Hebrew lessons

This is about half of my Hebrew class.  Sweet kids and earnest but without a chance of covering the material that was left to me.  First of all, the book is from 1927, full of words like 'thee' and 'hearken'.  Full of descriptions like this:

A word is said to be in pause when its accent is a major stop, i.e.  Silluq or 'Athnah (pp. 20-1): in either case the word being at the end of a clause.  The tendency, in speech, is to prolong the accented syllable of the last word in a sentence, i.e. when the word is in pause: thus, the word for 'water' is מים [with various vowels which I cannot reproduce here] in the middle of the sentence, but in pause it is: מים [with some different vowels] with 'Athnah or Silluq, i.e. the short vowel Pathah in the accented syllable is lengthened to Qames. 

This for students whose second language is English.  I don't even understand this stuff.

So the prof who started teaching the class covered the aleph-bet and rules similar to this one for the first 8 or 9 weeks, without them actually learning a single vocabulary word.  That was 27 pages of the dreadful textbook.  He left me 8 weeks to cover 70 pages including these topics: the definite article, inseparable prepositions, nouns and adjectives, gender and number, dual form, conjunction, interrogative pronouns, construct (I have to stop myself every time and =not= say smikhut), personal pronouns, possessive pronoun suffixes, the direct object marker (this is how far we've gotten as of today), past tense conjugation of regular verbs, active participle conjugations, imperfect conjugation, the imperative, infinitives, the heh interrogative, passive participles, cohortative and jussive and the reversing vav, in addition to all the vocabulary.  They don't cover the binyanim in this semester, which I guess is a blessing.

Last week, I found out that they are taking advanced Greek in the same semester, in addition to 6 other courses.  Of course, there is no option of changing anything because the curriculum is entirely dictated from the Presbyterian Senate (or Synod--many times I can't tell the difference between these two), as are the textbooks and final exam.

On the other hand, when I met with some of them yesterday for extra practice (classes were canceled because they were using all the classrooms for the entrance exam for next year's students--things like this happen often), they told me they really like the concept of the relationship between 'word' and 'thing' as expressed by the one Hebrew word דבר.  I told them I wish we could drop the whole rest of the class to talk about things like that.

At least a few have had their interest piqued.  I just pray that they will study enough and absorb enough to pass the final exam.