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xiphiasIn all my talking about whiskey and Spy Kids, I almost forgot to blog about the really IMPORTANT thing which happened today! My first day as moreh shel Kitah Gimmel-Dalet!
I had to work last night, so I didn't get home until 11:30 or so, and I went to bed by midnight or so, because, well, I had a big day the next day, which is to say, today. I set my alarm for 6:30, woke up at 5:30, and managed to get another half an hour of sleep or so until my brain just won out, saying, "GETUPGETUPGETUPANDFIGUREOUTWHATYOU'RETEACHINGTODAY!" which, of course, I hadn't planned out. Not a problem, I figured out a few ideas in the shower. I dropped by a couple 24-hour stores, because that's what was open at 8 AM on a Sunday morning, but didn't find anything useful (despite the fact that I was looking for a whiteboard for my classroom, and I later realized that one of the stores I'd gone to had exactly what I was looking for, and I just went into the wrong aisle, but, y'know, whatever). I got into school by 8. Fortunately, I have keys to the shul, because I was the first one there (as I expected to be).
I took a good look at my classroom. It is, in effect, one of those rooms which is made up of the leftover space after all the actual rooms are made into rooms. Basically, it's a hallway, running between the two back staircases, the back classroom (Hay-Vav), and the downstairs chapel/Aleph classroom (yeah, the first grade classroom is basically the same space as the chapel -- they've got blackboards dividing the room down the middle). Calling it a "classroom" is perhaps a bit stretching of the point, if only because calling it a "room" is perhaps a bit of a stretch.
I like it.
One end of the room has a big ole semibusted desk, with a big ole television set and VCR sitting on it. There's a closet off to the side. The space is maybe ten feet wide by twenty feet long (three and a mumble meters by six or seven meters), vaguely rectangular, so it's not that teeny, especially since my class is so small -- six kids. There were bashed-up, mismatched, but fundamentally usable chairs here and there in the space.
Naturally, all of you reading this spotted immediately what I spotted as the only really significant weakness of this space as a learning space for third- and fourth-graders.
That's right -- the television. That had to go.
Oh, and the second thing was the lack of a table, but that's no big deal. There are tons of beat-up folding tables scattered around every single religious organization on the planet. I'm sure that somewhere in the Pope's residence, there's a closet with a bunch of ugly brown folding tables with paint and glue stains on them and gum stuck to the bottoms. They are a fundamental and neccessary part of any successful religious education program.
Actually, I worked on the "table" problem first. I went upstairs to the function hall, and saw a pile of folding round tables in a corner. I thought it would be nifty to have a ROUND table in my classroom, so I grabbed one of the tables, and discovered it was made partially of neutronium. I wrestled it down the stairs, got it to the landing where the back staircase bends around, and got it wedged in the corner. After a bit more wrestling and wriggling, during which I nearly busted one of the smoke detectors on the ceiling over that staircase -- but I fortunately didn't bust it -- I managed to get it more tightly wedged in.
At this point, I decided that the round table idea would have to be, y'know, tabled for now, and managed to wrassle the table free, and back up the stairs, and I just grabbed a more normally-shaped rectangular beat up table, which went down the stairs much more easily. I got that set up, and then took a look at the television set on the beat-up desk.
It is a BIG TV, and not really easy to move, and, besides, it's supposed to stay there. So I hung my aleph-bet shower curtain over it.
See, I've got this aleph-bet poster, has the Hebrew alphabet on it, in both script and print, final forms included, with a row of vowels at the top. It's printed on shower curtain material, it's about as wide as a shower stall, it's about four or five feet long, and it's got those little holes in top that you put shower curtain rings through. It's a really useful thing to have in the classroom; everybody should have one. Especially if they have a classroom. Or are interested in Hebrew.
Of course, a shower curtain is wider than a television set, so it draped over the sides, making the letters on the left and right unreadable. I needed something to keep it sticking out straight while it say in front of the TV, blocking the TV from view. Something like a yardstick I could tape it too. . . .I looked around the shul, and found an old busted mop handle. I sawed it to length -- the Leatherman Wave is a vital tool in any teacher's toolbox of pedogogical tools -- and discovered the teaching supply I'd forgotten to bring -- duct tape. I looked around for a bit -- there's usually some duct tape, or at least electrical tape, around a shul, but I couldn't find any. So I used masking tape to tape the shower curtain to the mop handle and the mop handle to the TV.
