The Place to Take Children in Portland that You Haven't Thought Of

I've had occasion recently to visit a couple of shiva houses and I've been thinking of King Solomon's statement (Koheles 7:2) that it's better to visit a house of mourning than one of feasting. I was kind of reluctant to visit the first one -- "I am going so the mourner can talk about the person who passed away but others there are going to make small talk, it's a long walk, it's raining, there's a lion in the road, do I HAVE TO??" and yes, yes I did, so I went; and I was glad I did; the mourner was telling stories about her mother, and what it is like when someone passes away, and what it's like for the family, and it was a meaningful experience for all of us.

Fast forward to a recent trip to Portland.

My mother proposed that we ride the tram that flies across the city on a cable, which was built ten years ago to transport hospital staff from one OHSU campus to another. The ride is a few minutes long and quite beautiful, and we all enjoyed it, although Loops thought it would be more like a roller coaster and said she thought it ought to bump a little more. You can see all the mountains, even Mt. Adams; and I noticed for the first time that Portland's Mt. Tabor closely resembles the original Har Tavor in Israel; and the area below the tram is the old turn-of-the-century Jewish neighborhood of Portland, which is nice to look down on; and if you, reader, are wondering along with everyone else who rides the tram what the big round building you passed on the OHSU tram is, I can tell you: it's a synagogue built by Jews from the Isle of Rhodes, still in occasional use and known affectionately to the community as "the beehive."

Once we got off the tram we stayed in the station for another cycle to watch how the mechanism works (I'm glad we rode it before I saw that the whole thing boils down to just three wires - it's very elegant) and then we discovered that a set of stairs leads down from the tram to other parts of the hospital.

The best banister to slide down in Portland is the one in the Hilton hotel downtown; the second banister disappeared in a remodeling years ago and the third (the Keller Auditorium) and fourth (the Arlene Schnitzer) are nothing too out of the common; so I am pleased to tell you that the new banisters up at the OHSU tram station are almost as good as the one at the Hilton, better than any other banisters in town for sliding down.

Should you be weighing the merits of taking children for a ride on the tram (and down the banisters), the factor you haven't considered is that the tram station was built as an addition to the Doernbecher children's hospital and that of all the wonderful things we did that morning (it's only early July but the salal berries up there are already ripe -- OH JOY), walking through a children's hospital en route was an unexpected but very important experience for my kids.

There are exhibits in the halls of art by the children in the hospital and their families. A thousand paper cranes... sneakers the children designed that were made by Nike... and installations in memory of others.
It's all very beautiful and well-designed (children's hospitals usually are) and it served as a good opening for conversation with Loops.

Highly recommended.

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for that is the end of every man, and the living shall lay it to his heart.

בטוֹב לָלֶכֶת אֶל בֵּית אֵבֶל מִלֶּכֶת אֶל בֵּית מִשְׁתֶּה בַּאֲשֶׁר הוּא סוֹף כָּל הָאָדָם וְהַחַי יִתֵּן אֶל לִבּוֹ:

Pharaoh in Pajamas

A perfect send-up of the silent film genre.

Happy Pesach!

Pharaoh in Pajamas, by the 5th-6th grade at Torah Academy

Eruvin Comes Alive with the All-New Eruvin Lego Set!

The Portland Kollel using Legos for a visual aid in its studies

Kate Henderson and "A Meeting of the School Trustees"

I have always been fond of this painting of an 1880's schoolmarm, making her case to the Board of Trustees.

A Meeting of the Board of Trustees, by Robert Harris

It looks like she wants something that they are disinclined to grant her.

The subject of the image (though not the actual artist's model) is a teacher from PEI named Kate Henderson.
That's about all the information readily available about this painting.


So it was a very pleasant surprise to me to find that someone has taken this painting I like so much and dramatized it:
One-minute film


But what is the real story behind the painting? -- I couldn't find it.
...until...
this week, Loops asked me to bring her some children's library books on "how to teach," and in one of them I espied suddenly the name "Kate Henderson".
Aha!
You!

