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First, I got all the kids from the grade five class to join my class for half an hour. This lesson is best taught with a large group. (I teach 4/5; I didn't have the grade fours doing something different, because I'm two days back from a maternity leave and didn't have time. Also, they would just have been listening anyway. It won't hurt them to hear this one two years in a row.) I got them sitting on the carpet, and started to teach.
"A long time ago, in the land we now call Iraq, people lived in large family groups under the authority of one patriarch. The word "patriarch" means "rule of the father," and that's exactly what it was. In our patriarchy, the father will be T." (I picked the biggest, baddest of the grade five kids, first to get him out of trouble and second to make him feel important. It worked. He spent most of the class preening.) "Now, in these family groups, bigger was better. The patriarch wanted as many children as he could get, to help him tend his large herds of cattle and sheep. He might have several thousand animals, and they were his wealth. There was no paper money or coins; you were rich if you had a lot of livestock. So the Patriarch had many wives." I paused at this point to let the giggles run their course. "I need seven girls to be wives." I got my seven girls up there, blushing furiously, getting teased a bit by those still sitting. I let that run its course with a few quelling looks, because their turn was coming. "One of the reasons a patriarch would have had many wives was because of the likelihood that some of them would die in childbirth. We are very lucky in Canada, in this century. For the last hundred years or so, it has become more and more rare for women to die in childbirth. Now, most people only have a few children because they're pretty sure all of those children will survive to adulthood. That was not the case for most of history. In a real patriarchy, probably half the women would die in childbirth at some point in their lives. About half the kids would die, too, usually before they were five. If you survived that long, you had a good chance of making it to adulthood."
"The next group of people would be the children of the wives. These were the potential heirs. They were taught how to work from an early age, and they learned how to manage the herds and the servants. The boys might have waited until their late teens or early twenties to marry. The girls were probably married in their early teens.
"I need all the rest of the girls up here now. These girls are servants. Most of them are concubines, who are also going to give birth to children who are the children of the patriarch. These children, though, won't have equal status with the children of the wives. If there is no other male heir, one of them might become the heir. More likely, though, they'll be servants too." I divided up the rest of the kids as children of the servants. Then I got them all sitting down again.
"Now, T is looking for a wife for his eldest son." Snickers in the direction of the eldest son, M, are promptly quelled. "He knows that his youngest wife, A, has a younger sister who would be a perfect wife for his son. But A's family lives a long way away. It takes a lot of land to support herds of the size that T has, so there aren't a lot of other people really nearby. Probably, the nearest other patriarch is a few days' walk away. A's father is further than that. It's going to take a week or two to walk there. The messenger is taking a few head of cattle with him - say, five - as a gift to the bride's family." I pause in my narrative to pick up a piece of modelling clay that I have on my desk, and start working it in my hands.
"The problem is that T doesn't have anyone he really trusts to send this message. There are no phones, no computers, no roads, no cars, no writing, no mail. There's only one way to send a message: have someone go to the other person and repeat it, word for word. None of T's sons are old enough. His servants aren't competent enough. The best person to send is someone T thinks might try to steal from him. So T needs a way to send a message to A's father about how many head of cattle have been sent." I pause a moment to explain that "head of cattle" doesn't, in fact, involve beheading any cows. "He takes some clay, the kind his family makes pots out of, and makes five little pellets out of it. He bakes these so they're hard. Then he makes a hollow ball of clay around them, and bakes that. It's now hard. He gives this to his servant," I have T do all of this, "whose job is to give it to A's father. He in turn will break it open and count the pellets. If the number of pellets matches the number of cattle, then the servant doesn't get killed for stealing from his master." (This catches their slightly-flagging attention again.)
"A's father realizes that there's no need to bake the pellets into a ball. He can just as easily press them into a clay tablet and bake the whole thing. After all, the clay will become just as hard, and T will still know how many are in it. So when he sends his younger daughter back to become M's wife, he also sends six sheep, and a clay tablet with pellets pressed into it," and I demonstrate the technique. T knows then that there are six sheep. No one has cheated him."
Then I come up with another problem: how to tell the difference between cattle and sheep? So you get little clay cows and little clay sheep pressed into tablets. Then someone figures out that all you really have to do is scrape a picture of a sheep or a cow into the tablet, and make marks indicating how many you've got. And so on, and so forth, until you get pictograph writing, ancient Mesopotamian style.
