Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Workshop 6: The Journey of Bread & Water


As always, we opened our meeting with Avodaat HaLev, or Prayer of the Heart, where we have the opportunity to learn something unseen about a person in our group. Afterwards, we pieced together a gigantic puzzle from our Israelis, one that would end up forming letters and notes from them to us, in anticipation for the quickly approaching North American Seminar.


As we began the first workshop to our meeting, we were all given pictures, and under them were a set of instructions. We really had no idea what we were doing as we bumped into one another, just trying to match ourselves to the picture. As we continued to arrange ourselves in the formation of the pictures, we realized we spelled out "DILLER!" Through this, we were able to understand the idea that our missions aren't always obvious from the ground, but when we see it from above, everything becomes clear. 

Our second activity pertained to the concept of seeing life through "rose-colored glasses”.  This means that whenever you're faced with a problem or something bad happens to you, you, as a leader, look for the best way to resolve the conflict. For example, if you’re in the middle of getting thirty dollars’ worth of food from Dunkin Donuts for your friends, and you drop it all, what will you do? When you put on your “rose-colored glasses,” what will the resolved solution look like? What is the vision?

These two activities were part of something Diller called “The Journey of Bread and Water”. This means that you look at a problem, whether it is something like $30 of dropped food on a sidewalk or a lack in volunteers at a nursing home, you identify the steps that are necessary to take for problem to be resolved. You begin with a mission, a why, a reason for the problem to be solved, a reason you're set out to fix. Next, you see a vision, going back to the “rose-colored glasses,” you try to see what the conflict will look like in the end. Then, you have goals, what needs to be accomplished in order to get to that vision, and lastly there are objectives, kind of like a check in to see how we’re doing on reaching that vision. 

This led us into our next activity: Committees to prepare us for the North American Seminar. We split into 4 committees: the Welcome Committee, who will prepare a welcome for our Israelis, the Chupar Committee, (chupar, meaning treat,) who will prepare gifts each day for the Israelis while we are apart from them, the Shabbaton/Rituals committee who will prepare the Friday night service and Havdallah for us during our Shabbaton, and the Farewell Committee who will organize a goodbye - for now - to our Israelis. We created our mission, vision and goals for each committee and we all are going to take a big part in planning for the NAS.

With the North American Seminar quickly approaching, it was clear that Diller 6 needed to organize our time wisely, especially with our new committees and tasks. In everyday life, we all struggle to maintain a certain schedule. Whether it be homework, chores, or Diller, we devout certain amounts of time to certain tasks. But sometimes the constant juggle can be hard and leave us in a difficult situation. As exceptional teens, we have a responsibility to juggle all of our commitments without dropping the ball. As a way to show this responsibility in a real life situation, our Junior Counselors set up a game of Twister for us, but with a twist. Instead of plain red, yellow, blue, and green dots, a series of colored tasks such as school, homework, and sports were arranged on the floor like a game of Twister. We were told to place different body parts on different tasks and this proved to be a difficult task. As we tried to keep our right hand on schoolwork and our left elbow on SAT tutoring, we realized that it was very difficult to stay steady. This symbolized how hard it is to juggle the many responsibilities of being a Diller Teen Fellow. We concluded with discussing the differences between “importance” and “urgency”. It is important as busy high school students to be able to know in what order things need to get done. We were given a list of 10 examples of things that a typical person would need to do. These ranged from things like calling the admissions office of a college or calling a friend back because they have something funny to tell you. Individually, we had to rank the ten things in order of which we would do first given that we only have a certain amount of time. Then, we broke into groups of four and had to come up with one common list. This helped us realize that with our busy schedules, it is very important to know how to classify things as important or urgent. This will become especially important as the Israelis are coming soon and we have much to prepare for them, and ourselves!

Afterwards, we met up with our parents to discuss the orientation for the North American Seminar - the rules, the schedule, and the Israelis. We just can’t wait!!!!

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