Stayed up pretty good. And completely hid the existence of the TV, which was the point of the exercise.
At that point, I figured it was high time I gave at least a LITTLE thought to, y'know, actuall CLASSWORK and stuff, so I wrote up a couple matching worksheets. For instance, on the assumption that everybody would have forgotten everything over the summer, I wrote up a sheet with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the English letters which make the same (or similar) sounds, in columns, for the kids to match up.
After a bit, the rest of the teachers showed up, then, pretty soon, my first student arrived! She was new to the school. We talked a bit: she'd gone to a different Hebrew school previously, and HATED it. We talked a little bit about what she hated so much at the last Hebrew school -- largely, she was bored, because the class was large enough that she got lost in it, and she felt the teachers there didn't care. I told her a bit about my theories of teaching, and said that this was my first time teaching this level, so I would need feedback from her about how I was doing. I told her I didn't guarantee that I would change things based on her observations and feedback, but I did promise to at least take her concerns seriously, and that I would do what I could to make the class better for her. She had a rather skeptical look on her face, which I interpreted as, basically, "talk is cheap, buster, show me that you're not bullshitting me, and I'll believe you, and otherwise, I won't." Which I happen to feel is a pretty good attitude for a third grader to have towards school, and Hebrew School.
I'd at least met all the other kids in my class before and class went pretty well for a first day of school. I handed kids the "sounds of the letters" review sheet I'd knocked togther, with instructions to "do what you remember, and don't stress about the rest of it." Pretty much every kid said they didn't remember ANYTHING, and I told them, "Good! Since the instruction is to just do the ones you remember, if you don't remember ANYTHING, this will be very easy!" Each of them laughed, and proceeded to match at least a sizable chunk of the letters and sounds.
After a bit, we went around the table and did names. For each name that a student told me, I tried to tell them something neat about their name. This of course, let into digressions, and i went briefly into language drift over time, the changes in Hebrew over the millenia, and Yiddish and Ladino.
At snack, Mark and I led singing. I am exhausted, and will write more later.
I had to work last night, so I didn't get home until 11:30 or so, and I went to bed by midnight or so, because, well, I had a big day the next day, which is to say, today. I set my alarm for 6:30, woke up at 5:30, and managed to get another half an hour of sleep or so until my brain just won out, saying, "GETUPGETUPGETUPANDFIGUREOUTWHATYOU'RETEACHINGTODAY!" which, of course, I hadn't planned out. Not a problem, I figured out a few ideas in the shower. I dropped by a couple 24-hour stores, because that's what was open at 8 AM on a Sunday morning, but didn't find anything useful (despite the fact that I was looking for a whiteboard for my classroom, and I later realized that one of the stores I'd gone to had exactly what I was looking for, and I just went into the wrong aisle, but, y'know, whatever). I got into school by 8. Fortunately, I have keys to the shul, because I was the first one there (as I expected to be).
I took a good look at my classroom. It is, in effect, one of those rooms which is made up of the leftover space after all the actual rooms are made into rooms. Basically, it's a hallway, running between the two back staircases, the back classroom (Hay-Vav), and the downstairs chapel/Aleph classroom (yeah, the first grade classroom is basically the same space as the chapel -- they've got blackboards dividing the room down the middle). Calling it a "classroom" is perhaps a bit stretching of the point, if only because calling it a "room" is perhaps a bit of a stretch.
I like it.
One end of the room has a big ole semibusted desk, with a big ole television set and VCR sitting on it. There's a closet off to the side. The space is maybe ten feet wide by twenty feet long (three and a mumble meters by six or seven meters), vaguely rectangular, so it's not that teeny, especially since my class is so small -- six kids. There were bashed-up, mismatched, but fundamentally usable chairs here and there in the space.
Naturally, all of you reading this spotted immediately what I spotted as the only really significant weakness of this space as a learning space for third- and fourth-graders.
That's right -- the television. That had to go.
Oh, and the second thing was the lack of a table, but that's no big deal. There are tons of beat-up folding tables scattered around every single religious organization on the planet. I'm sure that somewhere in the Pope's residence, there's a closet with a bunch of ugly brown folding tables with paint and glue stains on them and gum stuck to the bottoms. They are a fundamental and neccessary part of any successful religious education program.
