In Defense of Tal Am

When I first saw the Tal Am curriculum,  I immediately fell in love with it! It was colorful, it was beautiful, and I wished I could of had this as my Judaic curriculum as a child. Soon after, I started hearing the reservations and worries  teachers had about this new curriculum.

Talam

In the past few years, I have seen many of the local Yeshivot drop parts of Talam, and replace it with Lehavin Ulehaskil, or with teacher generated worksheets with a stronger focus on the grammar.

The complaint I am constantly hearing from my colleagues:

Tal AM doesn't teach grammar! 

To deal with this problem, some schools have rejected Tal Am entirely, while others, still use Talam but they supplement it with many Grammar worksheets and drills.

Why Teach out of context Grammar at all?

Many teachers, myself included, can tap into our own childhood experience learning Dikduk. I learned, Shorashim, I learned the tenses, and I memorized the charts but I did not speak the language! Boring drill after drill had to be endured but there was no payoff at the end. Research consistently confirms:  learning grammar by rote memorization and drills does not lead to language acquisition.  

If drilling grammar is ineffective then why are teachers squandering so much class time on a "drill test and forget" methodology. The time is better spent giving the students the opportunity to truly develop their language skills by engaging in real conversations in Hebrew about the material being learned. 

Many teachers try to use Talam as a traditional workbook, thereby missing the crucial part of the Tal Am methodology, סביבה של עברית, creating an enriching immersive environment where students are engaging in the learning, where the student is at the center. If the teacher remains stubborn that half the lesson has to be dedicated to rules and drills there is no time remaining for the most important part of the Talam methodology: making Hebrew come alive for the student.

I often hear a very sad and almost tragic statement from teachers: "I can't talk in Hebrew in my classroom because I need to explain the very complex Dikduk rules in English, because if I explained it in Hebrew my students just won't understand." Perhaps, these students need to be speaking in Hebrew and learning the language the way our brain is wired to learn language, by learning in context in an immersive student centered environment.

Hebrew, or any foreign language, will never be learned by memorizing and drilling word lists and dikduk rules. The copy machines can keep churning out more and more worksheets. The students can work in school and then continue at home for many more hours doing painfully boring homework drills. If we want our students to learn the language, the students  need to be immersed in the language. Breaking the whole language into little parts is like trying to reconstruct a shattered glass vase by figuring out how to put the little shards back together again.

Hebrew needs to become our students language, not a subject in which they can memorize some of the rules. I want my students to be bilingual! proficient in both English and Hebrew and Tal Am is a platform which helps me design my classroom to be truly immersive!
 תלעם תל עם