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LIGHT A FIRE
The gemara5 says that Rebbe Yochanan sat at
the back of the yeshiva of Rebbe, aka Rabbi
Yehuda HaNassi, the famous redactor of the
mishna. Rav, another student in the yeshiva
who sat closer to the front, and Rebbe – the
student and the teacher – were sending lightning bolts back and forth at each other. Rebbe
Yochanan says: I didn’t know what they were
talking about! So, if Rebbe Yochanan couldn’t
follow what was going on, why didn’t he just
leave the class? He didn’t leave because he
saw something there – he saw excitement,
electricity, he saw that there was something
going on over there that he wanted to become
a part of. And that is what we, as teachers,
must do: we must light that fire! We must
show our students that there is something
exciting going on. When we teach, we have to
do it with a passion and an enthusiasm, no
matter how long we’ve been doing it.
When I was in 6th grade, we only learned
chumash (ie, the Five Books of the Torah)
I remember Ms. Newberry, my English teacher…. I’m not a big
fan of American literature. But I still remember the American
literature that she taught. She made it unforgettable. How she
made Faulkner interesting. And finally, I remember Professor Oliver
Schroeder who taught me constitutional law…. This guy came in
with so much energy, such excitement, such enthusiasm that I
couldn’t help but pay attention. I learned some constitutional law
that summer, but I also learned that people respond in direct
proportion to how much you reach out to them.
Donald Rumsfeld, former United States Secretary of Defense*
with Rashi; we didn’t learn gemara (ie,
Talmud) in our school. You had to go to
an afternoon yeshiva if you wanted to
learn gemara. I remember I thought chumash with Rashi was the end of the line.
And one time I saw my teacher, Rabbi
Chaim Tzvi Hollander6, he should live
and be well, a student of Telshe Yeshiva
I remember Alden Cool who taught freshman journalism…. He
took a bunch of kids… and made them believe that they wanted to
become newspaper reporters. It’s not clear that he taught us a thing
about journalism, but he taught me to love journalism.
Gwen Eiffel, National Public Radio*
NEVER GIVE UP ON A STUDENT
It’s my experience that parents rarely give
up on a child. There may come a desperate
point where that happens, but most of the
time parents don’t give up – they just don’t
give up. If Plan A doesn’t work, they go to
Plan B. There was a father who once asked
me to take his son, who was a bit wild, into
my class and his father even got him a paid
chavrusa (study partner) to help him. But it
just didn’t work out. I thought: what’s gonna be with this young man? Recently I met
the father and he told me that he sent his
son to yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel, got him
chavrusos there, and that the boy has become a fine student – because his father
didn’t give up, because parents don’t give
up. And that’s what good teachers are – people who don’t give up.
who had come to Seattle to teach in the
day school, talking with some older
boys, who were in the 8th grade and who
attended the afternoon yeshiva, and he
was yelling at them over a Ran (the acronym for Rabbeinu Nissim, one of the
classic commentators on the gemara).
And I stood there thinking: What’s a
Ran? What’s gemara? What is this that’s
going on over here? There’s something
going on over here that I don’t know
about and I want to learn that too. This
is what that gemara with Rebbe Yochanan means! The material is almost secondary. It’s that excitement – that’s
what teachers have to create.
I remember my professor, John Brenner, once assigned a
paper for a seminar and I knew when I turned [my paper] in
that it wasn’t very good. He shamed me in front of the whole
class and said: ‘Ms Walsh, this is a mediocre paper – you are not
a mediocre person.’ I think of ѡ