Great news: I may or may not be certified in CPR, which (for those of you keeping track at home) will give me approximately one useful life skill.

I don’t just go around looking for life skills. I was asked to take a CPR class by the principal of the mesivta in which I teach Language Arts, who recently found out that under New Jersey law there needs to be five teachers in the school who are certified. Five. That’s the law. This is a hard-and-fast number that doesn’t take into account whether it’s a smallish mesivta with a total of four classes or a public high school with thousands of students. The number is five.

In fact, I don’t even think there are ever five teachers in the building at the same time. The fifth person in our CPR class was the principal.

So I agreed. Not that I think anything is going to happen. Baruch Hashem, in my 17 years of teaching in this mesivta, there has never been any kind of issue for which I might have needed this knowledge. And you can say, “Yeah, but people are getting older!” The only person in the classroom getting older is me. The students keep staying the same age, replaced every year by a new crop of students that are hardier. (They must be. They’re definitely not smarter.) So most likely, this is going to be one teacher doing it on another teacher. We’re all in this together.

It also happens that I’ve never seen anything go down. Not just in yeshiva. Anywhere. I always walk into a room and people say, “Whoa, did you see what just happened?”

I also don’t think anything is ever going to go down, because in our yeshiva, if anyone is feeling even slightly off, they use it as an excuse to go home. I don’t think someone is pushing themselves to the point of a cardiac event. Except maybe in the beis midrash.

So I joined the class, despite my wife later pointing out that I’m not really good in an emergency situation. I tend to overthink everything first, and then I come back later and say, “Ok, here’s what I should have done.” But the thought here is that perhaps through the course—especially the part where I attempt to bring a plastic dummy to life—I can internalize what I’m taught and actually be able to save someone, provided something goes down before I forget this stuff. There are a lot of details.

So we had to take a whole first-aid course, consisting of three sessions during what would otherwise have been regularly-scheduled classes, but those are the sacrifices we make for our students. Which parents were going to complain?

“No, I don’t want you to learn life-saving skills. I want you to teach my son about polynomials!”

The class requirements were that we would learn more than just CPR. For example, we also had to be trained in the use of an AED. This stands for Automated External Defibrillator, I found out. I haven’t been keeping up on defibrillators, but apparently the new ones are not only automated, they’re also external.

Most of us think we know a lot of this stuff, but I definitely learned things I hadn’t known, or never really thought about. Here’s some of what I learned:

1. You’d think that teachers would make the best students, but looking around, I was the only one taking notes. Well, me and the principal. And we all know why I was taking notes. It wasn’t for the test.
2. During our first session, the instructor gave us a 98-page handout, which to my knowledge not a single one of us read.
3. At some point during the first session, the instructor told us how to find our pulse on our necks, and one of the teachers, as it turned out, did not have a pulse. At least he couldn’t find it. You know how some places are not specific on who they hire—all you need is a pulse? Well, in our yeshiva, you don’t even need a pulse. But you do need to know CPR.
4. During the second session, the instructor said there was going to be a test, and we all panicked. “What? Why do we have to know this? When is this ever gonna come up?” All of our pulses quickened, except for that of the guy without a pulse. Okay, so we didn’t say this stuff. But it is definitely what our students would have said if we taught this.
5. We took this course in December, but we weren’t given the test until late February, and it was with a two-hour warning, most of which we spent teaching, so I had to quickly print out my iffy notes moments before the test, hoping that the mere act of printing them would get me to remember everything.
6. The instructor didn’t show up on test day. There was just a pile of tests, and the principal was supposed to proctor, although he was taking a test himself.
7. I was the last person to start the test, and the first person to realize that the instructions said we needed number 2 pencils. The principal did some digging and found a box of compasses (the math kind), and we pulled the little golf pencils out of those and awkwardly filled in our tests.
8. Basically everyone cheated.

So if any kind of situation goes down, chas v’shalom, I would say that the students are in okay hands. I think. If all the teachers work together. And I say, “I think,” because as of right now, we’re still waiting for our grades.

So perhaps I could use a real chazara on the rules. Maybe I’ll go through what I learned in a couple of weeks, in article form, using my notes and maybe the handout, which I still have not read.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at MSchmutter@gmail.com.