This week from Austin Scholar...

1. How a month with Alpha World School taught me that kids want (and need) to do hard things

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

After nine fun-filled weeks, Alpha Summer in the Hamptons wrapped up on Friday, and I’m proud to say that 43% of our students said they would rather be at Alpha Summer than on vacation. If you’re wondering what could possibly make a summer program beat vacation, here’s a taste of what the kids actually did. They learned from Survivor player Ethan Zohn, then built and ran a Survivor course of their own. They hosted an open house for a nearly $6 million home with SERHANT., which meant learning the listing, the market, and how to talk to buyers. And in the final week, they built a Trojan horse, told the story of the Odyssey, and then lit the whole thing on fire in a bonfire. And all of this happens after completing their 2 Hour Learning academics in the morning.

Those examples show that when they’re in charge of work they care about, kids won’t dread going to school. In fact, some of them will even tell you they’d rather be there than on vacation.

How a month with Alpha World School taught me that kids want (and need) to do hard things

Back in June, I wrote a newsletter article about Alpha World School, which if you missed it, is the program where a group of high schoolers spend a year across Kenya, Ecuador, and the US, building schools and launching 2 Hour Learning in communities that have never had anything like it.

I just spent the past month in New York helping run the pre-departure bootcamp. The students leave for Kenya tomorrow, and while they’ve been doing some great work and learning a ton, I’ve learned so much from them as well.

Last Friday I watched a sixteen-year-old give a TED-style talk in a wood-paneled room at the Harvard Club in front of an Ivy League professor. Later that week, the same kids had a ten-minute conversation with a native Swahili speaker after starting from ground zero less than a month prior. In week one, every single one of them earned a wilderness first aid certification and each of them had to run a full simulated emergency as the lead responder while everyone watched.

My favorite day was one we called Grit Saturday. The students completed a gauntlet bouldering challenge during the morning (which, believe me, was absolutely exhausting), then less than an hour later got handed a clue card and a few hours to get themselves across all five boroughs of New York City by ferry, Citi Bike, and subway in 100-degree August heat.

I expected complaints (I myself was ready to complain). Instead, they came back sweaty, sunburned, and frankly a little smug.

What did that Saturday remind me of? Well, kids want to do hard things. They can do hard things, even impossible things. What they need from us is a structure that takes them seriously, and spending a full year getting 5’s on all of their high school AP classes while spending the entire rest of the day physically building schools and implementing 2 Hour Learning in Kenya and Ecuador is about as serious as it gets.

On the note of the AP classes, the especially cool part of this program is that an experience like this used to require a gap year. There was no version of “spend a year building schools on two continents” that didn’t wreck a college-bound kid’s transcript, because traditional school needs the kid physically in a building in class for seven hours a day. You had to choose between the impact and adventure and the academics.

AI-powered instruction broke that trade-off. With 2 Hour Learning, each student moves through math, science, and writing with the adaptive system that meets them wherever they are — all they need is a laptop and a Starlink connection (which they spent an afternoon learning how to set up and install).

So these kids will be able to do this year as part of high school. Not instead of it. They’ll take their APs. Their transcripts will hold up next to any top student’s. The academics are the floor of this program, not the ceiling.

Along with using AI-powered academic apps to learn academics, using AI comes up in another crucial part of the World School program. As we were preparing this program, during our visit to Kenya, we talked with a lot of the actual students who would be using 2 Hour Learning. And can you guess what the number one question they asked was? How can we use AI?

So to help our students become AI experts and have the skills they need to not only build for themselves, but also show the Kenyan students how to use AI to their advantage, week three of bootcamp was entirely about AI. These students spent two days learning Claude Code and each shipped a working AI tool, before defending it in front of a Gauntlet AI graduate. Then they went out and did fieldwork by visiting the UN and asking the Ambassador himself for feedback on their ideas.

Meanwhile, most high schools are still trying to ban the use of generative AI tools, as if that prepares anyone for the world these kids are actually walking into.

Alongside the differences from traditional education, it was also important during the creation of this program to ensure that it did not resemble anything close to the easy-to-do, fake-impact voluntourism.

I’m sure you’ve seen the two-week trip where teenagers paint a wall in Guatemala, take some photos, and fly home. And the research on those trips doesn’t actually lead to change. Sociologist Kurt Ver Beek reviewed thirteen quantitative studies of short-term service trips, and eleven of the thirteen found little or no lasting impact on the kids who went. In his own study of volunteers building houses in Honduras, participants swore their giving had increased afterward, but the donation records showed no real difference. A 2013 study of adolescent mission trips found international high school trips had no significant connection to whether those kids volunteered or gave as adults. At all.

So most of what gets sold to families as “service” doesn’t create generous adults. If anything, it probably lets a kid feel like they’ve done their part, checked the box, and can move on.

Alpha World School is built like the opposite of that. A full year instead of ten days. A month of preparation that comprises language, cultural training, medical certification, research instruction, grit challenges, and more. The students are working on projects in education that the communities asked for, shaped by community goals and evaluated by community leaders. And they create infrastructure that keeps working after the students go home: the school, the solar power, and the internet all stay. Other kids and colleges can sense fake service from the first photo, which is exactly why it doesn’t change them, and why I believe this version will.

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. “A” students aren’t actually “A”-level students

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

It’s week three of the World School pre-departure bootcamp and I have to say that these kids are killing it. Just this week, they’ve:

• completed a two-day AI and vibe-coding masterclass from a Gauntlet Superbuilder

• each created two fully-functioning apps to help the Kenyan students

• visited the Kenyan mission to the UN and interviewed Ambassador Lokaale

• gave a 60-second introduction to the Ambassador, in Swahili

• learned from UPenn professors about conducting graduate-level research

• presented a ten-minute TED Talk about their mission at the Harvard Club

All the while, they spend their mornings crushing their academics and working on their AP and SAT courses (naturally). These kids are truly going to do amazing things and I’m so proud of the work they’ve put in thus far. If you want to see what they’ve been up to, check out the video in Scholar’s Sources.

“A” students aren’t actually “A”-level students

Last week, incoming Alpha students took their very first NWEA MAP test, which is an independent, third-party standardized assessment that Alpha doesn’t design or control. Their results are catastrophic and should set off warning bells for America’s education system.

At Alpha’s in-person campuses, the students who just started their first year at Alpha are an average of 1.01 grade levels behind in math, 1.38 grade levels behind in language and writing, and 2.24 grade levels behind in science.

These are students arriving from the highest-end private schools in the country, where they charge $40,000 to $70,000 a year. Their parents bought the most expensive K-12 education in America, and their kids still showed up behind in every subject we measure.

It’s also interesting to note that the numbers get worse the older the student is:

• Elementary (L1): a few months behind in math and writing, but already a year and a half behind in science

• Upper elementary (L2): about half a year behind in math, more than a year in language and writing, nearly two in science

• Middle school: roughly two years behind across the board (−1.8 math, −2.0 language and writing, −2.7 science)

• High school: about three years behind in everything (−2.6 math, −3.1 language and writing, −3.3 science)

The longer your child is in the American educational system, the worse off they are. The average high schooler who walks through our doors, even after ten years at a $70,000-a-year school, is working roughly three grade levels below where their age says they should be.

The worst part is that none of these students were failing their classes. Pretty much every single one of these students had excellent grades, and many had straight A’s. Because of this, both the parents and the students have absolutely no idea that they’re behind.

In fact, across America, students’ GPAs have increased over the last few years, while standardized test scores have declined. Which means families don’t even know that something’s wrong.

But maybe it’s just these specific students who decide to come to Alpha that are behind? Maybe it’s not actually that bad?

Unfortunately, the Nation’s Report Card confirms the depressing results.

Only about 31% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders are proficient in reading. Math is barely better, at 39% of fourth graders.

A full third of eighth graders can’t read at even the basic level. Not “below proficient.” Below basic. These are fourteen-year-olds who struggle to determine what a passage literally says.

And before anyone reaches for the pandemic or AI as the only explanation: fourth-grade reading scores fell 2 points from 2022 and 5 points from 2019, continuing a slide that started before COVID.

Two-thirds of American kids are not proficient readers. And yet their grades have never been higher. Kids are being rewarded for not actually learning, and for blowing through material without actually absorbing it,, which leads, among many other problems, to students being massively underprepared for college academia.

Take what happened at Brown University this spring. I’ve written about this before, but to recap, economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his class a take-home midterm, the way he had for years. The class average came back at 96% in a course where midterms historically averaged 65 to 80. Suspicious that the students were using AI, he made the final exam in-person. The average collapsed to 48.6%, the lowest he’d ever seen. Dozens of students had likely used AI on the midterm, and the final exam revealed how little they actually knew. These are Ivy League students holding the most powerful learning tool ever built, and instead of using it to learn, they used it to skip learning because thirteen years of school didn’t teach them how to learn, or even why it’s important.

They instead learned that they could not only pass, but succeed at the highest level without truly learning. Whether that be from Quizlet homework answers, cramming the night before and forgetting after the test, writing reports on books not yet opened, or using AI to do assignments and take exams, students have been trained on the ability to get good grades, even at the cost of their own learning.

And that lack of learning is obvious to professors. UC Berkeley professor Zvezdelina Stankova, who teaches college calculus, wrote that “some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.” Before 2020, 71% of students on UC’s math diagnostic were ready or nearly ready for calculus; from 2021 to 2023, only 44% were. At UC San Diego, one in twelve incoming students tested below middle-school proficiency in math, all the while having maintained good grades in high school.

Stankova’s Berkeley colleague Alex Paulin had the same experience and said that students who took precalculus and calculus in high school “have basically been lied to by their school systems. They don’t actually know these subjects at all.”

These are students who got into Berkeley and Brown! They are the system’s “successes,” but their actual education was a failure.

And how are colleges trying to fix this? Remedial classes.

40 to 60 percent of first-year college students require remediation in English, math, or both. Nationally! These students and families are paying college tuition for their kids to relearn high school material (and yes, this is happening at Stanford, too).

And you’d think that these are the kids who made it. They got the grades, wrote the essays, got admitted into the top universities in the world, but the very first thing they encounter tells them they’re not ready.

Interaction with text and numbers also doesn’t stop at college. It follows you throughout your entire life.

So, every few years, the OECD tests adults across the developed world on literacy and numeracy. In the most recent results, 28% of American adults scored at or below Level 1 in literacy, which is up from 19% just six years earlier. The percentage of adults at a Level 1 in numeracy increased to 34% over the same period.

Let me explain what “Level 1” means. An adult at Level 1:

• Struggles to compare two pieces of information within a single article

• Struggles to tell whether a headline actually matches the data underneath it

• Struggles to read a graph (i.e. a mortgage rate chart, a medication dosing table, a poll result… all things they’d encounter in day-to-day life)

• Struggles to estimate values (meaning questions like “is this deal actually a deal?” or “can we afford this monthly payment?” aren’t obvious)

When you can’t read the world fluently, the world gets blurrier. Contracts, medical instructions, financial decisions, the news itself… all of it becomes something that happens to you rather than something you understand and navigate. That’s the life of more than a fifth of American adults (and rising every year).

When you strip everything else away, the education system has one core responsibility: prepare kids for the world. Hand them adult-ready reading, math, and thinking skills, so that at every stage, whether it be college, career, a Tuesday at the kitchen table with a stack of bills, they can navigate what’s in front of them.

With AI, the gap between that goal and the actual outcomes is only going to get worse, as evidenced by the Brown University story.

As doom-er as this newsletter has been (ironic, considering what I wrote about last week), I promise that it’s not all bad news.

Look at our middle schoolers: students in their first six months at Alpha are working about two grade levels behind on average, closer to three in science. But the middle schoolers who’ve been at Alpha for three or more years aren’t behind at all; in fact, they’re ahead in every subject: half a grade level ahead in math, nearly a full level ahead in language and writing, and ahead in science too. These students learned, on average, six grade levels of each subject in half of the time.

Students haven’t gotten less capable; they’ve just stopped being held accountable for their learning.

Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

Here is a video introducing Alpha World School students!

Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y’all on Sunday.

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The antidote to a bad mood is gratitude (& simple ways to get your kid to stop complaining)

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

It’s week seven at Alpha’s summer program in the Hamptons. The life skill of the week is public speaking, and the kids have been learning public speaking directly from top real estate agents at SERHANT., the fastest-growing agency in New York City.

By the end of the week, the students were hosting an actual open house for a 7,500 square-foot, almost six million dollar property. They learned how to price a listing, how to market it, and how to frame a house so that people walking through it can picture their lives inside.

Watching a ten-year-old kid stand in a foyer and confidently walk strangers through a multimillion dollar property after starting the week barely able to get through introducing themselves is guaranteed to completely transform how you think about what kids are capable of.

The antidote to a bad mood is gratitude (& simple ways to get your kid to stop complaining)

This week, I wrote the newsletter that I needed to read.

I’ve been feeling so stressed and busy lately. I’ve had a million different tasks to do, and too many tabs open – both in my mind and on my laptop – and I realized I wasn’t able to look at the world through a clear lens anymore. Everything was foggy and clouded, and a low-grade negativity had settled over everything. The heat was annoying. The schedule was annoying. I was annoying. So when I left the centre in the Hamptons for Alpha Summer Tuesday night, I decided to reset before the kids showed up the next day.

I took some quiet time on my drive back to my AirBnB to remember why I’ve been working so hard in the first place – to support all these amazing kids and help them have the best week of their summer. After a burning hot shower, I wrote down the things I was grateful for in my notes app. Only when I put myself in a better headspace did I start thinking about how I could problem solve for tomorrow. Then the next morning, I listened to Taylor Swift while getting ready and walked onto campus with a smile on my face and actual energy for the first time that week.

The reset was great for me, of course, but more important was that the kids noticed the change. The quiet ones who shied away from conversation and high-fives talked to me more that day than they had all week.

That’s what convinced me that I needed to write about this for a newsletter. Because the state of mind I had fallen into is the same one anyone can fall into:

It’s too hot out.

I don’t like dinner tonight.

I’m tired. I’m annoyed. Everything sucks.

None of those sentences seem dangerous. You’re just venting, right?

Maybe, but you’re also practicing negativity, and you get better at whatever you practice.

The idea of “venting,” or more officially “catharsis,” has actually been tested directly, and it’s less effective than pop psychology might lead you to think. In a 2002 study, a group of people who’d been angered hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who upset them. Another group hit the bag while thinking about something neutral, and a third group did nothing at all. The venting group actually ended up angrier and more aggressive than everyone else. The group that did the best was the group that did nothing. Rehearsing and practicing the negativity kept it alive.

The venting spiral is easy to fall into, though, because our brains are rigged for it. Across basically every domain psychologists have looked at, negative events grab more of our attention and stick harder in our memory than positive ones. Roy Baumeister’s famous 2001 review is literally titled “Bad Is Stronger Than Good”. If you go looking for things to be annoyed about, your brain will happily hand you an unlimited supply, and every single one will feel important.

I’m not trying to be cliche, and I can already feel the eye-rolls from your teenagers, but the cure to the brain’s desire to vent-spiral is gratitude.

The most classic proof of this is a study done where one group of people spent ten weeks writing down a few things they were grateful for (basically keeping a gratitude journal), while another group wrote down hassles (basically a complaint journal). The gratitude group ended up more optimistic, felt better about their lives as a whole, exercised about 1.5 hours more per week, and reported fewer physical symptoms.

Even more interestingly, the effects of keeping a gratitude journal last way longer than the habit of actually journaling. In another study, people wrote down three good things that happened each day, and why they happened, for just one week. Six months later, they were still measurably happier and less depressed than the placebo group.

Now, before the bean soup people find me in the comments: I am not talking about curing actual hardship via a journal. Grief, illness, a real crisis, or a genuinely awful situation are not “complaints,” and no one can just gratitude-journal their way through them. I’m talking about the small, daily, this-is-annoying stuff like the weather or the dinner menu.

Which brings me to the rule I’ve started using on myself, and the one I’d highly recommend trying out: every complaint costs one gratitude. If you catch yourself complaining out loud, you have to say one thing you’re grateful for in exchange.

After that, it’s important to think about what’s actually in your control and what is impossible to change. Walk through the specifics:

• You can’t control that it’s 95 degrees out. You can control what you wear, whether you bring water, and whether you spend the whole afternoon announcing how hot you are.

• You can’t (always) control what’s for dinner. You can control whether you eat it with a good attitude and whether you help pick (or cook) tomorrow’s.

