Someone was talking about this thing called Oregon Trail tonight and she was aghast that I had no idea what it was. She said “didn’t you use Oregon Trail during computer class in school” to which I responded “huh, you know, I never did get to use a computer in high school” which got me thinking about how I never really “learned” how to type correctly and so I use three fingers on each hand which produces an incredibly fast, inaccurate and loud typing. Then, I got to thinking about all the other stuff that regular folks probably learned during high school that I never learned.
How to dance: I guess it’s better that I had to teach myself to dance on my own, of course I have never actually danced with a girl (I don’t count club music and dry humping as dancing) so how I am supposed to know how to actually dance and being that the only girls in yeshivas were kollel wives there was really no one to teach us to dance around a ballroom in the first place. I always figured on marrying someone who could teach me to dance correctly.
Spelling: I am not sure how many of you folks have been reading this blog for close to 5 years, but you will notice a drastic change in my spelling. I used to get a lot more comments blasting my spelling and grammar usage than anything else and I always blamed this on a poor yeshiva education, where college is the devil and taking food stamps is seen as a good way to support the studying of ancient legislative texts while your wife nurses the brood.
Eating Healthy: Besides being a liberal ideal, eating healthy was just one of those things I never thought I would need. Let’s take a look at my diet when fresh out of high school, all I drank was generic brand mountain dew (I would drink more than 2 liters of it a day) for meals I would scrounge around for leftovers and everything else I ate was bread and pasta related. It took me a long time to discover that weeding myself off of sugar, ice cream and bread would work wonders for my tummy – it aint ever been flat, but the ladies have been flocking to me since.
Politics: The funny thing about yeshiva is that everyone loved talking politics, but all we ever talked about was how evil the liberals were and how moral and right the Republicans were. At the time I was sucked in by liberal bashing and hanging on to every word Bob Lonsberry and Micheal Savage would say, but as I grew up and started paying taxes I realized there are many more views than just right, left and center.
How to treat girls: I remember the Rabbis telling us to always make sure to compliment women on their food, but that was about it when it came to girls. I assume they didn’t want us to make any headway (or get any head) and by never telling us how to treat or talk to girls they did a good job at that. I remember being really honest with this one girl I was in contact with during high school and telling her that I liked her because she was hot, I should have just complimented her cholent or something. I remember a few years ago when I discovered two things about women that I thought were just sitcom style jokes – that putting down the toilet seat was really a big deal and that women liked when car doors were opened for them. All this time I had thought those two things were just pop culture type of jokes.
Sex Ed: I can remember sitting around with guys on Friday nigh talking about sex, but the yeshiva itself didn’t teach us a darned thing. I am sure there were guys who probably thought you peed into a woman’s butt and then she crapped the baby out 9 months later, I myself thought this at age 9, but in yeshiva there was a good enough amount of porn to figure otherwise.
How to cook: Some guys did teach themselves to cook, the food was horrible enough to make it worthwhile. Most guys had sandwich makers, irons and George Forman grills which were every yeshiva guys best friend. One year some guys got entrepnurial and they opened up Lackey’s Deli – for $3 you got a roll with some mustard and deli meat – all purchased down the block, but due to laziness and terrible dinners – this deli made bank. During the summer months guys would barbecue, but I’m not sure that anyone actually knew how to cook. I myself never cooked a thing until I got out of yeshiva and was thrust into a world of angel hair and tuna.
Hebrew: You would think that a yeshivas first priority would be to teach you Hebrew so you can learn on your own, but they didn’t teach Hebrew (unless you count the 30 minute class to fulfill our language requirement) well enough that we could actually open up a sefer a learn for ourselves. Of course, they may not have taught us Hebrew because then we would have been able to think for ourselves and find all those loopholes and different opinions in the scripture.
Oh, do I ever know how you feel. I was in yeshiva from k-8, but I had to go to public school as we lacked 2 things- The right last name and sweet, sweet cash. That was total culture shock. It was far from anything I read in those Sweet Valley High books.
You got KICKED OUT of BY because you couldn’t pay tuition?!
why do u sound surprised?
