Ed questions

 Some thoughts and questions regarding education

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Is it more important that we let younger people make mistakes – go through a constructive learning process using trial and error so that they can move forward with confidence that through mistakes they can succeed?

 

Or is it more important that we help them avoid the errors and instruct them directly about the “right” way to build the answer so that they can move forward into other areas armed with knowledge so that they can go further?

 

Is it more important that we model the process of learning, or model the process of knowing? The process of learning leads to independent learning without confirmation of rectitude but allows for autonomy. The model of knowing builds utility into the end result as a foundation for future exploration and valuing expertise.

 

Do we prioritize learning or content knowledge. If the former, then does the choice of content matter? If the latter, then all delivery is primarily to serve acquisition and only secondarily discovery.

Unbearable lighters

 

When I was a freshman in college I lived on a dorm hallway populated with the expected wide variety of personalities. There was the exchange student, the republican, the southerner, the stoner and I was the religious Jew. There was also the wheeler-dealer. He always had an angle and was always working on something.

One day he was wandering the hall holding a briefcase. I asked him about it and he opened it, showing off a selection of fancy lighters that he was selling. No bics, these – you had to open the top and twirl the cylinder thingie. They were fancy! And one of them was a gleaming gold.

Here I am, miles from home, finally in charge of my own expenses and interested in helping out a hall-mate, so, of course, I bought one. I don’t smoke and living in a college dorm meant that I rarely had to start a fire to keep warm, microwave popcorn or drink a beer.

I told myself I would gift it to my dad – some sort of culturally ordained retirement gift, like a gold watch, except this was a lighter because he had a watch. And didn’t smoke. And wasn’t retiring. So, knowing that he might not want or appreciate this gift, I held on to it, you know, just for safe keeping. And once every while and a half, I took it out, flicked it open and lit it, you know, just to make sure that when I gave it to him, or anyone, it would be ready for use. Also, it was shiny and I liked looking at it. It made me feel independent and grown up. I bought this. I used my money and made a decision, and this is mine. So, back into the decorative box with you, I am going to own you some more.

Growing up, all purchases had to be approved of by the parents. Well, not all – heaven knows how much money (of theirs) I spent on my ever growing music collection. College was a chance to buy things that I wanted and not feel like anyone was going to check up on me. Yes, yes, when I bought food and Calvin+Hobbes books from the bookstore, I often asked the cashier to write “texts” on the charge slip, so I’m guilty of that, and when I took cash out of the Shawmut machine (I wasn’t a Bay Bank guy) it was money my parents gave to me for the school year, but this was still a step in the direction of autonomy. For my high school years, I was on a strict, weekly allowance of $10 (to buy lunch each day, unless I wanted to make my own lunch and take it to school. Yuck.) If I couldn’t liberate another couple of bucks from my mom’s wallet, I was stuck with that $10, and when you are addicted to playing pinball, and eating lots of fresh-baked bakery cookies each day, ten dollars doesn’t last very long.

Then I get to college, already on a meal plan and with no particular need for oodles of cash, and there it is. I had gone to the ATM and made sure I always had cash on hand for splurges and whims. When I saw the lighter, and knew I had a $20 in my pocket incapable of burning a hole the way a lighter could; the course of action seemed simple and obvious. I wanted something and I had the ability to buy it so I was going to be my own man and get it. Consequences, shmonsequences. Heck, maybe I’d take up smoking, or go wander into the woods and need to make a forest fire or something.

It is weird how we assert our independence and how we rebel. Little things become symbols of who we are and how we were thinking. That lighter was an impulse purchase, a secret that I both wanted to reveal and needed to hide. It was a lie I told myself and a deeper truth that, even at the moment, I knew.

Thirty plus years later and that lighter is somewhere, I’m sure. A drawer or a box. Maybe the attic. Still in the decorative box. Still waiting for me to develop the right wrong habits. Still waiting to be a gift to my dad.

Parents and Teachers

 

So there I was, in shul, quietly listening to the Torah portion’s being read. Jesse called me over.

“Dan, I know this is about last week’s parsha, but can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said, “you can always ask.”

Jesse pointed out Sh’mot, 35:34 which reads “וּלְהוֹרֹ֖ת נָתַ֣ן בְּלִבּ֑וֹ” (ul’horot, natan b’lebo). The Artscroll translation has “He gave him the ability to teach.” Jesse saw that “natan b’leebo” means “gave in his heart” which would indicate the ability, and wanted to confirm the “l’horot” is the word for “teach.”

I agreed.

“Why?” He asked.

The easiest answer would be to say “the Chizkuni explains that it means ‘to give instructions to others’ so that’s what it means” but I doubt Jesse would have been satisfied with that. He asked me, not the Chizkuni. He might have previously asked the Chizkuni, I don’t know. He has a life outside shul so anything could have happened. At that moment, though, he was asking me.