Actually, I worked on the "table" problem first. I went upstairs to the function hall, and saw a pile of folding round tables in a corner. I thought it would be nifty to have a ROUND table in my classroom, so I grabbed one of the tables, and discovered it was made partially of neutronium. I wrestled it down the stairs, got it to the landing where the back staircase bends around, and got it wedged in the corner. After a bit more wrestling and wriggling, during which I nearly busted one of the smoke detectors on the ceiling over that staircase -- but I fortunately didn't bust it -- I managed to get it more tightly wedged in.
At this point, I decided that the round table idea would have to be, y'know, tabled for now, and managed to wrassle the table free, and back up the stairs, and I just grabbed a more normally-shaped rectangular beat up table, which went down the stairs much more easily. I got that set up, and then took a look at the television set on the beat-up desk.
It is a BIG TV, and not really easy to move, and, besides, it's supposed to stay there. So I hung my aleph-bet shower curtain over it.
See, I've got this aleph-bet poster, has the Hebrew alphabet on it, in both script and print, final forms included, with a row of vowels at the top. It's printed on shower curtain material, it's about as wide as a shower stall, it's about four or five feet long, and it's got those little holes in top that you put shower curtain rings through. It's a really useful thing to have in the classroom; everybody should have one. Especially if they have a classroom. Or are interested in Hebrew.
Of course, a shower curtain is wider than a television set, so it draped over the sides, making the letters on the left and right unreadable. I needed something to keep it sticking out straight while it say in front of the TV, blocking the TV from view. Something like a yardstick I could tape it too. . . .I looked around the shul, and found an old busted mop handle. I sawed it to length -- the Leatherman Wave is a vital tool in any teacher's toolbox of pedogogical tools -- and discovered the teaching supply I'd forgotten to bring -- duct tape. I looked around for a bit -- there's usually some duct tape, or at least electrical tape, around a shul, but I couldn't find any. So I used masking tape to tape the shower curtain to the mop handle and the mop handle to the TV.
Stayed up pretty good. And completely hid the existence of the TV, which was the point of the exercise.
At that point, I figured it was high time I gave at least a LITTLE thought to, y'know, actuall CLASSWORK and stuff, so I wrote up a couple matching worksheets. For instance, on the assumption that everybody would have forgotten everything over the summer, I wrote up a sheet with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the English letters which make the same (or similar) sounds, in columns, for the kids to match up.
After a bit, the rest of the teachers showed up, then, pretty soon, my first student arrived! She was new to the school. We talked a bit: she'd gone to a different Hebrew school previously, and HATED it. We talked a little bit about what she hated so much at the last Hebrew school -- largely, she was bored, because the class was large enough that she got lost in it, and she felt the teachers there didn't care. I told her a bit about my theories of teaching, and said that this was my first time teaching this level, so I would need feedback from her about how I was doing. I told her I didn't guarantee that I would change things based on her observations and feedback, but I did promise to at least take her concerns seriously, and that I would do what I could to make the class better for her. She had a rather skeptical look on her face, which I interpreted as, basically, "talk is cheap, buster, show me that you're not bullshitting me, and I'll believe you, and otherwise, I won't." Which I happen to feel is a pretty good attitude for a third grader to have towards school, and Hebrew School.
I'd at least met all the other kids in my class before and class went pretty well for a first day of school. I handed kids the "sounds of the letters" review sheet I'd knocked togther, with instructions to "do what you remember, and don't stress about the rest of it." Pretty much every kid said they didn't remember ANYTHING, and I told them, "Good! Since the instruction is to just do the ones you remember, if you don't remember ANYTHING, this will be very easy!" Each of them laughed, and proceeded to match at least a sizable chunk of the letters and sounds.
After a bit, we went around the table and did names. For each name that a student told me, I tried to tell them something neat about their name. This of course, let into digressions, and i went briefly into language drift over time, the changes in Hebrew over the millenia, and Yiddish and Ladino.
At snack, Mark and I led singing. I am exhausted, and will write more later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-15 05:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-15 08:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-15 09:39 am (UTC)Haha yeah! That is so absolutely true I can't even tell you :)