• You can’t control other people’s moods, the traffic, or the assignment. You can control your response, your podcast queue, and when you start.

• You can’t control feeling stressed. You can control whether you take the reset evening (the gratitude list, the extra sleep, the Taylor Swift) instead of letting the fog sit there for another week.

Almost every complaint is either something you can change (and after identifying that then you can figure out how to change it) or something you can’t, in which case the best solution is to practice radical acceptance, which “allows us to accept reality as it is, let go of judgment, and move toward healing. Radical acceptance does not mean that you like, endorse, or approve of a particular situation; rather, it simply means letting yourself acknowledge the facts of a situation and the difficult feelings it may bring up, rather than resisting the situation or trying to change reality.”

I find this skill particularly useful in regards to dealing with other people’s opinions and actions, because I literally have no control over them. I can just accept the choices they’ve made and do what I can to make the best of it.

I know it sounds kind of bleak and depressing, but as someone who likes to solve every problem and make everything perfect even when it’s impossible, radical acceptance allows me to feel peace when I can’t control everything. This is probably the skill that has improved my disposition the most. And as I talked about before, my disposition and the way I feel about the world impacted the kids’ reaction to me. The moment I walked in with a brighter mood I became instantly more approachable to them.

I understand that this newsletter might not seem as important to implement as the ones I write about academics or life skills, but here’s a question for you: what type of person do you want your kid to be? The one who’s known for finding the worst in every situation, or the one the other kids feel drawn to and want to open up to? That reputation, that magnetism, isn’t something they’re just born with; it’s something they can choose to practice every day.

So, to recap, if you want your kid to stop being a complainer, here’s what you need to do:

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Why learn to write in the age of AI?

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

World School is officially launched! This past week has been the craziest, most exhausting, yet fulfilling of my life and I am so beyond excited to see how these high school students transform education for millions of students in Africa. They just started vlogging, journaling, and reflecting on their experience and learnings. I will share their journey over the coming weeks and keep y’all up to date on everything these amazing students are working towards, so stay tuned for that.

Why learn to write in the age of AI?

Last week, I talked about how you can use generative AI to learn how to write. But I think a lot of teenagers today aren’t sold on the value of writing at all. It doesn’t seem obvious what the point is anymore: if a generative AI tool can produce an essay or story that’s better than a human in seconds, what’s the point in bothering to learn how to write in the first place?

That’s a completely valid question, particularly given the role writing currently plays in our educational system. For most teenagers, writing feels like a task to check off of a to-do list, mostly for the teacher and not really for themselves. Schools often treat writing as the final step of learning: first you understand it, then you write it up. But in practice, writing is often the very thing that creates understanding.

When you write, you have to select the important idea, organize it into a structure, and express it with enough detail and clarity that someone else can follow your logic and engage with your arguments. This process turns vague impressions and understandings into clear, structured ideas. That process of engagement is what actually forges original insights and creative thoughts. Often you don’t actually understand an idea until you’ve written about it, and often you make arguments by the end of your piece that you didn’t even see when you started.

Like in my newsletter, for example, I take my memories, experiences, and half-baked takeaways, put them in a Google Doc, and organize them until it’s interesting. I often don’t know the exact point I’m going to make or how all of the pieces and insights fit together until I’ve gone through the full writing process. My experience of this isn’t unique. In fact, there’s a whole body of “writing-to-learn” research, including a meta-analysis of 48 studies showing that writing-to-learn programs reliably improve academic achievement. And in one widely cited study on writing and critical thinking, college biology students who regularly wrote to explain and argue about course content significantly improved their critical thinking performance, while students in the non-writing group did not.

So if a teenager asked me why they should bother to learn to write in the age of AI, I would tell them this: writing is thinking. Writing still matters because it’s one of the best tools in the world for clarifying ideas, deepening understanding, and generating original thought. AI can produce text. It cannot create connections in your mind between disparate topics, use your personal experience to come up with examples or reasoning, or figure out for you how new knowledge fits into your existing knowledge map.

Why can writing do those things, you might be wondering?

Well, the act of writing as a learning tool is backed by learning science:

1. Retrieval practice

When you write about a topic from memory, you’re forced to pull information out of your head rather than simply recognize it on a page.This kind of active retrieval strengthens memory significantly more than simply rereading or highlighting. Every sentence composed without looking at your notes is, essentially, a small form of self-testing. That effortful retrieval makes the memory more accessible in the future.

2. Elaboration

Writing an explanation forces you to answer the questions “why?” and “how does this connect?” You can’t write a coherent paragraph about a concept without relating it to examples, causes, consequences, or other parts of your existing knowledge map. This embeds new material in a web of existing knowledge rather than leaving it as an isolated fact, giving that new material the context that comes through different connections and associations.

3. Organization

To write an argument, you must decide what comes first, what depends on what, which points are central, and which are supporting. That act of organizing that knowledge builds a schema. (I talked about schemas a few weeks ago, but if you missed it, a schema is a mental model of how the pieces of a domain fit together.) Schemas make your current knowledge more coherent, and they act as scaffolding that makes future learning in the same domain faster, because new information has a structure to attach to. A learner with a well-organized mental model of a topic can absorb a new fact in seconds, while a learner without one has to hold it as a disconnected item.

4. Metacognition

If you try to explain a half-understood concept in simple, understandable sentences, it will become obvious very quickly whether you actually know the content. Psychologists have shown that most of us walk around with an “illusion of explanatory depth“, which means that we feel like we understand things far better than we actually do, until we’re asked to explain them. Writing gives you an accurate map of what you actually know, which is necessary if you want to fix what you don’t.

5. Desirable difficulty

Desirable difficulty, which describes conditions that slow learning down in the moment but make it stick far better in the long run, is the underlying idea behind all of these learning science concepts. Writing is slower and more effortful than reviewing, which is exactly why it works better. The effort is the learning; writing is thinking.

Writing also does more than clarify your existing knowledge and thoughts; it actually improves them. Writing is linked to gains in memory, verbal skill, critical thinking, and creativity. One study of a ten-week creative writing program found that students’ critical thinking scores rose 25% while a matched control group barely moved, and other creative writing interventions have produced measurable gains in cognitive flexibility. This suggests that writing helps people explore alternative solutions, sit in ambiguity, and arrive at more original thoughts.

All of this is why I think of writing as a direct path to Depth of Knowledge levels three and four (strategic and extended thinking, respectively). The first two levels of Depth of Knowledge (recall and recognition) are increasingly easy to outsource, since AI can summarize, restate, and recombine information quickly. But strong writing requires analysis, justification, synthesis, and creation: the very skills that make up those higher levels of thought.

When I’m writing my newsletter, I’m synthesizing my personal experiences and the research I’ve done to create new ideas, examples, and methods to communicate innovation in education. I’m able to form new connections between concepts and themes as I’m writing, developing insights and (hopefully) coming up with cool ideas to share with y’all.

Putting all of that together: writing is not becoming obsolete in the age of AI. Its role in education just needs to transform.

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. AI is killing student writing. Here’s how Alpha is using AI to save it

2. The AlphaWrite walkthrough

This is a very exciting day because it’s officially the launch of the first year of Alpha World School! I am beyond excited to meet our students later today to begin their journey and to help them prepare for their year in Kenya and Ecuador.

While I’m back in New York, I’ll also be helping out with the last few weeks of Alpha Summer in the Hamptons, so I hope to get the chance to meet any of y’all who will be attending.

AI is killing student writing. Here’s how Alpha is using AI to save it

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how writing changed my life. From this very newsletter, to the essays that got me into Stanford, to the articles that landed my internship with David Perell, to even the poems written at two in the morning that helped me work through my emotions, my love of writing has made me a better, more emotionally regulated, reflective, and successful person.

However, as more and more people offload their writing to AI, I’m realizing that not only are students’ writing skills declining, but their general love of writing is also disappearing.

Furthermore, I read a piece this week by Natalie Wexler, who expressed confusion around how Alpha teaches the humanities, writing included. Thus, I felt like this would be the perfect week to talk about AlphaWrite, the AI tool that Alpha students use to learn how to write. So let’s dive in, starting with the question I’m sure all of you have: What is AlphaWrite and how does it work?

AlphaWrite is a mastery-based writing tutor built on the same evidence base as The Writing Revolution’s Hochman Method: explicit instruction from sentences to paragraphs to essays, embedded in content that matters to the students. Students work through a structured progression:

• First, they learn to craft clear, varied sentences: combining, expanding, and editing until they can reliably express a single idea well.

• Next, they practice turning those sentences into coherent paragraphs with topic sentences, supporting details, and logical order.

• Only then do they build multi-paragraph essays, applying the same habits of outlining, revising, and editing at a larger scale.

Because the app is adaptive and mastery-based, students get far more practice and feedback than in a traditional “turn in your essay, wait two weeks” model and are able to receive at least 10x more writing reps with immediate, targeted corrections.

Here’s what a typical AlphaWrite journey looks like:

1. Sentence practice.

The app gives them sentence-combining, sentence-expanding, and sentence-correcting exercises all related to the topics of their choice. Research shows these exact sentence-level tasks are more effective than isolated formal grammar drills for improving writing quality.

2. Paragraph construction.

Once they’re fluent at sentences, AlphaWrite introduces single-paragraph outlines: topic sentence, key details, closing sentence. Students practice organizing their own thoughts clearly, not filling in someone else’s template.

3. Essay building.

Only after students demonstrate mastery at the paragraph level does the app unlock multi-paragraph essays, guiding them through planning, drafting, and revising in manageable chunks. This one “chunk” at a time method allows writing to become a lever for thinking instead of a panic-inducing task.

The structure of AlphaWrite mirrors what both learning science and the strongest writing programs recommend:

• Explicit, structured instruction.

The Writing Revolution’s Hochman Method rests on explicit teaching of writing, starting in the early grades and focusing on sentences as the building blocks of all writing. Large research syntheses on writing instruction emphasize the same thing: students benefit from direct, structured teaching of strategies, not just “more writing time.”

• Sentence-first, then complexity.

Studies of sentence-level instruction and action research on The Writing Revolution have found that starting at the sentence level and gradually increasing task complexity improves secondary students’ writing and supports multilingual learners. Sentences that are grammatically accurate and varied free up cognitive resources for planning, argument, and voice.

• Grammar in context, not in isolation.

Decades of research show that teaching grammar rules in isolation doesn’t reliably improve students’ writing. What does work is teaching grammar and conventions in the context of students’ own sentences and paragraphs, with immediate feedback and revision.

• Deliberate practice and feedback.

Cognitive science recommends breaking complex skills into smaller chunks, providing repeated practice in those chunks, and giving prompt, targeted feedback.

This is all great research and design, but how do you actually know it works? Well, this year’s NWEA MAP results from Alpha Schools across the nation should convince you.

Last year, before students started using AlphaWrite, students grew 2.1x typical growth in reading and 2.7x in language.

This year, students who used AlphaWrite grew 3.6x in language and 3.3x in reading — compared with 1.8x and 2.2x for students at the same campuses who didn’t use it.

That means for every one point the average student at their grade level and percentile grew this year, our AlphaWrite students grew 3.6 points in language and 3.3 points in reading.

And in a world where most students simply type in a one-sentence prompt into a gen AI tool to write their essays for them, these results have become more and more significant.

However, despite all of my dunking on gen AI tools in this newsletter, I’m not anti-gen AI in general, but anti-gen AI as a shortcut around thinking. Alpha’s broader app stack, including AlphaWrite, is explicitly designed to use AI as a personalized tutor to scaffold their learning, not as an answer key.

In practice with AlphaWrite, that looks like:

• AI surfacing targeted prompts that require students to build, fix, or improve sentences and paragraphs themselves.

• AI diagnosing patterns (run-ons, weak topic sentences, vague pronouns) and coaching students through specific revisions, instead of simply rewriting their draft.

• AI keeping the challenge level “just right” so students stay in that productive zone where effort turns into skill, instead of crossing into either overwhelm or coasting.

This is exactly how cognitive scientists say we should be using technology: to reduce unnecessary friction (slow feedback, inconsistent grading) while preserving the cognitive work that actually causes learning. This allows for students to have their brains activated just the right amount to keep them engaged in learning how to write, which increases their propensity to enjoy the process of writing.

The other aspect that AlphaWrite uses gen AI for is personalization. If kids only ever write five-paragraph essays about topics they don’t care about, they probably won’t be able to fall in love with writing (or, at the very least, it will be more difficult). So, Alpha pairs the sentence -> paragraph -> essay progression with both the ability to choose the topics they’re writing about and later during workshops to have creative, personally meaningful writing opportunities.

While they are working on writing mechanics, they’re able to pick the topics to write about. (For example, I love Harry Potter, Ironman, and the beach, so all of my writing lessons involve analyzing sentences about Harry, Ron, and Hermione, paragraphs about Ironman’s heroic exploits, or essays about the morality of taking seashells from the beach.)

And once students have mastered the mechanics, they use their new writing skills on things that matter to them, such as:

• Social posts, scripts for videos, pitches for businesses, and even publishable articles.

• Storytelling-heavy workshops where they build characters, construct narratives, and pitch ideas in non-writing contexts.

This allows their writing practice to be both strengthened grammatically and structurally in the morning, and creatively during workshops and individual projects. I believe it is that freedom to choose the topics they learn to write with and seeing the direct application that helps to build a love of writing. And once they have a love of writing, it’s easier to convince them to spend a few extra hours writing their literary analysis on their own instead of with ChatGPT.

That’s how to use AI to teach students how to write. Stay tuned for next week for my philosophy on why it’s important to know how to write when ChatGPT could write a better essay than I could in a fraction of the time.

The AlphaWrite walkthrough

Here’s a quick walkthrough of AlphaWrite:

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Christopher Nolan built the world’s most expensive advance organizer

2. Scholar’s Sources: The Odyssey program

I’m back in Dallas for my annual two week sprint of watching the Texas Rangers with my dad. It really is so important to have rituals like this one to spend quality time together and have a connection point in the midst of a busy summer (and for me, a busy college life). It’s also been a great rest for me to prepare for August, where I’ll be back in New York to help with both the Alpha World School program and the final few weeks of Alpha Summer.

Christopher Nolan built the world’s most expensive advance organizer

Last weekend, I saw The Odyssey with my parents and we spent the entire ride home engaged in a literary analysis about the different interpretations and adaptations of the previous films and the themes that Nolan highlighted versus other versions.

It had been a while since I read the epic, but I was still able to recall the different emotions I felt during specific scenes, and to compare the different details that stood out in the book versus the film. Of course, as a book lover, it’s natural for me to use film to better analyze literature, which got me thinking about how this popular movie can teach students both the lessons of The Odyssey and a bit about storytelling and literary analysis.

How might this work?

Well, let’s go back to David Ausubel’s 1960 experiment. Ausubel gave college students a short conceptual overview before they read difficult, unfamiliar material. The students who got that overview, which he called an advance organizer, retained the material significantly better than the students who went in cold. The idea has held up for sixty years: before you learn something hard, your brain needs a scaffold, a rough map of what’s coming, so new information has somewhere to attach. Without the scaffold, a 2,800-year-old epic poem is just old names and boats. With the scaffold, every page slots into a picture your kid already has in their head.

Of course, there is also benefit to the exercise of deciphering literature with no context – for example, forcing yourself to understand complex (and often outdated) language and plotlines is a challenging exercise that will massively improve SAT reading comprehension skills and prepare students for dense college-level readings. However, with a text such as The Odyssey, whose value comes more from the themes, values, and lessons that the reader learns through Odysseus’s triumphs and failures on his way home, being able to focus more on the details rather than spending cognitive space on figuring out the plot is, in my mind, a better use of time.

(Similarly, though not specifically the focus of this newsletter, I find myself thoroughly enjoying Shakespeare when I have a full understanding of the plot and can focus on his witty dialogue and interesting language use instead of learning all of the character’s names and such.)

So, based on the idea of using Nolan’s The Odyssey as an “advance organizer,” I created a two week sprint to get your kids’ brains activated in time for school to start and to encourage thoughtful conversation on right and wrong, storytelling, and a myriad of life skills. I’ll provide a quick overview in this newsletter, but the full course with lessons, discussions, and quizzes is available to my paid subscribers as a website linked in Scholar’s Sources.

I totally understand that this program is a time commitment, especially for the end of the summer, but having even just a few of these conversations with your kid can encourage them to think about what it means to be a hero and what kind of person they want to be.

