To Judah...

I want to take this oppurtunity to thank you for the experience I had in your class. As a teacher, it is extremely hard to take all students comments and form a response to them. What is even harder is doing that when many of those comments are opinions from students, which could potentially offend others. I spoke to other students who have taken your course and they agree that you do an excellent job of taking these hard and frequent comments and pulling out potential questions and new directions for the discussions.

Teachers are still people, and they hold their own opinions, values, and beliefs. I have been in a few classes where teachers unintentionally reveal their own feelings. I think you do a good job at NOT doing this.

Until this semester I have never taken a class which is largely based on class discussion. I took a similar course in psychology and feel the format of a class which is based on discussions is hard to control. I think you interjected when necessary to calm some students down who had opposing viewpoints, and never allowed anyone to feel offended by others or by information we learned. This is a greater task than a teacher who just lectures and expects students to jot down every piece of information they say. The teacher needs to be an active participant in the discussion, and you did so in an extremely unbiased way.

Thank you for making the class as interesting as you did and chosing topics to discuss which all students could relate to. I enjoyed this class and plan on recommending it to anyone, Jewish studies major or not.