In the summer of 2023, when things in Israel looked much brighter and happier, I enjoyed a lunch in Jerusalem with a teacher in one of the gap year seminaries. During the conversation, this question arose.
Why is there a lack of Hebrew reading and comprehension skills including basic things that should have been drummed into students by 7th Grade? This would facilitate high schoolers possessing skills that permit the teaching of increasingly challenging, less boring material that is more suitable for their age.
Let’s unpack some elements of this query.
First, the experience of learning Jewish text is more like engaging in a conversation (see Pedagogy of Partnership) than it is simple reading comprehension. It is as if each student is in dialogue with the rabbis and scholars who went before and left a piece of themselves in the text to be discussed. If a student manifests weak decoding, vocabulary, and translating skills, then, even with a written translation, they will miss the nuances in the text and the conversational aspect of it and subsequently, some of the benefits of autonomous meaning making.
The inability to gather evidence independently and create one’s own individual narrative hurts a student’s development of belief, their confidence in the text's message, and the enjoyment of the learning process. I validate the question’s underlying observation that the vast majority of 7th grade students in Jewish day schools lack the series of skills necessary to approach text independently leading to high school learning engagement issues.
However, the view that expects the schools to “drum” the material into the young students lacks both nuance and understanding of Jewish day schools and second language acquisition. Challenges to Hebrew reading acquisition, in contrast with whole language reading, writing, speaking, as well as listening mastery, stem from multiple, overlapping factors. This data was compiled in 2024 by more than 20 experts in Hebrew acquisition as a second language called Pritzat Derech).
The challenges may include, from the student perspective:
● Inadequately serviced learning issues and behavioral issues
● Ineffective coping or compensating skills
● Weak drive towards delayed gratification for learning
● Lack of a desire for systematized methods to approach the topics
● Poor family supports for these topics, and
● An overly large class size
The challenges may also include, from the teacher perspective:
● The vast majority of Hebrew language and Judaic educators do not have training in standard pedagogical methods for teaching reading in a second language
● Most lack understanding of learning differences
● Many do not understand developmentally appropriate skills and time needed to comprehend the second language (reading and oral vocabulary overall) skills, and
● A majority require better skills in inculcating motivation and perseverance into students
Often, many Judaic teachers report a tension in the zero-sum balance between the time to teach the content versus the time to teach the series of skills needed to translate a text. As a result, the teacher may choose to avoid the translation skills as much as possible, make multiple memorization and spit back exercises, or demonstrate the learning process repeatedly where the student acts as the apprentice text learner. This course of action results in benefiting the small portion of students who possess the natural talent to absorb information in this format. The majority of the students gain some skills from this approach and also gain a slew of negative experiences more likely to deter further connection with our sacred texts.
Even considering the above perspectives and zero-sum issue, a school could mandate teaching the list of skills needed to translate sacred texts by early adolescence when the student’s age-appropriate resistance has yet to arise. However, this might create a barrier to two parallel goals in the classroom: teachers building close relationships with students and students developing close relationships with God.
Teachers recognize that the work of generating translation skills is achieved through resilience, perseverance, and self-assessment. Those “soft” skills make learning “hard” skill acquisition more successful. Teaching hard skills through other means, like repetition, is exhausting. Compared with much more pleasant and rapport-building classwork like discussion, interpretation, or storytelling, teachers often opt for more positive interactions to accomplish the two parallel relationship goals mentioned above. Therefore, the “hard” skills needed to approach more interesting material in high school remain underdeveloped.
The analysis of the question shows that Jewish day schools foster a group of interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a system. The current system requires reworking. Jewish day school students get to high school with weak translation skill sets because the system lacks the proper robust nature to support those goals. Assigning a linear answer to a complex problem–such as drumming the skills into students to translate text, so that they have those skills by high school–rarely yields positive results. The students and teachers do the best they can within the systems they inhabit. If we want the result to change, we need to change the system.