Today: teaching AND bartending

[xiphias]

Hebrew school went pretty well. The one kid who I've been having the most trouble with, I think I'm starting to get a feel for how he works. And I think his parents are starting to come up with things that help, too.

I vaguely suspect that he's somewhere on the autism spectrum, although I don't know, and I think that him having more physical, tactile inputs helps him. Today, he came in wearing knit gloves, and a big straw cowboy hat with a rawhide chinstrap, and a rope hanging down the back, touching his shoulders and back. And he sat at a desk which is at the side of the room with his back to the room.

And he seemed to have a better time concentrating and an easier time learning than he usually does. I just have a hunch that, maybe, the extra contrasting physical inputs from the knit gloves, the straw hat, the leather chinstrap and the rope might have helped his busy brain have extra stuff to do.

To those on my flist who ARE autism-spectrum -- does that sound reasonable? I mean, first, does it sound reasonable that he might be autism-spectrum, and, second, if he is, does that seem like the sort of thing that might help?

In the second half of school, I'm teaching Jewish history, again -- but this time I've done it before. This means that I now have a chance to make new and better mistakes. Ah, well -- this is how I teach. By the seat of my pants, with no clue what I'm doing, but, somehow, they keep hiring me. There are times I wish I had actual training and skills -- like, I strongly suspect that y'all on my friends list who have taken actual teaching certification courses just might have better ideas with how to teach the kid I described above -- but I mostly muddle through.

So, in the first three weeks of school, we're still on the first event which I'm covering. Which is fine, because they're learning, but it does mean that there is no way we're getting even to the birth of Islam at this rate, let alone the twentieth century. . . still, I'm enjoying it.

We're covering the Babylonian exile, since I believe that's where Jewish history starts. Before that, you have the history of the Israelites, and before that, the history of the Hebrews. But Jews don't start until a whole community of people get kicked out of Judea, but decide that they're still following the religion of Judea, and start practicing Judea-ism in places other than Judea, as a community.

Anyway, we've been discussing different aspects of this for a couple weeks now, and they're absorbing and understanding it. By which I mean, when I ask questions about the stuff we learned in previous weeks, they are not repeating it back to me in my words, but in theirs -- and drawing conclusions from the information they've got and using it. That is -- they're not repeating my ideas back to me -- the ideas which I'm throwing out there are now their ideas.

So, today, I started out with asking them if they were more or less familiar with what kind of technology people would have had at the time that we were talking about. One kid said, "Chariots," which I agreed with. One said, "Windmills." I said I wasn't completely sure, but I was pretty sure that he was right. And I feel pretty confident that they more-or-less understand the tech level we're talking about. I mean, I'm sure they have SOME anachronistic ideas, but nothing really bad or embarrassing.

So then I asked, among those people taken into the Babylonian captivity, what was the most common occupation? One kid said, "Shepherds". Another kid said, “Farming”. I said that was correct, and the first kid said, “That’s what I meant -- agriculture in general”. I approved of that answer.

So, my next question was, “So, you’ve got this group of largely farmers -- some rich farmers, some less rich, and some people who aren’t farmers, but mostly farmers or other agriculture. And now they’re all dropped into a distant city. What DON’T they have?”

Bunch of good answers, ranging from “seeds” to “money”. But they missed one obvious one. “What about ‘land’?” I said. They all looked kind of stunned -- oh, yeah, that’d be a BIG one for farmers, woudln’t it? And, no, you can’t really take your land with you when you get kicked out of your land. . .

So, my next question was: “Okay. You’re now in a new place, maybe with some money that you brought with you, if you were rich to start with, but not much else. What kind of jobs can you do?”

Interestingly, the fact that some of the kids play RuneScape helped this -- they’ve got experience trying to take first-level characters from nothing up to having something. And they were able to translate their gaming experience to the real world (I also suspect that their experience with MMORPGs helped with understanding the tech level that we were talking about with the Babylonians -- which is good, because Age of Empires I isn’t actually a that great a game, and AoE was my backup plan for getting the idea across. Since they already play better games than that, which may have sections or variations set in the Bronze Age and so forth, they already have the idea, so I don’t have to bring in AoE.)

Now, of course, their first suggestions per category were a bit idiosyncratic -- they suggested “lumberjack” as a way you could start out. Or “fisherman”. Or “fletcher”.

For “fletcher” I said, “Let’s generalize that to ‘crafting’ in general -- making stuff. Pottery, carpentry, and so forth.”

But, in general, they got the point well.

One suggested “fighting,” and I said that there was an entire community of Judeans in Egypt who hired on as mercenaries in Egypt. Another suggested “crime”, and I agreed with that one, too, but said that it was a very limiting choice -- once you went that route, you had trouble getting out.

One of the kids, as a joke, suggested “stockbroker”, and I said, “Actually, play with that idea for a minute -- you’re really close to a really good idea.”

He thought for a minute and said, “Trade! Buy stuff, and wait for the price to go up, and sell it.”

“Excellent. Except, prices tended to be fairly static in one place at the time. Usually, if something was one price at one place, it’d be pretty close to the same price tomorrow, and the day after. . . so what can you do with that?”

“. . . travel? Find some place where something is cheap, and then find some place else where it’s expensive?”

“Exactly.”

