"Where is the next Torah frontier?"

From an article by Rabbi Feigenbaum of Toronto; the full article is here.

A student once exclaimed to me, “I wish I would have been alive during the Holocaust – I could have been a hero and someone would have written a book about me. Now I am just another good girl who does chesed.” Everyone wants to move up a step, improve on the past, and feel they have conquered new heights and done something for the greater good. But what is left today? Taliesim will never slip again, no one is forced to work on Shabbos, everything is kosher, and chesed is institutionalized. Where is the next Torah frontier to conquer?

The easiest way to get that feeling of growth is to focus on the external – anything you can do I can do stricter, and the school with the most rules wins. Why? Because internal growth is hard to measure and, for societal reasons, frum people are not comfortable talking about “connections to Hashem” and “spiritual growth.”

Book review: Good to Great

I like looking outside education-directed sources for insights that may be useful in the classroom; and I've met some nice people recently who are CEOs of things and I was curious about what they do all day (it sounds like fun); so I spent some time this year in the business aisle at the library.

Until this year, I think the only book I'd read on business was Rav Dessler's Kuntres haChesed; and I still think if you're going to read one book on business that should be the one.

Anyway, I found two books that have good practical information -- Your Idea, Inc, which explains how to start a business; and the Nonprofit Kit for Dummies, which explains how to start a nonprofit - and the other interesting item was Good to Great, which is a study of what makes a corporation sustainable.

Most of the other books I found on business say, "Set your goal and pursue it aggressively!" but the Good to Great study found, it says, that the corporations that achieved lasting financial success are the ones that took a couple of years of experimentation to allow their ideas to gel; and then focused closely on what they found they could do well; and I think that rings truer.

Other factors mentioned are personal humility, and starting with having the right people rather than the right business plan ("get the right people on the bus, and then decide where you're going to drive it").

Something to think about.

Toward a Qualitative Reading Incentive

I had this discussion with my high school students recently.

Every reading incentive we've seen is based on the idea that children should be encouraged to read - a lot. -- e.g., the local elementary school awards prizes based on number of pages, and per book completed; and the local library does something similar.
We haven't seen any incentive programs that seek to direct children toward reading good books, only toward reading lots of books.
In fact, when I look at the lists of what the kids are reading, the worst possible writing seems to predominate.

We agreed that there is a difference between books and good books; and that it's worth encouraging children to choose the latter.

"What do you think?" I asked. "Is it possible to make an incentive program for children to read good books, or is the definition of a good book too subjective?"

Hm.

They suggested that you could give students a list of books to choose from.

Keep thinking about it.

Libi baMizrach in Chinook Wawa

This really has nothing to do with education (except perhaps to illustrate the idea that one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to mess around with it) but someone just surprised me by asking for a copy of it, so I'm putting it where people can find it.

I translated R' Yehuda haLevi's lament "My heart is in the East..." into a language of the uttermost West, Chinook Wawa: the trade jargon of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast region.

Thanks to Wawa enthusiast Craig Delf for smoothing out some wrinkles in the translation.

Nika mitlite tumtum siah kopa sun-get-up illahee, pe nika mitlite siah-siah kopa klip-sun-illahee.
Howkwutl nika mukmuk, pe howkwutl mukmuk chaco tsee?
Howkwutl nika mamook huihui nawitka, pe
Tsiyon kow Pil lope, pe nika kow Alap lope?
Klah mahsh konaway kloshe Spanyolillahee, kahkwa
Hyas ticky nanitch polallie kokshut Hyas-Tyee-wawa-Home.

Anatomy of a Learning Initiative: What Worked, What Didn't

I'm always interested to hear about people's special learning or middos initiatives for kids - particularly those that sustain momentum. I'm deeply interested in what makes an initiative last.

This is the story of one special learning initiative for kids. I thought it might last a couple of weeks. It's been going on now for, gee, almost five months.

Here are some factors that seem to contribute to the success of the program:

1. The task is simple, small, and specific: read a perek of Navi in English and tell me what happened in it.

2. The prizes are varied, cute, and very low-key -- on the order of magnitude of M&Ms, but not edible. The girls pick out one prize per perek. They not infrequently spend several minutes deliberating over which one they want to choose; but - this is my criterion for prizes - although some girls are drawn in by the prizes, I think they take more pleasure in the mastery of the material.

3. The initiative is public. The narrations take place in the shul social hall after davening on Shabbos, so when a girl comes up to tell me about a perek, her friends see and are reminded about the program. As long as someone is doing it, the other someones are interested.

Also, I put the prizes in a translucent bag, so they're in everyone's face. A number of girls have gotten involved because they came over to ask what those are, and can they have one?

Here are a couple of things that surprised me:

1. The e-mail I sent to parents explaining the initiative (with the graphic above) never went further than the parents. The only way communicate with the girls is to speak with them directly.

2. The fact that the initiative is l'ilui nishmas someone significant in our lives, while it is a nice thing and I'm glad we're doing it, seems to make no difference in anyone's motivation.

3. I need to remember not to underestimate the attractiveness of bite-sized anything. I now have several girls who've started learning Pirkei Avos instead of or in addition to Navi. It isn't any easier -- but the bites are smaller.

4. We've had tremendous surges in participation from all ages around Purim and Shavuos, because Megillas Esther and Megillas Rus are particularly user-friendly Navi.

5. We also have higher-than-average participation rates on Shabbosos or yamim tovim when the girls come to shul more than once, e.g. on two-day yontifs.

6. The age range surprised me. Girls who can't read yet are now participating because they get their sisters to tell them the stories in Navi. There is a sharp cut-off in participation at age 11: no one older will condescend to play with us (although several have said they want the prizes). I thought we might have one playful adult or even teen from this whole community, but no: it's turned out to be strictly a kid thing, ages 4-11.

So.

To sum up, I attribute the fact that what I thought might be a three-week program is still running five months later to

(a) nissim v'niflaos

(b) the fact that it's so low-key. It's an easy task and the prizes are tiny and consistent. There's absolutely nothing splashy about it... except that

(c) the content is real. The accomplishment is real. The girls really appreciate that they are learning something.

The one outcome I am still hoping to see that I haven't seen is whether the girls' interest will spill over to others in the community. We are starting an outreach kollel here in Elul but it would be pretty cool, if equally unlikely, if a group of 4-to-11-year-old girls can get the whole kehilla talking in learning before that.

Now that a lot of the girls are learning Pirkei Avos, when they come to tell me a Mishnah I suspect they don't really understand, I tell them they have to find an explanation for it. So they are engaging their parents, which is great.

Artist: Stephanie Law

I heard of Stephanie Law because she has a following in sci-fi/fantasy circles; but I like her botanical work best, for its brilliant details.
You can see more of her work here.