I have not been so nervous walking into a classroom to teach since my first day at Beth Tfiloh. I have taught at Beth Tfiloh for over 20 years and I have taught every grade in the high school and every level in the high school, but walking into my year 11 class this morning, I felt like a first year teacher on his first day of school.
I certainly a responsibility to represent Beth Tfiloh well. I also had no idea what their level of English would be. And the success of my lesson hinged on their English, since I wanted them to practice writing in English. However, once I started speaking, my nerves calmed down and it was like being at Beth Tfiloh. I used the same reassuring words to elicit their responses. I gave them the same encouraging praises to reward their efforts.
In my year 11 class, I introduced them to an essay that I often have my students write. The assignment is called a “This I Believe” essay. It comes from a long-running radio series. For this essay, the students define a core belief that anchors their lives in 250-350 words. Students have written on “I believe in kindness” or “I believe in perseverance.” Today we did several brainstorming activities to prepare the students to write. I teach this same group on Wednesday and I hope to do build on what we did today by having them do some in-class writing about their beliefs. My co-teacher here, Zsolt Martha, thinks this is a good idea because he feels they do not practice writing in English enough.
I also taught two year 7 classes today. It actually was the same group of students twice, once before lunch and once after lunch. Their English was obviously more limited than the year 11 students. They could understand me and speak with me very well. But they were reluctant to write. I only found out right before the lesson that year 7 is when they formally and intensively begin to study English. For the first period, we wrote a class poem. I give each child an index card and a writing prompt and the students have to complete the writing prompt with a short phrase. Then the students take the index cards and move them around like puzzle pieces to form lines of a poem. At Beth Tfiloh the activity always works really well. It was certainly neat to see and hear the students having the same discussions about grouping similar ideas and words, making smooth transitions between ideas and thinking about how to introduce and close their thoughts that the students at Beth Tfiloh do when I use this activity. In my second meeting with this group, I had them draw pictures of their rooms, directing them to make their pictures more and more detailed. Then they chose one special item in their room and wrote a short paragraph about why it was special to them. One reluctant English speaker, whose name I cannot spell, wrote about his autograph collection of YouTubers. Some teenage activities are universal.
I did have a ringer in this class. A girl named Sara. She was born in Ireland and lived there until she was 11. Her father is Irish and her mother is Hungarian. When her family left Ireland and moved to Hungary, her friends gave her a photo album. Sara wrote that she would cry if anything happened to it. I am so thankful that Sara was in my class. If she had not been there, I would have been sweating even more than I was.
There are some parts of the Scheiber Sandor School that my students at Beth Tfiloh would like. There is no dress code. There is very little davening. There are 10-15 minutes between classes. They take few Judaic classes. The 11th grade student who gave me a tour of the school only takes one 45 minute Judaics class period—the entire week. But the students at Beth Tfiloh would not like the 25 minute lunch period or the fact that they have no extra-curricular activities. Zsolt was very interested in learning about Beth Tfiloh’s literary magazine. When the students heard how many hours the students at Beth Tfiloh stay after school to participate in sports or theater, they asked, “When do they sleep?” I responded, “I often wonder the same thing.”
