We’d always been a “Navi family,” as I liked to call it, focused on learning independently

When my sister was in ninth grade, she got into trouble during Navi class. The teacher felt like the questions she raised bordered on chutzpah, and she called my father, a rav, to discuss the issue.

My father listened, promised to talk to my sister about her chutzpah, and then said, “So what did you answer her?” The teacher was floored. It hadn’t occurred to her to answer. To her credit, she began to consult with my father on difficult in-class questions for the duration of the year.

To be fair, my sister was going through an official Problem Child™ phase that year and probably was just out to cause chaos. But we’d always been a “Navi family,” as I liked to call it, focused on learning independently. I spent my childhood absorbed in the Family Midrash Says on Navi and Ishei HaTanach. We learned Navi with my father each Shabbos, and we’d often perform dramatic reenactments of the bigger moments in Jewish history.

I loved learning at home in a way that I never did at school. My teachers will tell you that I was well-behaved and attentive. I was, more accurately, so lost in a rich inner life that I wasn’t disruptive. I wrote novels during class, read books under my desk, and daydreamed my way through the day until the bell rang. I struggled to focus for more than a few minutes at a time. Now, I tell my students that I became a teacher because I don’t have the attention span to work a desk job. It’s probably true!