So we began to discuss trade routes. And I pointed out that this was, of all the jobs they suggested, the one where you could get richest. Except that you could get into problems. . . once you get big enough, you are going to want to hire other people to travel for you, so you can have more than one trade route at once. Since they’re going to have to have money with them -- a LOT of money with them -- to buy things in one place, and, after they sell those things, they’re going to have even MORE money. . . what’s to keep that person from just running off with your money instead of bringing it back to you?

Someone suggested “Send a guard along with them.”

“What’s to keep the person and the guard from splitting the money?”

Someone else: “Only send people you trust.”

“Not bad -- where do you find them, though?”

“How about a family business! You trust your family!”

“Excellent -- that’s one thing they did, yes.”

Another student: “But I don’t trust everyone in my family . . . I trust some of them . . . “

Someone else: “Well if you trust THEM and THEY trust someone, then you can use THAT person, even if YOU don’t know them -- so you need a NETWORK.”

. . notice, by this point in the class, the group of fifth-and-sixth graders have already worked out a good chunk of early international trading. . .

So it was time to bring in another concept. I pulled out my credit card, my debit card, a bunch of coins (US and Canadian), and my wedding ring. I put them in a pile in the middle of the table, and said, “I wanted this pile to have a one-dollar bill, a ten-dollar bill, and my checkbook, too, but I couldn’t find them. But pretend those three things are there, too. Anyway: of these things -- which ones of them are money? And why?”

It took maybe five minutes, with littlle prompting from me, for them to decide that the things which were money were money purely because we said they were. As one kid put it, “We have decided that a piece of paper with this picture on it is worth ten dollars.”

I said, “What if YOU made it, would it still be worth ten dollars?”

Everyone immediately said, “No! That would be fraud! You could TRICK people into thinking that it was worth ten dollars, but it isn’t!”

A different student said, “If everyone could make money, then money would be valueless.”

At this point, of course, I needed to go in a different direction, since they are really bumping up against the limits of MY understanding of economics. But everyone in the room was entirely comfortable with the idea that money is an societally-constructed abstraction.

So I said, “Okay, my checkbook (which isn’t here but we’re pretending it is.) What is a check out of my checkbook worth?”

“Nothing.”

“What if I write on it, ‘twenty dollars’ and Ben’s name, and sign it?”

“It’s worth twenty dollars.”

“But what’s it worth to MADDY, for instance?”

“Nothing.”

Maddy pipes up: “I could sell it to Ben for ten dollars. That way he’d get ten dollars and so would I.”

Anyway, we’d earlier come up with the idea of a trade route -- say chairs were cheap in Cambridge, and expensive in Somerville, and books were cheap in Somerville, but expensive in Cambridge.

“Okay. So now we have the idea that you can make a piece of paper that is worth a LOT of money, to ONE person, but NO money to someone else -- unless they sell it or something to the person for whom it IS worth a lot of money. Now: let’s imagine that you have ONE person who you really, really trust. What if Charlie moves to Cambridge, and Jake stays here in Somerville. But, before they go, Charlie gives Jake a thousand dollars and Jake gives Charlie a thousand dollars.”

A student interrupts, “If they’re doing that, then they don’t even have to do that -- they can just say that they did.”

I nod. “Now, Charlie agrees that that thousand dollars is still Jake’s and Jake agrees that that thousand dollars is still Charlie’s. Now, he’s going to need to send Illana, who he DOESN’T trust, to Cambridge, to buy chairs there. So he can write a note to Charlie saying, ‘Pay Bob the chair-maker $100 for chairs,’ and sign it, and give it to Illana. And Illana can’t steal it. But when she gives it to Charlie, Charlie can give that to Bob, and Illana can get the chairs. Or, Charlie can send Max to Somerville with a note that says ‘Pay Sam the book-printer $100 for books’.”

They seem to have gotten it.

Next week: money-lending, interest, banking systems -- and the roots of the Jewish diaspora community, and factors which would later lead to institutionalized anti-Semitism.

Comments

[sarianna.livejournal.com]

I love these posts. I get so much out of them. It's so awesome.
Thank you, as always. :)

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

If the kid is on the autism spectrum, then where the gloves and the hat helped is not as constant stimulus, but as a protection against unwanted stimulus. We don't like to be touched; the more sensitive among us, not even by air currents. We absolutely don't like to be touched when we're not expecting it.

But don't jump to an autism spectrum diagnosis without seeing at least some evidence of repetitive self-soothing behavior when stressed, and anger when that repetitive ritualized behavior is disturbed.

[fallenkalina.livejournal.com]

Gonna second this, on both counts (although, I've known kids on the spectrum that loved to be touched. Goes to show that no two auties or aspies are the same)

But yeah, until you see the second part, the repetitive self-soothing behavior, don't assume spectrum disorders.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Check out Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight--it's about "sensory defensiveness"--the problem of being stressed (sometimes to the point of incapacitation) by stimuli the vast majority can ignore. It's more common among people on the autism spectrum, but also appears in neurotypicals, who are then apt to be misdiagnosed as autistic

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

they suggested “lumberjack”

These kids are okay.

[jjblum.livejournal.com]

I would indeed second much of the advice on sensory sensitivity and autism spectrum diagnosis. For more on how sensory integration is important to every one but more pronounced in some, I suggest Sensabilities. A great and easy read, also full of good ideas for teachers and parents.

[cellio]

What a great class!