How to Teach 2nd Grade From Scratch

As the end of the school year draws near, it's time to reflect on how to teach 2nd grade without an education degree or a teaching certificate.


Step one,

Say yes when the head of school offers you the job. Move right past thinking it is crazy. Never mind what she is thinking offering the job to you - that’s her business. You have to leap at the chance before you think better of it.

Step two,

Call on all that other teaching experience:

Hebrew/Sunday school classes for which you were probably ill-prepared, but there was so little expectation or oversight that it just didn’t matter - and don't forget directing Hebrew schools, including teaching others about how to teach;

College classes for which you prepared detailed syllabi with oodles of reading, and horrid consequences explicitly laid out for plagiarism and cell-phone use in class;

Adult-ed programs for which you prepared too many texts and then wound up relying heavily on student questions.

Take them all, and throw them out the window.

Except maybe the plagiarism consequences, which you might want to save for when a student defies the sign saying “do your best work.”  No - throw out those consequences. They don’t really threaten the college students out of the plagiarism, and you can’t throw a 2nd grader out of class, or the school, for most of that defiant behavior. And trust me, you probably don’t want to. Plus, many second graders can barely read, so the college and adult-ed lessons are pretty useless.

Which brings me to

Step three,

Bring your heart.

Be prepared for it to get broken.

You will fall in love with your students. Really, you must. And if you don’t, then you probably won’t be a great teacher. And if you do, you need the have a great big open mushable, mashable heart, and be prepared for it to be bruised and scratched and torn.

Because content is only part of what you are teaching - and probably the least important part. What you are teaching, what you need to focus on, is character. You are teaching, or better guiding students to push through the hard stuff, to try things they think they can’t do, to get rid of that “can’t do” attitude, to persevere. You are teaching curiosity. No, you can’t teach that.

Nah - forget the word teaching

You are guiding

encouraging

fostering

The students will learn better when you stop teaching. When you see them. When you open the journey to them.

How do you teach 2nd grade? I haven’t a clue. I understand more about how to read a curriculum, how to write goals that I can meet and that students can understand, and how to write and (sort of) stick to a cohesive lesson plan. But teaching day to day? Every day is different, and no matter how well my plans are written, how cohesive and clear they are, I have learned to be flexible and ready for the unexpected.

What I do know, though, is that my students are awesome, and I appreciate every lesson they have for me, planned or otherwise. And I will miss them terribly when the year is over.

Addendum: thoughts that don't quite fit the above narrative
but I want to say them anyway:

• More than a skim of texts about 2nd grade pedagogy, including who 2nd graders are, is actually quite valuable, and probably necessary for sustained work in this field.
• If it weren't for the price many students would have to pay, I would think it valuable for every adult to teach for a year, including all of the preparation involved. As a society, we might respect our teachers more, and possibly compensate them better, recognizing all that they do. And more parents might then approach teachers with a level of compassion and gratitude, out of experience. I know the experience changed how I approach my son's teachers, even when I have a big concern.

For Our Teachers and Our Students: A Journey in NonLinear Faith

A long time ago this morning (likely yesterday by the time I finish writing and post), I sat at the table of local Torah maestro Beth Huppin. She is marvelous at demystifying Jewish text and weaving difficult teachings into meaning for any interested learner.

This morning's text, in honor of Yom HaShoah this week - was from Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943), Piaseczno Rebbe, who taught light in the Warsaw Ghetto (and before).

In his posthumous Sacred Fire, Shapira takes the Talmudic teaching that "when anyone repeats the Torah (teaching) of a dead scholar, the lips of the dead, though lying in the grave, mutter along with the speaker." (Read positively as "whisper," or "murmer" rather than "mutter" with its negative connotation.) Shapira argues that this is literally "in the grave," and literally "moving," not some dreamy picture of our teachers in an ethereal Olam Haba (world to come).

This teaching Shapira places near the end of a rather elaborate explication of the importance of students to teachers, which basically states that a teacher may learn something in the act of teaching that is far beyond the ken of the students, but which the teacher could not have understood without the configuration of particular learners around him.

