SBL Alumni Profile: Tziri Lamm, Part 2
PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE| PART SIX
In part two of this six-part series, Tziri Lamm, an alumna of the M.A. Program in School Building Leadership Program at Brooklyn College, discusses how graduate school empowered her as a Jewish educator. The application deadline for the M.A. in SBL is March 31, 2019.
(2/6) “Discovering Where I Belong”
“After my second year, I found an even deeper passion for this career. Teaching was something I was good at, something I could really see myself doing long-term. I decided that I wanted to go back to school to get a master’s in education. At that moment, teaching morphed from just ‘a job I could do’ to a career path I wanted to pursue out of passion.
Deciding to attend graduate school was very empowering, even though by that time a lot of the chaos had settled down. I was doing something for me, investing in myself and in my future.
This was the first time, at age twenty-six, that I entered a fully coed, secular school environment. Growing up, I attended a Bais Yaakov school, then seminary in Israel, and then a Jewish college. A secular graduate program was a big step out of any kind of comfort zone that I was used to.
One of the most surprising things about the experience was that I found myself often the lone Orthodox Jewish woman in my class. I felt that I needed to double down on my values and advocate for them when I felt they were being threatened. It had less to do with advocating for my own personal values and more to do with considering the communal values of the school in which I was teaching. I finally understood why education needed to be culturally competent. Originally, when I applied to the program, I had considered working in public school because of the benefits they offered. Now I realized that the Jewish world was where I needed to be, somewhere that my skills and cultural knowledge could be put to good use.”
This profile is brought to The Jewish Education Project in partnership with The Layers Project Magazine. Read part three.