I pointed out that l’horot is the same root as the word for teacher in Hebrew, morah/moreh. He seemed satisfied. But, nooooooo, I couldn’t stop there, so in the grand tradition, I made something else up.

“Seems to me,” I started, “that the word for teaching, like a moreh, a teacher, is connected to the word for parents, horim, because a teacher is exegetically considered a parent figure.” I was actually on solid ground with this one, at least the latter part about a teacher as parent. See here https://rosends.blogspot.com/2022/02/honoring-parents-under-law.html for more. But the etymological connection? I had no idea – which is fine, if Jesse hadn’t been the inquisitive type.

“Did you already study that?” He asked.

“No,” I explained, “I just made it up.”

He smiled and said “Well, there’s a dvar Torah for you to write.” So here I am.

So I did some digging trying to establish some sort of connection between the words for teach and for parent and I’m here to report my findings.

My first step was to look in the Aramaic and see if similar words are used by Onkelos. It turns out that the word used for “and she conceived” (Bereisheet 4:1) is vatahar and in Aramaic, ועדיאת v’adee’at, while the word for l’horot is ולאלפא u’l’alafa. Now, already I was intrigued because the act of physical union is based on the y-d-ayin root which also refers to “knowing” and the word for “becoming pregnant” is “conceive” so there is an intellectual aspect to that event. Teaching seems to work well with that.

Next up, I started looking to see if the roots overlap.

For l’horot, the Sefaria website starts with the Open Bible (via Github) which traces the root to y-r-h, meaning to throw or cast, to point, show or teach. The teacher is putting the curricular material out there, as it were. The same reference source on Sefaria has vatahar starting with the root h-r-h meaning to become pregnant, contrive or devise. So that is about keeping the intellectual property internal or at least, just conceptual.

I ran home. OK, ambled. And pulled out a couple of etymological dictionaries. Ernest Klein’s A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language has the h-r-h root (conceive, become pregnant) from the Akkadian eru (to conceive), and the Ugaritic hry (conceive) but also hr – conception. The derivatives include herayon (pregnancy) and horim, parents. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.1?ven=The_Contemporary_Torah,_Jewish_Publication_Society,_2006&vhe=Miqra_according_to_the_Masorah&lang=bi&lookup=%D7%95%D6%B7%D7%AA%D6%BC%D6%B7%D6%99%D7%94%D6%B7%D7%A8%D6%99&with=Radak&lang2=en&p3=Klein_Dictionary%2C_%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%94.1&ven3=Carta_Jerusalem%3B_1st_edition,_1987&lang3=en

For the y-r-h root he has what you would expect, all sorts of “throw, cast, shoot” words and then a secondary possibility of a connection to the Arabic “rawa(y) he handed down” which would lead to teaching. Interesting but not conclusive.

Over to Matityahu Clark’s Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew https://books.google.com/books?id=eVAAfn6Itb4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false . For h-r-h he has “implant and absorb seed” so that accounts for definition 1, “becoming pregnant.” But definition two is “teaching: implanting seeds of knowledge.” EXCLAMATION POINT. A direct connection between parenting and teaching, right there. I might have made it up, but clearly, I did not make it up!

Strangely, or not so strangely – I don’t judge, in his entry for y-r-h Clark makes all the connections to throwing and casting but says absolutely nothing about teaching, as if he doesn’t see this as the root for teaching at all. That idea only comes from the parenting word.

But I wasn’t satisfied with just being right; I wanted to add more to the idea. So I thought about the Aramaic words again. The word for pregnancy is ועדיאת so I looked up possible Aramaic words in Jastrow. My Aramaic is incomplete especially as it relates to grammar and while this might hamper one of any sort of integrity, it frees me up to make connections which the scholar might dismiss. So connect, I did. Jastrow (page 1043 http://www.tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Jastrow// ) has the Aramaic word derived from the root for “pass by,” “remove” or “carry” which lead to the woman carrying a fetus. But the source letters of ayin-dalet are the root for “proof” or “witness.” The pregnancy is proof of something. Jastrow has the root of alafa meaning “to join” and “to train” (there, page 72). The root is also the same one as the word for “thousand”. To train others is to increase knowledge from one person to more than one.

This process of growth, from being a parent (proving that you can pass along your genetic material, in most cases, to one other person) to teachers (who increase knowledge substantially and in most cases, to many) also seems to be present in the injunction repeated in Pirkei Avot. In both 1:6 and 1:16 we are commanded to “aseh lecha rav” establish for yourself a teacher. But what is the word for “teacher”? Rav, which also means “many.” We are told that we need to make our singular knowledge more widespread – we have to join others and increase information. The teacher casts information out for all, expanding on the parent who only produces a limited number of witnesses.

So, to answer you, Jesse, the concepts of parents and teachers are very inter-related and the logical link goes beyond just an overlapping etymology into an intellectual progression making the internal external and the local, universal. We can’t keep it to ourselves to we have experts who make sure that it gets out there.