They were awkward, tone deaf. They mispronounced words. They left some out. They looked at their audience, then up at the ceiling, sometimes because they were struggling to remember, sometimes because they were embarrassed to be reciting someone else’s declaration of abiding love.

Several of them, in their honest, simple, careful recitations, brought tears to my eyes. Though I know in a few months they probably won’t be able to recall the entire sonnet perfectly or immediately to mind—they procrastinate too much for that— someday, Browning will come rushing back to them. Someday, when they realize what love is, when they realize what they have, or, in some cases, what they lost, they’ll remember her words and maybe, just maybe, they’ll be grateful to her. She will have educated them in ways they won’t appreciate until that moment. She will have prepared them for what it means to be human.

I’ve become a proponent of public classical charter schools for exactly this reason. The mission of the typical American classical school is to teach students to love what is True, do what is Good, and defend what is Beautiful. I’ve watched schools full of students grow toward those things en masse. I’ve also watched promising schools turn away from their Mission.

The same state apparatus that runs all public schools writes 95% of the checks for your charter. Many families, desperate to escape low standards, and unsafe environments are running from their local public schools, not necessarily to high-expectations charters. So right from the get-go, you have two big hurdles: (1) state regulations which undermine the academic and behavioral standards necessary to keep expectations high and (2) the expectations of parents accustomed to the standards and workload of the typical public school who believe high-expectations charters are the same minus the “wokeness”.

The crucial variable in how the school will operate is the Charter Board’s understanding of and commitment to the Mission, as well as how they manage their single employee: the Headmaster.

The Charter Board begins with a dream: a public school that can be great for all families. They then labor for years to get the school up and running. They often have to scour the local talent pool to find a headmaster who will pour in long hours, guide teachers through rigorous curriculum, and mentor struggling students. No leader is perfect. She will make mistakes with personnel. She’ll hire too quickly and fire too slowly. Still, under her guidance, and with the Board’s determination, the school begins strong.

Unfortunately and all too often, institutionalized beliefs and habits prevalent in the wider K-12 system begin appearing in the school. Teachers the Headmaster hired from conventional public schools lean back into old, ineffective teaching practices. Those habits rarely align with the Mission. In other classrooms, where there is fidelity to the classical teaching model, some parents complain. The rigor and breadth of the curriculum means their child is frustrated and sometimes fails. They push teachers for easier or less work and escalate their complaints to the headmaster if grades aren’t what they’re used to seeing on the report card. Compromises to academic and behavioral standards are made, first by individual teachers, and then sometimes by an administrative team that sees lower standards as way to ensure all students “succeed”. These compromises spread from academics to student behavior. As a result, and all too soon, the visionary headmaster is overwhelmed. She lacks the support she needs. Her days are spent putting out fires rather than systematically supporting stakeholder alignment to the Mission. If the complaints continue, one of two things will happen: (1) she will give up facilitating the actual Mission, settling for crisis management (lawsuit prevention) or (2) she will leave, either pushed out or non-renewed.

The decline will continue, though the charter will survive on parent demand because so many families are desperate for a “safe” school. The original mission will be severely diluted and then mostly abandoned — though it will still be displayed prominently on posters and social media. This decline will play out in compromised curriculum, worsening classroom behavior, and the quiet exit of strong, mission-aligned teachers and families.

All charter school leaders face a sobering reality: the barbarians don’t have to storm the gates. They are already inside.

Case Study 1: Human Frailty Meets Institutional Reality

High Expectations charters schools mostly draw teachers from the public-school pipeline. Few teachers who complete expensive teacher credential programs go straight to a charter. Most arrive as refugees, older teachers tired of low academic and behavioral standards. Unfortunately, they come habituated to public school norms. They are used to shutting the door and doing what they want. They are used to telling themselves that they are the Good teacher on campus. Most importantly, they are often looking for a “safe” school for their own children or grandchildren.

Teaching at a High Expectations charter is hard. It demands that teachers get most students up-to-speed, even when they arrive in middle or high school with major knowledge and skill gaps. Teachers often find ourselves having to show students how to hold a pencil properly, what the margin lines on ruled paper are for, how to form letters, read a physical book, control attention-seeking outbursts, and build nonexistent study habits. They have to do all of that while also teaching a curriculum that is very high-rigor, comparatively.

This takes enormous ingenuity and a huge time commitment.

And, frankly, the pay sucks.

Older teachers seeking asylum in rigorous schools have followed a particular path successfully throughout their careers. They prepare a lesson, deliver it, and, if the kids don’t get it, move on anyway. When parents push back, they lower their standards or inflate grades to prevent conflict. Fighting to maintain high expectations for all students rarely pays off in their experience. Besides, their day ends at 3. It always has.

Administrators are supposed to hold high standards for instruction because the curriculum demands it, but constructive feedback can create resentment in experienced teachers used to little to no criticism. Aggrieved staff members complain to each other. Grievances become weapons and a school board, sometimes caught in local political crosswinds, may undermine the headmaster by asking him to ease up on teachers, enabling mission drift.

At one of my classical worksites, this resulted in fewer full books read, teachers trying to cover with lecture what should have been read for homework, and a noticeable decline in classroom behavior. These changes slowed the pace of entire classes and allowed students to push back on teacher authority, the decline in standards across the school having undermined every adult. With less administrative oversight, teachers preferred to minimize conflict rather than uphold the standards required for mission success. As a result, enrollment declined as stronger families left for private or magnet schools.

David Hicks saw this coming. His book, Norms and Nobility, is the treatise on modern classical education. But in 2017, Hicks published an article titled, “Is Classical Education Still Possible Today?” He answered his own question with a resounding, “No.” Here was a man with an elite education, who went to Stonybrook, then to Princeton, then got a Rhodes Scholarship, took a sojourn to learn Russian at Moscow University, went on to become the youngest professor ever at the Naval War College, and spent his career as a leader of the classical movement at prestigious private K-12 schools. The fact that Hicks felt he failed in private religious schools is crucial. If someone of his caliber struggled at those sites, the challenges classical public charter school leaders face are even more daunting. The checks come from the government, accountability is filtered through politics, and the frontline teachers have often been trained that they can close their doors and do what they want to minimize conflict (and their workload).

I watched this same scenario unfold at a second classical charter where I worked. The school that so many people poured years of hard work into came apart because much of the staff, including leadership, clung to the comfortable idea that a school is little more than a steady paycheck, social status, and summers off. Their habits kept them from embracing the discipline and hard work required to love what is True, do what is Good, and defend what is Beautiful. The school attracted plenty of parents, including Board members, who saw a free public school and thought that once their kids were enrolled, the Mission should bend to their will.

Compounding the problem is the reality that many of the people inside High Expectations charters pretend they can ignore politics. But that old saw is true: You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you. Political factions see the control of a charter school (and the money and jobs it provides) as worth fighting over. Without strong administrators and a core of mission-driven teachers willing to lead from the front, internal resistance — the barbarians already inside the gates — will eventually erode the school’s Mission fidelity, just as I watched happen at that site.

The other critical threat to public charters comes from external regulations that quietly undermine the mission.

Case Study 2: Pragmatics, Politics, and Lawsuit Avoidance

Another charter school I worked at showed enormous promise. It was in an old building in a lower-middle class neighborhood, but the curriculum attracted students of high-academic ability who had been stagnating in their public schools.

The rigor of the curriculum our school adopted created an unintended but predictable consequence. Parent requests for IEP and 504 accommodations began to mount. Because public charters must provide Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) under IDEA and Section 504, parents file complaints or pursue due process when they feel accommodations are not delivering success.

The core problem is a mismatch between what parents and teachers believe the word “success” means. Many parents expect IEP/504 accommodations to deliver high grades, even when a student reads below grade-level, turns in incomplete and/or poor work well past deadlines, or does not participate in class due to anxiety, emotional disability, or trauma. Administrators, concerned about legal exposure, often pressure teachers to lower standards for such students.

In practice, this led to lowered expectations for all students in most classrooms. Teachers allowed disruptive behavior to go unchecked to prevent parent complaints and administrative scrutiny. Whole-class instruction suffered. Disruptive students sabotaged time that should’ve been used for in-class practice and individual corrective feedback.

To prevent complaints about time spent on homework, teachers allowed all students to do all work, including independent reading, during class time. The result? Entire classes fell behind on curriculum.

Tests were often open-book or open-note, so students had little incentive to learn how to study independently. Some learned they didn’t have to pay attention in class as long as classmates would let them copy their notes.

Administration grew tired of repeated parent complaints about grades and missing assignments. Teachers were directed to “differentiate more” and “work more closely with parents.” For those of you not working in public schools, that’s a principal’s plausibly deniable directive to teachers to make the work easy enough so all parents are satisfied with their child’s grade.