Frum schools generally resort to many alternative options before actually asking a student to leave because of financial reasons. In my old yeshiva they would get some from the parents, some from tzedaka, and some from the other parents.
actually, that is not true. i know quite a few students asked not to come back to yeshiva next year because they could not pay tuition.
where i’m from, if you can’t pay, they only kick you out if you actually break the rules or are a bad example for other girls.
on the other hand, you can set girls hair on fire, get a tattoo, get caught smoking weed behind the gym and curse out your teacher and still NOT be thrown out if you pay full tuition.
true story my friends… sad but true.
Sad but sometimes necessary. Schools have closed down in the past due to lack of funds. If you don’t have enough funds the school won’t exist.
Seriously flawed school is better than no school.
The example you gave is admittedly messed up. I would justify it more if the story were that they found out the kid smoked weed, while poor parents Batya was kicked out a week ago for the same exact thing.
doesn’t it sort of make you wonder how important is it REALLY to get a jewish education, if they’re willing to throw you to the wolves over money? especially when some yeshivas make a point of teaching their students about the horrors of the secular world and of the “amoral goyim” out there! and i understand the need to pay salaried workers and all, but it sort of smells like hypocrisy.
welcome to the frum world. hypocrisy is the only true belief frum ppl actually stick to
yeah. one of the top reasons why i left.
same here lol. i think it applies to many ppl who do
I don’t know why you’re calling it hypocrisy. It’s not ideal and they don’t want to do it. They are forced to look like idiots and do what it takes to keep the school standing. Nobody wants to be dependent on some rich jerk.Do really think they should kick the kid out and take a chance of closing the entire school? Or even postpone the teachers payments for a month?
As a side point, it looks like you both had bad experiences with frum people and decided to either blame the Torah for it, or paintbrush everyone with whatever these people were like.
So instead of zeroing in on what Jews should NOT be like and matching that image with all the people with problems we have in our society, why don’t you focus on what a Jew SHOULD be like, and see for yourself how many good people there are among us?
there are many good jews. however, the practice of throwing kids out of yeshiva is very hypocritical when one of the main tenets of the shema is to teach your children. so i have problems with that aspect. the other issue that i find upsetting is that there are many organizations who pull in loads of money for kiruv work, meanwhile, there are jews within their own communities who can barely afford a lifestyle that includes many children and high tuition. another torah principle: get your own house in order before worrying about everyone else. don’t toss shmuel out of school bc his parents can no longer afford tuition while raising and spending exorbitant amounts of money to bring in new recruits. i’d say those two examples illustrate hypocrisy. if you give me time, i have a whole list i can rattle off. and fyi, i am still good friends with many of my modox friends, however, i was friends with them before becoming bt, so i don’t hate odox people, nor do i hate jews. of course, i’m failing to mention folks from after i became odox, but that’s another kettle of fish altogether.
*meant also that it’s hypocritical to not “teach” children in a yeshiva when that is one of the main tenets in judaism.
Think of it this way, you had a chance at a real education at that point.
Because “real” is a very precise term, which cannot possibly be defined in many different ways depending on who you ask.
It includes mathematics, science, history, civics and the ability to write workmanlike expository prose. Yeshiva fails miserably at all of these.
True. But all those things are only “Real” if you focus exclusively on them. If you take the big picture into account, they’re all worthless. The world isn’t inherently a better or worse place after a scientific or historical discovery is made. Just fancier.
It’s impossible to function at anything but the lowest levels today without at least the basics of these.
You can’t be a good citizen without a knowledge of civics.
You can’t learn from mistakes or have any idea what’s going on in the world without the rudiments of history.
Without the basics of science, starting with what it is, you are illiterate and have missed out on the greatest single advance in human culture since the invention of agriculture.
And RAH was right. A person who cannot cope with mathematics isn’t quite human. At best he’s a tolerable sub-human who has learned to dress himself and not make messes in the house.
The dichotomy you’re setting up of “They’re everything” vs. “They’re meaningless and unimportant” is not merely false. It’s not even wrong, so utterly stupid and trivially disposed of that it’s not worth the electrons it takes to dispose of it.
