Mesivta 404 Mesivta 404: Our Story of Risk-Failure-Opportunity | Page 11

The first thing that began to go wrong? Crowd control and engagement. If you are an online instructor it is very
hard to see what is happening outside the frame of your camera. It is also difficult to convey warmth and
emotion...to sometimes give a physical high-five.
But paying our online teacher left little to no money to hire an assistant. We were going to have to make due.
We began to try out new designs. Would using separate headsets and devices work better than one screen?
How about using technology to filter and block student’s activity during learning times? Was there a preferred
way of seating? Scheduling?
Everything we tried to engage the boys during classes worked for a short while, but within a matter of weeks
began to break down. Their teacher flew to New York twice to try and simply connect with them. This, too,
hardly seemed to matter.
The boys had discovered how little oversite really existed in their new situation. They had gone from the
extremely controlled environment of yeshivah to reckless freedom. Yet, with little time or resources, we adults
didn’t seem to know how to fix it.
Morah Rivkah and boys reflecting on what started going wrong