Setting the pace with an unconventional syllabus

“Hardly anyone can say that they weren’t impacted by missing the first month of matric, and were able to slot right back,” Brocha Lewis, a Cape Town Torah High School matriculant told the SA Jewish Report.

However, Lewis managed to do so because her school follows the flexible curriculum of the University of Nebraska High School, where schooling is done completely online.

So, when Lewis travelled to Israel in December 2022 to help her sister prepare for the birth of her child, and landed up staying for almost three months, she was able to begin her matric studies in Israel and continue when she returned to Cape Town without missing a beat.

“My favourite thing about my schooling is that I was able to work at my own pace,” said Lewis. Lewis moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town in 2020, and through attending Cape Town Torah High, realised that the more conventional Independent Examinations Board (IEB) or government syllabus didn’t work for her.

“Maths is my favourite subject, and I was stifled by the way that maths is taught in those schools. In a more conventional school, a teacher would teach a concept and then spend two weeks on that concept. It felt like that held me back. I would spend maths lessons colouring in instead of learning because I had understood the concept,” said Lewis. “The way our school works, I was able to work at my own pace enabling me to work on college-level maths in my matric year,” she said. “Our teachers are more like ‘guides on the side’ rather than ‘a sage on the stage’.”

The highlight of her year was spending time volunteering with the Community Security Organisation (CSO) as part of a project in which the student had to spend 12 hours job shadowing or doing service in the Jewish community. “I’ve always been fascinated by medicine and am considering what route to take in the future. I was able to get more insight into the medical world,” said Lewis.

“During my 12 hours on call, I travelled in the response car and saw the amazing work that CSO does and how it serves us as a community. It was an incredible opportunity,” Lewis said. “To be able to see the workings of something you are interested in is something that not many people get to do in their matric year. This is because at other schools, there’s nothing but studying in matric. We also had many other opportunities to round out the year so that it wasn’t academically focused all the time.

“It’s stressful for everyone to determine what they are going to do after school, and there’s pressure. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what that is,” Lewis said. She plans to attend Seminary in Israel, and would like to pursue a career in the medical field.