At the end of the lesson, kids get toplay work with modelling clay, making a message to send to their father-in-law when they want to trade some of their livestock. They can choose any one of the types of messages. At some point, I point out that this clay tablet serves exactly the same purpose as a cash register receipt in our culture.
And that's my favourite lesson of all time.
"A long time ago, in the land we now call Iraq, people lived in large family groups under the authority of one patriarch. The word "patriarch" means "rule of the father," and that's exactly what it was. In our patriarchy, the father will be T." (I picked the biggest, baddest of the grade five kids, first to get him out of trouble and second to make him feel important. It worked. He spent most of the class preening.) "Now, in these family groups, bigger was better. The patriarch wanted as many children as he could get, to help him tend his large herds of cattle and sheep. He might have several thousand animals, and they were his wealth. There was no paper money or coins; you were rich if you had a lot of livestock. So the Patriarch had many wives." I paused at this point to let the giggles run their course. "I need seven girls to be wives." I got my seven girls up there, blushing furiously, getting teased a bit by those still sitting. I let that run its course with a few quelling looks, because their turn was coming. "One of the reasons a patriarch would have had many wives was because of the likelihood that some of them would die in childbirth. We are very lucky in Canada, in this century. For the last hundred years or so, it has become more and more rare for women to die in childbirth. Now, most people only have a few children because they're pretty sure all of those children will survive to adulthood. That was not the case for most of history. In a real patriarchy, probably half the women would die in childbirth at some point in their lives. About half the kids would die, too, usually before they were five. If you survived that long, you had a good chance of making it to adulthood."
"The next group of people would be the children of the wives. These were the potential heirs. They were taught how to work from an early age, and they learned how to manage the herds and the servants. The boys might have waited until their late teens or early twenties to marry. The girls were probably married in their early teens.
"I need all the rest of the girls up here now. These girls are servants. Most of them are concubines, who are also going to give birth to children who are the children of the patriarch. These children, though, won't have equal status with the children of the wives. If there is no other male heir, one of them might become the heir. More likely, though, they'll be servants too." I divided up the rest of the kids as children of the servants. Then I got them all sitting down again.
"Now, T is looking for a wife for his eldest son." Snickers in the direction of the eldest son, M, are promptly quelled. "He knows that his youngest wife, A, has a younger sister who would be a perfect wife for his son. But A's family lives a long way away. It takes a lot of land to support herds of the size that T has, so there aren't a lot of other people really nearby. Probably, the nearest other patriarch is a few days' walk away. A's father is further than that. It's going to take a week or two to walk there. The messenger is taking a few head of cattle with him - say, five - as a gift to the bride's family." I pause in my narrative to pick up a piece of modelling clay that I have on my desk, and start working it in my hands.
"The problem is that T doesn't have anyone he really trusts to send this message. There are no phones, no computers, no roads, no cars, no writing, no mail. There's only one way to send a message: have someone go to the other person and repeat it, word for word. None of T's sons are old enough. His servants aren't competent enough. The best person to send is someone T thinks might try to steal from him. So T needs a way to send a message to A's father about how many head of cattle have been sent." I pause a moment to explain that "head of cattle" doesn't, in fact, involve beheading any cows. "He takes some clay, the kind his family makes pots out of, and makes five little pellets out of it. He bakes these so they're hard. Then he makes a hollow ball of clay around them, and bakes that. It's now hard. He gives this to his servant," I have T do all of this, "whose job is to give it to A's father. He in turn will break it open and count the pellets. If the number of pellets matches the number of cattle, then the servant doesn't get killed for stealing from his master." (This catches their slightly-flagging attention again.)
"A's father realizes that there's no need to bake the pellets into a ball. He can just as easily press them into a clay tablet and bake the whole thing. After all, the clay will become just as hard, and T will still know how many are in it. So when he sends his younger daughter back to become M's wife, he also sends six sheep, and a clay tablet with pellets pressed into it," and I demonstrate the technique. T knows then that there are six sheep. No one has cheated him."
Then I come up with another problem: how to tell the difference between cattle and sheep? So you get little clay cows and little clay sheep pressed into tablets. Then someone figures out that all you really have to do is scrape a picture of a sheep or a cow into the tablet, and make marks indicating how many you've got. And so on, and so forth, until you get pictograph writing, ancient Mesopotamian style.
At the end of the lesson, kids get to
And that's my favourite lesson of all time.