I have been debating whether I should respond to this query for a while, as a day school teacher I don't wish to speak for others and I certainly don't wish to create excuses. However, after viewing some of the comments on this thread I felt the need to explain "What are they doing with all that time?" from the perspective of a classroom teacher. I am using my own teaching experience in a Modern Orthodox Day school as an example and I imagine other teachers face similar challenges.
For starters, unlike a Yeshiva cheder school where children might spend an hour or so on Chumash six days a week, I get to spend forty three minute periods four times a week teaching Chumash. Actually, it is not a full forty three minutes because that includes the time we have for coming from recess. Thus, by the time everyone settles down, homework is checked etc, how much actual time is spent learning Chumash or related skills? Even if I get a half hour a day that amounts to two hours a week versus closer to six hours for the typical Yeshiva student.
Furthermore, many of my students come from homes where parents can't review with their children at home. (My school for example estimates that about half of all parents are not Shomer Shabbos.) Thus, not only do we have less time in the classroom (which would seemingly require that parents make more time for reinforcement at home), we actually have students who are getting less reinforcement at home than a typical Yeshiva student might receive. Related to this is the fact that many day school parents don't have a strong religious background and as such simply don't prioritize Chumash or have the same reverence for it the way Yeshiva parents often do. If the subliminal (or even explicit) message from some parents is that Chumash is not our highest priority or that it is just another "subject", why should anyone expect their children to treat it any differently? Can you really inspire such a child with a story about the Chofetz Chaim if they they never heard of the Chofetz Chaim and from where they are coming from can't really relate to who the Chofetz Chaim was? Or doesn't it make sense that that it might be a little more difficult to inspire the child who has a lot more "noise" in their head (read, TV, music, movies, Xbox 360, Internet etc) competing for their attention that a typical Yeshiva child does? (They say the average attention span today is down to a commercial...) I am not saying a day school Rebbe or Morah cannot motivate such children (and many children are by nature curious), but it is certainly a much more difficult task when you have to create the atmosphere to help many of these children become motivated to learn Chumash in the first place.
My main point is, we as teachers don't have "all that time" to teach skills, cover ground, review properly, motivate and take the place of parents at home. Is that an excuse? I don't know, but if it is true as Yitchok Levine posits that day school children are systematically not graduating with the necessary skills (and this was the subject of on excellent discussion here on Lookjed regarding "The Illiteracy Epidemic" [
www.lookstein.org]), then it is most likely built into the system. Instead of blaming teachers who give their heart and soul to help these students, I think we need to examine the old adage of "what you put in is what you take out". If day schools designate less class time and cater to a clientele who put less emphasis on Judaic Studies, don't expect comparable results to Yeshiva schools who put put in more time and whose parents are more involved. I don't blame day schools administrators as for the most part they are just catering to what their parent body can handle. Truth be told, I don't blame parents either, very often the fact that these parents chose to send their child to a Jewish school is admirable when you consider that public school is free. However, the bottom line is that day school teachers don't have "all that time" on their hands and these constraints are inherently built into the nature of the day school system. Part of what I have been trying to do in my own classroom is to make greater use of technology to compensate for this lack of class and home time and as educators we need to explore what methodologies will help us come closer to achieving our goals. Or in other words, these constraints don't give us an excuse to stop trying, but are rather a challenge for us to double down our efforts.
In conclusion, I wish to highlight one additional problem which I have written about in this forum in the past and which I believe adds to the problem being discussed here. The problem is the lack of professionally developed educational materials designed to teach Chumash or Chumash skills in an organized systematic way. Without a widely available curriculum with clearly defined goals for first grade skills, second grade skills etc there will be inherent confusion as to which skills need to be taught and how they should be taught. Thus, it is no wonder students often struggle with skills if there is a lack of educational direction in terms of teaching it. As I mentioned, these are challenges waiting for us to tackle, not to shy away from. In my mind, the question is not what are day school teachers doing with all that time, but rather what innovations are day schools coming up to make more efficient use of the little bit of time they do have?
Tzvi Daum
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