And for your kid, doing all of this feels harder than watching a recap video, so they might wonder why they have to go through all of this when they could simply read the SparkNotes. But they are actually experiencing desirable difficulties, which are conditions that slow performance down during practice, like testing yourself and spacing things out. Although this feels like a lot more cognitive work, desirable difficulties create the same conditions that actually make learning last – so although it might be easiest to stop at the advance organizer step (just watch the film), to truly understand the lessons that this epic has to offer, the steps that follow the film (discussions, exercises, and presentation) are paramount.

With all that said, let’s dive in.

The first step is, naturally, to watch the movie. However, if your kid is younger and the R rating is a no for your family, there are a few other video options out there that act as an advance organizer.

1. Nat Geo Kids, The Odyssey

2. Nat Geo Kids, Minute Myths

3. Everything you need to know to read Homer’s “Odyssey” - Jill Dash with TED-Ed

4. CLEAN Classics Summarized

5. The science behind the myth: Homer’s “Odyssey” - Matt Kaplan with TED-Ed

(My notes on the R rating: there are two horror-style scenes in the film – and as someone who gets scared by small spiders and eerie creaking doors, I just closed my eyes during those scenes and was fine. It would also be an option to wait until the movie is on streaming platforms and fast-forward through those scenes.)

As for which videos for which age:

• Kindergarten to grade 2: Use the one-minute Minute Myths clip and the Greeking Out compilation. Short, funny, and never scary.

• Grades 3 to 5: Greeking Out for the full story, plus the TED-Ed Jill Dash five-minute setup.

• Grades 6 to 8: The Classics Summarized retelling for the whole plot, plus either TED-Ed for depth.

• Grades 9 to 12: With your say-so, the R-rated film is a strong on-ramp for this age. If you opt out, the Classics Summarized video carries the full story just as well.

And obviously a kindergartener cannot read the same version of The Odyssey as a high schooler, so here are a few different versions of the poem fit for different ages.

Kindergarten to grade 2: Usborne Illustrated Odyssey – A bright, illustrated retelling for the youngest readers or for reading aloud together. The whole journey, gently told.

Grades 2 to 4: Tales from the Odyssey, Parts 1 and 2 (Mary Pope Osborne) – Short chapter books from the Magic Tree House author. Easy to finish, which builds a reader’s confidence. Comes in two parts.

Grades 3 to 6: The Children’s Homer (Padraic Colum) –A classic, richer retelling with real literary language.

Grades 4 to 7: The Wanderings of Odysseus (Rosemary Sutcliff) – A novelist’s version with beautiful pacing and momentum.

Grades 6 to 9: The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel (Gareth Hinds) – A gorgeous graphic novel. The pictures carry any reluctant reader through the whole epic. A finished graphic novel beats an abandoned translation every time. (This is actually the first version that I read!)

Grades 8 to 10: The Odyssey (Emily Wilson translation) – The modern verse translation everyone is talking about: fast, clear, and gripping. The first full translation most kids can actually enjoy.

Grades 10 to 12: The Odyssey (Robert Fagles translation) – A stately, lyrical full translation. Strong readers can set it beside Wilson and argue about how two translators make different choices.

Grade 12 and up: Lattimore translation, plus An Odyssey (Daniel Mendelsohn) – For the most advanced readers: the closest line-by-line translation, paired with a father-son memoir about reading Homer together.

After reading the book, the next step for real internalization is to pull out the various trials in the book (withstanding the sirens, defeating the cyclops, escaping Circe, to name just a few) and examine them as real-world scenarios – each one translated into relatable lessons that can be put into practice. My website (linked in Scholar’s Sources) turns each trial into a lesson your kid can do in 10 to 12 minutes. Here’s an example of the discussion prompts so you can see what it would look like:

The Sirens: “Don’t trust future-you. Willpower loses; systems win.”

Odysseus knows the Sirens’ song will destroy him. So what does he do? He does not “try really hard to be strong.” He has his crew plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast, and he makes them promise not to untie him no matter what he says. He designs a system while he’s still sane that protects him from the moment he won’t be. Behavioral economists literally call this a Ulysses contract. Now translate it: your kid’s phone is the Sirens’ song, engineered by very smart adults to be irresistible. The modern mast is embarrassingly simple. The phone goes in another room, physically, before homework starts. Not on silent. Not face down. Another room. Present-you ties up future-you, because future-you cannot be trusted within arm’s reach of TikTok. When a kid learns this from Odysseus instead of from a lecture, it stops being nagging and starts being strategy.

There are eleven more, from Circe (”Unchecked appetite turns men into pigs, literally”) to Calypso (”The most dangerous prison is a comfortable one”) to Penelope, who out-thinks 108 suitors who pose a serious threat to both herself and her son.

Each lesson ends with a short quiz and a few discussion prompts. Every lesson gives you the idea, what you’re steering toward, and age-banded ways to open the conversation.

Once you’ve finished the lessons, it’s time to showcase what you’ve learned.

At the end of the story, disguised Odysseus faces a room full of suitors who have spent years attempting to claim his wife and his palace. Penelope has created a challenge to decide who she will marry; however, it’s one that only her husband can accomplish. Only the real Odysseus can string the bow and shoot it through a ton of axes, live, in front of everyone.

In 2026, any asynchronous artifact your kid produces, an essay, a slideshow, a take-home project, can be generated by AI in about forty seconds. So the program ends with a sort of “bow test” your family can run in the living room. The goal is for your kid to write an original hero’s journey story where every trial encodes one of the axioms, then delivers a live 4 to 6 minute speech. You can find the full step-by-step instructions on the website in Scholar’s Sources!

Delving into the Odyssey with your kid can be a hugely educational experience, but the first steps are simple:

1. See the movie (or other, age-appropriate versions)

2. Buy the right-level book

3. Ask one dinner-table question; my favorite being, “Odysseus knew he couldn’t resist the Sirens, so he tied himself to the mast. What’s your mast for your phone?” (you can find the rest on the website in Scholar’s Sources!)

The Odyssey teaches incredible lessons, and Christopher Nolan is setting the groundwork for such rich discussions and deep analysis of this centuries-old epic.

Scholar’s Sources: The Odyssey program

For all of my paid subscribers, you can access the full course and instructions below:

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. First think, then ChatGPT

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

I got back from South Africa two days ago and I truly had the most remarkable time. Here is one of my favorite photos from the trip: a female leopard hunting for her cubs.

How beautiful is that?! And on the note of Africa, we have the final Alpha World School info session this Wednesday before the students arrive in New York for the pre-departure program. So if you’d love your kid to not only experience the beauty in Africa as I did, but also transform its educational system, come to the info session.

First think, then ChatGPT

Last week, I argued that filling your brain with knowledge is good (unfortunately an increasingly controversial opinion). But getting knowledge into your brain is only half the battle.

Just as a chatbot is able to recall facts, it’s even more famously able to write essays and complete analysis for students.

Students having access to chatbots has led to a crazy situation in schools: students don’t know how to study and learn. Schools no longer know how to teach kids to study and learn. Even at the Ivy League.

This is, naturally, also a massive issue that schools are floundering while trying to solve. School districts across the country have started to completely ban student cellphone use during the school day and specific AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.), yet allow students to use AI tools for “research, exploration, and creative projects” and “brainstorming, summarizing information… and as a study partner” as students are “already encountering AI beyond school walls.”

As a student myself, I am also confused about how and when AI should be used in academia. Every teacher has different policies and everyone has a different meaning of “research.” And so, because there are so few clarified guidelines and no true incentive not to, students across the country use AI to write papers, complete problem sets, and solve exam questions.

It goes all the way to higher education, too.

A post went viral on X exposing the discrepancy between Brown University students’ take-home midterm scores versus their in-person final exam scores:

Clearly, almost every single student used AI to cheat on their midterm, which is, of course, a problem. Part of it due to how easy it is to use to get a good grade, part of it due to a lack of incentive not to (Brown administrators and professors themselves remain arguing about what constitutes AI use, how to and if they should punish suspected that AI use).

All of that is concerning and troublesome and all of those things.

But what I find really concerning is that the students couldn’t figure out how to study for the final exam! These are smart kids; they’re all students (typically juniors and seniors) who have taken challenging classes, likely had some sort of job or internship, and were interesting enough to get into the Ivy League. But in between the time their professor announced the final would be in-person and the end of the semester, they were unable to actually study for this exam to do any semblance of passing.

Why?

AI has created such an ease for mental offloading that even at the slightest cognitive challenge students feel like they’re learning. This is where the re-reading epidemic has come in. Re-reading as a study technique has been prominent for essentially ever, but recently I’ve noticed that today’s students are overestimating its value. It might feel as though you are learning when passively watching a video or re-reading something, but it is only when you actively recall the answer without the material in front of you that true learning happens.

But re-reading a ChatGPT-generated summary of a chapter, class notes, or the practice exam answer sheets is classified as the best form of studying and learning across educational institutions, even ones such as Stanford.

I totally understand why, though. Rereading notes feels productive because everything looks familiar, but recognition is not recall. A student can recognize every term on a study guide and then go blank when asked for a definition.

Think of it like this: you can watch TikTok videos or Instagram reels of someone lifting weights for hours. You can study their form, count every repetition, and receive a beautifully formatted summary of the workout. But their muscles get stronger, not yours.

Your brain is like a muscle, so learning works the same way.

Every time a chatbot, an existing answer key, or the professor’s notes remembers the fact, constructs the argument, or makes the connection before you try, it may give you a better answer, but it also steals the rep. And the rep is where learning process happens:

“That answer looks right.” -> “I can produce the answer.” -> “I can explain why it is right.” -> “I can use it somewhere new.”

Successfully moving through the learning process can look like:

• Explaining the causes of World War I without notes.

• Solving a math problem before viewing the worked example.

• Reconstructing a scientific process from memory.

• Defending an interpretation of a novel using specific scenes.

• Predicting what happens next before running an experiment.

The reading allows recognition, but you need to practice to produce, understand, and transfer if you want to be able to actually do anything (like pass an exam) with the information.

Knowledge becomes useful when students retrieve it without the answer in front of them. The struggle (the thing that students are so unused to these days) is not evidence that learning has failed; often, it is the activity that produces learning.

My last newsletter talked about how a chatbot can hand the student a dot but cannot weave the tapestry. When AI recalls, organizes, explains, and connects everything for you, it may complete the assignment but will eliminate the mental rep the assignment was designed to create. So if you want to learn something, you can’t just let AI write up your answer and read it. You need to practice solving the problem yourself, complete the writing assignment on your own, and embrace the struggle instead of shying away from it.

All of this is not to say that you can’t – or shouldn’t – use AI in education. This is the Austin Scholar newsletter, after all! I went to Alpha for 8 years; I know it’s not true. However, AI should enter after the first act of thinking, not before it.

Here’s how I used AI at Stanford:

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Filling your brain with knowledge is good

2. Scholar’s Sources: For the kids who love science…

I’m spending the week in South Africa with my mom and sister. No words could do this trip justice, so here’s the view from the top of Table Mountain.

Speaking of, if you have a high schooler who wants to change the world by completely transforming educational access across Africa, come to our Alpha World School info session on July 16th (or learn more here).

Filling your brain with knowledge is good

Two things I read this week inspired me to write this newsletter.

First, the Atlantic article about the so-called “end of reading.” There were a lot of trends to discuss throughout the piece, but the one that I want to talk about was highlighted (literally) in this post.

What does that mean? Well, the skill that so many schools and administrations claim they teach, the ever elusive skill of “critical thinking,” has not, in fact, been effectively taught to the American population.

In a world that is rife with hallucinated facts and AI-generated images you can’t differentiate from real life, critical thinking does appear to be quite, well, critical.

This brings me to the second thing I read this week that inspired this piece: Carl Hendrick’s Children of the Magenta Line newsletter article. Every single paragraph of this newsletter is rich with incredible insights that I could ramble on about for days, but for this newsletter I’m going to focus on the section with my favorite title, “You can’t connect the dots if you don’t have any”. Here’s how the section starts off:

One of the dominant concepts of learning since the 1970s has been the idea that facts and internalised knowledge is the lowest rung on the ladder of learning, the part we can safely externalise, because you can always look it up (see Bloom’s taxonomy). Teach the transferable skills, ie the critical thinking, the questioning, the analysing, and let the facts take care of themselves; after all, they are only a search away, and half of them will be out of date within five years in any case.

In essence, Hendrick is describing the reasoning that encourages kids to not waste time learning their multiplication tables because calculators exist. Or the idea that they don’t have to actually remember any of the history facts they crammed for their exam because they’ll be able to look it up if they ever actually need to use it.

However, if you don’t know these things, how can you reason an answer if your server splits a check unevenly and hands you a total? How do you know whether to question it if you can’t ballpark the math instantly? Or if a politician explains that “this economic policy has never been tried before”, how do you know whether that’s true, or even what to Google, without knowing that similar policies existed? What about if you’re reading an article that calls something “unprecedented” and don’t know if it’s true? Well, you can only evaluate that claim if you have precedents stored in memory to compare it against.

As Hendrick explains:

You cannot analyse a text on a subject you know nothing about; you cannot evaluate a claim in a field whose hinterland of knowledge is unavailable to you. Comprehension itself, the plain act of understanding a sentence, depends on a vast store of background knowledge.

For example, my best friend’s dad is an absolute expert in baseball. He’s watched so much baseball, talked so much baseball, and read so much baseball that if he has an opinion about the sport, I know that it’s based in fact and personal experience. However, every four years, he and my dad get in arguments about the correct soccer strategy during the World Cup. Neither of them actually know anything about soccer, so I know not to put stock in anything either of them says because they don’t have the knowledge base to analyze the game or create strategy.

(And to even begin analyzing baseball strategy, you’ve gotta start by knowing your math facts.)

So if you want your kid to be able to “think critically,” you can’t ignore the mastery of facts. But the good news is that learning these facts will get easier as they continue to learn new facts.

A bit ago, I wrote about Ausubel’s article on meaningful learning. In the essay, Ausubel explains that your existing knowledge can be thought of as schemas in your long-term memory.

A “schema” is a package of logic or knowledge that helps you understand how part of the world works. Each schema has “branches” or “hooks” that related knowledge can hang on.

The idea is that when you’re learning new material, it’s easier to learn if you can hang it on an existing schema. And lucky for us, so many people have already charted out everything that a child will learn in K-12 education and exactly how they all relate together.

Here is the coolest display of everything a child learns in elementary school:

Every single dot allows for new connections, a deeper understanding of the world, and thus an increased ability to reason, make decisions, and think critically about the world.

Hendrick captures this idea well:

This is what schema theorists have in mind when they talk about assimilation of knowledge and say we grasp a new thing only by fastening it to things we already hold: the richer the existing weave, the more points at which a new thread can catch. This is why knowledge doesn’t just add to what you know but also compounds what you are able to learn next, and why the child with the fuller store of knowledge pulls further ahead with every passing year.

So as it becomes easier and easier to access information and basic facts and it becomes more and more important to know what to do with those facts, you can’t simply stop trying to master that which is accessible. In order to rise above chatbots and even people using chatbots, you need to be able to think better and critically about the world. And you can do that with developed schemas and a wide knowledge base. Once you have that, you’ll be able to spot patterns, notice interesting connections, and have intuition if something seems out of place.

So even though it’s the most unsexy answer, if you want to set your kid up for success and ensure they’re not part of the growing number of adults who cannot do basic reading comprehension, you need to make sure that they’re actually learning. And yes, that means no chatbot. Because:

A chatbot can hand a novice a ‘dot’, fluent, finished and correct but what it cannot do is weave the tapestry, because the weave is not a product to be delivered but a labour that only the mind doing the connecting can perform, and a mind that is handed the finished picture never learns to connect anything at all.

This seems obvious for math (i.e. you can’t learn a math concept if you let ChatGPT generate all of the answers), but how about for the “fuzzy” topics such as literature?

Without reading the book, I could hand in a paper about Steinbeck’s East of Eden that would easily get at least a B+ (A-territory with Fable) and thus know that the book has a theme of free will, but still be unable to explain how the concept of choice in America changed after WWI and what the effects of that might be today. I could generate a paper on the similarities between Nick Carroway from The Great Gatsby and Richard Papen from The Secret History but be completely unable to explain how an unreliable narrator impacts a story (though I wouldn’t have even made the connection in the first place if I hadn’t read the book).

