[HANASHIR:10162] trope

[Laura Ferguson <allenderl...>]

Rachelle,

I hope that you'll be able to teach more to these kids then just 
memorization techniques.  Learning the trope can be easier than 
memorization and it can even be more fun.   In the Sunday School I 
attended, there was a chug dedicated to learning trope that kids pre- and 
post- Bar/Bat Mitzvah took just for fun.  However, the best techniques I 
ever learned were learned as an adult when I was lucky enough to attend 
Beth Emet (Evanston, IL) while Jeff Klepper was the Cantor.  I took an 
adult education class and I wished I had learned some of these things while 
I was still a kid.

Jeff taught us a combination of methods which I found extremely helpful.  I 
had learned trope before, but had never been able to master a passage until 
I took his class.  You'll have to get the details from him (it's been a few 
years since I took it), but he uses several methods that resonate with all 
different kinds of learners (visual, kinetic, and of course auditory).

My favorite idea was that there are phrases within each verse and there are 
several "melodies" (made of 4-5 trope in a particular sequence) that are 
reused repeatedly to emphasize and de-emphasize phrases.  So you identify 
which melody each phrase is and then mark it with the appropriate color 
highlighter.  Working on a xerox of the portion from the Tanach,  you use 
blue for the most typical phrase (and its variations), pink for the next 
one, yellow and so on.  You'll need ~7 colors of highlighters, but most 
Torah portions end up being mostly blue.   When you are first learning, you 
study with a color decoder and an audiotape, but soon you won't need the 
audiotape at all.

For kids and adults, I think this method makes it a lot more fun:  you get 
to decipher and color your passage before singing it!

Once you learn to associate a color with a melody,  it is very easy to look 
at a page, see the trope sequences and identify which color you should sing 
and sing it.  From an educational theory perspective this is a great 
scaffold which "chunks" the trope and the phrases, thereby helping the 
learner perform more like an expert.  This method will really resonate with 
kids who are visual learners.

In addition to using colors, Jeff also teaches a hand system.  He has small 
sign language like gestures (gestures shaped like the trope themselves), 
which he can use to teach the original melody as well as provide hints on 
the pulpit. We each learned how to do the trope signs (kinetic learning) 
and I sometimes practice parts of my portion with hand signs.

The best part of this is that when the reader is floundering on the pulpit, 
before needing to sing et-nachta, the mashchiach (is that the right term?) 
shows the hand symbol.  When I had this kind of assistance, I was amazed at 
how quickly it got me back on track, faster than trying to listen, revise 
and re-sing the passage.

I chanted passages several times before I learned these techniques, but it 
was only after I learned them that I had enough confidence to really look 
forward to learning a Torah portion.

I'm not sure where all of these techniques came from, but together they are 
powerful tools that I would strongly recommend.  Even if you don't end up 
teaching trope, perhaps you can adapt the pattern coloring technique to 
help cue the memorization activities.

Laura Ferguson

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