"If you don’t have a feel for chinuch, you’re wasting your time. You need those instincts to be effective”
Once, Sholom Wasser had gone to a chinuch asifah. It was during school hours and he didn’t get the idea of missing giving shiur to learn how to be a better rebbi, but the menahel hadn’t given them a choice. All the rebbeim had to go, the menahel insisted, and he would serve as substitute teacher for the whole mesivta.
In a Lakewood wedding hall, there had been iced coffee and platters of sushi on a side table and Sholom had felt odd there from the start: He wasn’t one of those clean-cut, smooth chinuch professionals shaking hands and backslapping, talking easily about techniques and approaches.
He just wanted to be in the classroom, explaining the difference between when the Gemara says “Tanya” and when it says “Tnan,” easing Yitzy Blauer’s anxiety about the bechinah, and making sure that Aron Tzvi Pansky, who took pills and never had an appetite, remembered to eat something.
Instead, he was listening to a therapist in a fancy suit talk about boundaries. All around him, rebbeim were taking notes and he wondered if there was something wrong with him or with everyone else.
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