Here's the story.
One of Kate Henderson's responsibilities in Pine Creek School, PEI was to teach Bible. She found that the children were merely reading aloud, not grasping the content; so she set them to acting out the stories.
This went over very well with the children, and when they came home they told their parents all about how they got to play Pretend in school with Bible stories.
The parents opined that this was sacrilegious; and issued a call: Fire the teacher!
The members of the Board -- the shopkeeper, the miller, the doctor, and the minister -- met and summoned Miss Henderson to defend herself. In the end, they suspended her for a week.
The minister had his doubts about the issue of sacrilege involved, noted that the children had seemed unusually interested in his sermon that week, and that Sunday he got up, asked some children to act out a Bible story, and preached on the subject of new ways of understanding the text.
Miss Henderson was reinstated and everyone lived happily ever after, the end.

Jewish scouting program!

Moriya!

It's not Girl Scouts... it is a Scouting-style program for girls with Torah & middos content as well as hands-on skills.

It's open to grown-ups also.

Check it out:

Moriya groups!

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History: Connect the Dots

So, if I were writing a textbook, I would make a nice tidy outline for each chapter.

But, under the circumstances - and given that each era of history is such an interesting bundle of people and places and ideas all interacting with each other - I wrote the terms for each unit all over a piece of paper, and told the girls, “connect the dots”.

The non-linear thinkers love it, the linear thinkers hate it, but in practice they all take their notes on this paper.

~~Update.
As an experiment, I gave a list of the exact same terms, in the exact same non-order, but left-aligned on the paper.
The lights went on for the linear thinkers. They said they realize now, retroactively, how well they understand everything, now that they see it in a nice straight line.
So, I learned something.

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History: Apples to Apples, al-Andalus Edition

I made a card game, similar to “Apples-to-Apples”, as a review for the final. Each card has a noun on it. That could be a place (Kairouan, Granada), a person (R' Yehuda ibn Chiyuj, Kahina), a group (Visigoths, Berbers), a sefer, a thing (Grammar, “Not writing sefarim”), or something unrelated to the course (the name of a girl in the class, the lyrics to the national anthem). Each player draws five cards, which she holds in a fan so that only she can see them; one more is turned over in the center; every player except the “judge” (players take turns being the judge, one per round) submits to the judge the card in her hand that she thinks is most closely connected to the card in the center. When all players have made their submissions, the judge lays out the submissions on the table for all to see and decides which is, in her opinion, the most closely connected. Each submitter has to argue her case. The player to whom the judge awards the round takes the card from the center; she who collects the most wins the game.

In other words, it's Apples-to-Apples, except that there is only one kind of card (fulfilling the role of both the red and green cards), and that you have to justify your submission (which means that your identity is not a secret). IMNSHO it is a much better game this way.

Thus, if the card in the middle says “Beauty”, one girl might submit “Greek culture,” because of its emphasis on beauty, one “R' Yehuda haLevi,” because he wrote beautiful piyutim, one “Elisheva Ploni,” because she thinks her classmate is beautiful, one “Cordoba,” because she thinks it sounds like a beautiful place, and one “Reconquista,” because she doesn't know what any of the cards in her hand are about, which means she has some studying to do...

There was much giggling, much learning, and much clamor to keep going after the class ended, which was nice.

This game works particularly well with this unit because there is so much variety but also so much overlap: everyone was a grammarian, a physician, a paytan, a diplomat...

Some Thoughts on Burning Man; or, What Is Good Art?; or, Some Thoughts on Tsnius

A friend once announced that she was looking for people to put together a Burning Man theme camp with her. I looked up Burning Man, decided I wasn't interested, and promptly forgot all about it.

This week, the name surfaced under piles of rubble in my mind, and I looked it up again. What is “Burning Man”?

Burning Man is a hippie utopia. For one week each year, tens of thousands of people encamp in the Nevada desert to engage in “radical self-expression”. No commerce is permitted: it is a gift-based economy. People bring their own food; they bring enough to share; some operate free restaurants. Burning Man is also a no-holds-barred arts festival. No cars are permitted to budge, unless they have been transformed into something other than a car – say, a flame-throwing octopus. There are a great many extraordinary art installations on the blank canvas of the desert floor – but they Leave No Trace. It isn't back-to-the-land-y, though: people bring generators and there is a great deal of electric and electronic display and racket, 24/7. The festival culminates in the burning of an enormous effigy of a man, for no particular reason; but the burning of the man has come to serve in the minds of many “burners” as a symbol of 'carpe diem, live intensely and immediately, because everything is exquisitely fragile'. Then they all pack up or burn their art and pick up every last fleck of glitter and get back in their cars and go back to what they call “the default world,” which is usually the Bay Area, or perhaps dear darling PDX.

