I’ve had this passage stuck in my head since I read it as a high school freshman in 1991 or 1992. It resurfaces whenever I’m thinking about what it takes to be an outstanding learner.
In Chaim Potok’s masterpiece The Chosen, the narrator and protagonist Reuven Master, is studying the Talmud in Hebrew school. Late in the book, he discovers a new approach to preparing for his classes.
In the past, I had done all my Talmud studying on Shabbat and during the morning preparation periods. Now I began to study the Talmud in the evenings as well. I tried to finish my college work as quickly as I could, then I would turn to the passage of Talmud we were studying with Rav Gershenson. I would study it carefully, memorize it, find the various commentaries–those which were not printed in the Talmud itself could always be found in my father’s library–and memorize them. I tried to anticipate Rev Gershenson’s tangled questions. And then I began to do something I had never done before with the Talmud I studied in school. After I was done memorizing the text and the commentaries, I began to go over the text again critically. I checked the Talmudic cross-references for parallel texts and memorized whatever differences I found. I took the huge volumes of the Palestinian Talmud from my father’s library–the text we studied in school was the Babylonian Talmud–and checked its parallel discussions just to see how it differed from the discussions in the Babylonian Talmud. I worked carefully and methodically, using everything my father had taught me and a lot of things I now was able to teach myself. I was able to do all of this in real depth because of Rav Gershenson’s slow paced method of teaching. And by doing all of this, I was able to anticipate most of Rav Gershenson’s questions.
From The Chosen by Chaim Potok, Chapter Fourteen
I quote at length because I think it’s important to get the big picture. When I think of it, I picture this entire scene. And there are four points that are universally applicable to the avid student who wants to excel in the act of learning.
- The student excels by going beyond the assigned work, following the directions it points to further sources of learning.
- The student excels by anticipating and answering the questions that their teacher might ask.
- The student excels by not waiting to be told how to better prepare – he “was able to teach myself.”
- Underlying all of this, and the impetus for the student’s relentless pursuit, is a deeply-felt hunger for learning.
We can apply this whenever we are students, and we can encourage and reward this whenever we teach. Just one example: if it’s clear that next week we’ll be sight reading music that’s already in my folder, I’m going to set aside time to learn my part on my own, at my pace, so that when we are together, I am already ready for the conductor’s challenge.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the fourth point needs to be uncovered by each student individually, forever and ever, but that can be as simple as a speech to a class, or the example of a fellow student, or even a novel put in the hands of an eager and curious high school freshman.