These books changed my worldview only because of the work I’d already done: struggling through dense prose, learning AP US History, and reading Genesis and The Great Gatsby again and again. I had these insights because I thought about the “facts” (in this case, the novels), added them to my existing schemas, and drew new connections.

And those insights will allow me to “think critically” about the next news article I read.

So, to recap this article:

• If you want to think critically, you need to know facts.

• If you want to know facts, you can’t let a chatbot generate them.

Scholar’s Sources: For the kids who love science…

One of my 4th-grade students at Alpha NYC loves science. In fact, she loves it so much that she created her own podcast on quantum physics (yes, I’m serious) called Quantumplations. Because of her absolute love of the subject, she’s been able to articulate what she wants out of AI-powered learning for it: namely, visual models and virtual experiments. So when I saw this post, I knew I had to share it for her and any of the other science-obsessed kids out there. The account (the very same one that created the graphic of everything a kid learns in elementary school) has a ton of online modeling/experiments that kids can play with, so even those who don’t have podcasts called Quatumplations would enjoy these science games.

Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y’all on Sunday.

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Kids have stopped reading (but summer is the perfect time to get them to start)

2. How to get your middle schooler to pick up a book

3. Scholar’s Sources: What to put in front of them

About two months ago I wrote #216, about why summer reading matters and some ways to make it happen. However, a lot of the replies told the same story: the kid hasn’t touched a book in weeks, the library trip didn’t take, and reading has somehow become a fight.

As someone whose parents had to physically take books out of my hands, this is something I care deeply about fixing. So, if you have a middle schooler who just doesn’t seem to be into reading, this is for you.

Kids have stopped reading (but summer is the perfect time to get them to start)

Before anything else: if that’s your house, you haven’t failed at anything. A kid who reads on his own all summer is unfortunately rare now, and I want to show you exactly how rare, because I don’t think most parents have looked at these numbers recently.

In 2025, 14% of 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day. In 1984 it was 35%, and even in 2012 it was still 27%. Meanwhile, 31% of 13-year-olds now say they never or hardly ever read for fun, up from 22% a decade ago. So the never-readers outnumber the daily readers by more than two to one, and among the lowest-scoring kids, the never-readers are 42%. I’ve tried to find a gentler word for this than collapse and I don’t have one.

People like to blame the pandemic, but the scores started sliding years before COVID. On the 2024 NAEP, a third of 8th graders scored “below basic,” the largest share in the history of the test. And on the long-term trend, today’s 13-year-olds score one point higher than kids did in 1971. Ten points on that test is roughly a grade level, so the drop since 2012 means kids are finishing about a grade behind where the same kids would have landed ten years ago. Maybe they’ll bounce back. People keep telling me they will. Nothing in the data says so yet.

There’s also a timing piece that I think matters. Scholastic has surveyed kids about their reading habits for years, and frequency falls off a cliff at age nine. 57% of eight-year-olds read five or more days a week. Among nine-year-olds it’s 35%, in middle school 21%, in high school 15%. And it never rebounds. If your kid is somewhere between nine and thirteen and drifting away from books, this is roughly when it gets decided.

One more stat, take it for whatever it’s worth: Scholastic found that kids who rarely read report more anxiety than frequent readers (50% vs. 39%), more sadness (37% vs. 25%), and more loneliness (30% vs. 19%).

How to get your middle schooler to pick up a book

If you’re having trouble getting your middle schooler to read, you’re not alone. Pushing them doesn’t work because they’re eleven or twelve or thirteen, and at that age they’re reading you as closely as you’re reading them. When you push reading, what they hear is that you think they’re behind, and they take the pressure as a verdict and dig in.

Teenagers aren’t lazy or irrational, they’re wired to protect their status and to bristle at being condescended to (as discussed by Dr. David Yeager), and a parent playing enforcer trips exactly that wire. So don’t be the enforcer. Your job is to make reading the easiest, most obvious thing within arm’s reach and then get out of the way, which conveniently means the parent who does less tends to win. Every idea below can be done tired, on a random Tuesday, while you’re doing something else.

One thing to hold in mind as you read the list. If your kid spends hours on the wiki for their favorite game, or deep in a subreddit about a show, or reading every comment under a highlight reel, that kid is a reader. Maybe not the version you picture when you say the word, but every one of those pages is vocabulary and comprehension and background knowledge stacking up. So you’re not building a reader from scratch. You’re showing a kid who already reads for hours a day that a book can scratch the same itch.

1. Let them buy garbage.

Graphic novels. Dog Man. The novel based on the video game, the book spun off a YouTube channel, whatever they actually want. Veto nothing.

I know how this sounds, but reading doesn’t have to be good to count. The research is about words, how many and how often, and a graphic novel has words. A joke book has words. A manga about a kid training to be a ninja has words, and your kid will inhale four volumes of it in a week. Worry about taste later. Right now you’re building a habit, and the habit comes first. Your entire job in the store is to keep your mouth shut, which is harder than it sounds but is technically nothing.

2. Read chapter one out loud. Then leave.

Pick the book you’re hoping they’ll try and read the first chapter out loud, in the car or on the couch or wherever. Then stop, put it down somewhere they’ll see it, and go do something else. Don’t ask if they want more, and don’t hover.

Chapter one is the expensive part of any book. You’re meeting people, getting your bearings, and it feels like work right up until it doesn’t. If you pay that part for them, a lot of kids will pick the book back up on their own just to find out what happens. They won’t tell you that’s what they’re doing. They’ll just do it.

And if performing a read-aloud for a twelve-year-old is not happening tonight, fine. Play the free audiobook sample of chapter one on Libby while you make dinner. It does the same job, and a professional narrator handles it while you chop onions.

3. The bedtime loophole.

Tell them in the first week of summer: stay up as late as you want, as long as you’re reading.

That’s the whole rule. There’s nothing to check and nothing to enforce, and you go to bed at your normal time. The price of staying up is a book, and staying up is the thing they want most in the world right now.

Say it as a standing rule, not something you mention once and forget. They’ll game it immediately, midnight every night, bragging to their friends about it, and that’s fine. The 90th-percentile kid in that 1988 study was reading 21 minutes a day. One gamed bedtime doubles that. You come out ahead on this trade every single time.

4. Start the audiobook before anyone objects.

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. How to build a perfect Alpha Summer

2. Scholar’s Sources: Your Alpha Summer builder

Alpha Summer in the Hamptons starts tomorrow and I’m so excited for it. Not only do we have current students coming who “just want to go to Alpha over the summer” (proof our students would rather go to school than vacation perhaps?), but a ton of prospective and incoming families who want to experience Alpha before next year.

From running Survivor with the winner of the third ever season of the show, Ethan Zohn, to learning to surf and making your own boards, to actually building a Trojan horse and lighting it on fire, this summer is packed with incredible activities.

However, if you’re not in New York, I don’t want you to miss out on the incredible experiences your child can have this summer. So, I’ve created a mini, at-home version of Alpha Summer that you can run with your kid. (Check out the link in Scholar’s Sources to create your own personalized summer plan.)

Quick aside before we start: if Alpha Summer is happening in your city, just go sign up. Nothing in this newsletter beats being in a room with fifteen other kids who are also grinding, run by trained guides. But for the families who don’t have access this year, this newsletter is the next best thing.

How to build a perfect Alpha Summer

At-home Alpha Summer runs on two short blocks: first a focused hour of mastery academics, then about an hour on one hands-on side quest.

The academic hour consists of two pomodoros across two different subjects (for example, math and reading one day, reading and science the next). Short enough that your kid shows up with effort instead of procrastination, and because every subject comes back around on rotation, none of them rots for two months while you’re not looking.

Kids who go totally dark on schoolwork over the summer lose ground, but the usual fix of random worksheets at the kitchen table until everyone hates each other by ten in the morning is worse than the problem it’s solving.

Two focused 25-minute sessions on good adaptive, AI-powered software beats any amount of halfhearted review, even hours of it, and the hard stop is part of the reason. “You’re done in less than an hour” is a completely different ask than “do some math today.” And, you’ll be able to track exactly what your kid has done over the summer and where they’ve grown.

(Check out the link in Scholar’s Sources for a personalized app recommendation for your kid.)

The side quests have a new theme every week. For example, one week, a student might do side quests around kitchen & hospitality, the next on money & business, and so on. Each day they spend about an hour doing a quest, learning life skills alongside a fun activity.

These life skills are the part I care about most. Grit. Financial sense. Self-reliance. Attention to detail. Being able to stand up and talk. None of those skills come out of an app. They come from doing things with stakes, like cooking a meal someone’s going to eat, running a small budget with no safety net, teaching a recipe to a younger sibling and watching it fall apart because the instructions were bad.

Here’s an example of what a week for a 4th-grader named Maya might look like:

Mornings are two pomodoros across two subjects: Math Academy for fractions, Lalilo for fluency (she’s almost tested out of it; Membean’s probably next). It ends at 10:00. She knows that. That’s the deal.

Afternoons, one quest a day (taken directly from the Alpha Summer Builder on the Kitchen & Hospitality track):

• Monday: Knife Skills, Level 2. Julienne three vegetables, consistent half-inch thickness, parent signs off on how even they are. Skill: attention to detail — the kind that carries into anything where precision compounds, from cooking to carpentry to code.

• Tuesday: Grocery Math. Predict the total on a six-item receipt before checkout, then check it against the real number. Two rounds in a row within 15% to pass. Skill: estimating before you commit, and catching where your assumptions went wrong.

• Wednesday: Teach the Recipe. Walk a younger sibling through a dish step by step, then let them cook it from her words alone. Skill: communication. Good instructions are a skill, not a personality trait, and she learns that fast the first time her sibling botches it.

• Thursday: Plating for Guests. Plate the same dish three ways, photograph each, and present them to the family with a reason for each choice. Skill: presentation. Making a thing and showing a thing are not the same job.

• Friday: Menu on a Budget. Plan a two-course dinner for four on exactly $18. Write the shopping list and do the math before any money moves. Skill: planning under a real ceiling, which hits differently than an open-ended budget.

Every pass line is written down before she starts. She cleared it or she didn’t, and a parent can call that with common sense, no teacher’s rubric required.

Older kids get harder versions of the same quests. Thursday’s plating challenge for a 14-year-old might mean a written cost-per-plate and a pitch like she’s opening a restaurant. Younger kids get more support built in: do it alongside them the first day, step back on the second.

And when she doesn’t pass? “You didn’t hit the line. Try again tomorrow.” That’s the whole conversation. It’s also how grit gets built, in showing up to the same hard thing the next morning.

In a single week, Maya practiced fractions, learned to read and follow a recipe, plated a meal, budget for a meal, and taught someone else her recipe. She also got told “you didn’t hit it, try again tomorrow” at least once and came back the next day anyway.

That’s grit. That’s hospitality. That’s attention to detail. That’s following directions under real conditions. That’s, frankly, more useful than half of what a 4th grader does in school.

She’s nine.

The side quests work because each one is small enough to finish in under an hour, specific enough to have a real pass bar, and pointed at something bigger so she can feel the through-line.

This is how you put together an Alpha summer for your kid without a camp in sight. Two short hours a day, one of focused academics and one of real-world quests, and a kid who spends the whole summer getting better. At math, at real skills, at being a person who can do hard things and finish them.

Two hours, then out.

Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

This week’s source is the tool itself: the Alpha Summer Builder. Everything discussed in this issue (the morning academic rotation, the themed weekly quests, the pass criteria, the end-of-summer recap) is built right into it. Answer a couple of questions and it prints a full summer plan for your own kid. It’s the closest thing to an Alpha summer you can run at your kitchen table, and the best place to start is by building one and taping it to the fridge.

One note: the builder is for paid subscribers. If you’re not one yet, this is the week to upgrade. You’ll get the link and can build your kid’s plan today.

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The three things that actually make a kid love learning

2. A summer playbook for building all three

3. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

This last Thursday was the final day of Alpha NYC’s first year, and the final day of my internship there. I left the end-of-year party with a tote bag of photos with the kids and a kind of grief I wasn’t expecting. I went in thinking I’d make some workshops and teach a few life skills. What actually happened is I watched two ten-year-olds pitch a business to an investor, a middle schooler design a curriculum for the younger kids and then teach it, and a fourth grader corner me to explain why everyone should love quantum physics. I left believing in kids more than I did in September. They are capable of so much more than the adults around them usually let them try, and I am going to miss them a lot.

I’ve also been thinking about them all week because two weeks ago I wrote about motivation, and the inbox response was basically one question, asked twenty different ways: okay, but how do I get my kid to actually love learning?

So that’s what this week is about.

The three things that actually make a kid love learning

The story most parents have been sold is that loving learning is a personality trait. Some kids have it, some kids don’t.

I don’t buy it. After watching hundreds of kids at Alpha (including my younger sister, who just graduated and is one of the most well-read teenagers I know) and after going through it myself, I think a love of learning is three things stacked on top of each other.

Here are the three:

1. Kids love things they’re good at.

2. Kids love things their friends respect.

3. Kids come out of the womb curious.

1. Kids love things they’re good at

I am a math major at Stanford. I would have bet you a thousand dollars at 12 years old that this sentence would never be true.

I struggled through math for a long time. I felt like I was spending ten times longer on it than the rest of my peers, and I always just felt like there was something missing, like everyone else had been handed a key that I had not. I was getting through it, but I wasn’t enjoying it, and I definitely wasn’t in love with it.

The thing that flipped it was a book, and I am only a little embarrassed about why I picked the book up. I was at a bookstore in Oxford (long story), and I wanted to seem smart, so instead of grabbing the romance novel I actually wanted, I walked over to the math section and pulled down Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. I thought I was going to skim three pages and put it back. I ended up reading it cover to cover.

Strogatz doesn’t open with the chain rule. He opens with the idea that calculus is what happens when you take any curved, complicated, continuous thing in the universe and slice it into infinitely many simple pieces, analyze those, and add them back together. That’s the whole game. Once I actually understood what calculus was, I had this overwhelming reaction of oh my god, this is the most beautiful thing humans have ever invented. And then, the very next semester, I was good at it. A year later, I’m a math major and genuinely love it.

Competence first, love second. Pretty much every time.

The research is consistent on this. A 2023 longitudinal review in Annual Review of Psychology by Eccles and Wigfield found that whether a kid feels competent at a subject right now is a stronger predictor of whether she’ll value it five years from now than basically anything else — including how fun the subject is or how good her teacher was. Ryan and Deci’s whole self-determination framework names the same thing: competence is one of the three psychological needs without which intrinsic motivation never really gets off the ground.

The parent move here is the one that feels backwards: stop trying to make the subject fun, and start making sure your kid is actually getting good at it. A kid who is two grade levels behind in math will never love math. A kid who hits mastery on their multiplication facts in second grade starts to enjoy math, because every problem they meet from then on feels solvable instead of humiliating.

2. Kids love things their friends respect

You all know I love David Yeager’s 10 to 25. I have brought it up in essentially every other newsletter for the last six months, and I’m going to keep doing it, because it really is the best book on adolescent motivation I have ever read and it is applicable to almost everything I write about.

Yeager’s whole argument is that from roughly age 10 onward, anything that gets coded as a route to status and respect inside your kid’s actual social world becomes massively motivating, and anything that doesn’t gets tuned out. This is why “because it’s good for you” doesn’t land for a 13-year-old. The kid doesn’t need a better lecture about long-term outcomes. She needs a route to look impressive in front of the people whose opinions she actually cares about.

The reason I’m bringing him up again, though, is that I think we usually only apply this to the bad behaviors (i.e. teens vape because their friends think it’s cool) and miss that it works exactly the same way in the other direction. Teens read Dostoyevsky because their friends will respect them for it. Same mechanism. We’re the ones who get to point it at something worth reading.

My sister is the example I know best. She didn’t grow up loving heavy books. She figured out around 14 that having read a serious book gave her the upper hand in basically any argument with her friends. The book was a weapon, and she found that the weapon worked. She kept reading harder books, kept winning arguments, and somewhere between Crime and Punishment and her senior year of high school, the weapon became the thing. She just graduated, and at this point, she will, unprompted, lecture you on The Brothers Karamazov. The status was the on-ramp. The love of literature and philosophy showed up after.

It also means a kid’s friend group does most of the work, for better or worse. In a friend group where being well-read is high status, your kid will read; in one where caring about school is cringe, she really, really won’t. The peer environment is essentially the variable, from middle school on. This is one of the reasons Alpha works the way it does: when everyone in the building is hitting mastery and getting publicly recognized for it, being good at school is the high-status move, not the embarrassing one.