Burning Man attracts a lot of spiritual seekers, artists, troubled souls, wandering Jews, and people who have completely lost their moorings and want to be loud about it.

I don't remember why I wasn't interested in Burning Man the first time I heard about it. This time I find the idea very interesting, but I won't be attending; one, because I have a low noise threshold (that includes trance music); and two, because when you invite people to a place with no rules, you get not only good art and catharsis but a great deal of cheap behavior. It doesn't sound as if cheap is exactly vanishingly rare at Burning Man.

Cheap is the pitfall of “radical self-expression” untempered by tsnius. (How shall I translate tsnius? It is sort of the anti-cheap, but a positive concept.)

Tsnius, save when it inheres in the self being radically expressed, is not one of Burning Man's Ten Principles. Cheap, like noise, is, at Burning Man, OK. And I don't think I would benefit from a week of it. So as much as I would kind of like, in some alternate universe, to open the one-woman Burning Man Community Kollel, I don't see it happening.

But there is quite a lot about Burning Man that I like the sound of – I have a thing for idealistic, creative people forming groups devoted to some end – and I was chewing over its principles, and as I got sleepier and sleepier the many other elements of it that I find attractive started to sound to me more and more like... lehavdil elef havdalos...

...well, it's Adar.

In two weeks there will be a day when the Jews dress up in costumes. And go about all day giving each other presents. And nichnas yayin yotzei sod, men will be dancing and singing in the streets and round each others' tables. And one of the themes of the day is not to be inhibited by self-imposed, artificial limitations. And it is all pretty crazy. My Purim is such that I can plan its details for weeks, but on Purim itself, I just wake up and say, Let's give food to everyone we know! And everyone we don't know! And it doesn't essentially matter what!

But the story of Purim is not one of straight “radical self-expression” – on the contrary, the joy of Purim comes out of it being a day of tsnius. Esther didn't reveal who she was. The old minhag of costume was to dress up, not like your inner martian, but like the enemies of the Jewish people – because things aren't what they appear to be. The megilla itself is about the Divine working invisibly – so much so that the name of G-d does not appear in the megilla. Cheap, on Purim, is not OK. The rules are not suspended: things get artistic, generous, and crazy, but the world of Purim is complex enough – through its being so very tsnius – to be truly exquisite. Intense. Immediate. Those things that people go to Burning Man to find.

 In two weeks, I will have that right here on my block. In my house. With an entire community of similarly Purimmy people.

#SilenceYourEgo

A worthwhile project, brought to you by NCSY:

http://silenceyourego.tumblr.com/

Some Thoughts on Other Ways to Teach Math

I once had a math teacher who said she wished she had time to revise the math curriculum to teach it as an art. She never did have the time - but she managed to point out items of aesthetic interest whenever they popped up in the regular curriculum. Those of us in the class who considered ourselves sworn enemies of math appreciated this.

Betty Smith, who grew up to be a writer, had the idea to assign each number a personality, and thereafter looked at each equation as a story about a relationship.

As a history nut, I always wished we could learn math as history; that is, in chronological order. We learnt, say, the Pythagorean Theorum without knowing a thing about Pythagoras or how he developed it, and I found the lack of context frustrating. The story of the unfolding of math is a fascinating one. Fractions become ten times more interesting to the aspiring historian when you learn that the ancient Egyptians regarded solving fraction problems as a form of magic.

In high school, we heard about some mathematician - probably Buckminster Fuller - who characterized Euclidean geometry as suitable for stationary things but unsuited to human beings, who are constantly changing, and developed in its place a geometry based not on lines but on rays, which are in motion. At the time I was madly in love with philosophy, and took this idea and ran with it: Euclid's geometry was physical; this alternative geometry was humanistic; I spent one delightful bus ride trying to work out a "monotheistic geometry", which was probably the first and last time I ever thought about math voluntarily.

To teach math as an art, a prose, a history, or a philosophy, would be unfair to those who actually like math, and think mathematically. But I'm surprised I haven't heard of anyone experimenting with offering history of math, or math for those who wish everything were humanities instead, as a parallel course - covering the same material, but presenting it differently - in one of those monster high schools where there are six classrooms all studying the same math simultaneously. By then everyone has had a taste of normal math study -- and most have decided what they think of spending the next four years experiencing more of it.

