Learning is good

[liv]

In the spirit of just posting rather than worrying about whether it's worthy, a brief update on the state of the Liv.

Things that are currently making me miserable: A series of minor ailments. Namely a rotten cold, which at least I'm nearly over now, horrible awful period pains, and a UTI, which thankfully rarely happens to me but it's unpleasant enough.

Things that are currently making me happy, in spite of the above: learning new things. My not-a-resolution intention to do more learning is working really well.

I am getting into the swing of knitting with round needles, and did a bit of knitting in front of the TV while watching Toy Story with the kids. I've got far enough to convince myself that my Moebius scarf is actually a valid Moebius, which of course makes it behave weirdly.

jack reminded me that I had a programming project ongoing and I didn't want to lose momentum. I managed to tick the next couple of tasks off my to-do list, and have a plan for what I want to try next. I am definitely finding this more satisfying than doing artificial exercises! Anyway, details about my projects should go in livredor at some point, I just wanted to mention that they were making me happy.

Swedish Duolingo is progressing. Slowly, I'm not trying to keep up any streaks or anything. But a few minutes a few times a week is good for me. I'm a bit stuck on adjectives; Swedish is hardly inflected at all, even verbs barely change, let alone nouns, but adjectives have endings I can't get my head round. I don't have a problem drilling different forms, and indeed Duolingo's gamification is particularly helpful for that. But I really struggle with remembering when adjectives need endings and when they don't.

My Hagaddah class is going well. This is teaching, yeah, but it's also learning because I've never taught Hagaddah before, or fitted a Jewish text into an academic reading group format. Plus most of my students are Christians so I'm learning odd bits about Christianity on the way. First session I did a kind of potted history of the Hagaddah, and skimmed through the whole liturgy to give people an overview. The Christians were more surprised than I realized about the idea of a home-based service.

Then the second session, we looked at Exodus 12 – 13, asking the question, which of these verses pertain to the historical event of the Exodus, and which are commandments for future celebrations of Passover? The group had interesting ideas about that, and going through ~60 verses in an hour was an interesting pace, I usually work a lot more slowly that that with lots of close reading and commentary, or a lot faster than that just summarizing the plot.

We do digress quite a lot; we had the inevitable discussion about dating Passover versus dating Easter (and the latter is just ridiculously complicated anyway). But I'm avoiding the most egregious; yes, you have correctly spotted one of tefillin verses, no I am not going to explain tefillin to you right now.

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about the seder plate, and the other physical objects involved in setting up the service. The best thing about this learning is that ghoti_mhic_uait is interested, so I get to come home and talk my sessions through with her. She and I found out together that the Gamaliel in Acts is the father of the R' Gamaliel who instituted an important part of the Passover service. (Wikipedia is massively confused on both the Hagaddah in general, and attempting to provide a biography of R' Gamaliel, indeed it seems to conflate several different Gs. So we turned to the old but better organized Jewish Encyclopedia to figure out all the biographical stuff.)

Teaching cheder has been nice too; the Yr 6 class are going through that levelling up you often see in kids about 10, where they grok that meta-cognitive understanding of how learning works. I love that, it's nearly as exciting as being present when a kid figures out reading. So they've been collaborating with me to create educational games, which is just a million times better than me bribing them with games when they're reluctant to learn. We made a Happy Families variant using items associated with different blessings, a little bit of food vocab, a little bit of practising asking simple questions like, do you have the orange? / yes / thanks.

I'm in a really nice situation at work: we have basically completed all our obligations to the funder of the project, comfortably ahead of the official deadline of the end of February. And my boss managed to find money to extend my contract to July, so I get to work on things that are interesting academically and directly relevant to my university. Which means going into a bit more depth than the descriptive stuff that the government want. I've started conducting interviews, which I'm really enjoying, including few with disabled students, because there's nothing published at all about how my particular teaching method works for disabled students. I'm really liking asking the students directly (and paying them for their time with the last scraps of the project budget) rather than relying on theoretical speculation by abled academics.

I'm somewhat less busy than in the crunch time at the end of the project. I have plenty to do but also a bit of slack in my working day. So on a whim I started a FutureLearn MOOC about online learning. Yes, very self-referential, I know. But it's nice to experience being a student using the kind of modern education methods I'm training people on. And I think having a minor qualification in online learning might be no bad thing when I'm looking for my next job.

Also, wow, 80 people had opinions about not seeing the wood for the trees. I also learned something new from my silly poll: in other Englishes and other languages, it's unambiguously a wooded area, not the material. I love you guys.

Comments

[rosefox]

That Haggadah class sounds fascinating. It hadn't occurred to me that home-based services just aren't a thing in Christianity, but they really aren't (barring exorcism or last rites, or some other situation where the person/people involved just cannot go to a church).

[karen2205]

Some funerals in Northern Ireland have home-based parts before going on to a church, and that’s weird to somebody culturally Christian who grew up in England.

[lilacsigil]

Home based services were definitely a thing where I lived in the 19th century because of being a remote area - the idea was for the community to build a church when they could, but until then a travelling minister or priest would hold the service at the biggest house or in a woolshed. Then the churches got built and now they’ve mostly emptied out again and been sold off, so small services happen in homes and town halls again this century. But the biggest service outside the churches are in the nursing homes.

[davidgillon]

And before the 19thC and post-Reformation, there was, for UK Catholicism, a tradition of covert services and priest holes. Which I suppose may have led to a focus on church services as "we can now".

[lilacsigil]

Also, I hope you're feeling better soon! I only seem to get a UTI with periods anyway, but somehow it just makes the whole thing that much worse.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that the Christians were so surprised. There's the whole "house church" movement within Christianity, which seems to be adjacent to charismatic evangelicalism. They meet for worship in people's homes and share a meal, because they reckon (and they're probably right) that's closer to what the first Christians did, before the Church became more of an institution. Our neighbours over the road run one, and I think some other people we used to go to church with either run or attend one.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Re your year 6 students: Bethany's homework often seems to include things like "Design a game to help people learn X" (as one of several options; other options might be writing a short essay or designing a poster. I like the choose-from-several-options structure.) She's in year 4 and has been getting these for a couple of years now. I'm not sure if kids in years 2-4 can understand very well how to do that. So it's interesting to hear your observation that they get there in year 6.

[oracne]

I'm doing German on Duolingo, and finding it very satisfying.

[sfred]

I hope you feel properly better soon.

[seekingferret]

I think the Talmud is also sometimes confused about some of the R' Gamaliels, so...