Chedva was keeping the rule — the one rule! — sitting in her seat quietly the entire lesson, but she was wrecking everything

Shaindy Brucker had to hear it from her neighbor.

She knew that Chaim wouldn’t go to the meeting last night — he didn’t care about speed bumps and stores in private homes, these made no difference to him. But he could have at least gone to hear his son say divrei Torah.

Later last night Chaim had come in from learning and asked Heshy what the derashah had been about. Heshy had laughed, but Shaindy could see he was embarrassed, as if it wasn’t Chaim’s type of speech.

A moment later, Heshy actually said that — “Ta, it wasn’t your type of speech, don’t worry about it” — which Shaindy found an odd thing to say.

Altogether, she was out of sorts from Heshy, feeling like the whole situation was slipping away from her. Early in her teaching career, there was a student who came and went during class, making a ruckus. The teachers from the previous grade told Shaindy not to even bother to try to rein Chedva in: Her father was the school’s biggest donor and that was it, just ignore her and cut your losses. Learn to work around it. Shaindy thought it was a travesty that they were cheating the poor girl out of a chance to grow, and she was determined to make a statement.

Feeling innovative, she called Chedva over and told her she had one rule and one rule only. She had to sit nicely in class, not interrupting. What she did in her seat was up to her, as long as she didn’t disrupt. She could eat or drink, doodle or nap, but she couldn’t go in and out during the lesson.

“One rule,” Shaindy had written on a page, spelling out the one and only regulation they had agreed upon and Chedva signed it proudly. See, Shaindy thought. It wasn’t that hard if you took a moment to think about what was good for the child.