
General
Dan Katz experience
Dan Katz experience
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been able to express myself through writing. Even now, as an adult, when asked to communicate my thoughts verbally, I tend to clam up. Either the words don’t formulate in a timely manner, or too many words come to mind at once, and wind up flying out of my mouth all jumbled up and nonsensical. Deep down, at my core, I’ll know what the answer is. What my feelings are. How I can contribute appropriately on a given subject. But those words are lost until I pick up a pencil, or touch fingers to keys, and deliver my thoughts through writing.
When I access the earliest memories of my education experience, what I recall the most is feeling dumb. Sitting in a class of thirty kids, as a first grader, not wanting to read aloud for fear of embarrassing myself, not knowing what to do after assignments were handed out, constantly guessing the wrong letter when it came time to learn spelling (something I’m still particularly bad at I might add). But I also remember that changing - when I switched schools, and suddenly found myself in a classroom with only twelve other students. It was now the third grade, and our teacher had written the word ‘ because’ on the board, and declared it a tough one. I knew ‘ because’ already - heck I could even spell it. Maybe I wasn’t dumb. Maybe I just needed a different environment. And a little more attention, and someone to focus on me and ask, do you understand this assignment, instead of just leaving me to my own devices.
Too many kids don’t get to make that transition. From school A to school B. From one environment to another. From small fish, big pond to–you get it. I was privileged. Privileged enough not to get left behind, not to be given-up on. Privileged enough to have completed lower school, middle school, high school and college well before a pandemic outbreak would decimate society and throw a wrench right into the earliest memories of a new generation’s education experience.
This is what has drawn me to Atypical. This is how I connect with our mission. Inspire positive change. Help these kids - who just lost a year plus of learning to a zoom screen or a google meet - to not get left behind. So they know that they haven’t been given-up on. Where would I be if I never discovered my propensity for the written word? Where would I be if I never discovered my instincts for telling stories?
I’m proudly Jewish for reasons that have very little to do with religion. Some of my earliest exposure to storytelling came at Hebrew school - a place my parents sent me every Sunday, no doubt to give themselves some time off from parenting, and to prepare me to one day become a Bar Mitzvah, but also to instill within me a sense of identity. This is where I would learn the stories of our people. The Biblical tales and the holidays. The language and the history. The suffering and the perseverance. My people’s persecution is a tale as old as time, and I take pride in our ability to survive and endure. To not let our Jewish identity die in the face of neverending hatred and antisemitism. Very soon, there will be no one left alive who experienced the Holocaust. And on that day, that the Earth loses its very last Survivor, the power of storytelling will become infinitely more essential. Because some stories are too important to ever be forgotten.