Jewneric: A New Platform for the Jewish Voice

Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic in Retrospect, Part III: Bad Timing

Posted Feb 17, 2010 by Moshe Glasser

Last time, we discussed how certain subjects, like literature, come with so much baggage that even the most Jewish of literature is left grasping for options that will avoid the cultural and moralistic problems that stymie the best teachers. This week, let’s attack something a little more mundane: scheduling of the school day.

Jewish day schools have a unique challenge. Their students are in fact in two schools simultaneously, secular and Judaic. This means that every one of our students is doing twice the work that their public school counterparts are meant to endure. I have often seen high school students on television or in film (usually played by actors and actresses in their mid to late twenties) who seem to have a tremendous amount of time on their hands. I finally understood how that could be when I visited a friend at Rutgers early in my college days (I was at Yeshiva College at the time). He had barely three hours of class a day – and complained about it. I had trouble not smacking him.

Consider what a dual curriculum means to the students: double the work, double the pressure, double the time. Most yeshiva students begin their day before 8 AM, and many end it well after 5 PM. That is nine long hours (often much more), with nary a recess to be found past elementary school. Couple that with the outdated athletic and gym equipment, let alone art or music, that the budgets of many schools can provide, and students are left without either outlet or expression for their frustrations or difficulties. This is a perfect recipe for creating basket cases out of average students, and nervous breakdowns out of normal emotional reactions.

The problem is that there is just too much to learn. Consider the basic subjects: math, English, history, science. Add to that Talmud, Bible, Jewish history, and Hebrew. This is without even the basic electives or additions that so enrich a school: Jewish philosophy, art, music, drama, Zionism…the list goes on and on. And once that school day, long as it is, is over, then the fun begins: sports teams, college preparatory activities (such as SAT preparation), student newspaper, bar mitzvah lessons. Do we really expect our students to have time for all of this? Look at the list above and notice what hasn’t been done yet in the twenty-eight hours of work I have listed. That’s right – the student has yet to do his homework. Or sleep. Or have a social life.

This is not a small problem, nor is it one I am exaggerating. A friend of mine was hospitalized in college for attempting to consistently keep an eighteen hour day. (He later left the college for one with a less rigorous academic program, and spent several years on a mandatory eight-hour-a-night sleep schedule.) One of the twentieth century’s greatest sages, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Hakohain Kagan, better known as the Chofetz Chaim, spent a year of his life away from Torah study, on doctor’s orders, because he came close to working himself literally to death. We are doing our students no favors by driving them to exhaustion. We are merely exhausting them.

Well, maybe that’s not true.

There is one crucial value that is being communicated through a very full day's work: the value of a full day’s work. It is no mystery to me that so many of my friends accept the frankly insane schedules expected of medical or law students; no mystery that so many businesses are delighted to hire religious graduates in accounting or finance jobs. The work ethic that these students are learning, without even knowing it, is making them accustomed to a degree of effort that is unheard of in most schooling environments. The most important thing I learned in Israel is not any piece of Torah I can repeat or any moral lesson I absorbed. It was the ability to focus on a task, for hours at a time, without distraction or difficulty. There is a reason the term is “sitting,” as in “to sit and learn,” and even the word “yeshiva” itself is derived from the Hebrew term for sitting. What did I learn by going to school for nine hours a day? To put in a nine hour day. At age 12.

The purpose of this is not to suggest that we give up on the strenuous and usually stressful education of our children. We simply need to find a better way to transmit the information, skills, and ideology that our students require in a way that is better able to provide the critical lessons without torturing our young people out of their love for both schooling in general and religion in particular.

There has been a tremendous amount of study regarding the concept of block scheduling. This concept hypothesizes that students (and teachers) will perform better if faced with double the time in one subject half as often (meaning eighty minutes of English twice a week as opposed to forty minutes of English four times a week). The theory is not hard to understand. Homework, classwork, the stress level of anticipating a class, and the attention span of students are all improved by giving them fewer things per day to consider. While this is not a simple solution to integrate into a dual curriculum, it can be considered in other ways. For example, we can double the time dedicated to a given subject in one half of the year, and swap it for another subject in the second half of the year. This also gives students a shorter time span to worry about: a shorter semester for a given subject will make a difficult one seem less intimidating, and an exciting one seem more intense.

This is just one of many ways block scheduling might be integrated into our very crowded classrooms. Hopefully, these methods will draw our students into their learning, and not allow them to treat their studies as merely an exercise in endurance.