The parent move here is to take the status question seriously instead of pretending kids should be above it. They aren’t. You weren’t either at 14. Ask yourself: in my kid’s actual social world, what gets respect? And is there a version of learning that earns respect inside that world? For my sister, it was winning arguments. For other kids it’s a YouTube channel, a side business, a sport, a band, a chess rating, a math competition, a debate trophy, a publishable essay. Whatever it is, you’re looking for the same shape: a public arena, a bar to clear, and an audience whose opinion the kid genuinely wants.

3. Kids come out of the womb curious

This is the piece most “love of learning” advice leads with, and the one that actually requires the least work from you.

Every kid arrives on this planet curious. They get obsessed with bugs. They want to know why the sky is blue, why ice floats, how the toilet works, whether the dog can see the same colors they can, what happens if you put this thing in your mouth. A 2007 paper by Michelle Chouinard in the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development actually counted: preschoolers ask something like 100 information-seeking questions an hour with a parent who’ll answer them. A hundred. That’s not a typo.

You don’t have to give your kid curiosity because they came with it. The job is to not break it, which, depressingly, is most of what school accidentally does. Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist at Williams who has spent her whole career on this, has documented that the rate of spontaneous student questions falls off a cliff in elementary school, sometimes all the way to literally zero questions per hour of class. It isn’t that the kids became less curious. It’s that the classroom around them stopped being interested in their curiosity.

A summer playbook for building all three

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Does your high schooler want to change the world?

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

This week, I’m going to tell you about one of the projects at Alpha that I’ve not only spent the most time on, but also been the most proud of. When I was a junior in high school, my sister, my friend, and I went to Ukraine and Hungary to launch 2 Hour Learning in schools with refugees from the war, and it completely changed my life and how I think about the world. This project is that experience times a million, and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

Does your high schooler want to change the world?

You know the question that sits underneath everything I write here: if a student can master their academics in two focused hours a day, what should they do with the rest of their time?

At Alpha, the answer has always been about centering the afternoons around workshops, passion projects, masterpieces, and life skills. That answer changed my life, and I’ve spent four years on this newsletter explaining why.

Alpha World School takes that same question and gives a much, much bigger answer.

A full school year. Three continents. Kenya, Ecuador, and the United States. Mornings spent staying academically ahead through 2 Hour Learning. And the rest of every single day spent doing real work, with real communities, where the outcomes actually matter.

(There’s only 20 spots, so every student is truly known.

If you’re curious whether it’s right for your child, the next step is a quick 20-min call, no commitment.)

First, the part every parent asks about

Let’s get the academic question out of the way.

This is Alpha, so the academics don’t pause. They don’t “integrate into the experience” in some hand-wavy way where a hike counts as biology. Every morning, wherever the cohort is (New York, Kenya, or Ecuador) students do their two-hour learning block on Alpha’s AI-powered platform, with the same mastery-based progression, same AP preparation, and the same expectation of performing in the top percentiles nationally.

The two-hour block is treated as inviolable, because the entire premise of World School only works if the academics are bulletproof. The time students get back is only valuable if nothing was sacrificed to get it.

So a World School student finishes the year with a transcript that looks like a top Alpha student’s transcript. That’s the floor. Everything else is built on top of it.

What the rest of the day looks like

Here’s where it stops looking like any high school you’ve seen.

World School students spend their year working on real projects with real stakes. They help launch 2 Hour Learning in partner schools in Kenya and Ecuador. They work on solar power installation, internet access, clean water, and school infrastructure. They’re building systems that will educate children in these communities for decades after the cohort flies home.

I want to be clear about what that means, because “students help communities abroad” is a sentence that has been worn down into meaninglessness by a thousand service-trip brochures.

Think about what 2 Hour Learning actually is. It’s an adaptive learning system that lets every student learn at exactly their level, at exactly their pace, with a personal tutor’s worth of attention, and it doesn’t care whether the student is in Austin or a village outside Nairobi. The thing that has always limited world-class education isn’t the technology anymore. It’s the infrastructure around it. Power. Internet. A building. Someone to set it up.

That’s what World School students spend their year building. The pipes through which the best education in the world can flow to kids who were never going to get it any other way.

A school in rural Kenya that gets solar power, internet access, and a 2 Hour Learning launch this year doesn’t just serve this year’s students. It serves every class that walks through its doors for the next thirty years. Multiply that across partner schools, across two continents, across systems designed from day one to scale, and the students in this cohort are laying the foundation for something that can reach millions of kids in South America and Africa. Kids who currently have no path to an education like this. Kids whose entire trajectory changes because a sixteen-year-old spent a year making sure the system got built right.

I know there’s a certain kind of student reading this, or a parent who’s raising one. The kid who says “I want to change the world” and means it, and then looks around at what high school actually offers them and feels something deflate. Because here’s what we offer world-changer kids: Model UN. Case competitions. A fundraiser. Simulations of impact, practice rounds for a game they’re told they can play for real in fifteen years, after the degrees, after the entry-level jobs, after they’ve waited their turn.

World School is built for exactly that kid, and its answer is: you don’t have to wait. There is a difference between pretending to negotiate a resolution about clean water access and standing in a community in Kenya where the water system you helped set up either works or it doesn’t. One of those is practice. The other one is the thing itself. And these students get the thing itself at sixteen, working alongside community leaders, presenting their progress every week, and are held accountable for measurable impact by people who are genuinely counting on them.

When you treat teenagers like they’re capable of real work, they tend to do real work. I’ve watched this happen at Alpha for ten years.

The research layer

There’s a third piece to layer on top of this already incredible program.

Alongside the fieldwork, every World School student pursues an AlphaX research project, which is a serious, graduate-level inquiry mentored by professors, PhDs, and researchers from institutions like Harvard, MIT, Penn, Stanford, and Columbia. The kind of work that can become publishable research.

And the research isn’t separate from the travel. Students develop their questions before departure, then spend a year with access to primary sources most researchers would kill for: communities, leaders, systems, and problems they can actually observe up close. A sixteen-year-old studying educational technology adoption gets to watch a 2 Hour Learning launch happen in real time, on the ground, in a Kenyan school. There is no university seminar on earth that can offer that.

If this program seems exciting to you, learn more and ask the World School team questions at the info session this Friday.

Okay, now let me tell you about the pre-departure program

This is the part I’ve been working on, and y’all, I’m so excited about it that I’ve been physically restraining myself from leading with it.

Before the cohort ever gets on a plane, they spend four weeks together in New York City. And the design philosophy behind those four weeks is simple: treat fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds like the adults they’re about to need to be.

These four weeks are a ramp. Students get fluent in the Alpha system and start learning Swahili from the very first day. They earn a real Wilderness & Remote First Aid certification, the same one Scouting America delivers, with scenarios tilted toward exactly what they might face abroad. They film a Swahili self-introduction on top of Rockefeller Center and send it home to their families that night.

Then it gets academic, in the best way. Students go behind the scenes at an anthropology research wing and handle East Africa fieldwork archives the public never sees. They learn to build multi-agent AI research teams — not “how to use ChatGPT,” but how to orchestrate specialized research agents the way a principal investigator runs a lab, then verify every claim against primary sources by hand. They interview Kenyan diplomats and diaspora community members across the city. And at the end of week three, every student pitches candidate research questions to a panel that includes an Ivy League professor.

The final week is the validation of their hard work:

• A live Swahili conversation evaluation with native speakers.

• A live research-method demonstration.

• A full audit of their academic growth.

Four weeks. By the end of it, every student has a wilderness medical cert, functional conversational Swahili, a working AI research methodology validated by a university professor, and a cohort they’d trust with their life. Most high schoolers don’t accumulate that in four years.

Who this is for

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I believe the highest-leverage thing education can do is give students back their time and then take them seriously. Every piece of learning science I’ve ever written about points in the same direction: mastery-based academics, real stakes, genuine contribution, adults who hold the bar high and believe kids can clear it.

World School is all of that, compressed into one year, stretched across three continents. But I want to be honest about who this program is really for, because it’s not for everyone.

It’s for the kid who feels it physically when they read about children who will never learn to read. The kid who has been told “you can make a difference someday” so many times that the word “someday” has started to feel like an insult. The kid who doesn’t want a line on a resume that says they care about the world, but instead they want proof that the world is different because of them.

If that’s your kid, here is what World School actually offers them: the chance to be one of the people who builds the system. Not volunteers at it. Not raises awareness about it. Builds it. The schools they help launch, the solar panels they help install, the internet access they help establish… these are the first pieces of an education infrastructure designed to reach millions of students across Africa and South America. Students who, without it, would never have access to anything close to a world-class education. Not because they’re less capable. Because nobody gave them the opportunity.

A World School student gets to spend a year of high school personally providing students with that opportunity. And then they get to spend the rest of their life knowing that somewhere, right now, there are kids learning in a school that exists partly because of work they did at sixteen. Kids whose kids will learn there too.

The goal was never just to help students see the world. The goal is to help them become the kind of people who can change it, and to let them start now, instead of someday. By the end of the year, they’ll have lived on three continents, built something that lasts, conducted meaningful research, kept their academics at the top of the country, and built the kind of story no transcript can tell.

If I could be sixteen again for one year, this is what I’d do with it.

You can learn more at world.alpha.school.

Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

Last week’s newsletter on motivation got a great comment pointing out that I skipped Roland Fryer’s research, and the commenter was right, so let’s fix that, because Fryer’s work is some of the strongest experimental evidence we have on this exact question.

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The mainstream understanding of motivation is totally wrong

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

One year ago I published the most-replied-to edition of this newsletter I’ve ever written. The argument was that everyone, from educators to parents to researchers, along with basically every TED Talk from 2010 to 2020, has been telling the wrong story about motivation. Extrinsic motivation isn’t the villain. Waiting for your kid to “discover their love of learning” before giving them a real goal is a strategy for getting nothing done.

Most readers loved it, but some pushed back. And a handful sent me enough follow-up questions that I’ve spent the last few months going deeper into the research, so that’s what I want to talk about today.

The mainstream understanding of motivation is totally wrong

Every conversation about motivation in schools eventually traces back to two experiments.

In 1971, psychologist Edward Deci had college students work on a puzzle. One group got paid $1 per session. The other didn’t. When the experimenter left the room, the paid students voluntarily spent less time on the puzzles (3.3 minutes on average, compared to 6.1 for the unpaid group). The headline: money kills motivation.

Two years later, at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, researchers Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett watched preschoolers who already loved drawing. Some were promised a “Good Player Award” (a certificate with a gold seal and red ribbon) for drawing. Others got the same award as a surprise afterward. Others got nothing. Weeks later, the kids who’d been promised the award drew for 8.59% of their free-choice time. Kids who got nothing? 16.73%.

Education saw those two numbers and ran with it. Teachers were told to avoid rewards. Programs that paid kids to read books got criticized for “corrupting” intrinsic motivation. An entire pedagogy was built on one study from 1973.

But the studies had a problem.

The expected-reward students got their prize for simply showing up, so there was no incentive to keep going once they had it. The extrinsic motivator was attached to attendance, not performance.

The reward was also a symbolic certificate, so not meaningful money or something the kid actually wanted.

This goes back to the Deci puzzle study too, which used one dollar to motivate college students. I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but as a college student myself, I wouldn’t spend a bunch of energy on a project for that ($7.50, adjusted for inflation).

Both studies tested the narrowest possible version of the question: what happens when you put a trivial, generic reward on top of something someone already does for free? That’s all the evidence the education world used to decide external motivation corrupts children.

But that conclusion didn’t hold up under any stress-testing whatsoever.

What the larger body of research actually says

By 1994, researchers Judy Cameron and W. David Pierce reviewed 96 experimental studies and found that, across the literature, rewards don’t decrease intrinsic motivation. The only negative effect appeared under one specific condition: when expected tangible rewards were given for showing up, regardless of performance. That’s it. The problem was never “rewards.” It was lazy, participation-contingent, impersonal rewards that told a child the task was so trivial they needed to be bribed to do it.

The paper that actually settled the question came in 2014. Christopher Cerasoli, Jessica Nicklin, and Michael Ford published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 183 studies and 212,468 participants across school, work, and athletic domains. They asked something nobody had thought to ask: not whether extrinsic rewards replace intrinsic motivation, but whether both types work together to drive performance.

And they found that they do. Completely. Intrinsic motivation predicted performance even when extrinsic incentives were present. The two didn’t cancel each other out.

What SDT actually says

Self-Determination Theory, the most empirically validated motivation framework in psychology, developed by Deci and Ryan, is almost always summarized as “intrinsic motivation good, extrinsic bad.” That’s a misread.

What Deci and Ryan actually argued is that motivation exists on a spectrum of internalization. On one end: pure external regulation, where your child does homework because they’ll lose the iPad if they don’t. On the other: genuine intrinsic motivation, where they do it because they find it fascinating and can’t stop.

But between those extremes are two zones most parents have never heard of. Identified regulation: the child understands why the task matters to them personally, even if it isn’t fun. “I don’t love fractions, but I need them to be a fashion designer.” That’s what my sister’s Guide told her when she was refusing to do fractions. He didn’t lecture her about the importance of math. Instead, he used what he knew about how she wanted to design clothes and made the connection in her terms.

Integrated regulation goes one step further: the work becomes part of how the kid sees themselves. “I’m the kind of person who does hard things.”

The external reward is what gets them moving, but the identity is what keeps them going. They don’t compete; one creates the conditions for the other.

What Yeager adds

David Yeager (a psychology professor at UT Austin and author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People) takes these ideas into biology.

His research found that around age ten, puberty rewires the brain to become acutely sensitive to social rewards: status, admiration, respect. An adolescent who seems to care more about looking competent in front of peers than about the content itself isn’t being shallow. They’re being driven by a brain calibrated for social recognition.

That matters for the rewards debate in a way that doesn’t come up enough. External recognition from someone a teenager actually respects, like a Guide who knows their goals and their struggles, might be the most motivating thing that exists.

Yeager also found something he calls purpose beyond self: when students connect their work to something larger than their own grade (such as their family, a future they’re building, or people they want to help) they show stronger academic self-regulation and deeper processing of material. It’s not purely intrinsic motivation. It’s not purely extrinsic. Purpose is its own category, and it’s one of the best predictors of persistence the research has turned up.

That’s exactly what the Alpha model is built around, even if nobody there is citing Deci and Ryan by name.

What Alpha does

Alpha School has an in-school store called the Emporium.

Students earn a school currency called Alphas for academic progress, hitting goals, showing up consistently, and performing well. Then they spend them at the Emporium on things like snacks, privileges, small prizes, and stuffed animals.

And because Alpha’s Guides spend almost no time on lesson planning, they pour that time into figuring out what each individual kid actually cares about. What would make this child want to push harder? What does this one find embarrassing to fail at? What does this one light up about? The Guides then stock that item in the Emporium, buy tickets to that experience, or talk with parents about coming to have lunch with their kid if they meet their weekly goals.

Alpha also pays students money for academic performance.

Score 100% on a grade-level test? That’s $100. Hit the 99th percentile nationwide on the MAP assessment for your grade? $1,000.

When most educators hear this, they immediately invoke the overjustification effect and claim that paying kids to learn will destroy their love of learning. The research doesn’t support that concern for performance-contingent rewards. And the lived experience at Alpha doesn’t either.

What the research actually predicts is something closer to what I’ve watched happen. My sister is the clearest example. She wasn’t drawn to academic learning the way I was. Without some kind of external pull, she’d do the minimum. But with the right incentive tied to something meaningful and a performance standard she had to hit, she accomplished things she didn’t believe were possible. The $1,000 MAP goal didn’t replace her internal drive. It brought it out of her. She worked hard enough to discover she was actually capable of high-level math. Once she knew that, the capability became part of her identity. The external motivation and the internal motivation were building on each other, exactly the way Cerasoli’s meta-analysis describes.

The Guides at Alpha understand this intuitively. They know some kids are motivated by money, some by social time with friends, some by unlocking a specific privilege, some by the challenge itself. The job of a Guide is to figure out which one, and then connect that pull to a performance standard worth reaching.

What to try at home

1. Purpose-linking

When your kid is resisting something, don’t argue about whether it matters. Ask them what they want to be able to do someday. Then pull the thread. Fractions lead to scaling patterns that lead to designing clothes. Fractions lead to calculating distances and understanding maps that lead to the trip they want to take. Keep going until you hit something they care about in their gut.

