The excitement in the air of the Manhattan Day School (MDS) gymnasium was palpable, as a full house of students anxiously awaited the beginning of the first-ever Tu B Shevat Bracha Bowl.
On September 28, Tzom Gedaliah, seventh- and eighth-graders from Ben Porat Yosef, RYNJ, Tenafly Chabad Academy, The Moriah School, Yavneh Academy, Yeshivat He’Atid and Yeshivat Noam joined together for a screening of the acclaimed documentary “Screenagers.” Students were divided by grade and gender and gathered at four of the participating schools for the Yom Iyun program, which comes on the heels of the RCBC’s “Living Connected” community-wide Shabbat that engaged more than a dozen area shuls in technology awareness. “Screenagers” was created in 2016 by physician and filmmaker Delaney Ruston, who describes growing up in a tech-saturated world where she believes that balance needs to be drawn between screen time and screen-free time.
How do you know if someone is really listening to you? Really paying attention? Really focusing on what you are saying? Well, often it is hard to know for sure, but when it comes to noticing if someone is not listening or not paying attention, we can usually tell.