicated stuff, but with the help of their spectacular teacher, they made wonderful sense of it.  Why didn’t Joseph tell his dad he was OK for all those 20+ years?  Why did he hide a cup in his little brother’s bag of grain, and "frame" him as a thief?  Why, in big brother Judah’s pleas to Joseph for mercy, did he mention their father 14 times?  In the  mini-sermons given today those questions, and more, were answered.

I wish you could have seen these little girls (really, 9-12 years old) stand in front of a huge sanctuary and speak in clear, confident voices, retelling bits of the story, citing commentators and making their points.  It was thrilling.   

There’s lots more to do for both girls and grown women in the Orthodox world, but days like today, and the growth of groups like the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance encourage optimism.  Of course here I am, only four years into life as a somewhat – more and more – Orthodox woman -and already ready to join the revolution. [What else is new? ]

The women (and men) who are part of this movement are smart  religious activists and it’s an inspiring community indeed.  What happened today is emblematic of their commitment to bringing more and more equity to the lives of religious Jewish women and in the process they are building a remarkable constituency and setting an amazing example for women (and men )from six to sixty and beyond.

JERUSALEM DIARY 2.0 – DAY TWO (CORRECTED): THE SOTAH, THE HEBREW AND THE MEANDERINGS OF THE DAY

Israel_new_delhiIsn’t this funny?  We passed it walking home from dinner tonight and I just thought I’d share it.  We’ve had quite a day, one that I’ve already written about once and then, somehow, allowed the post to be devoured by the ethers of the Internet.  I’m going to try again but far more briefly as it’s getting late.

Mall_guard_with_gun
First, here’s my daily security photo – from outside the coffee shop where we had breakfast.  And yes, this young man is patrolling THE MALL with a machine gun. 

Leahnachmanitova_2After that well-guarded breakfast we went to our first class of this trip at Pardes, a wonderful educational entity that’s tough to describe and even tougher not to love.  Our teacher today, as she was last year, was Tovah Leah Nachmani (she’s on the left.)  She’s an inspired and inspiring teacher and we had a blast discussing the laws of the Sotah (a woman accused of adultery) and, according to the Book of Numbers (Bamidbar), what should happen to her.  You can read it here – beginning with verse 11.  It’s fairly horrifying on first (or second or third) reading but this time we ended up with an unusual perspective. 

Tovah sent us out with our Chevruta (study partner – mine was my husband) to try to figure out what the commentators were asking themselves as they wrote about this passage -and how they answered.  As we did so, a strange perspective emerged.  SEE DAY THREE POST FOR IMPORTANT CORRECTION TO THIS: Basically,it seems that asking a woman accused of adultery to stand before God to be judged (the only time God concerned Himself in this way with the laws of men), to drink water mixed with dirt from the Temple floor and the ashes of the burned paper accusing her, and then to wait to see if her belly swelled up or not (yes was a sign of guilt) seems to subjecte her to something both terrifying and humiliating.  But once past that, even if she was guilty, there was no physical punishment, only a mandated divorce – and her lover was also punished.  SEE DAY THREE POST FOR IMPORTANT CORRECTION TO THIS

There’s more to it though: if his possibly adulterous wife stands before God to be judged, no husband however outraged is going to play God and punish her himself -by killing her ashe could in so many other cultures or even by beating her.  The ordeal in fact protects her from worse.  In addition, it’s clear to all that the preservation of the family was so important that only God could adjudicate when it was so jeopardized.

There’s lots more to it but it’s really late.  Suffice it to say that it was exciting to learn how much more lay behind this disturbing ritual.  Even so, it’s all of a piece.  )Our hair is dangerous, our voices are dangerous, even the potential for adulterous behavior is dangerous.  WE are dangerous.  And it’s not, mostly, for what we might do but for what we might cause to be done that is the big issue.  Granted, the Sotah has to have been formally warned in advance by her husband that she shouldn’t hang around alone with a specific man he suspects of having designs on her – and she can only be tried if she has done just that, but even so, these rules don’t apply equally to husbands. 

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in the couple of years since I began studying this stuff, however, is that you can’t read it only from the perspective of the present.  The culture of the times is a critical variable in the mission and outcome of divine commandments and their enforcement.  And of what we can allow ourselves to learn as we read.

Enough already.  We also had an amazing walk around the city, bought me an orange hat and had a three hour Hebrew lesson.  But that’s for another day. Goodnight for now… and, as I learned today – erev tov.