2. Make the reward meaningful

A sticker chart tells a kid their work is worth a sticker. A real reward tied to a real performance standard tells them their work is worth taking seriously. Think about what your child actually wants (not what you think they should want) and connect it to a specific goal they have to earn. A $100 payout for mastery looks irresponsible until you watch a kid who didn’t believe she was good at math spend six months proving otherwise.

3. Replace “good job” with something specific

“Good job” is honestly pretty meaningless. “You tried a completely different approach when the first one failed and that’s actually hard to do” is valuable. A 1999 Deci meta-analysis (separate from his 1971 puzzle study, this one looked across 128 experiments) found that positive feedback enhances intrinsic motivation by a larger effect size than most of the negative effects from tangible rewards. We’ve spent so long worrying about what not to do that we missed what actually works: telling a kid exactly what they did that was worth doing.

Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

I read a fascinating essay on AI in mathematics this week and wanted to share it along with the original piece that inspired it:

New Mathematical Workflows & A New Consciousness of Mathematics

I’ll start by summarizing the first essay, then move to the second. The most decorated mathematician alive breaks proof-writing into three stages: generation (come up with the argument), verification (confirm it’s airtight), and digestion (turn it into something a human can understand, teach, and build on). AI is racing through the first two; digestion, he says, stays “subjective and human-paced.” He has essentially handed us a map of which thinking makes sense to outsource and which doesn’t. Generation and verification are the “did you get the right answer” steps and are increasingly automatable. Digestion is the “can you explain it, connect it, teach it to someone else” step, and that’s the one that builds a real learner.

Another Stanford math student took that and explained how AI is getting frighteningly good at the parts of math that have a clear right answer (generating a proof, checking if it’s correct), but isn’t making much progress on the part that turns an answer into understanding. This is the exact tension playing out in all math classes right now, not just the ones at university-level. She also explains how “getting it done” and “getting it” have become two different activities, and that traditional school still mostly measures the first one.

Honestly this conflicts a lot with how I think about using AI backed in learning science to teach math, but it’s interesting food for thought, and you know me, I love interesting ways of thinking about mathematics.

Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y’all on Sunday.

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Why Alpha’s three commitments are the core of its success

2. How to replicate the magic of Alpha’s three commitments at home

Before we get into this week’s newsletter, I have a quick ask for you. I’m working on something new for parents, and I want it grounded in the nightly reality you’re living. So: what is the hardest part of weeknights with your kid right now? Homework, dinner, screens, the time between activities and bed… whatever it actually is. Hit reply and tell me in one sentence.

Twelve years ago, Alpha was MacKenzie Price, a lead guide (Brian), and a very small group of kids in a garage in Austin. Today there are campuses across the country, proprietary apps, expansive programs, and hundreds of guides. When people hear that arc, they assume the interesting part of the story is the scale. I think the more interesting part is what didn’t change, because that’s the whole reason any of it works. When I enrolled it was less than thirty students, then we moved to a bigger campus, then split into two campuses, then opened a location in Brownsville, then Dallas, San Francisco, Miami, and the rest is history.

The building got bigger. The number of guides went up. The cities, the tools, the programs… most of what you see when you tour an Alpha campus today is new. But the thing that never changed is the three commitments that existed before the first kid ever walked through the door:

1. Kids love school.

2. Kids learn twice as fast in two hours a day.

3. Kids build life skills.

That is the entire model. I know that doesn’t sound like much to support an entire school. But every other decision (campus design, hiring, schedule, currency system, even what’s for lunch) is a downstream consequence of those three commitments, and the discipline of refusing to renegotiate them is the reason Alpha works.

I’m going to walk through each commitment, share the research that says they aren’t arbitrary, and then give y’all a framework for running the same structure at home.

Where this came from

I have to start by saying that the commitments are not marketing language. Any kid at Alpha will tell you the same three lines without hesitation, because they’re a core part of the student experience.

One of the investing books I read last summer was Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. They spent years studying what separates companies that last from companies that don’t, and the finding was kind of counterintuitive: the most adaptable organizations are the ones with the most stable core ideology. 3M and Disney preserved a fixed set of values while everything else around them was free to evolve. The companies that tried to update their core values to chase whatever was trending fell apart.

Alpha understands that. The garage-to-nationwide arc looks like a growth story, but the actual story is about what we refused to let change.

Commitment 1: Kids love school

The first commitment tends to get dismissed as the soft one. Nice if you get it, but not really the point. I think that’s completely backwards, and the research agrees.

In 2000, psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci published what became one of the most cited papers in educational psychology: “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” in American Psychologist. Their core finding was that a kid’s intrinsic motivation to learn depends on three basic psychological needs being met at the same time: autonomy (I have some choice in what’s happening), competence (I’m getting better at something I can measure), and relatedness (someone here sees me and cares). When all three are present, engagement isn’t a struggle. When any one of them is missing, motivation degrades, often without anyone noticing why.

The hard part for traditional school is that it violates all three at once. The schedule is fixed, the pace is fixed, the content is fixed, and the adult-to-kid ratio makes real relatedness almost impossible.

Alpha has been mastering intrinsic motivation for the last twelve years. Here are some of the things that made me love Alpha back when I was in fourth grade and that are currently fostering a love of school in thousands of students:

• Kids can vote at Town Hall on new rules, new traditions, and anything they want to change about the school itself (that’s autonomy).

• They get specific, clear academic reports at the end of every session, and three times a year every Alpha kid takes the NWEA MAP test and gets to see their own growth, which is wildly more motivating than a letter grade (that’s competence).

• And the guides’ entire job is to know your kid, motivate them, and connect them to the material (that’s relatedness).

This love-of-school commitment worked in the original Alpha School in Brian’s garage, it works at the downtown Austin campus, and it works in the new schools launching across the country, from New York to Miami.

Commitment 2: Learn 2x in two hours a day

The second commitment is the one that gets the headlines: two hours a day for academics. Kids spend roughly two hours each morning on their laptops, working through adaptive apps that meet them exactly where they are.

The portability of this commitment is the part I love most. I did the two-hour day in Brian’s garage. Later I did it in a house, then in a wedding venue Alpha rented while we waited for a new campus to open, then on a Ninja Bus while we were traveling. The environment kept changing, but the two hours held. As long as that block was protected, the rest of the day could become almost anything (see the examples in the life skills section).

That’s the point. The two hours are what makes the love-of-school commitment and the life-skills commitment possible, because they free up the time and attention everything else requires.

Commitment 3: Kids build life skills

Alpha doesn’t teach life skills by lecturing students about grit. It builds situations and projects where kids have to actually practice the things most adults wish they had practiced earlier, like public speaking, giving and receiving feedback, leading a team, and solving a problem with stakes attached.

The workshops themselves change all the time. The commitment that they happen, every day, doesn’t. When I first showed up at Alpha ten years ago, I was learning how to be an expert and how to problem-solve by building trebuchets that had to launch a grapefruit 60 feet, and I was practicing public speaking and critical thinking in a Model UN workshop. Today, Alpha students are running food trucks, training for Spartan Races, and pitching businesses.

The locations, ages, and workshops differ, but the commitment is the same.

A framework for the three commitments at home

Most families have values and goals, but if you ask a parent (or a kid) what their three non-negotiables are for how learning and growth happen in this house, most people won’t have a clean answer.

The question I want to ask is: what are the two or three things about how your kid learns and grows that you refuse to let any circumstance change? What stays true whether it’s a hard semester or an easy one? Whether your kid lands a great teacher or a terrible one? Whether it’s the first week of summer or the middle of finals?

Here are examples of what a family’s three commitments might look like (pick two or three, not all nine):

Read more

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The Alpha High Class of 2026

2. Scholar’s Sources: Where can you find them?

On Friday, I watched my sister graduate as valedictorian of Alpha High School, and I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of anything than being her older sister. Listening to her and the rest of the Class of 2026 reflect on where they’ve been and where they’re going was so moving. Some of these students, my sister among them, have spent a decade at Alpha. These are their stories.

Elle

I’ll let my sister go first, partly because I love bragging about her but partly because she earned it as valedictorian.

In second grade, Elle came home with a family portrait she’d drawn and labeled. Next to me, she wrote smart. Next to herself, she wrote dumb. She was seven. The traditional school she was attending had convinced her that was as good as she was going to get, mostly because she liked talking to her friends more than she liked listening to her teacher explain division.

Then she came to Alpha, where she climbed from the 50th to the 99th percentile. Which is incredible, of course, but more importantly, she stopped writing the word dumb under her own face.

And her achievements are not just academic. By the time she was a senior, Elle had built a mobile app called AskElle, which now has over 70,000 downloads. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. She submitted a paper to Nature and will be the first high school student published there. She runs research alongside professors of anthropology and psychology, and one of their assistants once asked her when her graduate school applications were due, assuming she was a PhD candidate.

Her AlphaX guide, Chloe, says Elle is the only student she has ever met who is equally good at “creating” and “distributing.” The AlphaX program traditionally requires students to post once a day; Elle posted seven times a day. When Chloe asked why, Elle shrugged: “How else am I supposed to know whether there’s a market for my idea?” That kind of comfort with putting yourself and your ideas out there is something I try to embody every day.

She also gives her time away. After a research meeting in which Elle out-jargon-ed Chloe on Zotero citations and data analysis techniques, a freshman walked up and asked Elle if she had thirty minutes to teach her how to grow an audience online. Chloe started to say Elle was too busy. Elle had already said yes.

I could talk all day about my sister, about her incredible achievements, character, and the way she made me cry during her valedictorian speech. If y’all are interested, I can absolutely post her entire speech on the newsletter, but for this week here was my favorite line: “Alpha’s job was never to make us great. It was to unlock what was already there.”

Sloane

I’ve known Sloane for her entire life, and watching her grow up and become such a kind, resilient, intelligent woman had been one of the best experiences of my life. Sloane now has over 2.3 million TikTok followers, and I’m not surprised one bit. Sloane has been writing little plays, filming docudramas, and writing stories for as long as I can remember. She is made for the screen and is truly the best role model for those millions of girls to look up to.

Sloane’s remarkable TikTok account didn’t start with a mission. It started for fun. But early on, when she had a few hundred thousand followers, she found out that one of her young viewers, a twelve-year-old girl, had taken her own life. Sloane has relived that moment in our conversation many times. Her exact words, which Chloe wrote down because she didn’t want to misremember them: “I know I wasn’t responsible for it. But I also know that if I’d known she was watching, I would have posted something very different the day before. And because of that, I have to post something very different every day, forever.”

She has, every day, since. Sloane has spent thousands of hours reading the research on teen girls’ mental health. She built a framework she calls The Coach Method, which teaches girls to talk to themselves the way a good coach would, generous, honest, motivating, rather than the cruel inner monologue most of them inherit by the time they’re twelve. When she shared it online, the video crossed 7 million views and the comments filled up with girls saying it had changed their lives.

To make the method available to anyone who needed it, Sloane learned to code and built an app called MindMail. Tens of thousands of people joined the waitlist within hours of the announcement.

Then, in classic Sloane fashion, she went looking for ways to help the next generation behind her. She pitched VCs, raised $500,000, and started an incubator for young women who already have audiences. Her thesis: too many girls with reach use it to promote other people’s brands and never realize they could be the founders themselves. She has signed three clients so far. One of them, a fifteen-year-old in the UK, launches her own app in a few weeks.

When prospective families tour Alpha, the running joke is that we have to confirm whether they’re there to see the school or to meet Sloane. She always says yes to the hallway conversation, no matter how tired she is.

Maddie

I first met Maddie when she was eight years old, and we bonded over singing duets and learning choreography. That very year, she put together a performance of Wicked at Alpha.

So when she told me she was going to write a musical that brought Gen Z to Broadway, I knew it was something she could do, but even I was blown away by her success.

By senior year, she had written, produced, and directed 355 the Musical, an original show about female spies in Revolutionary War-era New York. It is not a school play. Maddie has logged over 5,000 hours on it: researching the historical record, writing the script and the songs, cold-messaging hundreds of singers and songwriters on TikTok, booking studio sessions, hiring a band, and meeting with Broadway producers and entertainment lawyers. When she started posting clips online, the songs went viral. Her account passed 80,000 followers, millions of likes, and a comment section full of teenagers asking when they could buy tickets.

BroadwayWorld picked her up. A Tony Award-winning club in New York invited her to perform a showcase, which sold out so fast they brought her back for an encore. Her first single is at 170,000 streams on Spotify, with a second on the way. She is regularly in New York and Los Angeles meeting with producers to talk about deal structures.

The part of Maddie’s story I love most is the part where Capitol Records offered her a record deal. Most teenagers would have signed it in the parking lot. Maddie read the terms, ran her own legal analysis, called the lawyers she had retained for her own production company (which she set up as an LLC because she’s a minor and the labor laws in New York are complicated), and turned the deal down. She then explained, in writing, why the terms weren’t in her favor.

Chloe, who used to be a practicing attorney before she became an educator, jokes that she spends more time around lawyers now because of Maddie’s project than she ever did while she was actually a lawyer.

Maddie is also the reason Alpha now has a creative entrepreneurship track. She is the first student to prove that the AlphaX model works for art the same way it works for software.

Alex

Alex may have only joined Alpha in high school, but he fit into the community like he was always supposed to be there.

The first time I met Alex, he was a fourteen-year-old at a passion-project event Alpha hosted for prospective high schoolers. There had already been a babysitting business, a couple of tutoring services, and a clothing brand. Then Alex sat down and talked about Berry: an AI-powered plushie designed to address the youth mental health crisis. He had the research to back it up, could quote the anxiety and depression statistics for Gen Z, understood the insecurity loop, and had thoughts on how AI would reshape the toy industry.

Chloe asked him the standard follow-up: make the goal measurable. Most students at that stage say something like “reach a few thousand kids.” Alex said he wanted Berry on every teenager’s bed in the United States and across the world. He was admitted the following week on a full merit scholarship.

What I have learned about Alex since is that the ambition is the easy part. The work ethic is the rare part. Our AlphaX program requires every student to keep a research document called a BrainLift. The four-year goal is 25,000 words at an A grade. Alex hit it in month two. The funnier part of the story: corporations outside Alpha use the same software to score BrainLifts, and one day Alex’s document broke it. Tech support told us they had never, anywhere, seen a BrainLift that long. The tool literally could not process the volume of research he had put into it.

Alex was also unwilling to use his age as a crutch. He refused to pitch at teen-only pitch nights. He applied to pitch alongside adult founders at Capital Factory in Austin, got selected, and apparently did so well that the president of Capital Factory told us future Alpha students would have to go last because Alex’s pitch made the adult ones look bad.

He has now raised $100,000 in total funding for Berry from investors including Cactus Capital, 1517 Fund, and Hume AI, and his most recent valuation came in at $15 million. He is sixteen.

The best Alex story, though, is the lawyer story. He was working with a lawyer on a privacy policy. The moment Alex mentioned his age, the lawyer dismissed him as a high school project. Alex didn’t argue. He went home, read every privacy policy he could find from AI companies serving minors, taught himself the relevant law, and walked into his second meeting with a different lawyer who was so impressed he couldn’t dismiss him if he tried.

The thing about watching this class graduate is that they don’t talk about high school like it was a holding pen. They talk about it like it was the place that gave them permission to try. Maddie’s musical, Sloane’s app, Alex’s plushie, Elle’s research, none of them came from a curriculum. They came from a school that gave them their time back to do the work that was actually valuable and impactful for them.

I’ll close with Elle’s last line on Friday, which I have not been able to stop thinking about: “Most people spend their lives shaped by the world they inherited. Alpha taught us that the world is something you shape back. Alpha doesn’t change the world. We do. This school’s only real product is sitting in this room.”

Scholar’s Sources: Where can you find them?

• Elle’s published research & Elle’s TikTok advice account

• Sloane’s TikTok account

• Maddie’s TikTok 355 updates account

• Alex’s website & Berry Plushie website

Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y’all on Sunday.

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Why Alpha students stopped asking, “When am I ever going to use this?”

2. Why traditional school can’t solve the relevance problems

3. What it looks like when relevance is engineered in the program

My sister is graduating from Alpha High this Friday!! I’m so beyond proud of her and am the luckiest person in the world to be her older sister. She’s been working on an incredible valedictorian speech, so I’ll make sure to give y’all the highlights next week. Stay tuned for that newsletter where I’ll highlight the graduating class of Alpha 2026!!