I broached this idea to a math-teaching friend once. "You mean you would test them on the life of Pythagoras?" she asked, aghast. No, no -- the point would still be learning how to wield the theorem: how to think logically and use math. Only the presentation would differ.

Charlotte Mason omits certain advanced math from the curriculum altogether, save as an elective, on the theory that none but a mathematician will ever need it.

Other ideas: mash math together with physics; teach trig using Ayil Meshulash; work into the math curriculum some of the mathematical portions of Gemara; coordinate with equation-balancing in chemistry class instead of letting students puzzle out why what works in one field does not work in another.

Judaism and Charlotte Mason

A lot of people find this blog by Googling "Jewish Charlotte Mason", and I am sorry there is not more here on the subject to welcome them. So I'll take a stab at it, although I am no expert.

If you just want to see it in practice, check out my friend's blog at Al Pi Darko Academy.
If you want the opinion of someone who is an expert, read this nineteenth-century essay.

The post here that gets the hits is Charlotte Mason on Secular Studies. That post is just the tip of the iceberg, though: CM is a complete theory of education.

I'll start with her attitude toward secular studies.
What Charlotte Mason has in common with Torah is the understanding that one's life as a religious individual is a whole into which certain general studies can be incorporated, without resulting in a religious-secular "double life".
Off the top of my head, I would hazard that under rarefied conditions (and there is a spectrum of opinions on just what that means):
-Good science can help you to live sensibly and appreciate the wisdom and love of the Creator.
-Good humanities can also show you what is in a person or what is in the world, can illustrate poignantly and poetically principles of how to live or how not to live.
-It can be helpful for a person to be exposed to beauty, order, and genius.

Where Charlotte Mason and Torah part ways in general studies is on whether the arts and sciences are seen as an end in themselves.
Charlotte Mason's branch of Christianity, so far as I can make out, seems to have adopted the Classical Greco-Romans as its honorary forebears, and so to have inherited the Classical values of beauty, order, and genius for their own sake: of beauty as an end in itself. Thus, in CM it is an independent moral duty to study nature and to acquire discriminating artistic taste.
CMers, do I have this straight?

How Charlotte Mason, and the religion behind her, decided which Classical principles to accept as eternal and which to reject, I cannot make out.

In Judaism, things are valued according to whether they are used to bring G-dliness to the world. Judaism is keen on beauty, order, and genius, but only "in the tents of" truth: in the service of the Torah principles of love, justice, and education. So artistic taste and knowledge of botany are excellent things to have; but if we ever find ourselves back in the Stone Age, we will miss botany and art, but we won't feel less Jewish for lack of them.

What I like about Charlotte Mason, then, is not why she teaches the arts and sciences, only how. I do think her methods are excellent, and a lot closer to Jewish ideas than a lot of educational theory out there. But one can't pluck the religion bits out of a CM education, tack a Judaic Studies curriculum on the CM general studies, and call it Jewish Charlotte Mason. Her reasons for studying secular studies inform her approach to them and her choices of material. If you want Jewish Charlotte Mason, you'll have to look into a truly Jewish approach to secular studies. Personally, I like the one Rav Hirsch spells out in Vol. VII of his Collected Writings, which is here [not to imply that I think this blog lives up to it].

Thus far, general studies.
There are more obvious differences between Charlotte Mason and Judaism when it comes to issues like Bible study and theology.
We have an oral tradition that explains the text and helps us draw life-lessons from it. (As Rav Hirsch puts it, reading the written text without the oral tradition to reading shorthand lecture notes.)
Charlotte Mason was not heir to the Jewish oral tradition; she engages less with the text and when she does draw lessons from it, ten to one they are incompatible with Jewish tradition.

This is just one point in a whole host of differences to be expected given that Charlotte Mason was not Jewish. You will not find "Jewish Charlotte Mason" in her chapters on religious education. Go to the original sources.

What about the area of overlap between general and religious studies, values and the development of good character? How much of that do Charlotte Mason and Judaism have in common?
Here I must confess that my Vol. 4 of Charlotte Mason is lent to a rebbetzin down the hill so that I can ask her this question.

