When asking for volunteers...

[terriqat]

I have Talmud shiur (class discussion where one person reads and explains the text while the rest of us follow along and the teacher tries to explain what we don't understand) 4 days a week. And every class, my teacher asks for volunteers and sometimes he gets them and sometimes he doesn't. Today, he didn't, so he volunteered someone. Whats the

Comments

[debka_notion]

I'm guessing that the teacher would rather have volunteers who presumably are people who know the material well, are well prepared, etc. But sometimes no one prepares/is interested in talking in class, and then what is he/she going to do? If he/she usually gets volunteers, then I can see how occasionally just choosing someone at random is worthwhile. If most of the time is random choice- then yeah, I'd think that having an advance schedule would be well, wise.

[nuqotw]

The point is to give students an opportunity to show what they have accomplished. If one asks for volunteers on a regular basis, it is no secret to students that they should prepare themselves to give a somewhat extemporaneous summary. By not assigning people, the instructor avoids the problem of discovering in class that the assigned presenter didn't understand what happened in the reading, and that no one else prepared to present. (And believe me, I have been in the situation of understanding 50% of what was going on when the instructor was asking for volunteers. I ALWAYS make a point of volunteering for what I understood in a hurry.) I am actually about to do this in one of my recitations. I'm going to ask for a volunteer. And if I don't get a volunteer, I am going to pick someone.

Further explanation

[terriqat]

I think I need to explain: Shiur is preceeded by a two hour session where pairs of students prepare that day's material-- we usually don't know how much to prepare before that day, and he will usually give last minute instructions on what to focus on. This makes preparing in advance basically impossible. Also, when asked to volunteer, one is expected to read for the whole class, even if one did not understand, or if one completely misunderstood the section. This is extremely easy to do in Talmud because of the the language barrier (I don't speak Aramaic leagalease) and sometimes the commentaries are just as complex, if not more so. So volunteering on a day when one only understood part of the material is not always a good idea. It is not uncommon for everyone in the class to miss a crucial point and come to a completely wrong conclusion -- it happened today in fact. (Suffice it to say, if you happen to contract tzara'at, make sure you bring your sacrifice in a timely fashion.) While the teacher does explain when this happens, he has

Re: Further explanation

[rymenhild]

Ickiness. That just sounds like a bad teaching style.

What does one do about sacrifices if one's apartment contracts tzara'at? Does that have to be timely too?