I resigned at the end of the year rather than comply.

My colleagues who remained were directed to plan extensive differentiations for multiple students in every class. Conscientious teachers spent after school hours every day managing accommodations and responding to parent and administrator emails. Other teachers took the path of least resistance and simply lowered their standards until the complaints stopped. The strongest, most mission-aligned teachers began leaving. Some went to private religious schools; others left teaching entirely. As the academic and behavioral expectations declined, the most engaged families withdrew their children, creating a cascading decrease in rigor as weaker, less motivated students became the majority in most classes. While the curriculum remained clearly prescribed, fidelity to it decreased markedly, with teachers largely abandoning requirements for independent reading and practice, then gaming assessments so that few children took home a D or F on the report card.

Mission failure at a High Expectations charter can appear orderly. The school may hold on to a uniform dress code and classical-inspired decor, but only a veneer of the intended instructional model will remain when it comes to actual teaching. Practices and policies will average down until the school performs like a public middle/high school in a suburban neighborhood, only without the bonuses of sports, dual enrollment, or other resources available to better-funded conventional public schools. At that point, a family’s cost-benefit analysis will favor the conventional public school, so they’ll leave. As one of my former students reported after transferring to the local public high school for exactly these reasons, she and her classmates could watch Netflix throughout the school day on their school-issued laptops and get As without trying.

Once a charter drifts too far from its Mission, there’s no real reason for anyone to stay.

The Good News

No matter how hard any single teacher works, regulations, bureaucracy, and politics make it difficult to maintain high expectations in public institutions. A charter is always only a few weak hires or litigious parents away from mission drift.

Some parents are content with a school that appears safe and orderly. Others — many of you reading this essay, I’m sure — lie awake at night worrying about wasted time and lost potential in their children’s education.

But here’s the enduring truth: the greatest minds of the West left us a priceless inheritance of ideas. We already have the curriculum.

Having said that, we ought not pretend we can leap straight from the current state of American education into that school the Founding Board envisioned. Our systems are too compromised for that, and the wider culture is not supportive.

At least, not yet.

What High Expectations public charters can do to build that support is serve as carefully structured institutions producing far better educational outcomes for diverse student bodies across the nation. They can strive to give students a serious foundation in the Western tradition, strong habits of mind, and curriculum and instruction ordered toward what is true, good, and beautiful.

This is long-term work. We are planting the seeds of trees whose shade we may never enjoy.

At all my worksites, I’ve endeavored to offer clear, practical systems that allow schools to give as many students as possible meaningful access to that foundation while protecting the environment where serious learning (and its companions: wonder and joy) can happen.

For those of you working inside public classical charters or considering founding one, I’ve created something practical to help. The Playbook for the Preservation of High Expectations Education in Public Institutions is a free collection of editable resources drawn from real experience in multiple charters. It includes the systems, policies, and accountability tools needed to protect a school’s mission from the kinds of pressures described above. These materials are free for schools to use and adapt, but please do not sell or rebrand them as your own. You can find the downloadable PDF file in the linked article below.

High Expectations charters can work well when leadership stays mission-aligned, teachers are chosen carefully, and clear systems are in place to maintain standards. For example, the classical tradition is not fragile, having endured far darker times than ours. With clear understanding of the threats and disciplined use of mission-aligned systems, we can offer an excellent education to millions of students. We must. In a 1779 letter to James Warren, Samuel Adams said, “If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav’d. This will be their great Security.”

I hope the Playbook linked above is of immediate use for those of you working in High Expectations charters or those of you hoping to establish one in your community.

For those of you looking for direct support at home, I’m building a collection called Classics Reclaimed, reading guides to help families engage with the great books and ideas of the Western tradition, the first of which you can find here. I’m also developing The American Legacy, a humanities curriculum covering United States history, literature, and the arts that will be available soon.

How do we love thee, America?

Let’s count the ways.

If you’ve found this work valuable, I’d be grateful if you’d consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or by subscribing on Substack. Your support helps me continue creating resources for families who want to rear children grounded in the principles of American liberty. Core content will always remain free.

Classical charters offer all that, but their vision aims far higher. The caveat? That higher vision requires strict Mission Fidelity, especially given the intense, unrealistic pressure for schools to address all kids’ unmet needs.

I watched two schools I cared about slowly drift away from their purpose, not because of a dramatic, sudden collapse, but through a series of small, justifiable-in-the-moment compromises that eventually left the original mission mostly decorative.

The Free Playbook

I believe in the mission and want as many schools as possible to succeed. I also am well aware of the financial realities of running a classical charter. Typically, classical charters don’t have the budget for the kind of deep support they actually need, especially when the school’s faculty and staff have good intentions but also carry professional habits formed by careers in conventional public schools.

I built a practical collection of tools, templates, and systems to help founders and leaders defend the Mission. It includes systems for:

• Leadership structures and protected time

• Family onboarding

• Observation and accountability

• Curriculum pacing and rigor

• Classroom culture and behavior systems

These materials are free for schools to use and adapt, but please do not sell or rebrand them as your own. You can download the entire Playbook below.

The Playbook

3.47MB ∙ PDF file

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Implementation Support

Review the playbook with your Board and leadership team. If you’re a founder, use it to reflect on the kind of people you’ll need to execute this plan. I hope this resource will be immediately useful.

Still, some teams attempting to bring high-expectations education to their communities will need more support. You may want help customizing systems or clarifying the mission for staff or families. You may need someone to review your onboarding practices to attract and retain effective teachers and committed families. Sometimes, a team under pressure needs an objective view from the outside. I know what you’re up against and can help. I offer limited private support at an accessible price point.

James Madison was right when he said, “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” Classical charters are our best shot at preserving American liberty for our posterity. If my experience can be of use to start yours or keep it going, it’s on offer.

If you’d like to talk, you can reach me at:

educatedandfree@protonmail.com

If you’ve found this work valuable, I’d be grateful if you’d consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or by subscribing on Substack. Your support helps me continue creating resources for families who want to rear children grounded in the principles of American liberty. Core content will always remain free.

Others here may not be as concerned about overt politicization of schools, but are seriously concerned about the wasted time and lost potential that come from weak (or subverted) curricula or poor teaching.

But here’s the truth: we have the Greatest teachers right at our fingertips. The best minds of the West left us a priceless inheritance.

It is written. You only have to open the books and read them together.

That is the purpose of this project: The Great American Conversation, a humanities program designed for American families — parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles, alike — rearing children who understand the founding principles of America and love them. While I believe this work supports solid academic growth in children over time, its main goal is the formation of Good Americans, having the virtues every Founding Father recognized as crucial to the continuance of our Republic: self-mastery, courage, magnanimity, and wisdom. With a clear understanding of American history, the arts, and literature, you can rear your children to their full, unique greatness.

We begin with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the first in a series guides designed to help families build American character through the study of great texts. This guide frames Douglass’s record as an account of the moral goodness America requires of all of Her people, and, specifically, the requisite attitude for true American citizenship. The text speaks clearly and forcefully about the evils of slavery, but I want parents to also see it as an unflinching look at the price of freedom as well as its priceless reward, as stated by Douglass: “I was my own master.”

Douglass’s story is the perfect starting point because it so clearly demonstrates both moral virtue and the question of human liberty: What does freedom require of us, and why must we keep choosing it? His story, better than any other in the American canon, demonstrates that freedom is never simply given. It must be claimed through personal virtue, fought for, then actively defended. It must never be taken for granted.

Douglass shows us the true cost of ignorance. A portrait of Douglass and his immortal words, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free” hangs in my classroom. It’s there because he understood basic literacy is not enough. We must actively address our own ignorance. Douglass (along with the Founding Fathers) doubtless took to heart the words of Epictetus: “Only the educated are free.”

Douglass also reveals how slavery corrupts both the oppressed and the oppressor. This moral failure ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the government itself and helped bring about the Civil War. Douglass’s life demonstrates the power of self-mastery, courage, magnanimity, and wisdom, and gives us an extraordinary example of American citizenship.

Crucially for all American students, Douglass shows that even after physical escape, freedom demands constant vigilance, self-mastery, courage, and wisdom. Every American faces the daily choice between “dangerous liberty” and comfortable servitude.

By beginning here, families will see and understand the essential American question: do we take the easy, comfortable path that cedes to those currently in power control of our freedom or do we tread the demanding, virtuous one that keeps the state in check to preserve liberty for all Americans? Douglass does not merely tell us that freedom is good; he shows us what it costs and what it requires of those who would keep it. His is THE example for those who would choose freedom over servitude, in whatever seductive but ultimately dishonest form it takes.

