Dan Katz experience

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.