Week+4

//Due October 27// //Readings// //Wiggins and McTighe, Chap. 3, Chap. 5// //[]// //1. Design a motivating activity for your Yom Yitzhak Rabin lesson.What central (or Essential) question will be at the core of your lesson? Does your motivating activity begin the process of introducing or exploring that?// //2. Read the following passage about Rabbi Moshe Besdin, the founder of the James Striar School of Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University:// //The curriculum of the James Striar School consisted of the study of traditional Jewish texts: the Bible and its classical commentaries, (R. Besdin himself taught this class to every one of the incoming students), the Mishnah and the Talmud. He would regale me with his philosophy of education during those unforgettable lunches: "Teach it, not about it," which meant that he was against a paper-back, even Artscroll form of Torah-in-translation, or a Judaism-lite article about Biblical or Talmudic thought. His "itological" theory of learning meant that a serious student would welcome the opportunity to take the necessary intellectual plunge and grapple with the text itself: learn to read it, translate it, understand it and internalize it, slowly but surely progressing from Chumash to Rashi, to Mishnah, to Talmud. He actually called himself a "hederologist," based upon the heder (literally room or class-room) which was the Jewish School in the European "shtetl" that successfully taught hundreds of generations of Jews how to properly "learn" and understand a classical Hebrew text, based on the single educational principle that if you can't properly read and translate the original verse or Talmudic passage, you will never truly understand it.//

//In making the argument for the pursuit of BIG ideas, Wiggins & McTighe downplay the value of learning and absorbing information or facts; the nitty-gritty minutiae and specific examples must take a back-seat to the meta-ideas and enduring understandings. Please comment on what you see are the benefits/dangers of using of each of the approaches (Wiggins & McTighe vs. Besdin). What would suggest would be a healthy relationship between the "micro" (or non-enduring) understandings" and the "macro" understandings? Which approach do you think is most reasonable/appropriate for the population you think you will be dealing with?//