Friday, February 11, 2011

what happens when you teach in a "not in the zone" phase

so my plans for today were to finish chazara of revi'i (we still have yet to get to that), and to start from vayera and review the 4 pesukim. being in a "down" phase i thought we should only do 2 new pesukim. but the new pesukim seduced me and chana seemed ok, so i wanted to do more. so avraham said he was going to bring them some bread to feast on, and i wanted to do all of the pesukim of the food he prepared to contrast between his words and his deeds.

so we got through the pasuk on making cakes, and we got through the pasuk on the soft, good, baby cow that he gave the lad to prepare. then chana asked a question: who is the lad?

which i thought was an absolutely fabulous way entree into "how to find the answer in rashi." i said that rashi has an answer. i wanted her to find the rashi herself.

she went nuts. why can't i just point it out to her, why does she have to do it herself, why can't she do it when she's older.

i said to her that this is a perfect pasuk to teach her how to find a rashi. (she said, "it's not a perfect pasuk to find a rashi! it's the WORST pasuk!" which even she knew was a blatantly ridiculous statement. i looked at her without speaking. then i said quietly, "please say sorry." she said sorry).

i then explained to her that first we find the pasuk we are in (i KNOW... she rolled her eyes. but when i didn't go step by step she was feeling like i'm expecting too much w/o explaining it..). then we find that pasuk in rashi. i explained to her how the pesukim are in bold in parentheses (i thought that was obvious. apparently not). then i explained to her that the dibur hamatchil is in bold, and are the words from the pasuk. then i showed her that the rashi script is rashi's comment on the words from the pasuk.

then she found our pasuk. then she had some trouble finding the dibbur hamatchil (it was the 2nd one) but she found it. then she read "zeh yishmael." then she ran away screaming.

i let her and sat down to write this. i am now going to ask her what was so bad that once she successfully found the answer, she ran away screaming. then hopefully we will finish the pasuk about butter and then we'll probably need quite a break before we get back to revi'i.

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