Memos from the We Would Never Have Guessed Dept.

Whoa!

Rabbi Oppenheimer (the rav who kicked off Portland's transformation into a model of a thriving Torah community) wrote this week here:

I have heard Rabbi Yissochor Frand שליט"א say on several occasions that when he was growing up in Seattle, they considered the Jewish community in Portland, Oregon to be a virtual עיר הנדחת.  The community seemed so irredeemably lost to Torah-true Judaism that there was no hope that anything positive would come from it.  Surely that was meant hyperbolically; it has been proven quite wrong...

Portland is now a community that other communities look to to find out how to grow a Torah community.

...

The other item in this vein is that I recently caught up with a middle school classmate who was able to fill me in on what the rest of our class is doing.
Pretty much every one of us is doing something that could not have been predicted from who we were in middle school.
The boy who slouched in the back of the room with his hair in his eyes is a rising star in the fashion industry.
The girl who never went anywhere without two spare pairs of high-fashion shoes is in rural South America organizing a farming commune.
The list goes on and on like that. Almost none of us seem to have proceeded in a straight line from who we were in middle school.

I look now at the class of middle schoolers I taught this year and realize that everything I think I know about them could be wrong completely.

Book Review: Never Work Harder than Your Students

I spotted Never Work Harder than Your Students, by Robyn Jackson, on a friend's bookshelf, but didn't have time to read much of it; took it out of the library; didn't have time to read much of it; and finally ordered a copy, which I am now quickly skating through.

First impressions.

The form of the book is self-helpy. It starts with a quiz; it has its own website; it occasionally breaks out with a term like "Master Teacher" that you sense the author is just waiting to trademark.

But:
The content of the book is great. Some of it is obvious but all of it is getting good ideas crackling.

So, so far, I recommend it.

(The title is misleading -- it's not a book about keeping teachers from working too hard; it's a grab bag of pedagogical insights.)

Demographics

Someone recently quoted to me an insightful comment by a teenage girl. She had been asked to describe her transition from attending a cozy small-town high school to attending a much larger high school in a larger community.

She summarized,

"I lost my mentors, and in their place I gained role models."

...

It doesn't sound to me like a value judgment in favor of one or the other. Others may read it differently.