You don’t need to be a professional teacher to follow this guide. You just need to be willing to read great texts with your child and talk about them honestly. In doing this, you’ll also be modeling the habits of mind and virtues necessary to citizens of a free nation. Heartfelt conversations with your child around great American texts like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass will do more to shape your child’s character and strengthen her commitment to liberty than nearly anything she’d experience in a classroom.

Those conversations will shape the nation into something that honors the men and women who have come before us and sacrificed so much on the altar of human freedom, especially Frederick Douglass himself.

You can find the guide linked below. The books are waiting. All that’s left is for you and your child to begin reading and talking together.

Welcome to The Great American Conversation. I’m so glad you’re here.

The Great American Conversation: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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The Great American Conversation: How-to Guide

303KB ∙ PDF file

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If you’ve found this work valuable, I’d be grateful if you’d consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or by subscribing on Substack. Your support helps me continue creating resources for families who want to rear children grounded in the principles of American liberty. Core content will always remain free.

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Here’s what will.

If you’re a parent who wants your child to live a Good life, you have 5 things to do, 6 if you want to push.

1. Test your child's current reading level.

If you don’t have an avid reader on your hands, it’s not because of a moral failing. All too often, it’s a mismatch of book with reading ability.

There are a couple of tests you can use to figure out your child’s reading level. Many end-of-year state tests will let you know if you can access your child’s scores. I’m sorry to say that you can not trust your child’s grade in English Language Arts. If you can find their test results, you may see a grade-level or lexile-level stated.

If you don’t have those, you can have your child take the free test at readtheory.org. Once your child finishes the test, you can sign back in and see the “pretest average” which will give you a reading score by grade and lexile level.

If you’re trying to keep your child off screens, you can print out the San Diego Quick Assessment. It may not be the best tool for a more advanced reader though, since many of them can sound out words, but lack the vocabulary knowledge to fully comprehend more advanced texts. Don’t fret, though. Your child can make strides quickly.

2. Choose a Great book you BOTH will read.

One of my favorite studies to share is that bad readers aren’t necessarily bad readers; a student could simply be struggling with a lack of knowledge (vocabulary) relevant to the reading. The study took a group of kids who were advanced readers and a group who were poor readers, but were selected for their knowledge of baseball. When both groups of students were given a text about baseball, the “poor” readers scored as well as or better than the group of kids who had previously scored higher.

If your child needs to improve in reading, the trick is to select a book that is just a bit above their current reading level and that deals with important human questions.

Teachers often recommend prioritizing “high-interest” titles. Usually, what they refer to are books that serve a niche like dinosaurs or unicorns or engage in low-brow humor — though I will cop to the fact that I find Rodrick from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series hilarious. What I mean when I say Great books are books that speak to the question all humans face every minute of every day: how do you live a Good life?

And that’s what I made for all of us, below. Reference the reading levels listed with the books. If you have a struggling reader, don’t shy away from the books meant for younger kids. They all have meat worth tearing into, even for a disaffected early adolescent who struggles to finish a page, let alone a chapter.

Here are a few of my own children’s favorites: Redwall, Farmer Boy, Hatchet, Sign of the Beaver, The Golem’s Eye, The Lonesome Gods, Betsy Tacy, Black Beauty, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and, for me, a personal favorite, The Hunt for Red October, which my teenage son also read and loved.

On logistics: When she’s reading, make sure your child has a set time and a place as quiet and distraction-free as you can provide. I cannot stress enough how important it is that screens be absent. Even the simple buzz of a notification makes attending to the text much more difficult and requires additional time to reorient to the reading. It’s much, much better if you can remove all devices while your child reads.

Start with 15-20 minute stints (use a kitchen timer) and increase the time spent reading as your child improves. If this process works, she may just choose to read more on her own.

If your child reads a book that is slightly challenging but not frustrating (i.e., one in her zone of proximal development) every day, you read it with her or alongside her, and you discuss each section together after she finishes, you should see significant improvement in her reading ability after two books.

How do you support improvement in reading skill specifically?

• Check comprehension. When you talk about the reading, start by inviting your child to recap what happened in her own words. Note where she hesitates, confuses details, or loses the thread. Read those chunks together and help your child work through them.

• Help her learn to make inferences. Use structured questions. After reading, ask questions like, “Why did the character do that?” and “What might happen next and why?”

If your child struggles with these tasks, the book you’ve chosen might be too hard or she could be struggling with attention; I really mean it when I say screens undermine the development of attention and, thus, the skills, needed to read full books. If this is the case, you will have to build up your child’s attention.

This is how I go about this. I sit beside my child in a comfy spot with my arm around her. I’ll read big chunks of the text and then stop somewhere and ask her to recap what we’ve read. I don’t press for every detail, I just make sure she can follow the story. I might pose some of the questions above if the text supports going into a little more detail. Then I ask her to read as much as she feels like reading out loud to me. I never judge where she stops, and I help her when she misreads something. I correct her reading matter-of-factly, careful to keep both frustration and sympathy out of my tone. I do this with my students too. An emotionally neutral correction emphasizes that the reader’s primary job is to get the author’s words right so as to understand his meaning, and secondarily as an exercise in reading fluency. My students respond well to this, and my children don’t mind it.

Getting through the reading is important. You don’t need to quiz your kid, but make sure she understands basic plot points and the development of the main character.

Eventually, she’ll get better at this if you frame the reading with one simple point of focus.

3. Anchor the reading in purpose.

Before you start a new reading, tell your child that when she finishes the chapter/section, you’ll want to go over what happened in that part of the story, and you’ll want to hear specifically what your child thinks the author is trying to teach his audience about what it means to live a Good life.

I don’t want to belabor this point, but I’m learning, slowly, that many parents have been led to believe that the purpose of education is training for a good job. After what I’ve been through in the public school system, I want to very clearly tell you this attitude hurts kids, a lot.

We educate our children so they can live good, happy lives. We need to train them to read the best literature, roadmaps drawn by the greatest minds of the West to help us tread our own winding way: a life well-lived.

4. The Gift That’s Not the Real Gift: The Commonplace Book

My students take Cornell Notes. But this is summer and you’re a parent, not a teacher, and your goals are different from mine, especially given that you’re likely working with a handful of kids at most.

Here’s what I suggest. Start this journey with a gift. I just bought this for my 16-year-old to start the summer, and hopefully carry him through a few more years.

This is what will become his commonplace book. It’s an old tradition that I think is staging a comeback, especially with parents who are intentional about reading to set an example for their children. Here’s a little bit on the Commonplace Book from a fellow Substacker I admire, Mr. Jacob Allee:

A practice and habit of great minds is to collect the best of what other great minds have said and done so that they might make use of their wisdom. A commonplace journal is a great tool for gathering together the wisdom of history and literature into one place. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of commonplacing, here is what you need to know:

1. Get yourself a nice journal. Pick a great one that is beautiful, sturdy, and has plenty of room.

2. As you are reading (or in some cases listening) take note of the wisdom you read and hear and write it into your commonplace journal.

3. Use your commonplace journal as a source of inspiration for your own writing projects, for pieces to memorize for the good of your soul, for arranging them into public speaking opportunities, etc.

4. Write down the quote (verbatim), write down the source, and why you value the information (e.g. “This was beautifully said and I want to remember it”, or “This is a great definition of justice!”, etc).

That is pretty much the whole idea. Not too complicated.

I gave an inexpensive leather-bound journal (without lines, at his request) to my son as a sort of chronicle of himself at this age, but, instead of talking about himself, he’ll write down quotes from books he reads that strike a chord in the young man he is now. I’ll encourage him to write down questions that come to him as he reads, questions he may want to ask me or his father or his friends or ones he just wants to sit with.

He doesn’t have to annotate what he’s reading. He doesn’t have to write an essay. He only has to record what strikes his fancy. Maybe he’ll sketch settings or characters. Maybe he’ll doodle. I don’t know. I just hope he’ll be able to look back at it someday and see who he was and how far he’s come.

5. Talk at dinner (or after, or while preparing, or while driving to practice, whatevs).

After every chapter, invite your child to discuss her answers to the most important question any of us ever faces: what does it mean to live the Good life?

What in the story is teaching us how to be good? What is the book teaching us about the nature of Truth? How does the author show people appreciating and defending beauty?

You can ask your child to compare and contrast the actions of good characters and less good or outright bad ones. You can ask them what they love about the book. You can ask them what they picture from the words and if they think the setting is beautiful. If nothing is very beautiful — some Westerns make this tough— ask them where they could find beauty in a place like the one the author describes. Share, share, share your thoughts about the book with them.

You might have some disagreements, but now you have a chance to model how to handle disagreements and how, when the purpose is finding great meaning, there can be wildly different answers that aren’t necessarily wrong and actually add to our own understanding of what is good and beautiful in our world.

