Any successful class should be related to the personal lives or future of the students. In lower grades, the class must be related to the current situation faced by students, since they do not relate as well to issues in their future. Older classes, on the college or adult level, may relate to the students' future.

Students may find this method to be strange, since nobody else seemed to care enough about them as individuals to teach them in this way.

Thus, English teachers in educational institutions for observant Jews should find ways to relate the studies to Jewish homes or issues. Try to accompany the message with some humor in order to deal with students who are uneasy with this approach.

Some of the students may point out that you are not teaching a religious topic, and that Jewish issues are not related to the current material. They are wrong, of course. You, as the teacher, will therefore have to help them get used to this new approach. However, by the time they are ready to take a major examination based on one of the Shul handouts, and filled with Jewish jargon, they will no longer be surprised.

In some cases, it may be helpful to edit those pages before distributing them, since the original writer is an expert in Judaism, and not in writing. Feel free to do so, but be sure to give full credit to the source.

Similarly, computer teachers might ask students to make spreadsheets showing seating plans for shuls, with calculations of the size of the Ezrat Nashim based on a percentage of the men's section.

This method offers the teacher additional respect. It also changes English or computers from irrelevant subjects that are not related to their lives to important areas in which their Jewishness can be expressed.

It also promotes the concept that everything can be expressed in Jewish terms, and that Judaism can and should the basis for all of their education.

This is the reasoning behind the Jewish Teaching forum. That group stresses the intertwining of all secular and Jewish teaching with Judaism.