And they’re of infinitely more worth than endless regurgitation of millennia-old arguments about religious dogma and Bronze Age legal codes most of which have never actually been implemented. Accepting those with the fervor your beliefs demand makes it impossible to advance in any field of human endeavor other than memorizing more dogma in dead languages. Art. Science. Logic. Rhetoric. Music. Mathematics. Philosophy. Physical culture. History. Archeology. Linguistics. You have to give up all of them and a thousand other wonderful things if you take on the chains of Fundamentalism.
My reply will be up soon. It’s currently in moderation limbo. Suffice it to say you’ve made a choice. Nothing is important to you but regurgitating millennia-old dogma and never-implemented Bronze Age legal codes. Thousands of years of human progress don’t exist except insofar as the goyim provide them for your benefit. That is a terribly impoverished existence. And no, the Joy of Learning Torah doesn’t compensate for the rest, especially since it requires you to ignore reality.
So if I understand you correctly, it is a problem when frum schools disregard secular studies only because they are incorrect in their view of reality and truth, but if they are in fact correct in their beliefs, then their schools are doing great, and putting time and effort into those studies would be a waste of time.
not learning hebrew in yeshiva? sad but not at all surprising. pre-otd, i sent my kids to a particular yeshiva. in the first grade, they insisted that i pay additional money for a tutor (who they hired) to teach my daughter how to read hebrew. i thought that’s what i was already shelling out the big bucks for, silly me!
I have never heard of this practice before. This must be new. What a creative money grubbing technique.
my rabbi told me that he learned the bulk of his hebrew by teaching himself for a couple of years and then going to israel for a year. all that after 13 years of jewish education. go figure….
so i can understand yeshiva grads who have trouble in secular subjects or who weren’t taught certain things (not that i condone it, but i can understand it in an eye-rolling way) but sheesh, not learning hebrew? or barely learning hebrew? how do they even justify running these schools?
Torah’s not important. Only Talmud. If you can mumble fast enough you can get through services.
Speaking of Oregon Trail- my family “solved” that game.
What you do is, before you get to the end, you stop your wagon, and start trading. You trade back and forth, until your wagon cannot hold any more of anything, except money which there is no limit. Then, you trade money for oxen, and oxen back for money, ad infinitum.
This took all the fun out of the game, since there was no longer any purpose in the rest of it.
I still haven’t actually searched to find out what the game is
Hesh c’mon, even I played Oregon Trail growing up.
me too. its almost as old as pacman (i think)
We didn’t have computers in my yeshiva and in Manhattan Day School we played the math game number crunchers on blinking green screens.
So you never played Doom or Duke Nukem?
Funny thing i saw. 9 yr old yossi asked his mom, can little girls have baby’s? she said, no. He came back and said rivky, my m om said its ok, we can play that game again……!
Except in most cases, when a nine year old boy and girl aren’t embarrassed to play with each other, their names are more like “Joe and Becky”.
And if they are embarrassed to play together there’s something fundamentally broken about their development.
haha awesome. this could double as a Things I Learned After I Left Beis Yaakov;( in 12th grade at public school and mostly) in college: (i would actually love to write a post on this)
1) my first few months i could never really tell if guys were hitting on me or just talking/being nice, was always scared they would think i was flirting by being too nice. this was cuz all the guys i spoke to in high school was just flirting at hang-outs.
2)Dancing totally agree!!! my first few parties were a total disaster!!! but i eventually learned. took dancing last semester too so iv even gotten to learn proper dancing now.
3) eating healthy was weird a novel concept that the new goal of eating was to be healthy not anorexically thin. figured it out when i went vegetarian tho.
4)$sex ed (are u still filtering out the word $ex?) was one of my biggest issues. i had no clue about anything!!! they really should give some form of $sex ed in BY.
thats from heshys list. i have tons more stuff that i was totally waaaay off on b4 i went to college.
You should email me – This could be a really good post
frumsatire@gmail.com
will do when i have the time
idk why that came up as anonymous.
How about math?…… When I went to college after NIRC, I realized I had forth grader´s level….
I went to a T14 law school after ten years in yeshiva, and did just fine.
haha, exactly, try going into engineering….where you actually need to sum.
I took Federal Income Tax in my second semester. I haven’t gotten the final grade yet, but I was right on top of the class in the assignments we had.
haha, ok so you got a good calculator, my point is when you get all those LOG, LN, LIM, F, E, etc in the middle of your numbers you wished you had a better background.
did you a get a BS in talmudic law?