This can also be an opportunity to share your deepest beliefs with your child around a foreign, fictional scenario that is low-stakes for both of you, but opens a broader conversation.

I hope this doesn’t sound patronizing, but it’s my great hope that my work going forward will give more parents the opportunity to hear the wonder in their children’s voices that I hear whenever my students talk about great literature. I hope that it opens more doors into your child’s heart and helps you move them deeper into yours.

6. The Feynman Test (optional)

When you finish a story, invite your child to retell the story to a younger child. She could do it with a younger cousin over FaceTime. She could create a children’s book version of the story. She could create a stage play adaptation of a pivotal scene that a younger audience could enjoy and share it with younger friends and family. She could take one or a few of the quotes she recorded in her commonplace book and explain their significance to a younger sibling and share what they mean to her personally.

This simplified version of the Feynman Test will let you know how well your child understood the text you read together.

This will help cement the story in her mind and, more importantly, sharing something meaningful with someone she cares about will cement it in her heart.

H.A.G.S.

I hope you have a wonderful summer. I’ll be working hard to create more resources that help you and your children engage with the literature and history of the West, the shared moral heritage that cultivates love for what is True, Good, and Beautiful in those who take it to heart. My goal is to help parents raise the kind of people who not only cherish this heritage, but are equipped to preserve it for posterity.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider buying me a coffee as a small token of appreciation or, if you’re able and willing, subscribing to support my work on a longer term basis through Substack. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide my most important posts to support you free of charge.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

I don’t remember my teacher discussing anything beyond the usual 1984-as-cautionary-tale against the rise of totalitarianism.

I read the novel a few more times as an adult and left it every time demoralized, until this year, my first year teaching it. I have detailed, quote-heavy threads of those readings on X (you can read them here, if you like).

The weight of blasting Orwell’s warnings on X depressed me. I stopped at the end of Book 2, meaning to pick up the work again at Book 3. By then, though, my class was ripping through the novel and I was buried yet again by all 6 of my literature classes.

And then I found something that changed everything.

I found out that I actually hadn’t read 1984 — at least, I hadn’t read it all.

You know who showed me that? Thomas Pynchon of all people. He wrote about the actual ending of Orwell’s masterpiece, the ending I missed so many times. (Read Pynchon’s whole essay here.)

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined.

Yeah, we know, Thomas.

But strangely, it is not quite the end.

Wait.

Wait.

What?

What did you say, Mr. Pynchon?

We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, “The Principles of Newspeak.” We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don’t—we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, “A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing… I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run.” Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?

So I read the Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak and found out how wrong I was about the book, thankfully, in time to reframe it for my own students.

Orwell wasn’t the son of a bitch I thought he was when I was 15 (and again in my 20s and 30s). He tried to tell me on page 4 (PAGE 4!) that we are going to win. That we will always win.

The post-Party author of the Appendix (remember, the Appendix is part of the story) tries to be neutral in discussing Newspeak, but lets the mask slip once. Of the Party’s approved political lexicon, the B Words, he writes: the “words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation.”

I’m no PhD, but “mutilated” has a pretty negative connotation; it denotes agency and intent. The author of the appendix, using brilliant turns of phrase and beautifully complex syntax, seems to be stomping on the Party’s grave throughout as if to say, “You tried to kill this beautiful thing and, instead, it became the weapon we used to destroy you and will wield to smear your memory in perpetuity.”

Just as Orwell’s Proles held on to their patois, a patois rooted in Donne, Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens, we too can hold on to Donne, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and Orwell.

The Appendix reframes the whole novel. Through it, we see that the power of totalitarians is only ever temporary. Although they try to regulate the vehicle (language), they can’t prevent it from delivering truth. The Party’s need to legitimize itself as the proper inheritor of English power prevented it from destroying history. It needed the truth of English greatness to legitimize its rule. English literature transmits truths that can’t be changed—even in the face of torture. The words were dangerous, but the Party in its hubris believed by controlling words, it could control Truth.

This is the end of the appendix:

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.

Dead white guys won the day with their words.

Words we use.

Every day.

Yes, this post is about 1984, but it’s also for everyone who sees that we’re at war with a Party that believes the same things Orwell’s did: that they control the present and, so, control the past. That they control the books so they control all learning. That their messaging and nudging and narrative-building will continue to overwhelm the panem-et-circenses-distracted Proles.

They believe they wear the boot “stomping on a human face forever.”

We Good Teachers, whether mom or dad or grandparent or tutor or co-op leader or classroom teacher, understand the war. We know that every lesson is an opportunity to arm our children, our students, with the weapons they’ll need to continue the fight against an evil that wants to see every human subservient and dependent.

We are not facing anything new. We have always been at war with Eastasia and Eurasia. As was Winston, so we too are in a civil war in Oceania because we humans are always at war—with ourselves.

As Americans, we have been whistling past the graveyard of totalitarianism and pretending heavily-gamed markets are “free” as we enjoyed the debt-fueled consumer orgies of the 1920s, the 1980s, the late 1990s, the mid-2000s, and again in the Covid era. These credit bonanzas have allowed our local, state, and Federal governments to run amok with fraud, waste, and abuse — some of which has enabled the crimes of dictators oceans away, allowing real danger to make its way to our shores.

Wars are fought. Markets implode. Some people get rich, some get poor. Some seem to be above the law while others fall from grace and lose everything. The vast middle-class grinds. Women and men marry. Babies are born and loved. Dogs are walked. Books are read.

Life marches on.

American polymath Albert Jay Nock, whose Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is both laugh-out-loud funny and a brilliant guide to effective framing of modern American life had this to say about the tension so many of us feel, this sense of at-war-ness:

All history attests to the fact that devolution—the decline into socialism—is, with few exceptions, followed by evolution, with progress inching ahead over the millennia.

My brother calls this the Divine Sine.

It echoes what many of us know to be true, that history doesn’t exactly repeat, but it does rhyme.

Humans suffer. Some accept their suffering. History is replete with slavery, conquest, misery, and tyranny. Fighters emerge, people who can’t accept that their lives are meant to be lived in continual fear. They reject the idea that a human life should be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So they fight.

They fight by building families they hold tight and keep rooted in the laughter and disagreements of the kitchen table and the long car ride. They fight by taking special care with the children of others, to teach them what is objectively good and objectively true in classrooms and on sports fields. They fight by attending church and shaking hands with new parishioners after a Sunday sermon. They fight by looking out for their neighbor’s children when they play on the street outside. They fight by building businesses that outmaneuver bureaucracy. They fight by going to the range with their friends not only because it’s fun, but because that action specifically makes tyranny less likely.

They grow gardens.

They raise chickens.

They read books.

They look out for their neighbors.

They love their families.

In 1984, there is a moment when Winston is fully relaxed, alone with Julia in the room above Mr. Charington’s shop, looking out the window at a Prole woman who sings as she hangs laundry to dry in her garden on a warm summer day. Winston recognizes she is beautiful, despite Julia’s complaint that she’s at least a meter across in the hips.

He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years.

In the Prole woman’s daily actions, in her “laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering,” there is resistance to those who would prefer that we be less than human, less than free.

That resistance? It’s love.

Winston fails for a reason almost all of my students could see: he hated the Party. That hatred was much greater than his love. So when the Party used hatred against him, he had no defense.

As I sit here typing with my low grade, caffeine-intensified anxiety about what tomorrow may bring, I am comforted knowing you are out there, laying out this year’s garden, raising chickens, making breakfast for your family, planning a road trip, reading a book to a child on your lap.

My dad, a roofer, came home exhausted every day. He got up before 5, made coffee, and was gone by 6. When he came home, he’d be filthy and exhausted. He’d take a shower (an involved process for a man who worked with mastic; IYKYK), drink a beer, eat dinner, and fall asleep on the couch.

Sometimes, we’d talk as he emptied his truck when he got home. He’d often say to me, “The war can’t be won, but you can win your battle every day.” My dad taught me many things, but this might have been the most important thing he ever said to me. I watched him win his battles, day after brutal day.

Things may get bad, but because of you fighting your fight, they will get better too.

The war is forever.

The fight is life.

May we all win our battles today.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider buying me a coffee as a small token of appreciation or, if you’re able and willing, subscribing to support my work on a longer term basis through Substack. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide my most important posts to support you free of charge.

Most of these people haven’t learned the lessons of property redistribution at the hands of government. Our public schools’ emphasis on feelings over facts has had some seriously deleterious effects on anyone who graduated after 2010 or anyone who has spent their life working in government bureaucracies or for rent-seeking corporations that receive revenue from the state.

