Part I: How Do People Teach Navi?
I’ve spoken over the years with a couple
of Navi teachers, I’ve observed a couple of classes, and I am blessed to be a
student of some truly great Navi teachers, like the one I’ve quoted here before
under the name of Rabbi St. Helens.
Most Navi teachers of my acquaintance
begin a perek or lesson with an overview or an anticipatory question or
anecdote, perhaps an “Imagine that you are…” moment. Then they call on each student
in turn to read and translate a verse. They write new vocabulary and grammar
rules on the board for students to study. They “bring out” the lessons of each
passage by telling the lessons explicitly, sometimes with additional stories,
or by initiating a class discussion. Eventually the class gets to the end of a
perek and then there is a review game or art project (e.g. make a scrapbook
page, or build the scene out of candy), and a test.
Some Navi classes, among them many night
lectures for adults, are more what is called in the vernacular “outside”; that
is, outside the text: the focus of the class is not so much on the text itself
but on its application; the course objective is only to teach ideas, not to
also develop student text-skills.
My middle-school Navi teacher just had us
dramatize each perek and then take turns reading it aloud in English, but
that’s not standard.
Part II: How I Tweaked the Model
I knew when I started teaching this year
that I did not want to follow the model of most of the best and most
inspiring and popular Navi teachers I know, who lay each verse before the class
by having a student read and translate it. In some skills-intensive classrooms
this constitutes the majority of the lesson. I suspect that it takes a lot of motivation/inspiration/classroom
management presence/charisma/student philadelphia to keep a roomful of students
focused on a Hebrew text before them, silently following along to improve their
own skills while one classmate at a time haltingly hones hers aloud. I am
neither male nor South African and I just could not see myself pulling that off
effectively and keeping students excited about it in a class with a four-year
grade span.
Instead, I gave each student a list of
translated – not words, exactly, but shorashim and prefixes and suffixes and an
occasional injunction to “look in your friendly local Metzudas Tzion” – and set
them in chevrusos (draw a toy from the basket; learn with the girl who drew the
same species or color; and eventually I assigned seatmates, which saves
shuffling-around time) to prepare the text; and then we went over their work
together.
Some loved this and said it worked much
better for them than the read-aloud model; some – they are after all preteen
girls – missed the higher percentage of large-group social experience.
Discussion, creative projects, games,
tests. I try to stick with art projects that demand either a detailed or a
sophisticated understanding of the material, so we didn’t do a whole lot of
scrapbooking.
Class was good…
…but the proportion of School to Fireworks
was still too high. I like to see a blinding Aha! moment go off at least once
every 40 minutes and despite varying the lesson in all sorts of interesting
ways I just was not getting that kind of display from them.
“Make it top-down,” advised Rabbi Silktie.
“Make it bottom-up,” advised Rabbi
Estuary.
“Make it so top-down it stands on its
head,” advised Rebbetzin Appletree.
I experimented…
…class got better…
…still didn’t get enough fireworks.
I went back to the principal, and asked,
“Can we revisit that idea I proposed at the beginning of the year…?”
So we did, and here it is.
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