We only had about a half hour of regular class: I did a version of blackjack using the numerical version of Hebrew letters. The goal was to get as close to 613 without going over.

See, the values of the letters are, for the first ten letters, 1 through ten, for the next nine, 20 to 100, and then 200, 300, 400. So 613, which is the traditional number of commandments G-d gave to us (although, when you count them out, you have to be real creative to hit 613 without going over or under -- there are several different lists out there of what the 613 are), is a pretty good number for this.

We had a deck of cards with Hebrew letters; kids could hit or stay.

Since there was only half an hour, and the four kids I had were spending a good portion of their time talking (which I didn't mind for the last day), when we were told that it was time to go upstairs, Kalilah was ahead with 184 points, and Annessia was in second place with something like 92. But Kalilah wanted to do just one more round.

Annesia pulled a ת, the final letter in the Hebrew Alphabet, jumping her ahead to 492, and she won.

Anyway, none of the activities that we had in the all-school program were particularly Jewish-educational (just fun things like making things out of graham crackers and marshmallow fluff, things like that), so I didn't mind that Annessia and Kalilah didn't want to participate, so we just sat and talked. And they were annoying at me in the way that they tend to be. And when someone came by to give me my paycheck for the day, I stuck it in my guitar case, and Kalilah grabbed it, and ran into the other room to look at it and see how much I was paid per class.

She came back and gave me the paycheck and said, "That's not a lot of money. That's really pathetic." I pointed out that it IS only for one day of teaching.

"Yeah, but then the only other thing you do for money is tend bar."

Anyway, we kept talking, and Annessia asked who did the cleaning in our household, me or my wife, and I said, mostly me, and she asked about laundry, and I said, always me, and she asked about cooking and I said, almost always me. She said, "So what does your wife do?" I said, "She WORKS. A lot. She's a designer at a software company."

Kalilah nodded in sudden understanding. "OH! So THAT'S how you get money!"

Yes. Yes. It is true. A designer in a software company makes better money than a Hebrew School teacher/bartender. It's a fact of life, and one that eleven-year-old kids are quite aware of. I had to explain that the reason I tend bar and teach Hebrew school is because I really do genuinely love doing it, and Kalilah looked truly dubious.

Ah, well. It IS true, though.

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"I don't want to be Senator Obama any more. I want to be a guard."

"I don't know if the shpeil is even going to HAVE any guards."
( Read more about the glamorous life of a Sunday school teacher! )

Yesterday's class didn't go as well as last week's but it wasn't bad. Someday, I have to learn something or other about classroom management. Is it bad when every cartoon that my kids doodle of me has me yelling, "QUIET!!" (And I have had a number of students over the years who are quite good artists, so I've seen plenty of cartoon caricatures of myself yelling "QUIET!" Many of them are quite good.)

They don't mind when I yell; I think they find it charming. Generally, if it gets noisy, one or more of the kids -- including the ones who are noisy -- say, "Use your Teacher Voice!" I dunno. They seem to like it when I yell at them. I guess that means that they're comfortable with me -- they know that I love them, even when I'm yelling at them.

Anyway, I guess I'm more comfortable teaching history this year, because we appear to be covering the material more quickly, but with the same degree of comprehension. We started with the Exile from Jerusalem, and went over the Babylonian Captivity -- and talked about how the religion changed in exile from one based almost entirely on giving sacrifices to an elite group of people to take care of, to one based on daily communal prayer.

And we even got to Cyrus the Great, and the 50,000 Jews who went back to Jerusalem to re-establish the Temple when Cyrus gave Judea back to the Judeans. And how they had to fight against the people who were there, since it's not like nobody moved in in the past 70 years. . .

And then we finished off mentioning that, once the Temple was re-built, you were able to go back to the Temple-based religion of giving animals to an elite to sacrifice -- but that the communal religion didn't go away.

I said, "So, now we've got two types of religion going on, with the Kohanim running one, and the local scholars running the other. What do you think happens in this situation?"