Such people appear to believe there is a magic wand the government has but refuses to use which could prevent any financial hardship and thus any negative emotions. I suspect the 13 years they spent learning that everyone gets an A as long as they comply hard enough is a significant contributor to that mindset.

This training appears to be very sticky, especially if it comes with well-meaning parents who, after 13 years of public school, send their 18-year-old off to college with a blank check (often courtesy of the state). These college students generally focus their time on recreation; grade inflation in the university means real head-down studying is optional. Students’ utopian leanings are also reinforced by the typical social media feed where beautiful women emote and a rigid set of rules around what “empathy” looks like are enforced by a choir of high-follower count Useful Idiots.

It’s no wonder so many leave college with a Bachelors degree and the belief that pretty much everything necessary to human life should be provided, free of charge, by the state and that anything less than that is a form of institutional racism.

In their defense, our political representation, regardless of party, are printing money like it’s going out of style. They give the most connected billions of dollars, while also ensuring that “the poor” enjoy an upper-middle class standard of living without working through generous subsidies covering rent, food, cell phone and cell service, daycare, Wifi, and college that comes off the backs of the American taxpayer, whether through direct taxation or inflation. In many young Americans’ minds, the government can just print money with no ill effect. Yes, you and I both know there are ill effects but no one has explained them to these kids.

Take a gander at this:

Those of us punched in the face daily by the steel gauntlet of reality and also happen to know a smidgen of history have klaxons sounding in our heads. How the hell do we arrest this epic slide to Cuba at best and Stalin’s USSR at worst?

There’s lots of happy talk in right-wing circles about anti-communist education and a rebirth of the classics in public schools. As usual, I will serve as your dream-killing black cloud of doom on this.

Even if the schools were to adopt such curricula, it would take years to roll out. The teachers don’t understand economics, period, so the best, most logical responses to socialism are totally lost on them. You know that because none of the college kids get it, and almost all of them were required to pass economics to get into college.

We’ve got three possible reasons for this massive failure. The teachers:

• don’t understand socialism/communism/Marxism; or

• are purposefully subverting it’s proper teaching; or

• have no real incentives to teach properly and every incentive to make every class easy for every kid to pass.

My point in saying this is that just as they do with pretty much any cosmic truth, the schools are going to drop the ball scaling the teaching of adopted anti-communism curricula. (If your child lands in a class taught by a weirdo unicorn like me, count your lucky stars and send her a sincere, handwritten “Thank You” card.)

Knowing all that, if you have an adolescent on your hands you don’t have a lot of time to counteract the current teaching in your kid’s school. Teachers spend all day with your kid—six or more different teachers. Almost all of them live by the idea of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” because that zero-accountability Marxian propaganda set-piece means as long as teachers keep their mouths shut, they get paid. (No, their job isn’t easy, but it is 100% socialist and the pay and benefits and total lack of accountability are a huge draw for many of them.)

Your child hears socialism-friendly lectures all day. She is seeing people who are doing very well, thank you, based on the cars they drive to school and the homes they live in. Those people have benefited from property redistribution at the hands of the state. She is learning the lesson that everyone can have an A, that everyone can be fed, that everyone can get mental health services, that everyone can have a similar education and, to her, because this all happens at school and no money is exchanged, it appears to be free.

In fact, for her classmates, it is very close to free because, thanks to the Equity policies running riot in all our schools, nobody has to work very hard, if at all, for any of it, and she may never be taught to measure opportunity cost of all the hours of human life being wasted in her school. I used to say, “Other than attending school regularly, nobody has to work very hard,” but now even regular attendance is optional.

I won’t belabor this point, and will refer you to prior articles I’ve written if you want to get deeper into how the schools are perpetuating the myth of “to each according to his need” and get down to brass tacks. You can start here.

Today, my aim is to give you a playbook to inoculate your child against what the 20th century proved beyond a shadow of a doubt: economic collectivism is a genocidal ideology.

I hope you object to rearing a child who thinks the state should have more say in a citizen’s life than she does herself. I hope you don’t want her to favor the state forcibly taking from one group, enriching the connected, while only redistributing crumbs to the masses. I hope you would teach her to reject the imprisonment of those who dissent for using their natural right to freedom of expression.

If you do, your family needs to run a prevent defense. All you have to do is read together.

Ideally, you’d handle these one chapter at a time, reading through them on your own first, then asking your child to read them and debriefing with her once she finishes. (Please note: if you have a very sheltered child, these books will be brutal reads. The authors’ pain is real, even if they understate it.)

The debrief should not look like a quiz. It should not be a test. It should be you two together, on a walk, over a hot chocolate, running an errand, driving home from school. You should ask simple questions about what your child thought about the events of the chapter. Start by asking her if she was confused by anything. Try to clarify with her. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know. Let’s see if we can find out.” Share your own feelings — your view through the lens of a parent will bring something to the conversation she can’t fully understand yet.

If you follow me here, feel free to reach out to me via chat if you want to know more about any of these titles, about Stalinism or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. (I’m not as good on Cambodia, but I know people who are.)

Without further ado, here’s how to prevent your child from buying the greatest lie told by man in four moves. (Affiliate Links below. I’ve quit Amazon based on their business practices, so the books I’ve linked below are not as low-priced, but if you’re on a tight budget, keep in mind that eBay hosts excellent used booksellers).

Step 1: Animal Farm

If you could only read one book, I would recommend Animal Farm by George Orwell.

If you haven’t read it (even though it was assigned in school) get this book in your hands immediately.

At a slim 120-ish pages, depending on the copy you order, you can sit down and have this sucker read in a couple of hours. It will suck you in and beat you over the head. (I linked the copy that also contains 1984, just because you might as well buy both in hardback.)

If you have even the scantest knowledge of how communism works — what it promises and then what it actually delivers, this book will resound with you. If you know a little more about the Bolshevik Revolution and know a bit about the purges under Stalin, reading what happens to the humble barnyard chickens and the sheep and the dogs will send a chill down your spine.

If you can get your teenager to read it, she will be devastated by it. She will have questions about why the animals act this way. How they can accept the insanity of Animal Farm. The climax will haunt her. The ending will infuriate her. She will never, ever forget the sentence: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And that’s when you’ll move on to the real life stories of people who lived under communism so that she sees that Orwell may have subtitled Animal Farm “a fairy story” but, like all the greatest tales we tell children, it contains deep and abiding and, in this case, horrifying truths about human nature.

Step 2: Man Is Wolf to Man

Janusz Bardach was an idealist. He thought communism was a wonderful idea, just like so many young Americans do today.

He quickly changed his mind.

And here’s the thing: if you both read Animal Farm first, you will have the framework in which Bardach’s memoir, Man is Wolf to Man, neatly fits. The parallels are obvious. Orwell was that good. Bardach was that truthful.

She’ll see how anyone educated enough to actually oppose communist and/or fascist (but I repeat myself) takeovers are the first people targeted for extermination.

She’ll see the vast chasm between ideology and political reality and how far True Believers will go to silence anyone who points out the delta between them.

She’ll see how totalitarians weaponize fear to keep everyone in line.

And she’ll also see something very special: the very human strength to transform devastating tragedy and personal pain into the will to make the world a better, more beautiful place for all humanity, whether or not we deserve it.

Janusz Bardach escaped the Soviet regime and immigrated to the United States. A plastic surgeon based out of Iowa City, Bardach pioneered a method of surgery that reduced the total number of surgeries children born with cleft palates would have to endure to correct it. He performed hundreds of these surgeries free of charge for families in need over the course of his life.

#3 Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Wild Swans by Jung Chang will leave an impression. It’s not as gritty as Man is Wolf to Man, but it will help you understand one of the main goals of communism as stated by Marx himself: the abolition of the family.

Marx believed that the modern family placed the children in a slave-state. He writes:

“What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

“Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists…On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain…The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

Marx and Engels imagined it; Mao brought it to fruition in China, killing upwards of 60 million Chinese in the process.

Chang’s approach here covers three generations, beginning with her grandmother’s life as a warlord’s concubine prior to the Chinese Cultural revolution. This helps us, her readers, understand how the massive economic disparities and political corruption in China brought Mao to power. The desperate circumstances of millions of Chinese clearly helped drive her mother into the arms of the communists.

Chang’s mother married another idealistic young communist who held deeply to the ideas of full equality of the People. What happens to her father is especially heart-rending if you can view it with some sympathy for a naive young man who recognized the corruption in which he was raised and thought that he was serving truth and moral good, only to watch his beliefs unfurl as he slowly comes to the realization that his support for the party makes him complicit in the victimization of his fellow citizens. Chang chronicles these cracks as they form in her family’s belief in the rightness of the cause and the danger it puts them all in.

