Judaism to Christianity

I am exhausted. My seventh hour class certainly enjoys talking.

We'll be spending the next several days on monotheistic religions. Today I incorporated some language development into the lesson. I gave a brief overview of pictograms and idiograms without going into too much detail or defining those words. (I linked some wiki definitions if you're so inclined...)

We talked about how written language was not originally meant to be read, but developed from a mnemonic device (proto-writing), and that Ancient Hebrew was written in a later developmental stage... (I didn't use all those words, so parents... if you're kid says I didn't teach them that stuff, I did... but not in that way...)

I gave them an example or two of how that would work. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, spaces, lower case, or punctuation. Some students asked how this worked, so I wrote something on the board for them. (Most every class had something different, that way they couldn't cheat.) You could have them write it down for you right now to see if you can figure it out.

We then talked about the Hebrew name of God, YHWH - and the reason some people won't say the name. This all hit a number of standards, including language development and religions. And I thought it was very fun.

We started into Christianity by watching 15-20 minutes of the video that the department uses. Honestly, I don't think any of us (teachers) really love these videos, but they're the best ones we've found. Every year we talk about making our own. Maybe this is the year...

To get the extra credit: Ask whoever is in my class to show you what mnemonic language would look like... have them write something without spaces, vowels, lower case, or punctuation and see if you can figure it out. Then discuss some of the similarities between Judaism and Christianity.

Sign the piece of paper that they wrote on, and have them turn it in for 5 extra credit points.