[I have to tell you, just because I find it amusing, that the form of this volume is peculiarly reminiscent of medieval Jewish texts on the same subject: the preface says, more or less, I searched for a treatise on character traits, but could not find one; I therefore presumed to write one; I shall list the character traits, together with the means of acquiring them, the obstacles to acquiring them, and the means by which these obstacles may be overcome....]

I did ask one teacher of mine what we think of Charlotte Mason's value of loyalty: Miss Mason opines that it is immoral to shop in other neighborhoods that offer lower prices, that one should be loyal to the shopkeepers nearest one's house, so long as the price is fair.
This teacher answered that in Judaism there is a value of chesed, lovingkindness, according to which one should allow one's neighborhood shopkeeper the peace of mind that comes with having a regular, familiar customer; and that chesed must be balanced with the value of being financially responsible; but that the kind of loyalty Charlotte Mason demands, independent of its effects, is not a separate Jewish value.
Two Jews, three opinions; the next teacher I asked was not so sure. So I am not going to pull apart Charlotte Mason's Ourselves for you and attempt to identify what is a Torah-sourced idea and what is not. A good address for this sort of thing is Mussar Truffles.

In sum: my feeling is that Charlotte Mason (and, from what I've seen of it, the Classical Education movement) is a great resource for how to teach general studies, but not why, and only sometimes which. They are definitely not helpful in figuring out how or why to teach kodesh. And my jury is still out on her treatise on character traits... but it's not really necessary to go there: we have a  mesora on those; do Mesilas Yesharim instead, with something (or someone) like Rav Leuchter dot com to unfold it for you.

Wilderness skills in Portland -- come one, come all; we're starting a course

There's an organization in Portland called Trackers PDX that teaches all sorts of wilderness skills - among them tracking, building shelters, archery, blacksmithing, spinning wool. (Those of us who lump certain of these skills together under a mental heading of Lord of the Rings ranger skills will be pleased to know that the site references ranger all over the place.)

They have agreed to offer a course on a weekday or Sunday (or several, depending on interest). There's a discount for groups of six or more; we have at least four people already (really great people) and we're looking for more.

Please drop a line at jewsintherain at gmail.com indicating what sort of things you'd like to learn and when you're available. Their prices are reasonable: friendly to a student budget. (It's not worth listing them here because they vary depending on course content.)

Thanks!

An Hour in 1862

This is what certain grown men do for a hobby: they dress up in loose-fitting trousers and wheel cannons out to a field to pretend to kill each other twice a day for a weekend.

Put plainly, the Battle of Antietam was recently re-enacted in a field near Chehalis, by the Northwest Civil War Council. (Costumes not required for spectators.) We happened to be passing through Chehalis that day. Honest.

Their wives, mothers, and daughters go with them, in hoops and tafetta; or as vivant what's-its-names, daughters of the regiment; and sit with their crochet hooks, or trying to keep their hoops out of the fire, in and around tents furnished to resemble nineteenth-century homes as nearly as possible.
Those who do not have wives sleep in rough, soldierly dwellings indeed: just a length of canvas draped over a stick or two.

A few of the women manage large tents purveying 19th-century wares. O it did make me happy to walk into a store of bonnets, 19th century sewing patterns, and wee wooden needle-cases.

As I was asking the shopkeeper where, exactly, we were in America (she didn't know where Antietam was either), drums and fifes sounded, and bagpipes:
The minstrel boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death ye shall find him
His father's sword he hath girded on...
Three hoopskirts and I swished out of the shop to watch the soldiers march into battle.

And here they came! First the cavalry marched, on handsome horses in beautiful straight lines - up to trot! up to gallop! - past us, and halted.

Then the Union infantry, in row after row of young men, marching to music.
I had to fight a bizarrely strong instinct to rise from our hay-bale in honor of the young men going off to give their lives defending the Union.

 "Are you an attorney?" called my mother, to the man in the frock-coat.
"No, he is a Yekke!" yelled my confused instinct.
'I am the governor of Maine,' the gentleman introduced himself, and presented us with his card, on which was printed, indeed, his name, and Governor of Maine. 'These are my boys,' he indicated the troop marching past us. 'They march, as you see, under the sign of an Elephant, for they've never "seen the elephant" before. They've never been in battle.'
We wished him success in battle and he returned to his men as they marched past us...