Chang’s parents’ elevated positions in the early part of her life sheltered her from the hardships less-connected Chinese citizens experienced during the Cultural Revolution — but their own situation was far from rosy. On paper, they looked extremely privileged with a maid, a nanny, and private living quarters. As you read Chang’s description of the reality of their home, not only does their financial situation pale in comparison to that of the average working-class American at the same time, she clearly conveys the stress of being under constant surveillance not only by the state, but by envious neighbors and coworkers who wanted to rise within the party and were only too happy to inform on her parents to do it.

As Chang narrates the events of the Revolution and the behavior of groups like the Red Guard (which she joined) and the capriciousness of Mao’s favoritism, we clearly see the danger she and her family are in, even if she was trained not to see it. Eventually, the pettiness and envy of other communists—emotions and behaviors weaponized by Party leadership which was always on the lookout for threats to centralized power—brought down Chang’s idealistic father and her sensitive, outspoken mother.

Though Chang was a loyal communist, the fate of her parents, neighbors, and friends under communist rule broke the barrier in her mind that had prevented her from recognizing the logical inconsistencies inherent to communism. The questions she began to ask herself and the inescapable conclusion that the state’s actions ran counter to the ideals she was raised to espouse resulted in Chang leaving China as soon as she was able. She ended up in England and married Irish historian Jon Halliday.

Once there, she produced this epic memoir giving us a woman’s perspective on both the physical and psychological brutality of rule by communists. She has traveled extensively to give talks on her experiences, but all her books are banned in China. In order to visit family there, she had to petition the Chinese Communist Party for permission to re-enter the country.

Step 4: First They Killed My Father

First They Killed My Father is a harrowing read. It is deeply personal. Unlike Wild Swans, Ung doesn’t spend much time on Communist ideology. Ung doesn’t spend a lot of time on the mechanisms of Polpot’s power grab, but she does detail what happened to her family as his control increased.

Loung Ung here tells the story of a family that knew they were in danger from Day 1. Unlike Chang’s, Ung’s family was always on the wrong side of communism, her father having been a high-ranking military officer in the regime deposed by Polpot and his lackeys. Her parents clearly understood that they were the enemies of the Party, knew they were in mortal danger, and did their best to protect their children.

As it turns out, that was impossible.

In gripping detail, with all the emotion you can imagine from someone who is watching her immediate family be destroyed, not to mention watching dozens of other desperate fathers and mothers doing whatever they can to keep their families intact and alive under the most brutal conditions imaginable, we see the true end game of communism: a vicious maw that eats up anyone who might oppose the people pulling the levers of the machine, including defenseless women and their young children.

At age 10, Loung Ung moved to the United States. She has spent her life speaking out against genocide, and traveling back and forth to Cambodia to help the country, still recovering from Polpot’s ravages.

Final Thoughts

Bardach, Chang, and Ung are able to tell their stories thanks to Western ideals.

Your children must understand that the on-the-ground reality of communist governance would never have been known without the bulwark of the West. The death toll could be even more staggering than it currently is.

Is the United States perfect? Nope, but that’s on Americans, and yes, I include myself here for not working hard enough to limit the government to its only proper job, the defense of natural rights, i.e., the protection of freedom of speech, association, the press, and, underpinning all that: private property. It is the citizen’s job to ensure property rights are enforced. We must maintain strict limits on government power.

In this way, we, Americans, are the polar opposite of every communist regime. Without millions of Americans rejecting demands that the state forcibly take and redistribute property, we have no defense against the events that Bardach, Chang, and Ung narrowly survived.

If your child completes these readings understanding the reality communism imposes on the individuals in a nation, that’s a win.

Of course, it’s not enough to hate Communism as we learn in 1984, where Winston’s hate creates its own set of consequences. We must also love the gifts of freedom we were bequeathed by our Founding Fathers, respecting the spilled blood of thousands of freedom-loving men. We must understand the legal framework in the Constitution that defends the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

Most importantly, we must teach our children that they will not only have to know these things, but that they will also have a lifelong fight on their hands to ensure that they are followed by our elected representatives, all of whom are imperfect men, easily corrupted by power.

I’ll likely be working on this until I’m dead or gulaged. More help is coming, specifically on the principles enshrined in our Constitution, but, for now, I hope you will read these books (affiliate links) for yourself and/or with your children, talk about them together, and share the ideas in them with as many people as will listen.

With deep affection,

DT.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider buying me a coffee as a small token of appreciation or, if you’re able and willing, subscribing to support my work on a longer term basis through Substack. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide my most important posts to support you free of charge.

The K-12 leadership class decided direct instruction was Bad. Mere knowledge didn’t meet children’s emotional needs, and if their emotional needs weren’t met they couldn’t receive knowledge anyway. This counterfactual idea meant that instruction took a distant second place to relating, whatever relating might look like. Teachers were told to default to 180-day-time-limited “relationship-building” over instilling the discipline necessary for children to retain knowledge and build upon prior learning.

Everyone was supposed to feel good all the time. Students who hadn’t learned much were promoted to the next class where, disenfranchised from learning at higher levels by weak reading and math skills, they either quietly feel further and further behind or acted out, disrupting the learning of the other students. Adults in charge — seeing a new unmet need — bowed before the worst behavior, sacrificing entire schools full of children to students they labeled “traumatized” and hiring more outside specialists to deal with a problem their wrong-headed emotions-over-instruction policies created.

Grades were inflated to protect egos, minimize time spent studying outside of school, and avoid conflict with parents who asked tricky questions like, “Why isn’t my 9-year-old reading?” and “How come my 7th grader still adds on her fingers?” Graduation rates neared statistical perfection. There was only one path out of high school and it led to six figures in student loan debt.

The proper student-teacher relationship has fully broken down. Students are not related to their teachers. Whatever familiar relationship a teacher can build is strictly time delimited. For that reason, neither party has the incentive to put in the emotional labor to build a relationship meaningful enough to spur the hard work of learning. On top of that, there is now little to no disciplinary support from administrators who are incentivized to minimize any data indicating the school is anything other than a peaceful, calm learning environment. There are no effective consequences to apply to a student who refuse to behave, let alone work at learning when everyone gets passed regardless of demonstrated knowledge and/or skill.

All of this is a result of the unmooring of American schooling from its telos, or ultimate mission.

The good news? A parent can fix this, and the work required is one of the most joyful labors of love you can perform.

The Problem

For the last two generations, our public school teachers have been trained to believe that attempting to teach a child to be Good is, in and of itself, morally wrong. Worse, to teach a child that objective Good—and, thus, objective Bad—exists, is classed as an act of bigotry. I was recently criticized on X for making the vanilla statement that To Kill a Mockingbird demonstrates that even the worst human will strive toward moral goodness. I was told that a public school teacher should not mention virtue but focus only on plot, literary devices, diction, and vocabulary instruction.

Meanwhile, Aristotle, arguably the greatest teacher in human history, would have rightly labeled American schooling a failure because it pretends it can provide a solid footing in life by distributing knowledge alone (assuming schools are doing that, which they’re not), while denying that young humans “must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.”

Aristotle does not use the word “really” for emphasis there. He means that in order for a child to flourish (i.e., be happy and successful), he must be able to distinguish things that are objectively pleasant and likable (because they lead humans toward flourishing, i.e., happiness) from those that are disgusting and hateful (because they are objectively Bad, and harm his flourishing, i.e., long-run happiness). Aristotle understood that unless a child is trained to know what is objectively good, he cannot later reason what will provide the greatest chance at human flourishing for himself and his family.

The ability of an individual to differentiate objective Good and Bad for himself has obvious implications for his family, community, and nation.

The Solution

The student, your child, must be coached like an archer to aim for what is Good. Hitting the target is inherently pleasurable, but first he must be trained to see it clearly. Then, he can spend time practicing his shot so he’s always closing in on the bullseye: the Highest Good.

Aristotle says:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Schools now prioritize students’ subjective and immature preference for comfort over learning. But as I’m sure most of you know, growth is uncomfortable, even painful at times. If a child isn’t trained to desire the Good through childhood and adolescence, he will have to work much harder to overcome a habitual avoidance of discomfort (work) to become a truly Good man.

For instance, you could feed your child an endless diet of Gummy Bears. He will enjoy it. You won’t have to fight him at dinnertime or listen to him whine that he doesn’t like his lunch. Unfortunately, you will have to deal with his sugar crashes, lack of focus, and illnesses exacerbated by such a poor diet. Doctors advise parents to make conscientious efforts to train their children to enjoy eating healthy foods. The rule is that it can take thirty exposures to a nutritious food before a child learns to like it. In other words, good parenting requires parents to teach their children to love what is good. Such training requires consistent effort over time.

