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I have now added two new syllabi: “Faith and Violence“, a first-year seminar, and “The Talmud.”

I am happy to announce a new article that I have just published on pedagogy.  Here is the abstract:

During my career, I have regularly taught a survey course on the history of Jews and Judaism in the Persian, Greek, and early Roman periods (ca. 520 BCE – 70 CE). Student performance in the course has long concerned and puzzled me. By the end of the course students demonstrated familiarity with the narratives and concepts we covered, but most did not really “think historically.” They had great difficulties using and applying the historical tools they learned to new situations and evidence. In 2006 and again in 2010 I overhauled the course not only to improve it, but also to figure out how my students learned history. Using a wiki exercise, I traced how students learned and then applied these insights the next time I taught the course. In this essay I report on what I learned.

The article can now be accessed for free here.

I am presently reading Daniel Kahneman’s engaging book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics (!) for his collaborative work with Amos Tversky that helped to develop the field of behavioral economics, gained notice primarily for his work on understanding the kind of biased (and often incorrect) decisions toward which we gravitate.  In this book he draws a more synthetic and accessible picture of how we think.

In sum, he simplifies our thinking processes into two “systems.”  System 1 is our default, intuitive system – it allows us to make decisions with little or no effort.  System 2 is our more deliberate, focused way of thinking, which we consciously engage in order to solve problems too difficult for System 1.  This is certainly a simplification of thinking, but it is not entirely a heuristic.  When System 2 is engaged, there are measurable physiological changes, including a rise in pulse and dilation of the pupils.    The book describes these two systems but, more importantly, elaborates on how they work and their ramifications.

I will most likely write a few posts on this book, but I am now thinking about how  educators in higher education might maximally exploit these findings in a classroom in order to fool increase student learning.  Right now I am intrigued by the possibility of using a pre-class audio/visual presentation.  That is, students walk into the classroom and encounter a loop of a series of slides and background music.  The purpose, of course, is to put them “in the mood” to learn.

This, though, is where it gets interesting.  Because System 1 is lazy and works with the information that is easily at hand, it is very susceptible to “priming.”  A slide show thus might include technical vocabulary.  When we actually discuss that vocabulary later in class, there should be some increased degree of recognition.  A well-designed set of slides could thus prime students for the learning to come.

In addition to priming, the music sets the mood.  My classroom is generally discussion centered; it is a System 2 kind of place.  For discussions to work, students must be thinking rigorously, but they must also feel comfortable.  Here, then, is my conundrum.  Dissonance activates System 2.  Nice, easy, listening is System 1 music: “all is fine around me, there is no need to think too hard about anything.”  On the other hand, I am sure that if I were to open class with a track from Metallica, it would leave many students (but certainly me) grumpy and combative.  So here is where I turn to you, reader: What music in particular would you suggest that I play in my classes (now entirely putting aside the actual subject of those classes) to achieve these goals?

 

I have been struggling recently with the biblical account of Jacob’s last testament to his sons and their descendents, found in Genesis 49:1-27.  I am hardly the first.  As many commentators have already noted, this is one of the most obscure passages in the Pentateuch.  The Hebrew is difficult and at times almost unintelligible; the text keeps mixing metaphors; and the word-plays that it makes on the names of Jacob’s sons seem to be in tension with the derivations of the names given earlier in Genesis.  The testament is also nakedly political.  Most of the tribes are lightly brushed aside in a verse, and the two tribes that receive extended blessings are Judah and Joseph, the tribes that not coincidentally at all are associated respectively with the southern and northern kingdoms, formed after the death of Solomon in the tenth century.  The “blessings” of Reuven, Simon, and Levi – the three oldest brothers – are hardly blessings, and seem intended to malign them in order to set the stage for Judah’s ascendency.  That is, as the fourth son, Judah would gain power only because his three older brothers forfeited their right to it due to their bad behavior.

What is a plausible historical context for such a text?  What is particularly peculiar to me is the dual blessing of Judah and Joseph.  The blessing of Judah clearly assumes that the tribe of Judah holds supreme power; I cannot see how it can be dated prior to the fall of the northern kingdom (Israel) to Assyria in 722 BCE.  Yet the blessing of Joseph assumes that his tribe – Israel – has withstood attacks and is flourishing.  It is hard to imagine how a scribe writing in Judah/Jerusalem after 722 BCE could have written this.  How can we make sense these two blessings appearing together?

Here’s my preliminary solution, following, to some extent, John Skinner’s suggestions in his volume in The International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (pp. 507-25).  The bulk of this testament, including the blessing of Joseph, was produced in Israel (the northern kingdom) prior to 722 BCE.  After Israel’s fall, it was part of the literature that exiled scribes brought to Jerusalem.  Some time later, being revised by a scribe in Judah, the testament was updated to include the strong statement about Judah’s leadership.  By that time Israel was no threat, so Joseph’s blessing was left unchanged.

If this solution works, then we have here an excellent example of the ways in which the scribes of Judah revised the texts that they received from their brethren from the north.