...and down into the valley wherein erupted the Battle of Antietam, with a cry of Charge! and a clatter of rifle-fire and the Boom! Boom! Boom! of cannons, sending smoke rings into the air and shrouding us all in smoke.
O horror! Those young lads from Maine, and their flag of the Elephant, were the first under fire!

Drums, fifes, and bagpipes played all the while, even under fire, from the battlefield.
"Their rifles are accurate within 200 yards," explained a commentator; and the troops fought a great deal more closely than that: one group of men against another, close enough to recognize each other.

The battle raged a long while, the Union first gaining ground, then being pushed back, with a rebel yell, by the grey and Zouave Confederates. The rebel yell was wild and animal; it made me suspect that they weren't in this fight for states' rights at all, but for Don't you tell me what to do, or I want my slaves, or I'll show I'm a man by defending mine own; and it seemed to me a miserable cause for war; so that I thought of Ruskin's suggestion, to let the South secede, and then fight them, with purer motives, over the issue of slavery alone, as one sticks up for oppressed frosh in a boys' boarding school... -- but it was too late; they were already at war!

A group of Union soldiers fell, one by one, just before us, felled by a group of grey Confederates crouching in the brush; the surgeon, standing to the side with a white sheet, in a blood-spattered apron, inspected them, turned hopelessly from some, tended to others as best he could with sadly limited resources and with filthy, blood-stained bandages. The rebel band left their place in the brush and crept round the dead, to behind the Union ranks, to fire on a small band of soldiers.
On the hill across the valley, a cavalry battle ensued.

The smells of battle: horses and saltpeter.

There was something disturbing in that all the women came out to watch their menfolk slaughtering each other. One Southern belle came in her ballgown.
"That looks like a party dress," said my mother.
"It is."
"You must be a real devotee of the cause, to think this is a party," observed my mother, snapping a photograph tintype of the belle with two of her friends from the North.

It was easy to imagine that the battle was real; it was harder to imagine it so real as to find it dreadful. That's probably a good thing -- save the distress for what really merits it.

Novhardok, Keep Portland Weird!, and Not Caring About Public Opinion

I'm going to go off on a tangent and tell you another Novhardok story, one that is common knowledge in these parts, just because this is basic Jewish history that everyone should know I love Novhardok.

If you're doing the right thing, it doesn't matter what other people think of you - but how do you practice not caring about public opinion?
The students of the Novhardok yeshiva used to practice by going into a store and asking for a product not sold there - e.g., they would enter a pharmacy, and ask to buy a hammer.

As the joke goes, if you try this in America, the pharmacist will ask you, "What size?" but in the specialized shops of pre-war Europe (Rav Elya Pruzhiner's family shop, for example, sold only yeast and salt) it was a truly ludicrous request.


How can this story be true? I asked one day, a few years after I heard it. Isn't it problematic to give the clerk the impression that Torah students are crazy?

"It is true," answered the rav at whom I threw the question. "I knew the daughter of an old Novhardoker, and she said that when her father came to America, he would try to pay for his groceries with Monopoly money. And when the clerk would say, 'Sir, you cannot pay with this,' he would assume a confused air, and ask, 'Why not?'"


...

I do not own this image

I was enthusiastically describing the unusual individualism of P-town's alternative culture (Keep Portland Weird!) to an elderly rebbetzin of Jerusalem, and she exclaimed, "That's not good! There's no normal to keep people on their toes."
Which is the flip side of not caring about public opinion.

Dostoevsky said, 'Where there is no God, everything is permitted', but where there is no objective definition of Good and also no normal, what, save fear of the government, is to prevent the selfish from committing any crime they want?
Keep Portland Weird and Idealistic!

Evidently you have to care even in a Torah society: the Netziv once chided his nephew for not caring whether the post office staff would laugh at him for including extra information in an address, saying that a person immune to public opinion has lost a useful motivation to behave properly (and to tell the truth, and so is disqualified from testifying in court).


You have to not care about public opinion... but you also have to care. It's probably one of those things that should be swung either way and eventually allowed to settle somewhere in the middle.

Anyway, wouldn't you just love to gather up all the self-conscious teenagers of the world, hand them a wad of Monopoly money, and send them shopping? Such a powerful lesson.