We’ve been away from our campus on Ellis Street for so long (this is the 25th Shabbat in a row since COVID19 moved us into our homes), it’s easy to overlook things that happened last March. One likely overlooked March 2020 headline headline announced a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. AI researchers in China and the United States finally bested real people on the benchmark used to measure sentence comprehension and sentence-pairing.
Seeing that headline triggered a vivid memory of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gray, presenting our class with a very modern, machine looking box. As she set the big box on the table in front of her desk, she lifted the lid to reveal a set of illustrated story cards side by side with a range of color-coded question cards. It was called the SRA Reading Laboratory. Mrs. Gray said we’d be using it to deepen our 9-year old reading comprehension skills. I bet a lot of you used that or later versions of the SRA reading boxes.
I loved that SRA box. I could move at my own pace. I was competing just with myself. It was very growth-mindset oriented.
But -- and I share this part of the story because it is the season of reflecting on and assessing our past mistakes as we prepare for the new Jewish year that starts in three weeks -- I messed up. My 9-year old self began getting focused on moving through the box in order to look smart to Mrs. Gray and my classmates. Seeming smart on the outside became more important to me than being understanding what I was reading.
