My kids schools felt the risk of internet outweighed the benefit of zoom and admitted the children may learn less. However they felt the kids could always make up the material at a later date as opposed to sending a mixed message which they felt couldn’t be as easily corrected. I was skeptical. But I’m happy to report that b”h all of my kids are doing great with the teleconference program. The system my schools are using has the teacher in front of a screen, he knows everyone’s number so he knows who is there. He has the option of muting everyone to teach. In this mode the kid can raise their hand by pressing some buttons. Raising hands are heavily incentivized. He can call on the kid and unmute them. He can also unmute everyone, such as to say a posuk with teitch, and he could see who is saying along and which isnt, bec his screen shows which lines have sound coming out. He called me the other day to tell me I had feedback coming from my line, he knows its mine from what his screen is reading. He can also put the kids into groups like they do in school to do chazarah. So essentially he transfers the kids into smaller sub conference rooms which he pops in and out of answering questions. All this is done with a lot of incentives, much more than usual, incentivizing following along, raising hands, answering questions, and general participation. May the kids learn better with all this plus zoom? I still think so, but they’re not wasting their time either. The kids are still gaining and the hashkafah from the school stays consistent.

Yehudayona,
Just because someone did a flawed study does not mean that his findings are incorrect. The fact is the government is telling us that if we want to slow the spread of this disease we need to keep 6 feet apart. The CDC is recommending that if we want to slow the spread of the disease we should wear masks. Any place that these restrictions were not in place have been fair game to being shut down and listed as a contributor to the spread. I don’t see peer reviewed studies about shuls. I dont see peer reviewed studies about barber shops or sporting goods stores. Have you been on the subway? I rode it every day till pesach, what I saw was far worse than what you would see anywhere else in the city that was still allowed to be open. So forget the study, just look at what we are told will slow the spread of the disease. Look how it was followed almost everywhere except the subway. That’s why I stopped taking the subway before I ever heard of this study (which was from your comment just now). Do you have a peer reviewed paper that says the subway is safe? Or just a google search that says it’s a “conservative talking point”.

Obviously all news agencies should be agenda free. However to Joseph, to call banning porch minyanim a “left wing” agenda, makes you sound ignorant of the halachic debate. The bottom line is that we (I do daven on my block in a socially distant porch minyan) are relying on a tiny miyut of poskim who are relying on one “ephsher” in a Rashba, to create these Minyanim in a shas had’chak. And many of them are not k’dai because they are done in a way that wont work anyways.

Sara Levine,
Perhaps you’re right, maybe before artscroll a lot of people couldn’t learn. And now they could and that’s a great zchus for the publishers. But that’s not what the OP asked and that’s not what e everyone before you was addressing. OP specifically asked why Bnei Torah dont like to use it.

Abba a,
You have the most convoluted logic. People who don’t want secular education but would vaccinate, would withhold vaccines to their children just to put them in a non secular education homeschool? Huh? Why would they have to withhold vaccines to go to this homeschool? Also, if homeschool is the way to get out of secular education, why wouldn’t they put together a vaccinated group?
As to your next point, and this has been gone over so many times, there are children who are medically not able to get vaccines, they rely on being the exception to the rule, so that if everyone is vaccinated and can’t bring in measles, these kids will be safe in the herd immunity. Every additional kid who is unvaccinated increases the chance that someone will bring measles into the school. Additionally the vaccine is 97% effective so if someone brings measles into a school with a couple hundred kids, statistically speaking there will be a handful of vaccinated kids who also catch the disease.
As to the AIDS point, I think you proved that you dont understand how diseases spread. If HIV spread as easily as you wrote, anyone who took a subway or played in a public park could catch HIV. That’s not how it works, it’s actually difficult and rare to catch HIV in an instance where you dont have direct contact. Even with direct contact you need very certain specific bodily fluids(saliva or sweat don’t do it, it has to be blood, etc) to come on contact with a mucous membrane or directly into the blood flow. Unless someone has an open sore in the mouth they are not catching HIV on their mouth. Measles on the other hand spreads through the air the sick person breathes. To ask if I would rather have an AIDS kid in the class while implying that that means other kids will catch AIDS is either ignorant or disingenuous.