Why Alpha students stopped asking, “When am I ever going to use this?”

Every teacher has heard the question, when am I ever going to use this, at least a hundred times. The standard answers come in three framings:

• “You’ll need it someday.”

• “It builds discipline.”

• “Because it’s on the test.”

All three are real answers and none of them are good ones, because none of them address what the kid actually said.

What the kid actually said is: I cannot find a single thread connecting this material to anything I care about, anything I recognize, or anything I will plausibly do, and I am asking you to give me one. The student has correctly identified that the lesson, as designed, will not stick and is asking for the missing connective tissue before they invest the effort.

And when the adult cannot supply that connective tissue, it makes sense that the kid stops trying. A long line of cognitive research, which we’ll get to in a second, says that material learned without a felt connection to the learner mostly evaporates. The learning science name for the missing ingredient is relevance.

And on that idea of learning science, let me dive into the four incredible papers that inspired the approach to relevance.

The dominant model of how interest develops in learners is Hidi and Renninger’s four-phase model: a learner moves from triggered situational interest (something in the material catches their attention), to maintained situational interest (they keep coming back), to emerging individual interest (they start re-engaging on their own), to well-developed individual interest (it becomes part of who they are). The model’s most important claim, for our purposes, is the first one: interest is not a fixed trait kids walk in with. It is a developmental sequence, and the entire sequence is gated on phase one, where something in the material itself has to trigger the kid. The kid who looks “unmotivated” in your classroom is, in nine cases out of ten, a kid whose teacher never got past that phase.

In a now-classic line of experiments by Hulleman and Harackiewicz and their collaborators, students asked to write brief reflections on how course material connected to their own lives showed measurable gains in both interest and performance. The effects were largest precisely for the students who were struggling most. This is the cleanest evidence we have that relevance is a manipulable variable that, when increased, produces real learning gains in real classrooms.

Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory argues that intrinsic motivation requires three things: autonomy (some control over what you do), competence (a sense you can actually do the thing), and relatedness (a sense it connects to people, places, or things you care about). Relevance is the key to unlocking the relatedness aspect.

Finally, a one-line nod to Brown, Collins, and Duguid’s 1989 paper on situated cognition: knowledge learned out of context tends to stay there. The chain rule learned only as “the chain rule” lives in a sealed compartment in the brain labeled “the chain rule,” and refuses to come out when a physics problem actually needs it. Pulling knowledge into the contexts a learner cares about is how knowledge becomes transferable in the first place.

Synthesize all four of these papers and the picture is unambiguous: kids learn when the material connects to them. The reason we have kept ignoring this is not that the research is contested. It is that connecting every kid to every piece of material, every day, has historically been logistically impossible.

That’s the part that recently changed.

Why traditional school can’t solve the relevance problem

Before I get to what changed, I want to make a point that I think gets skipped a lot in this conversation. The relevance failure in traditional school is not a teacher failure. I have had brilliant, devoted teachers who deeply believed in making material relevant and could not actually do it for me, because the structure of their job made it impossible.

The scaling problem. One teacher, thirty kids, one lesson plan. Even a teacher who believes in personalized relevance can hold the cognitive load of customizing for maybe two or three students at a time. The other twenty-seven get the generic version. Multiply across 180 instructional days and the median student has spent the entire year being taught material framed for someone else. This is the same shape as Bloom’s 1984 “2 Sigma” problem — the gap between what works one-on-one and what survives the ratio. Bloom was talking about mastery; the same logic applies to relevance. The thing that works at one-on-one doesn’t survive the ratio.

The textbook problem. Curriculum gets written for an imagined median student who does not exist. The reading passage is about baseball when half the class doesn’t watch baseball. The word problem is about a train when no one in the room has been on one. The historical example is the one in the textbook because it’s the one in the textbook. Publishing economics demands a single artifact that ships to every classroom in the country, so the artifact is calibrated to no one. The teacher’s options are to stick to the materials and bore most of the class, or to spend their evenings rebuilding the curriculum for the kids in front of them (which a small number of heroic teachers actually do, until they burn out).

The IOU problem. Because individualized relevance is structurally impossible, teachers fall back on deferred relevance: you’ll use this someday. Kids correctly intuit that “someday” is an IOU they cannot cash. They watch the adults around them and notice, accurately, that almost no one is actually using the polynomial long division they were promised they’d need. Motivation collapses. Compliance fills the gap, for a while, until it doesn’t, and the kid checks out.

None of this is anyone’s fault. It is what happens when you try to deliver individualized relevance to thirty kids with one adult, one textbook, and forty-five minutes. The bandwidth doesn’t exist. It never has.

Which is why the only honest version of the relevance problem, until very recently, was: we know it matters, we know how it works, and we cannot do it at scale. The thing that ended that sentence is AI. The tool that didn’t exist now exists. And it is most clearly visible, right now, at Alpha which has rebuilt the curriculum on the assumption that the tool is here.

What it looks like when relevance is engineered in the program

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The summer reading problem (Pizza Hut figured this out 40 years ago)

2. A parent’s playbook for raising a reader (this summer)

3. Scholar’s Sources: Book recommendations

A few things inspired me to write this newsletter:

• My favorite part of Alpha NYC is the library (seriously, I would’ve spent every single day in there)

• I saw a viral video exposing how truly alarming America’s literacy crisis has become. (High school students can’t read the word “extraordinary”)

• Some parents have asked me about summer reading lists

The summer reading problem (Pizza Hut figured this out 40 years ago)

The biggest challenge every parent has during the summer is getting their kid to read. You all know the struggle: your kid is given a summer reading list by their school, they say they’ll get it done, they don’t, and they just end up cramming the SparkNotes version of the books before class.

So what should you do? Well, I believe that every parent on the planet should pay their kid to read a book.

Not always in cash (as we’ll talk about later), but the bargain is the same. You give them a thing they want. They give you pages.

Pizza Hut figured this magic out in 1984. The BOOK IT! program has handed out an estimated 1.5 billion personal pan pizzas to elementary schoolers who hit a reading goal. Forty years and 70 million kids later, it is still the longest-running corporate-supported reading program in the country. Applebee’s runs “A is for Applebee’s”, which is a free kid’s meal for kids who get good grades or finish a stack of books. Panda Express has Read with Me, where if you read five books, you get a free kid’s meal. Barnes & Noble has been doing the summer reading sticker journal forever.

These programs exist because somewhere in a corporate boardroom in the 1980s, an executive correctly understood something most parents are still nervous to admit:

Kids will read for a slice of pizza.

And honestly, thank god, because the alternative is that they don’t read at all (which is now becoming increasingly obvious as high schoolers struggle to read a simple sentence).

Everybody knows that reading itself is great. That’s not the problem.

So much research has been done showing that being a reader is one of the single best predictors of how a kid’s life is going to go. Vocabulary, focus, empathy, writing, test scores, the ability to sit still for longer than a TikTok… it all traces back to the kid who actually reads.

Knowing that has never been the hard part.

The hard part is the motivational model. Because you – the modern parent – are not competing against boredom anymore. You are competing against an algorithmically optimized infinite-scroll machine that has been A/B-tested on a billion teenage brains and is engineered to be exactly as rewarding as possible at exactly the right cadence to make a 250-page novel feel like climbing K2.

A book is slow. Effortful. It asks your kid to concentrate for forty minutes to feel anything.

TikTok is fast, effortless, and pays out dopamine every 1.4 seconds.

You cannot win that fight by also offering slow, effortful, and with a side of “because it’s good for you.” You will lose. You are losing.

So you need more weapons. And you need to actually use them.

“But won’t paying my kid ruin their love of reading?”

This is the worry I get from parents the most, and I just have to disagree. As someone who has loved reading since the day I was born, earning rewards for reading hasn’t made me love it less; in fact, it helped me get through my reading slumps and ensured I always understood that reading is valuable.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer ran a field experiment in Dallas where 2nd graders earned $2 for every book they read. The result: those kids ended up roughly 2.5 months ahead in reading comprehension versus the control group, for an investment of about $20 per child. That is one of the cheapest, most effective reading interventions in the literature, and it absolutely demolishes things like extending the school day on a per-dollar basis.

A World Bank review of the Project READS incentive trial found that incentive-group kids read more books than the control group, and the comprehension gains were largest for kids who were already a little motivated to begin with, showing that the incentives didn’t kill intrinsic motivation.

So now you might be wondering, “how do I actually implement this?”

A parent’s playbook for raising a reader (this summer)

Here are five different extrinsic motivational models that you can use in your family. You can choose one, mix and match, or try a few different ones out to see what would work best.

1. Pay them.

This is the simplest one. Pay for pages.

You could do something like $5 per finished book under 200 pages, $10 for 200–400, $15 for anything over 400. For high schoolers, bump the long-book tier to $20 if you want to seriously incentivize the doorstop classics (a teenager who finishes East of Eden has put in an insane amount of focused effort, and twenty bucks is a fair signal that you noticed).

If cash isn’t the right currency in your house, the same idea works for screen time, late bedtimes, or whatever else your kid actually wants.

But it’s important that you make them have a short conversation with you about the book before they get paid. It forces them to hold the book in their head for one extra beat after they close it, which is when most of the actual learning happens. This is also an opportunity to connect with your kid and talk about the things they’re thinking about.

2. Run a book club.

Pick one book and a few of your kid’s best friends. The kids read the book over two weeks. At the end, you host a movie night where you watch the adaptation together and the kids “defend” the book versus the movie. Which was better? What did the movie miss? Who got cast wrong?

The argument is the analysis. Yeager’s research on adolescent motivation is unambiguous: kids will do extraordinary intellectual work if you let them be a little bit of a hater about it (see Austin Scholar #183 for the full case on this). A book club where the deliverable is “rip apart the movie” is a book club kids will actually show up to.

3. Let the easy books count.

If your eight-year-old wants to read Wimpy Kid for the fourth time, let it count. If your twelve-year-old tears through the entire Percy Jackson series in three weeks, that counts too. The literary value of any single book matters way less than the fact that your kid finished a 350-page book in a week and wants to start the next one.

Reading is a muscle. The muscle gets built by reps. The reps get built by enjoying it.

This is not a license to hand your kid whatever’s on the YA bestseller shelf at Target – plenty of “middle grade” and “YA” books today have content that is wildly inappropriate for a twelve-year-old, and your job as the curator of the reading list hasn’t gone anywhere. Pre-read or skim the books you’re not sure about. But within the universe of age-appropriate books, lean toward whatever your kid is actually excited to finish, even if it’s the literary equivalent of mac and cheese. The reps are the point.

I read a lot of mac and cheese in elementary and middle school. I also got a perfect score on the reading portion of the SAT. Those facts are related, not in conflict.

4. Watch what works for them specifically.

Not every kid is the same animal. I’ll give you the example I know best, which is my younger sister.

She was not a natural reader. She did not curl up on the couch with a book the way I did. What got her reading wasn’t pizza or pocket money – it was the feeling of being smarter than everyone in the room. So my parents handed her East of Eden. Then Crime and Punishment. Then The Brothers Karamazov. The harder and more imposing the book, the better, because the reward she actually wanted was walking into school and casually mentioning she was three hundred pages into Dostoyevsky.

She is now an extremely well-read adult. The motivator wasn’t the books. The motivator was status, and the books were the vehicle.

Some kids are bribed by pizza. Some by bedtime. Some by movie nights. Some by the chance to feel a little superior at brunch. Your job is to figure out which currency your kid actually accepts, and pay them in that one.

5. Some miscellaneous ideas

• Stay up as long as you want, but you have to be reading

This was the one that got me. I read most of my elementary-school summers under the covers with a flashlight, hours past lights-out, feeling like I was getting away with something. (My parents, of course, were thrilled.) The “I’m sneaking around and cheating the system” is an incredible motivator for kids, so try and use that to your advantage.

• Movie nights

They want to watch Brave with you? They read the book first (Disney has actually published a ton of books adapted from their films, so check those out!). Hunger Games? Book first. Bridgerton? Book first (Mom will need to pre-screen, since the content in this one is pretty adult, but you get it). You can then compare and contrast the two and talk about which conveys the story better. This is an easy add-on and a simpler version of the book club.

• A reading list with status attached

Don’t just hand them ten books. Hand them ten books and say, “This is the list of books that the kind of person you said you wanted to be at 25 has read.” For a teenager especially, that framing can be life changing – and can get them to read challenging, intellectually stimulating books.

• Family reading

Thirty minutes a couple nights a week, everyone in the living room with a book. Kids learn by imitating, so if you demonstrate the behaviors you want to see from them, they’ll copy you.

Scholar’s Sources: Book recommendations

With input from myself, an Alpha reading specialist, and a former NYC public librarian, here’s a comprehensive list of book recommendations for all ages:

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The truth about “screen time”

I want to do a kind of reverse Scholar’s Sources today by asking y’all what your kids are currently reading, watching, and talking about. Since coming to Alpha NYC, I’ve learned about the Needoh squishies, that slime is still just as popular as it was when I was in middle school, and how quickly 5th-graders can read Project Hail Mary. I want to keep coming up with exciting projects and have interesting conversations with the kids, but I’m realizing that I’m not cool enough for them :(

The truth about “screen time”

The most damaging idea in modern parenting might be the phrase “screen time” itself.

Treating “screen time” as one thing is like treating “food time” as one thing. A grilled salmon and a Pop-Tart are both “food.” A kid using an adaptive math app for 20 minutes and a kid mainlining TikTok for 20 minutes are both on “screens.” In both cases, lumping them together makes it impossible to think clearly about what’s actually happening to your kid’s brain.

A 2026 review in Frontiers in Psychology of preschool screen exposure found something specific and important: passive screen time (watching, scrolling) is consistently linked to worse attention. Active screen time (interacting, creating, problem-solving) is linked to better orienting attention. Two screens with two completely different cognitive outcomes.

A 2025 CDC analysis found the limit: 4+ hours a day of non-school screen time is the threshold where things like sleep, mental health, physical activity, weight, and perceived support start sliding sideways. Below that, the relationship is messy and bidirectional. Above that, it’s bad. Notice the qualifier: non-school. The CDC isn’t worried about your kid doing 90 minutes of an adaptive reading app. They’re worried about a phone-based childhood that has eaten 4+ hours of every day.

So let’s stop having the wrong argument. The question isn’t “how many hours.” The question is: what is the screen actually doing to my kid right now?

There are really only four things a screen can do:

1. Teach them something they didn’t know, in a way that forces their brain to do work.

2. Let them create, write, design, code, edit, and build.

3. Let them connect, talk to a real friend, a grandparent, or a coach.

4. Consume them, scroll, watch, and stare.

Categories 1, 2, and 3 are tools. Category 4 is a slot machine. The whole game of modern parenting is moving your kid’s screen time from category 4 into the other three.

This is the part I want to be direct about because I went to Alpha and now work there so I’ve watched the model up close, and people often assume that because Alpha is an “AI school,” it’s somehow more screen-saturated than a normal school. The opposite is true.

Most American high schoolers are on a screen for 6+ hours during the school day. Chromebooks open during lectures. Worksheets handed out as PDFs on their tablets. Documentaries playing while the teacher grades papers. YouTube tabs. Group chats running quietly under the desk. And (I’m not exaggerating) an enormous portion of homework is now done by pasting the prompt into ChatGPT, copying the output, changing three words, and turning it in. The teacher doesn’t know. The parents don’t know. Even the kid often doesn’t know what they don’t know, because the grades come back fine.

That is a screen-based childhood.

Alpha looks nothing like that. The truth is:

1. It’s just two hours

Alpha students do roughly two hours of academics a day on adaptive software in the morning. Then the screens close. The rest of the day is workshops, life skills, projects, public speaking, entrepreneurship, sports, outdoor education. Total daily screen time at most Alpha campuses is lower than at a traditional school that nominally “limits tech.”

2. It’s not a chatbot

This is the part that gets misunderstood the most. Alpha kids don’t sit in front of ChatGPT all morning. They use a curated set of adaptive learning apps (like FastMath, AlphaRead, AlphaWrite, Math Academy and others) knit together by an internal AI tutor called TimeBack that decides what each kid should be working on right now based on what they’ve already mastered and where their gaps are. The AI doesn’t generate answers for them. It generates the right next problem for them, then watches whether they actually understand it.