This brings us back to the problem with modern schools: the people running them have —for many reasons— decided that training children “to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful” is no longer part of the school’s mission. They don’t realize that this divorce of what is True from what is Good is deeply demotivating. It turns every subject into a random collection of facts that seem irrelevant. If the teacher can’t point out the telos of reading The Odyssey or the telos of understanding how human frailty caused mass death in World War I, or the telos of recognizing the laser focus and self-sacrifice Marie Curie applied to make the world a better place for all of humanity, why learn any of it? For a grade? A grade that can be saved at the eleventh hour with very little effort thanks to equitable grading policies?

The loss of telos in our public schools makes the entire educational enterprise much more difficult. Instead of harnessing basic human self-interest — because who doesn’t want to flourish?— teachers are required to use a broken grading system to coerce students into learning disconnected facts. Teachers present subject knowledge as “necessary” without explaining why it matters, undermining their authority in the process.

So, what is a mother to do when her child’s school selects curriculum and teaching practices that undermine her efforts to teach her child right from wrong at home? What can a father do when equitable grading policies undo his work to train his son to be conscientious and disciplined? What if the school itself trains students, in deed if not word, that lying about grades and student behavior to prevent conflict is more important than humbly accepting corrective feedback that results in actual learning? What if the school teaches your child that there is no such thing as objective Truth, that Good is subjective and, moreover, it’s immoral (ironically) to call anything Bad?

These what-ifs are patently obvious in schools across the nation. The relevant question is: “What now?”

Well, parents, you pick up the ball the schools dropped and run with it.

How? Provide the telos.

The best tool we have for this are stories. You and your child can read great literature as a guide to the perfection of human character.

In the Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom relates a story about his students at the University of Chicago. At some point in a course, he would ask his classes who their heroes were. He was chagrined to find they had none. Moreover, Bloom recognized the special danger their lack of a virtuous ideal posed to the American Republic in particular. He explains:

In us, the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his own skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons […] Liberation from the heroic only means they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current “role models.” [Students] are constantly thinking of themselves in terms of fixed standards that they did not make. Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses, or Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, or TV personalities around them.

Except, where the good professor mentions TV personalities, we must weigh the effect of internet influencers who rarely model propriety, self-mastery, or wisdom. Bloom continues:

As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.

I grew up in what many consider an extremist church, but in disciplining me to read the Bible over and over from young childhood, the church helped me build a moral compass that meshed tightly with what I read later in the Western canon.

The authors I’d read — men like Steinbeck, Faulkner, Orwell, Shakespeare, Ellison — transmitted truth and moral good clearly and without reserve. I got to teach some of their work in my English classroom but knew something was missing. Yes, I could talk about symbols and allusions and metaphors and narrative style, but the deep lessons of human nature were often lost in the fog of literary jargon. My students rarely showed understanding of the human lessons provided by the great stories. When I switched to teaching American history, I found it difficult to convey how exceptional the contributions of the Founding Fathers were without that same moral underpinning. I hesitated to use Biblical morality as a framework to teach literature or history to my students because doing so in a class required for graduation smacks of coercion.

But at least I saw the lack. I understood something crucial was missing.

Without telos, without a clear, central mission, everything a school does ends up being haphazard, coincidental. In fact, you can see the collapse of mission in the fact that graduation rates are gamed to near 100% in every school district. Somebody realized that if the school’s only measurable mission is to get kids a diploma, why bother with the hard work of teaching? Why force students to do the labor required to actually learn? Just pass them on to the next grade until they’re gone.

But a parent’s mission is not the diploma — that’s a side quest. A mother’s mission is to help her child flourish. A father wants his child to be a Good Man or Woman. And this is where we actually begin to educate.

As a teacher, policy made it hard to answer the question, “Why this book?” The answer is, was, and always should be that literature systematically teaches kids what goodness looks like through characters who are clearly flawed but struggle toward goodness. The roadblock for me was that in modern schooling, the subtext of all professional development is that teaching moral goodness is a violation of professional ethics. Even if a teacher wanted to try to thread that needle, a sensitive adult would recognize that such an approach could alienate young teenagers with little to no moral education.

If only I’d been wise and courageous enough to see that training them to love what is Good through literature would give students all the advantage they needed. Such study doesn’t require religious instruction; it simply requires that students attend to the words on the pages of great books. Fortunately for my students teaching economics moved the needle for me. Spontaneous order, mutualism, and positive sum games made teaching the moral virtues of self-discipline, humility, and justice, and intellectual virtues like knowledge and prudence and intuition, obviously necessary.

I finally got the whole picture at a local classical charter school. At first, I only saw the school as a means of escape for my own children, but once I began teaching there, I saw how I could address the major deficiency in public education.

The school had selected objective virtue as the core of its mission and taught those virtues through the secular California standards. My high expectations for student learning required that students develop the school’s adopted virtues at the same time as my instruction pointed out the virtue (or lack thereof) visible in the great works and great Ideas of western civilization. (And, yes, I still taught all the state-adopted standards.)

I am notoriously slow on the uptake of a lot of things, so many of you likely already realize virtue doesn’t have to be tied to religious instruction. No religion has the market cornered on virtue because all humans are inherently flawed, believers or not. Even those who actively reject religion consider virtues desirable in friends, mates, coworkers and their wider society. The trick in a modern public school setting lies in the unpopular assertion (among credentialed adults) that virtue is objectively good and ought to be taught (h/t C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man). The Founding Fathers recognized the necessity of virtue. James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

The biggest problem in education is not that the kids can’t read or add. The biggest problem in American education is the unmooring of taxpayer-funded public schools from their proper mission. That is: educating American citizens to check state power in accordance with the United States Constitution, preserving American freedom for our Posterity.

The Action

Below, you’ll see an upwardly building ladder of virtue, largely based off Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In subsequent posts, I’ll explain how I use this framework to support and motivate every student, from the SpEd kids who believe they are not “good at school” to GATE kids who need to learn intelligence is not a virtue, but magnanimity is.

For now, spend a little time reviewing the chart below. Think of it as the true curriculum for grades K-12 because, frankly, these are the things a parent ought to want her child to master. Focusing on this chart will also provide the mooring necessary for a student to understand why the subjects he’s learning are necessary to his own flourishing, thus providing the intrinsic motivation to soldier on when learning gets tough.

Every book we read with them, every discipline we encourage them to study, should be anchored to virtue. I would argue that every subject is, in fact, moored this way — just not in our public schools.

Then, keeping in mind that the 180-day school year is both arbitrary and limiting, all you really have to do, mom and dad, is read books that have withstood the test of time. And that’s why I published this list:

The chart below offers you a master plan for your child’s education that gives you, the parent, enormous flexibility in choosing curriculum that supports your family’s values and allows you to apply your own hard-won life experience to teach your own children. Once you unlock this door, guiding the education of your children becomes easier and, crucially, more joyful.

Take a look, starting from the bottom and moving up. Think about how easily and pleasantly stories like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “Cinderella” and “The Little Blue Engine That Could” teach these lessons. Then, understand the larger meanings novels like Fahrenheit 451, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn take on as your child grows toward magnanimity. Then imagine what readings of Aristotle, Adam Smith, David Hume, and Alexis de Tocqueville will mean to your older teenager — or to you as you stretch toward wisdom, held up as you will be on the shoulders of the giants of the West.

I’ll break this down in greater detail in future posts, but regardless of how much help you think you need, it is my hope that this framework helps you build your child into an American adult who seeks what is True, does what is Good, and loves what is Beautiful. Our Republic requires that they do.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families taking control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling), please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing what you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Benjamin Franklin did not invent the lending library — he invented the free market version of it: a member-supported circulating library. For an upfront sign-up fee and small monthly payments, tradesmen, merchants, farmers, et al could borrow anything within. The Founding Fathers all recognized the necessity of education, though they argued the extent to which the state should run such a system — yet another thing they were right to be concerned about. Still, Franklin’s system meant that access to great ideas was no longer reserved for the rich.

And here we are, 250 years later, many of us with the space and the disposable income necessary to build the kind of library that would’ve made any of those great men envious — thanks to independent used booksellers in our towns and nationally on eBay and companies like Bookshop.org.

My purpose here is to make it easier for you to find and purchase the books I recommend. I’ve separated the libraries into three age groupings and all the lists are searchable by genre, so if you have a sense of who your reader is, selecting a fitting title will be easier.

You can navigate each list with the pagination button on the top right corner of the table or search by genre, author, and title. Give some attention to lexile level. Lexile levels below 800 are best for young readers. Mid-range readers are comfortable anywhere from 700-1100, and experienced readers will thrive at 1000+. Don’t be afraid to pick up a book with a high lexile score — just know you may end up reading it to your child instead of with him.

