Inquiry+Learning

I have been reading our week's sources on Inquiry Learning, and on the importance of relevancy for the student int he learning process. This is something that means a lot to me, as I have questioned our education system for years. While I was always a straight A student, a lot of what I "learned" in school was simply information that I cannot use for anything in my life. But boy - could I spit it out the way they wanted me to. Needles to say, I do not remember most of it.

This is the way we have been teaching Judaism in supplementary school for the most part. Most of our students have little, if any, Jewish life skills. They can (in the best cases) do a beautiful reading of an aliyah, sometimes even of the whole parashah, but how is that relevant to their lives? I have been a strong advocate of working with teens with the starting point being their concerns in life. So instead of teaching them a collection of facts which in their eyes is irrelevant, I would rather take problems they are dealing with (just as an example: peer pressure, dating, relationship with parents), and look at that problem with Jewish eyes. Only if Judaism has something to say that is relevant to their lives, will they have any desire to learn about Judaism, and the feeling of connection to Judaism.

I must also point out an article that I read, and most of you have probably seen, about Watson, the computer who won Jeopardy. If you ahve not read it, here it is: []

At my Shabbat table yesterday, I was talking about this with one of our rabbis, and he pointed out that one of the beauties of Jewish studies (most specifically Gemara) is that it is never a "learn the information and spit it out". There are layers and layers, as displayed in a Talmud page - if you understand the basics, there is something more sophisticated. If you understand the more sophisticated, then you must ask yourself why different people read two completely opposite things in the same word/verse. If you can do that, then you must be able to come up with your own reading. And so on. Then today I read the Habits of Mind applied to Gemara page in our course, and it shows exactly that.



As Jewish educators, it seems to me that we need to go back to that concept: teaching with relevancy and in a layered format. Of course, the difficulty is to convince our Education Committees that this is much more important that having the child chant his Torah portion very well, for 2 and a half minutes so that all the family friends see what a wonderful "job" he did... (By the way, am I the only one bothered by the use of the word job when a Bar Mitzvah reads from the Torah???)