3. It’s not social media. Not scrolling apps. No phones during the day.

It’s an AI-powered learning environment, not a phone-based one. The screens at Alpha are genuinely closer to a one-on-one tutor than they are to Instagram. They are doing all four of the things that the Frontiers research and the JAMA research suggest active screen time should do: forcing interaction, demanding decisions, requiring problem-solving, providing immediate feedback.

This is why the results aren’t subtle. Alpha students grow 2.6x faster than national averages on NWEA MAP tests, with the top 20% growing at 6.5x. Every grade from K through 12 sits at the 99th percentile on achievement, and high school math projects to a 780–800 SAT Math average. None of that happens because of “more screen time.” It happens because Alpha rebuilt the curriculum, the schedule, the teacher model, and the software itself around a single principle: screens should teach, not consume.

The reason most other schools can’t copy this isn’t laziness. It’s that they’re trying to put 2026 tools into a 1926 system. You can’t get adaptive mastery out of a tool that’s only used as a fancy worksheet machine. You can’t prevent AI cheating when the AI is a generic chatbot the kid can simply ask for the answer. Alpha works because the whole system was rebuilt around the screen, not because the screen was put in the system.

So what should you take away from this article?

There are three things determine whether a screen is helping or harming your kid’s brain:

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This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Understanding the learning science

2. How to prompt AI in a way that actually helps

3. How parents should talk to their kid about APs

It’s officially the stretch of the year where every high schooler in America taking an AP class is quietly panicking and every parent is quietly wondering if it’s too late to help.

I’ve had at least five parents reach out to me in the last week with some version of “what should my kid be doing right now?” so I figured it was time to write it down in one place. This article doesn’t have a paywall, so please forward it to any parent with a kid taking an AP, or any high schooler you know.

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How to use learning science and AI to get a 5 on your AP

Here’s the thing almost every high schooler does when their AP test is two weeks out: they open the Princeton Review book, re-read the chapter summaries, highlight a bunch of stuff, maybe watch a YouTube video or two, and feel productive.

The thing is, almost none of that actually works.

I don’t mean “works less well than something else.” I mean there are 40+ years of learning science research telling us that re-reading and highlighting are among the least effective ways to prepare for a test. They feel productive because they’re easy and the material feels familiar when you see it again. So your kid walks into the exam thinking they know the material because they recognized it on the page. Then the question is phrased differently than the textbook and everything falls apart.

What actually works is retrieval practice.

Retrieval practice means closing the book and trying to pull the information out of your brain from scratch. A blank page and a prompt. No notes. No highlights. Just: “what do I remember about the Krebs cycle?” Then you check what you got wrong. Then you do it again tomorrow.

The research on this is overwhelming. In study after study, students who spend the same amount of time testing themselves outperform students who spend that time re-reading by massive margins – often doubling their long-term retention on material. The weirdest part is that students in those studies almost always predict re-reading will work better. It feels better. It is worse.

Pair retrieval practice with spaced repetition (doing those retrieval attempts across multiple days instead of all at once) and you’ve basically got the entire evidence-based playbook for studying. Cramming the night before crashes your working memory and does almost nothing for long-term recall. Ten minutes a day for two weeks beats five hours the night before.

The science about all this is extremely clear. So students, if you want to crush your APs this year, here is a study plan backed in learning science:

Count backwards from your exam date and map these phases onto whatever time you have:

Phase 1: Diagnostic (first 1–2 days of studying per subject). Take one full official practice exam, timed, under real conditions. College Board releases old FRQs for free on AP Central – use those. The score doesn’t matter. What matters is the map: which units you crushed, which units destroyed you. If you’re studying for multiple APs, do one diagnostic per subject before going deep on any of them.

Phase 2: Targeted retrieval (roughly 60% of the remaining time). One weakest unit at a time. Close the textbook. On a blank page, brain-dump everything you remember about that unit for 10 minutes. Then – and only then – open the textbook and fill in what you missed in a different color. Do 15–20 practice questions on that unit (not re-reading the chapter, actual questions). End with a 5-minute “teach it to the wall” out loud, as if explaining the unit to a friend who’s never seen it.

That whole cycle is about 60–75 minutes per unit. The “teach it out loud” step feels ridiculous. It’s one of the most effective things in the research. It’s called the protégé effect, and it works because the process of explaining forces retrieval plus organization at the same time.

If you have two APs the same week, alternate days per subject. Don’t try to study both every single day – that’s how cognitive overload sneaks in.

Phase 3: Mixed practice + timed FRQs (roughly 30% of the remaining time). Now you mix units together. This is called interleaving, and it’s the closest thing studying has to a cheat code. Mixing topics feels harder in the moment (because you can’t coast on pattern recognition) and that’s exactly why it produces better transfer to the actual exam. Do one timed FRQ from each of the last three years, grade using the official rubric, and write down why you lost the points you lost. Not the right answer. The reason.

The schedule should wrap around your actual exam dates. A student with Calc BC on May 11th and Physics C on May 14th should hit Phase 3 for calc around May 8th and Phase 3 for physics around May 11th. Map backwards from each individual exam, not from some generic “exam week.”

Before we get into using AI, here are some resources that I used and loved for AP studying:

• AP Classroom and AP Central (College Board’s own site). This is the most overlooked resource in the entire AP ecosystem. Every released FRQ, every scoring rubric, every sample response. It’s free. Use it before anything else.

• Math Academy for AP Calculus AB, Calculus BC, Precalculus, and Statistics. If you’re taking a math AP, Math Academy is the single best resource in existence. It’s adaptive, it’s mastery-based, it uses distributed practice and interleaving by default (the exact things I just told you actually work), and it’s built on a knowledge graph that catches and fills prerequisite gaps automatically. Ten days of Math Academy is worth a month of a traditional prep book.

• Marco Learning’s free FRQ rubrics and Albert.io’s practice banks for extra MCQ reps when you’ve exhausted the College Board’s.

• Fiveable for unit guides and live review streams in the final week – their cram sessions are free and are genuinely helpful for students who need a human voice walking them through things.

How to prompt Claude or ChatGPT to actually help

AI is going to be the single biggest unfair advantage for students who know how to use it well, and a giant trap for students who don’t. The difference is the prompt.

Most students use AI like a glorified Google search. “Explain the French Revolution.” They read the answer. They feel smart. They’ve learned almost nothing, because they didn’t retrieve anything, the AI did.

Here’s what you should use instead:

Prompt 1: The Question Generator (the one to use most):

“I have my AP [subject] exam in [X] days. I’m currently on Unit [Y]: [topic]. Generate 15 practice questions that mirror real AP exam style and difficulty: 10 multiple choice, 3 short answer, and 2 free response. Do NOT give me the answers yet. I’ll send you my answers, and then you’ll grade them and explain what I got wrong. Start.”

That prompt forces retrieval. The model becomes a question bank, not an answer bank. The grading-afterward piece is what makes it work.

Prompt 2: The Interleaver (for the mixed-practice phase):

“Mix questions from Units [list]. Don’t tell me which unit each question is from. Give me 10 multiple choice questions. After I answer, tell me which unit each question came from and where my weak spots are.”

Prompt 3: The Feynman Partner (the secret weapon):

“I’m going to explain [topic] to you as if you’re a 10-year-old. After I finish, ask me three specific follow-up questions that would expose any gaps in my understanding. Don’t go easy on me.”

Prompt 4: The Spaced Repetition Coach:

“I studied [list of topics] on [dates]. Based on the forgetting curve, tell me which ones I should review today, and give me 5 retrieval practice questions for each.”

Prompt 5: The Adaptive Tutor (for Claude or Perplexity Computer – my favorite).

This is the one I’d actually use most. It’s a multi-layer prompt that turns the model into a full adaptive tutor that diagnoses, re-teaches, and re-tests on exactly the right content.

“You are my AP [subject] tutor. I have my exam in [X] days. I’m going to work with you in phases, and you will not skip phases. Confirm you understand before we start.

Phase 1: Diagnostic Test. Give me a 10-question diagnostic that covers Units [list the units]. Mix of multiple choice and short answer, calibrated to real AP difficulty. Do NOT give me the answers. I’ll send you my answers in my next message.

Phase 2: Grade and Diagnose. Once I send my answers, grade each one. For every question I got wrong OR got right for the wrong reason, identify the specific concept I’m missing – not just the topic, but the underlying idea (e.g., not ‘integration,’ but ‘u-substitution with radical expressions’). Rank my weak spots from most to least urgent given my remaining time.

Phase 3: Re-teach. Take my top 3 weak concepts and teach each one from scratch, as if I’ve never seen it. Use a worked example for each. Be concise – no filler.

Phase 4: Re-test. Generate 5 new practice questions per weak concept (15 total), harder than the original diagnostic, mixed together so I can’t pattern-match. Do NOT give me the answers. I’ll send my answers back.

Phase 5: Confirm Mastery or Loop. Grade round 2. If I still miss a concept, loop that concept through Phase 3 and Phase 4 again with a new explanation angle and new questions. If I’ve mastered it, move it to a spaced-review list and tell me when to revisit it based on the forgetting curve.

Start with Phase 1. Wait for my answers before moving on.”

This prompt turns a chat model into something that behaves a lot like Math Academy’s knowledge graph, except for any AP subject. The structure forces retrieval at every step, diagnoses root-cause misconceptions instead of surface errors, and re-teaches in a way that’s personalized to the specific gap. I’ve run this with friends prepping for everything from AP Chem to AP Lang and the diagnostic quality is genuinely impressive – as long as you don’t let the model skip Phase 1 and hand you answers.

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How parents should frame this conversation

The single biggest mistake I see parents make in the two weeks before AP exams is treating the exam like it’s a referendum on their kid. The stress is already unbearable. You adding “Did you study yet? What’s your practice score? Are you ready?” three times a day doesn’t increase their preparation. It increases their shame, which decreases their willingness to come to you when they actually need help.

Here are some scripts that work better:

Instead of: “Are you ready for the AP?” Try: “What’s one unit that still feels shaky? Want to talk through it out loud?”

Instead of: “You should be studying.” Try: “I’m around if you want me to quiz you from the practice book for 20 minutes.”

Instead of: “What did you get on the practice test?” Try: “What did that practice test teach you about what to focus on this week?”

Essentially, you want to shift the conversation from evaluation to collaboration and offer to be a part of the process instead of judging it.

And that’s it! Good luck to everyone studying for APs this week.

Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y’all on Sunday.

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. How to talk to your kid when they want to quit

2. Scholar’s Sources: Be a creator, not a consumer

It’s the end of session four at Alpha New York, which means a few things:

• We received the student feedback surveys and will be using them to make session five EVEN COOLER

• We’re launching new life skills workshops next week (which I’ve had so much fun helping the guides plan)

• I get to work from home this week! (aka I don’t have to wake up at 7am for school)

Such exciting things, so stay tuned for more on the new life skills workshops!

How to talk to your kid when they want to quit

This last week I’ve been thinking a lot about grit.

Tuesday at our NYC campus, our students had a test to pass. The whole thing was built around grit, growth mindset, and, more specifically, bouldering.

Quick aside for newer readers: at Alpha, a “test to pass” isn’t a paper test. It’s a real-world assessment where students prove they’ve internalized a life skill they’ve been training for weeks. For this test, the kids (K-8) had been bouldering every Tuesday. They’d been learning both the technical stuff (footwork, body positioning, how to read a route) and the mental stuff. The growth mindset part. What to do when your fingers are shaking and the hold is just out of reach.

Kids started this workshop too scared to take both feet off the ground and pass their test by sprinting up routes I would not have even dared to attempt. I watched a girl freeze halfway up the wall, cry, hang there for a full minute, and then keep climbing. I watched another kid fall off the same problem maybe fifteen times and try harder each time. By the end I was tearing up in the corner like a soccer mom.

Then – and this is the part that made me actually want to write about grit – I went to a Stanford in New York alumni event the very next night. I asked an entrepreneur there what life skill he’s found most valuable. Without missing a beat: resilience and grit. Then he told me Angela Duckworth’s Grit is the single most useful book he’s ever read and that he hopes every student in the country reads it.

So: two days, two completely different rooms, the same lesson. That’s hard to ignore.

I covered the actual science of Duckworth’s research a few newsletters back (#208, if you missed it). This one is different. This one is for parents who already buy the premise that grit matters and that you want your kid to have more of it, but want to know what to actually do at home.

We’ll start with a quick refresher on the book, then get into practical steps you can take.

Most people familiar with Duckworth’s work know the headline: grit beats talent over the long run. They’ve seen the TED talk. That’s fine, but you can miss a lot of the core insights layered throughout the book.

Here are the parts that don’t make the rounds, and that I think actually matter more for parenting.

Grit is mostly about staying interested, not about toughing it out. This one caught me off guard the first time I read the book. We picture grit as gritted teeth and clenched fists. Duckworth’s research keeps pointing the other way. The grittiest people she studied are weirdly, persistently fascinated by their thing. The toughness comes downstream of the interest. If your kid is white-knuckling through something they hate, that isn’t grit. That’s compliance motivated by the desire to follow rules or adhere to expectations.

Hope, in Duckworth’s framing, is not optimism. Optimism is “things will probably work out.” Hope is “I can do something about this.” Gritty people, even after they fail, keep believing their effort changes the outcome. Optimism is passive. Hope is operational. Worth the distinction.

Parenting style matters less than parenting consistency. The book pretty firmly debunks the “you have to be tough on them” story. What Duckworth’s research actually shows is that gritty kids tend to come from homes that are both warm and demanding (high support, high standards) applied the same way on Tuesday as on Saturday. Not one or the other. Not different on different days.

There’s a “Hard Thing Rule” she runs in her own family. Everyone in the Duckworth household, kids and parents, has to be doing one hard thing. You get to pick it. You have to practice it. You can’t quit in the middle of a season — when the season ends, you can pick something new. I think about this rule constantly.

So what can you actually do this week to help your kid build grit?

You don’t need to send your kid to Alpha to build grit (though we’d love to have you). Here are six things that work, in rough order of how easy they are to start tomorrow.

1. Pick a hard thing as a family. Duckworth’s Hard Thing Rule, but lower stakes to start. One thing each. It can be Spanish on Duolingo, learning to skateboard, weekly piano. The only constraints are that it’s voluntary, it’s practiced regularly, and it has a defined endpoint (a recital, a belt test, the end of a sports season) so that quitting is a decision and not a drift.

2. Failure is fuel. When something doesn’t go well for you, narrate it out loud at dinner. “I gave a presentation today and it bombed. Here’s what I think happened. Here’s what I’d try next time.” Modeling matters way more than lecturing. Your kid is also watching how you treat your own failures, not just how you talk about theirs. The kids at Alpha learn the saying “failure is fuel,” and they loudly exclaimed it before they started their bouldering test to pass. That might be a good saying to teach your kid :)

3. I can’t do it YET. One of the Alpha NYC mascots is our Yet Yeti, which reminds kids that if they’re struggling with something, it’s not that they can’t do it, just that they can’t do it YET. It can be natural for kids to fail at something and lament that they just can’t do it. (I was guilty of this too, trust me!) But it’s important to remind kids that, if they continue to work at it, they will be able to do it. They just can’t do it yet. You, too, can buy your kid a Yet Yeti and set it next to them at the dinner table when they’re trying to solve math problems or messing up a part of their piano piece to remind them that they just can’t do it yet.

4. Find them one coach who’s harder on them than you are. Sounds counterintuitive coming from a school famous for not having teachers, but it’s not. The point is exposure to an outside adult whose feedback they trust and who won’t soften the truth. A piano teacher, a wrestling coach, a chess club mentor. Someone who can say “that wasn’t your best” without it turning into a Thing.

5. Schedule the part they want to skip. The deliberate practice research is unambiguous on this: meaningful gains come from working on the part you’re worst at, not the part you already enjoy. Help your kid identify the specific weak link (e.g. the F# barre chord, the second mile, the long division step) and put fifteen minutes of practice on it on a specific day. If there’s more scaffolding put in place to help get through the hardest parts, they’ll continue building up the skill.

6. Take them somewhere their body has to keep going. Bouldering, hiking, open water swimming, long bike rides. Something where the body is the proof. I’ve watched too many kids walk taller into school the day after they finished a route they were scared of to think it’s a coincidence.

Now, to get to the question most parents have: how should I talk to my kid when they want to quit?

This is where most well-meaning parents I talk to get stuck. The kid is in tears. They want to quit. You don’t want to be the parent who broke them, but you also don’t want to teach them that crying gets you out of hard things.

A few scripts that work, drawn from the families and guides I’ve watched do this well.

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