Making the Grade

Today’s yeshivah rebbi knows there’s even more at stake in his job than his students’ proficiency in Chumash, Mishnah, or Gemara. Due to many shifting societal factors affecting family dynamics, from financial pressures to gender role reevaluations, the mechanech’s job description has evolved to include coaching and advocating for his talmidim, getting to really know each child personally, and spending time with them out of the classroom, both as a group and one-on-one. Of course, there’s recess duty, but today it goes beyond making sure no one gets pushed and no little fellow needs stitches. The rebbi’s antennae are busy gauging: Who is happy? Who is socially awkward? Who is not part of the chevra? For he knows that in order to teach his students, he must first reach them. He needs to be aware of individual personalities and do whatever he can to make sure each child enjoys yeshivah and is happy with his level of social integration.

What has changed, to bring these teachers into roles outside traditional didactic discipline? Old-time chinuch meant a child saw what his parents did — one zeide gave his boots away to a pauper, the other broke the ice to immerse in a mikveh, and his mother gave bread to the poor — and that was his main chinuch in Yiddishkeit. Today, the child is out of the house for most of his waking hours, and therefore his chinuch is entrusted to the authority figures that frame his life for most of the day.

“For a confluence of reasons, part of the parenting role has transferred to the school,” says Rabbi Hillel Mandel, a longtime educator who has served as principal in several American yeshivos and day schools and is today an acclaimed teacher trainer and chinuch consultant throughout the Jewish world.

Large families and realities of parnassah are the primary forces that make such gargantuan demands on parents’ time and resources.