Of course, he got the classical BS TLaw + John Hopkins/Maryland Combo.
Lets just say, my degree is certainly BS
T14 law school?? i guess you went to the 14th
y isnt my comment getting posted?
um…where’s my comment?
haha awesome. this could double as a Things I Learned After I Left Beis Yaakov;( in 12th grade at public school and mostly) in college: (i would actually love to write a post on this)
1) my first few months i could never really tell if guys were hitting on me or just talking/being nice, was always scared they would think i was flirting by being too nice. this was cuz all the guys i spoke to in high school was just flirting at hang-outs.
2)Dancing totally agree!!! my first few parties were a total disaster!!! but i eventually learned. took dancing last semester too so iv even gotten to learn proper dancing now.
3) eating healthy was weird a novel concept that the new goal of eating was to be healthy not anorexically thin. figured it out when i went vegetarian tho.
4)$sex ed (are u still filtering out the word $ex?) was one of my biggest issues. i had no clue about anything!!! they really should give some form of $sex ed in BY.
these are the ones from heshys list. i have tons more stuff that i was totally clueless about b4 i went to college.
Great post. But you know, look at the bright side, look at what gifts you got from yeshiva:
A finely tuned sense of cynicism, which helped your blog and tons of material for it.
Unknowingly, the yeshiva was grooming you for the blogosphere.
Oh the yeshiva and my father were grooming and I’ve gotten all of my jobs in the last 5 years from blogging and have met some cool peeps.
They don’t teach guys in public school how to dance or how to treat women.
He’s a clue though, for men. Don’t be F*cking @$$Hole.
Why men power trip and play games with a girl they supposedly like, I will never NEVER understand.
it’s because they still think of us as inferior! guys get off on that kinda crap. theyre into total control. obviously not talking about ALL guys here, just a whole bunch
Yeah, that’s why I’m single. Not interested in some guys inflating his ego off of insulting me.
But the ones who spend time around girls pick up the rudiments of how they think and act, what they like and what gets you a clout on the ear. Going to dances you either spend your time holding up a piece of wall or learn get out and dance.
It’s not great, but it’s quite an improvement over being completely segregated and forcibly restrained from learning anything.
haha awesome. this could double as a Things I Learned After I Left Beis Yaakov;( in 12th grade at public school and mostly) in college: (i would actually love to write a post on this)
1) my first few months i could never really tell if guys were hitting on me or just talking/being nice, was really awkward. I was always scared they would think i was flirting by being too nice. this was cuz all the guys i spoke to in high school was just flirting at hang-outs.
2)Dancing; totally agree!!! my first few parties were a total disaster!!! but i eventually learned. took dancing last semester too so iv even gotten to learn proper dancing now. although they dont teach dancing in public school either
3) eating healthy was weird, a novel concept that the goal of eating was to be healthy not anorexically thin. figured it out when i went vegetarian tho.
4)$ex ed (are u still filtering out the word $ex?) was one of my biggest issues. i had no clue about anything!!! they really should give some form of $ex ed in BY.
sorry for the double post
Haha
How about not having watched certain movies, like mary poppins or something, then you talk to a non orthodox jew and think you know about movies because you watched air force one and friends and they think you are retarded because you never saw indiana jones (why are yeshiva guys addicted to Friends?)
There are just some basic elements of pop culture that guys in yeshiva often miss
That’s a good idea for a new post. If heshy doesn’t do it here, I’ll do it on my site.
Unless you want to write one…
The part of this post that blew my mind was the fact of never having used a computer, not in high school. I would never have imagined such a thing!
They started taking us into the computer lab to play Oregon Trail in the second half of first grade at my elementary school! And we started Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in the second half of second grade!
Of course, Heshy was in elementary school at the same time that I was, in the 80s. So perhaps, since that time, things have changed?
Could any parents with young children getting a private Torah education please comment?
Are the students in such schools still being educated today without touch-typing, basic use of computers and familiarity with ubiquitous software introduced into the classroom?
And geography. I’m actually from Oregon and people only recognize the state if they played the game. Then they ask if I rode a horse to school. I said yes, of course.