shiur vs. class....

As the snow was starting to fall last night, I was standing at the bus stop looking at a sign for a shiur that took place last night. Some shul in the area was talking about kashrut FAQs.

So, I was looking at the sign and I was thinking about how they were calling it a shiur. It's a funny thing that "shiur" I believe means learning because I associate shiurim as distinguishing themselves from a class by being someplace where you don't learn. There's a shul here in Queens that has a lot of shiurim, but you don't really learn anything at them. They just repeatedly tell the women to be a "good, nice" girl and "wear skirt." They say things like, "girls who wear pants are like a toilet bowl and girls who wear skirts are like a champagne glass. Why would any man want to drink his champagne out of a toilet bowl?" Once you've learned not to be a toilet, what is there to learn?

The reality is that no one even listens or cares about what they are teaching. They leave the "shiur" talking about how "good" and "nice" it was but they keep doing whatever they were doing before. So, I was struck reading this sign for what I would call a class but what they would call a shiur. In my mind I was thinking, "why are they calling it a class? It looks like you actually learn at it."