Will gets Nostalgic and Jewey

The Times of Israel reports on new rules in New York State for Yeshivas, 'The rules will require instruction in four core areas — mathematics, science, English language arts, and social studies. There will not be a set number of hours for instruction in those subjects...The new regulations were approved after a New York Times investigation indicated yeshivas receive hundreds of millions in public funding, provide dismal secular education and some mete out physical punishments against students.' 

A contentious issue. 

Longtime reader(s) will recall that we taught at a second rate Orthodox (mostly not Hasidic) Yeshiva in Passaic New Jersey. So we've seen what goes on inside one of these schools. 

The Yeshiva's focus was on religious studies. These began in the morning and ran till lunch. We weren't privy to these classes, but know they included Torah and Talmudic instruction plus Hebrew and Jewish history. Secular studies began at 2:00 PM and ran through 5:00 PM. That's right, by the time we got the students they'd already had a full day of school. They were restless and rowdy, and didn't take secular studies all that seriously, nor did they respect non-Orthodox teachers (like us and the rest of the secular studies staff). Frankly we think the rabbis undermined us in the morning. 

Moving on to the pointless nostalgia part of this post...that was 2003. We turned 30 and finally after all those years things were really starting to come together for us. We'd finished our BA the year before and started our MA, in American Revolutionary Studies (should have majored in the Civil War, those papers would have been very publishable).

That spring we published our first magazine article, a short piece in Strategy & Tactics about Sparta defeating Athens. We decided we liked publishing and kept writing. We started jogging, two miles a day. Our rock & roll/heavy metal revival had begun and we were really, really into Led Zeppelin. In March we started writing a little novel that we thought we'd complete by the end of the summer. One can feel how we felt back then in the opening paragraph. 

We'd complete A line through the Desert in two years. In the morning we'd start out at a little coffee shop in Bedminster called The Daily Grind. We're still friends with the manager. During the summer we'd finish late afternoons at the local Borders. The system worked. 

What a time. We look back and all we can see is the sun.