My weekend, part 2
Feb. 23rd, 2004 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasMy computer had been giving me a hell of a time -- it refuses to recognize the existence of our printer, again, or to connect to the home network (these are related problems. . . )so I couldn't print out the worksheets I'd been working on, or to shift them over to Lis's computer. And Lis's computer doesn't have a floppy drive, and my floppy drive is . . . questionable. Not quite as dodgy as the CD drive, but pretty dodgy nonetheless. So I ended up emailing the files to Lis as an attachment, then downloading them to her machine.
The lesson plan ended up pretty good. Once I fix a few careless errors, I may save the worksheets as PDF files to make them available for other teachers. Like I said, my Hebrew spelling SUCKS (even worse than my English), so I'm going to need to get someone who's actually KNOWS Hebrew to look it over.
So, I went to sleep Saturday night around 3 am. Sunday morning, rather. I woke up at 7, in order to get into school by 8:30 or so. I photocopied the worksheets I made, cut apart the bits which I wanted to cut apart. One of the other teachers, Isaac (who I'm becoming more and more convinced, was in the Haganah when he was young) looked over what I'd done, thought the general concept was good, and made a bunch of corrections to my spelling. I had no way to fix those things, though. Oh, well.
There were several worksheets, then there was a sheet of Hebrew words that I'd cut apart, and another sheet that I'd cut apart.
Lis helped me do some of this setup stuff, and then she left to meet her parents for breakfast.
I only had three kids in class Sunday. The lesson went slower than I anticipated -- not because the kids were distracted, or getting confused, or anything like that, but simply because they kept doing more work than I asked them to!
I had each student take a worksheet, and one of each of the Hebrew phrases.
This worksheet had three columns. The first column was numbered with the first eleven letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The second column had various mitzvot, in transliteration -- English characters. The third column had the English translations of those mitzvot. Like, for instance, "Bal Tashchit" -- "Do not destroy", or "Kibbud Av v'Im" -- "Honor your parents," or "Bikur Cholim" -- "Visit sick people."
The piles of Hebrew words that I'd set up were the mitzvot. Each child had these mitzvot written out in Hebrew, and would read the Hebrew, match it up with the transliteration, and stick the Hebrew word over the transliteration.
This took longer than I anticipated, for two reasons. Instead of doing these all at the same time, the kids went around in a circle, each watching the others do theirs, and taking turns putting ones on their own paper. And, they kept turning the worksheet face-down, reading the Hebrew word, then turning the sheet back face-up and looking for the transliteration. I'd figured they'd be using the transliterations to help them figure out the Hebrew, but, no, they seemed to feel that doing it THAT way would be too easy.
We briefly talked about how, in the Torah, there are no vowels, or, in fact, nikkudot of any kind. But, as the kids pointed out, y cn, knd f, rd Nglsh wtht vwls, t. And I pointed out something neat: we had one mitzvah that started with the word "Kibbud," and one that started with the word "K'vod". And I asked them, "If you took out all the dots in each of those words, would they be the same, or different?" They realized that those were the same word, just pronounced differently.
After they finished, I handed out the second sheet. This one had a series of little paragraphs. Each paragraph was a scenario which involved people doing mitzvot. For each one, they would figure out which of the mitzvot listed on the first page were involved in the story --- most of them included multiple mitzvot. Then they would write the letter that corresponded to each mitzvah next to the story.
The first comment that the kids made was that they weren't really STORIES, because they really didn't have conflict or dramatic tension in them. Which I admitted was true, and that I probably should have called them "scenarios" instead of "stories", and the kids were happier with that definition.
This also took a bit longer than I anticipated . . . because one of my students thought that just writing the corresponding LETTER was too easy, so she wanted to write the entire name of the mitzvah.
I explained that I'd made a bunch of spelling errors in the sheet, and showed them the master sheet which Isaac had corrected for me. They were very amused, and one of them took it, and wrote "F-" on it. I protested that what I had done was solid B work -- there were SOME errors, but it was MOSTLY correct. But they didn't buy my argument. So I'm going to re-do that sheet, re-print it, and show them that I corrected it.
We were working on that when snack-time rolled around, and we went out for snack. I forgot to turn the light off when I left the room, but one of the students remembered. I was quite proud of that, and asked who had turned off the lights. Shayna said it was her, and I shook her hand and thanked her for doing that, because I had forgotten.
We sang a couple songs, and then went back for the second part of class. Shayna said that she wasn't quite sure exactly what "Tzedakah” meant -- she sort of knew, but not totally, so, I handed her, and everyone in the class, eight strips of paper.
“Each of those strips of paper is a way of doing tzedakah. And all of them are tzedakah -- all of them are a mitzvah. But some of them are better than other ones. So, what I want you to do is to arrange them into a ‘ladder’ with the least-good way on the bottom, and the best of the best on the top. Then, after you all finish, we’ll compare how everybody ranked them.”
After they finished, and talked a little about how they’d decided to put them, I told them that I didn’t make those ways up. Maimonedes did. Maimonedes was a rabbi who lived in the Middle Ages in Spain, and he was one of the best, smartest Jewish scholars of all time. His name was Rabbi Moses ben Maimonedes, so we call him Maimonedes, or “Rambam” for short. And he’d thought a lot about tzedakah, and he came up with these categories, and I showed them how he’d arranged them.
It was getting right towards the end of class by that time, so I just finished off by pointing out that, the way Rambam organized them, the better a kind of tzedakah was, the less embarrasing it was to the person getting it. And so, helping someone be able to support themselves was the best kind, because it caused the least embarrasment. One of the students observed that it was still embarrasing, because it meant that you needed help getting a job instead of getting one by yourself. I agreed that it was, yes, a little embarrasing, but it was a lot LESS embarrasing than having to have people give you money, and the students agreed that they could see that.
After school, Lis took me out for breakfast at a Bickford’s nearby (she’d already eaten, so she just had a hot chocolate to keep me company), and then we went out to my parents house so I could spend a couple more hours with my sibling. Then we went home and, fairly early, went to sleep.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-23 07:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-23 07:39 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-23 07:59 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-23 09:22 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-24 04:42 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-24 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-23 07:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-23 08:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-23 08:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-23 08:51 pm (UTC)Now 'fess up -- did Shayna really ask that convenient tzedakah question all by herself? :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-24 04:40 am (UTC)