One of my students said, "Political fighting to control the religion and government of the country?"

My students don't miss a lot.

You know, it occurs to me that if the current Administration had the grasp of political and religious power dynamics that my fifth-graders do, we wouldn't be IN the kind of messes that we're in. . . .

And then lectured them about lashon ha-ra.

I feel vaguely guilty about yelling and lecturing, but I'd feel a lot worse if I hadn't taken some action about students hurting each other's feelings.

I just don't know if I handled it right. One student wrote something that could be construed as hurtful about another student in zir notebook. A second student looked over zir shoulder, read it, and called the student about which it was about over to also see it, who saw it, grabbed the page of the notebook, and crumpled it up. Only the last part of this was obvious, so I yelled at the third student. Who was more upset by this than zie usually is when I yell at zir, so I knew that something else was up, and found out the rest of the story.

I told them that all three of them had done things wrong, but that they weren't of the same magnitude. I said that writing hurtful things in one's own notebook is bad, but that, as it wasn't intended to be seen by anyone, and therefore wasn't intended to hurt anyone, that is mitigating. So it's bad, but not SO bad. I said that grabbing someone else's notebook and crumpling the page was absolutely unacceptable. But that the person who had done the worst thing was the second student. Because that was lashon ha-ra.

And I lectured them about that. And how we, in the classroom, are a community, and lashon ha-ra damages communities. You don't have to LIKE everyone in your community, but you ARE a community. And avoiding lashon ha-ra is one of the ways you preserve communities.

The three students looked abashed and ashamed at their actions, and the rest of the class looked intent and somewhat worried. And at the end of the lecture, I asked if we were all willing to, in a sense, pretend that this whole situation hadn't happened. That, to repair our community, we had to forgive each other, which, in this case, would mean trying to remember the lessons, but forgetting the incident as much as we could.

They all agreed that they would like to move past the whole thing and pretend it never happened. I did try to be certain that all of them knew that, if they DIDN'T feel comfortable moving on, we could still work on it, but they were all embarrassed by it and wanted to just have it over and gone, so we did.

I still don't know if I did the right thing. I think I did an okay thing, but I don't know if I was right.

It's hard to know if one was fair. It's hard to know if one was correct.

Was I right that crumpling up the page was more wrong that writing the page? Was I right that calling attention to the page was more wrong than either writing it, or destroying it? I don't really know. I THINK I was at least close enough to right, but I'm not certain, and am still feeling guilty and unsettled. But I would feel MORE guilty and unsettled if I HADN'T done something like that. I'm responsible, in part, for my kids' moral and ethical development, and for their emotional health.

Note to self: if a student in your class starts being all sarcastic, going to him and saying, "No dark sarcasm in the classroom!" won't actually help, unless your goal actually WAS to have the entire rest of the class sing large chunks of "The Wall" to the one student who hadn't heard it.

(Sixth and seventh graders -- eleven, twelve years old or so.)

Okay, I was supposed to have done this earlier this week, but I finally finished it. If anyone wants to read it and critique it, I'd appreciate it. Please make any suggestions you have.
( The schpeil I just wrote )

Some of you may remember that I spent much of the summer working out a timeline of Jewish history, starting at 1000 BCE and going to modern day, which I hung up on the wall of my classroom and was to use as a major part of how I was going to teach the class this year.

It was thirty feet long, a hundred years to the foot. It was in two fifteen-foot sections, taped along an entire wall of the classroom.

It's gone.

Over the high holidays, my classroom was used for daycare, and someone took down the timeline, and it hasn't been found. Far as we can figure, someone threw it out.

Now that I think about it, I'm actually pretty angry about this. I spend many, many hours on that timeline, and it was going to be the fundamental tool which I was going to use this year. And it's GONE.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess I'm going to have to redo the whole thing. It sucks.

On the other hand, I'm a damn fine teacher.