Theres nothing wrong with it but I’ll spell out 2 reasons (there may be many more but this is what I could think of right now). First of all, an Artscroll is not appropriate for anyone currently learning in a yeshiva. The yeshiva years are designed to teach boys the skill of “knowing how to learn”. Yeshiva is not meant to be a trade school for rabbis, it’s meant for bochurim to learn from a rebbi a derech halimud and acquire the skills to learn the rest of their lives. This is why the yeshivos focus on certain mesechtos which are conducive to developing these skills. Just as you wouldnt let first graders learning arithmetic use a calculator, anyone learning any skill is better off figuring it out on their own. Secondly, even for those not in yeshiva, our mesora is that Torah is nikneh with ameilus. This doesn’t mean one cant be amul with an artscroll, certainly you can, but for many people, true ameilus comes with working out the gemara on their own.

Shmuff,
2 questions. Who did you ask? And did you show it to the Rav or explain it to him?

I think gadol and some of the others have a point in that the customer has a right to spend his money wisely. However, these are subjective opinions which vary from person to person and if I was a newspaper publisher or an influential food writer I wouldn’t want to take it on my pleitzas to disproportionately affect someone else’s parnasa based on my opinion alone

I read a really interesting explanation of this topic in the name of Reb Mottel Pegrimansky, one of the great thinkers and baalei musser of pre and post war Europe. He asks, why is there no reference to the establishment of a Jewish state, before moshiach comes, anywhere in tanach, chazal, the zohar or similar places where we find descriptions of moshiach’s arrival. You would think something so momentous would be mentioned if it was part of the geulah OR if it was part of the pre messianic suffering, both of which are described in great detail. His answer is that the state must simply not be part of either one. Rather it is a nisayon, can we stay true to the Torah in a Jewish state. It’s not mentioned because by definition a nisayon cant be revealed ahead of time. However before we can get to the ikvusa d’moshichusa, we need to go thorough many nisyonos and Israel is one of them.

I’m not sure if we are talking about adults or children. Certainly it would be better for an adult not to be involved in this shtus. But I would say, and my Rav agrees, that when it comes to children, sports is the lesser of most evils. Certainly something like woodworking would be more kosher, but not every kid will be grabbed by that. Besides sports there are so many other temptations kids can fall into from online gaming, to movies, to the apikorsus and worst things you can find on the internet. We have to think long and hard what the ramifications are before we say no to an outlet. Will saying no lead him to something better or worse? Besides kids who play ball naturally want to follow the professionals because they like the sport. So if I want my kids to be active and healthy, I would let them follow the pros and hope they grow out of it as they mature. Many of our gedolim in America grew up following sports, i doubt any of them grew up in the other schmutz kids could easily fall into nowadays

There was no big meeting amongst the yeshivos where they decided to require white shirts. This is a situation that has evolved over time. Our gedolim from Europe who came to America all wore white and this has slowly trickled down. Now we are where we are and a boy who is on yeshiva is making a statement by wearing colored. A statement that he doesn’t want to be part of this community. There is nothing inherently wrong with blue. There are many communities in Klal Yisroel and many of them have some sort of exterior “levush”. If someone finds themselves moving towards MO they may put on a suede kippah, if someone starts relating towards a more chasidish life they may start wearing a bekiche, mizrachi, a kippa seruga and these are all modes of dress that have evolved over time.

Should a 3rd grader use a calculator to do his homework? Most would agree that he shouldn’t. I, as an adult use a calculator for most of the arithmetic that I perform on a daily basis in my field of work, despite the fact that I could do it almost as quickly on paper. However it’s still important that I learned all the basic concepts of arithmetic in my early school days. A yeshiva bochur is learning how to learn. Yes as a balabus he will use the artscroll to learn his daf yomi, even though he doesn’t need it and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Additionally his skills that he honed in yeshiva will help him with every other sefer he may open for the rest of his life, where there may not be an English version, whether hes looking up a halachah, preparing a dvar Torah for his shabbos table, or any other topic he wants to learn.