Hebrew school stuff
Oct. 22nd, 2007 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasYesterday'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. . . .
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. . . .