So, my co-teacher this year is Larry Rich, who has two sons, Adam and Teo (as a baby, he couldn't say "Theo", and the name stuck) who help out as madrachim ("guides", a term for student teachers in Hebrew schools). He's covering the Hebrew portion, mainly, while I'm covering Jewish History. I presume that, once he gets a better idea of relative skill levels, he'll divide the class into two halves and he'll, probably, take the more advanced half.

That's what I'd suggest, anyway. Because I'm a better disciplinarian.

I don't think of myself as one -- but I am. The students, on the whole, appreciate it -- as long as they have to be in class, they'd prefer to get something out of it, and they're willing to let me ride herd on them so long as I ride herd on everyone else. If they actually were not even going to try to learn anything, then, sure, goofing off would be cool -- but if they're going to try to learn something, they want to have an outside chance of success, even if I have to force it on them.

That previous paragraph seems to be absolute gibberish, but I suspect that those of you who are parents, teachers, and/or child psychologists (and, come to think of it, I think that's pretty damn close to a majority) will recognize some of it as possibly true.

So it was frustrating watching Larry trying to cajole the class into behaving, because That Trick Never Works. At a couple points, some of the students turned to me and said, "Ian, use your Teacher Voice!"

So I did a couple times. Worked somewhat okay.

For my half of class, though, I handed out notebooks and pencils and told them, "Okay, you've got these notebooks for two reasons. If you are left-handed, I want you to take notes on the left-hand page. If you are right-handed, I want you to take notes on the right-hand page. On the OTHER page, you are to doodle. Because I know I listen better when I'm doodling, so I want to see if that's true of you, too."

Seems to have worked. We'll see how much they retained, but they were at least apparently attentive, and, even if they weren't, they weren't disruptive.

. . . which, incidentally, starts this Sunday -- I'm both really nervous and really excited -- is that I'm putting together a timeline to get all the events in Jewish history in order, and with a sense of how long they took and how far apart they were, and I'm including other events from around the world to put things in context.

And I've never seen a lot of them juxtaposed.

I mean, I guess most people are aware that Lao Tse came before Confucius, but that their lives overlapped -- but, for instance, were they both before or after Zoroaster? Or the Buddha?

Was the Babylonian exile of the Jews before or after the first Olympics, or the founding of Rome, or the Golden Age of Athens under Pericles? For that matter, obviously the first Olympics happened before the Golden Age of Athens, but was THAT before or after the founding of Rome?

The fact that the "discovery" of the Book of Deuteronomy, which allowed the Israelite people to have a formalized code of laws happened in the same year that Draco formulated HIS formalized code of laws . . . that's kind of neat.

Met shadesong for the first time. And a whole bunch of other people whose LJ names I don't remember, although I do, more-or-less, remember their meat-names.

Discovered that the Rte. 1 miniature golf course was closed because of the rain, which was disappointing, because it looks like a really cool course.

Went bowling instead, with the aforementioned folks, and had a great time. It was the first time I'd ever bowled ten-pin --I bowled candlepin a few times when I was a kid, and enjoyed it, but haven't in decades.

Bowling is a whole lot of fun. I had a great time. I want to go bowling more often. And if I get reasonably good at ten-pin, I wanna switch up to candlepin. Because it's such a fun sport, at least when you're with a group of people who are just having fun and not worrying about if you're doing really well or not.

Then I tended bar for Reunion Week at Boston College. There were five bartenders at the event I worked, the Class of 1976. It was a WHOLE lot of fun -- all five of us were more-or-less in the weeds from 7 pm to 11:30 pm, and people were tipping. We pooled tips, and all five of us walked out of there with an extra $120. That's the second-best one-shift tip total I've EVER made.

And today was the last day of Hebrew school. Each class put together a little something to show what we've learned. My class put together a play. Although there were roles for all the kids in the class, Sam didn't show up, so Max ended up taking both the role of Narrator 2 and Narrator 3. (I always do that -- write roles for everyone, with some roles collapsible in case some people don't show up.)
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