Am I blown away by this teaching? Yes. While we were careful in the room this morning to read this as having broad meaning, I want for a moment to reflect on its context, a teaching during the Shoah, before I move on to weave in a few texts that came to my mind.

Consider: Shapira is teaching this in January 1942. By now he is aware of the death of teachers and students, and may, whatever hope he tries to keep alive, reasonably anticipate his own mortality. (Significant change came with partitioning of the ghetto in December 1941, two parts joined by a wooden foot bridge.) Did he intend this teaching as comfort to those he spoke them to that January? A reminder to himself that so long as people came to learn from him, he had purpose, and he could learn? To console himself at the loss of his own teachers?

Consider now the far-reaching meaning of this text. One of the questions Beth asked her students (me) to reflect on this morning was whether we had "ever experienced hearing the lips of the dead speaking" when we speak or teach words we learned from them.

This gives me chills, just thinking about it. And I say, "well, not literally, no . . . and, yes!"

Sometimes simply studying a text that is thousands (!) of years old, if in a moment I sense the person or people behind that text (author, editor, redactor), I may feel profound awe at the opportunity to find meaning for myself in their words.

There are people who converse with a text. I mean out loud, even. What do you mean by X? they might ask, or delving deeper, Does your idea hold up when you consider A? This, I think, was the savvy of the Talmudic rabbis - not to try to preserve the text as is (though with sacred texts they did their best), but to be in conversation with those texts, or to imagine themselves in conversation with the originators of the text.

Many scholars have done this simply in the margins of a text (See Rashi's Torah commentary, for example). Joseph Caro was overheard by his disciples having conversations with the personified Mishnah.

How do I do it? Usually quietly in my head. Sometimes jotting an epiphany on paper. And recently, I have begun the idea of writing out such conversations.

Am I "imagining" the conversation? What is imagination?
Am I "really" in conversation with a text?
Do the answers that I scribe for the text or its author actually belong to the person I am channeling?

Yes or no, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is:
Somewhere along the way, now and then, I experience the murmer, the דובב (dovev), of teachers past, some of whom I can never have known.

A long time ago this morning - now yesterday morning - I sat at the table of a great teacher. She taught the words of another great teacher. And he cited Talmud from more than a thousand years ago, which in turn cited Shir haShirim, Song of Songs, attributed to King Solomon nearly 3000 years ago.

There is no time in Torah. The teachings reach backward into the generations, and forward to students not yet born, who will elicit from their teachers new and revelatory understandings, just as our students do today for us, and as we have for our teachers. Though I prefer, unlike Shapira, to consider an Olam Haba rather than the earthly grave, I offer the prayer: May we hear the voices of our ancient teachers and their future students murmering through the veil.

In memory of teachers and students lost.

When the Learning Comes Together

How do we articulate goals about Torah study - to students of any age? What should those goals be? Obviously, there are skills one develops for Torah learning: language (Hebrew and English), understanding structure, finding one's way in a chumash or a tanakh or an online equivalent, and so forth. But when it comes down to it, the most compelling goal I have heard articulated recently is that students of all ages should develop love and passion for Torah and for Jewish tradition, and that it should be alive for them..

Easy enough to say. But how does it work?

Well, this week I saw my students' eyes light up. Recognition that learning we have been doing for weeks is not simply rote, neither is is some archaic thing. Words and concepts we have been studying in Modern Hebrew for several weeks came together with this week's Parashah, Vayera, in beautiful synchronicity.

Avraham and Sarah welcome strangers to their tent.  So, too, does Avraham's relative Lot welcome strangers - angels, even - to his city. And they welcome with such grace and hospitality that we can't help but learn from them that this is a godly, holy way of doing things.  Aha! So the fact that we began the year's Hebrew language module with language of welcoming - to welcome new students (both real in our class, and in the virtual classroom of our textbook) - is actually Torah, not just modern Hebrew! And not only that, but we had unexpected visitors in our classroom this week, AND next week we are having "Bring a Friend" day. 

I just love it when all the learning starts to come together. And when I don't even have to bring it together, for the faces of my students (in this case second graders) to light up with joy . . . I think I might just have achieved a little bit of the goals that Torah should be alive for the students, and that they should develop passion for it.