While I am a Bookshop.org affiliate and I’d love it if you bought these books using my links, eBay is a great place to buy them used at low prices. Sometimes the only way to get a particular title is from a used bookseller. Many can also be found on Kindle, and the out-of-print titles are often under $3 in the Kindle bookstore. Physical books are much better for young readers though.

Many large used booksellers on eBay offer discounts like “Buy 3, get 1 free” or a set discount if you purchase multiple books. Most offer free shipping. Amazon makes it easy to ship long distances and delivers quickly, but eBay is a great option if you’ll be there to place gifts under the tree and have time to plan. I recommend purchasing hardbacks wherever possible; they hold up better. Someday, your grandchildren might be reading the very same copy of your child’s favorite story.

The most important note: if you’re gifting these to little ones in your extended family, don’t forget to sign the inside cover (hopefully after rereading these wonderful stories yourself). My grandmother signed a book for my first child; every time I open it, I remember how much she loved him—and me.

If my house was on fire, I would save that book.

Booklists for Ages 3-7

As Julie Andrews sang to us, “Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start.” So this is my first, and most important recommendation: Siegfried Engelmann’s Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. If your child is very young, but ready to read — and very young children can be ready to begin learning to read — pick it up. You won’t regret it. If your child is older, aged 5-7, I hope you don’t need it. I hope that your child’s school has done a great job of teaching her how to read. If it hasn’t though, this book will save you both. That recommendation, along with my tips for taking on a list this full of joy and love with your own children are in the essay linked below.

You probably don’t need all that much motivation from me here because these books are mostly very straightforward and clear, but I will say this: read these books yourself. They will fill you with love and wonder and new appreciation for their depth and wisdom.

Below, you can find a clickable, searchable list of the titles I recommend for young children. (Note: as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.) The first column will tell you the type of book. Anthologies (ANTH) will give you the best bang for your buck. They contain lots of stories and information. If you’re very tight on funds, E.D. Hirsch’s What Your _____ Grader Needs to Know is a great place to start for a variety of stories, poems, idioms, and nonfiction texts in science, history, art, music, math, and geography. The other anthologies are either full of stories (ANTH:ST) or poetry (ANTH:PO).

Picture books (PIC) tend to be better for bedtime reads with smaller children. The pictures draw them in and the words, read in your voice, will resonate in their hearts for years and years, if not forever.

Chapter Books (CH) are where the rubber meets the road. Older kids have more patience for a story drawn out over several sessions, but younger kids love them too. Don’t hesitate to read to your children when they’re drawing or eating or doing other (non-screen) things; they’re still listening. These stories are so good, sometimes they won’t want to stop for anything. There are more varied genres here too. You can choose from Biographies, Classic Literature, Fantasy, Folktales, History, Science Fiction, and Western.

And now, the list, all 14 clickable, searchable pages of it:

Booklist for Ages 8-12

My original essay is linked below if you’re interested in the thinking behind these recommendations and tips I offer for reading them with your children. The list below has 15 pages of recommendations. You can search by genre if you know the tastes of the child with whom you’d like to read. Your choices there are Adventure, Animal Stories, Anthology, Autobiography, Biography, Drama, Fantasy, Fiction (General), Historical Fiction, History, Science Fiction, and Western.

Booklist for Ages 13-99+

My original essay is linked below if you’re interested in the thinking behind these recommendations. This list, more than any other, is the one you’ll have to work up to. It takes no prisoners. The essay below is a long read, but it’s meant to support you as you open the door and invite the greatest minds the planet has ever known to guide you in the great search for truth.

The list below has 18 pages of recommendations you can navigate from both the top and bottom of the table. You can search by subject, author or genre, which on this list are Adventure, Autobiography, Drama, Economics, Fantasy, Fiction (which includes General Fiction and Science Fiction), Historical Fiction, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Political Philosophy, and Western. Here it is:

Final Thoughts

This took a ton of man hours to put together and I don’t know how much good it will do. Lists like these exist all over the internet. I’m not sure people read many books based on them. I know that because sometimes I buy books fully intending to read them, but am satisfied enough by having them that I don’t open them.

Still, I’m publishing this in hopes it helps adults who love the children around them find the stories that speak that love aloud. I hope that they not only buy a book, but sit patiently beside their beloved and read it too, or read it aloud together. I hope that in a book (or two or three), they find the true, the good, and the beautiful. I hope that they see the great gifts the men and women who wrote these books bequeathed to us. I hope that they look to become more like the heroes those great men and women imagined up for us.

I hope.

If you appreciated this article, I hope you’ll consider buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Most of the time, the AP Environmental Science is run through the computer. Your daughter takes out her laptop when she walks in, opens to Google Classroom, selects the assignment and gets to work.

Fridays, though, are special. Your daughter’s teacher, Ms. Smith, is a climate justice activist. She’s told the class this many times, reluctantly, of course. She frequently says she doesn’t want to bring her personal life into the class, except where it’s relevant.

Ms. Smith is small and sweet-voiced and still pretty well into her thirties. She’s a vegan and tends to wear natural fabrics — though lately she has shared her struggles with cotton clothing due to the unjust conditions under which it is grown, usually in India and other nations struggling with the legacy of colonization.

There is a keffiyeh tied to her hemp handbag. She loves her students and tells them so every single day. Fridays are special. Her love means focusing every Friday on her conviction that the earth is on the brink of a disaster only students can stop, and only by rejecting the economic system which gave her 23 work-free years to dedicate to her own education.

Normally on “Fix It Now! Fridays” Ms. Smith invites in a fellow activist as a guest speaker. Sometimes it’s someone from her climate justice group, sometimes a local union leader, sometimes someone from a tangentially related activist group, like groups supporting the “unhoused” working on decriminalizing vagrancy and advocating for safe spaces for local addicts to access paraphernalia and use drugs with no legal repercussion. The expectation for students on “Fix It Now! Fridays” is that they will close their laptops, listen attentively, take notes, then write a heartfelt thank you note citing evidence from the speaker’s talk, written in appreciation for the speaker’s action toward climate justice on behalf of the kids in the class—nay, all the children of the world. Ms. Smith reads these. Sometimes, she gives them back to students without delivering them and asks her student, sweetly, to rewrite her note because it doesn’t show authentic enthusiasm for the important work the speaker does.

Students comply. The letters count as a “Project” grade, so the notes have the same impact on their grade as a test. Getting an A on this weekly assignment means the weight of actual unit exams has less effect on a student’s overall grade. For kids on the AP/Honors track with the goal of admission to a competitive college, this weekly assignment is a significant gift.

Your daughter has had to write at least two of these to her teacher’s friends and one to the local Teacher’s Union leader. Ms. Smith has presented her own efforts toward climate justice on a “Fix it Now! Friday” at least twice, but waived students off when they asked if they should compose a Thank You note to her; she felt it would be unethical to give a grade for a thank you note meant for her. She took the students’ disappointment as a sign that they truly value her efforts. Perhaps it was. Then again, it might’ve been the fact that there were no easy-A test grades those weeks.

Your daughter’s classmates take out their notebooks and a pencil. Fridays are pretty mindless for most of them, but some of them truly enjoy these lessons. Since their teacher’s done such a good job of ensuring they know the Western world in particular is responsible for destroying the planet and, importantly, shifting the burden of pollution onto developing nations around the world, they are glad to know that people not much older than themselves are courageous and wise enough to take collective action. A few of the girls have told your daughter they feel enormous fear and grief at the state of the planet now that they have come to proper awareness of the multiple climatic catastrophes the West has inflicted, either directly or through capitalist subjugation of the indigenous peoples in developing nations. Native men and women would live in utopian symbiosis with their own environments if it weren’t for the West. Obviously.

As your daughter patiently waits, her notebook open, pencil in hand, the teacher speaks. “I know that today you were probably expecting to welcome a new speaker, but instead, it’s time we start the work on a project. We are going to begin our becoming as Agents of Change. In a few months, we will put that energy into the world with civic action in the form of an art installation in an underserved local community.”

She continues, excited. “But before we can manifest our dream, we must begin the envisioning process. I want you to think back to one of the wonderful speakers who’ve visited our classroom. Choose one of them, and from their perspective, imagine that you have won the world that you want — you have been successful in your struggle against injustice! Describe a day in your life in this new world. Use sensory details: What does it feel, sound, look, smell, and taste like? How is it different from the current world we live in and how is it the same? There are no rules here, you can do this in whatever format you’d like!”

The students are silent. They know not to murmur; it will disappoint Ms. Smith. Her frown usually presages a long diatribe about how privileged they are and how they must act to prevent becoming a bigger part of the problem.

A boy’s hand goes up. “How many pages should…” he catches himself, “…we limit ourselves to?"

“Hmmm…” she says, aloud. “I hadn’t thought about that. I think since we’re visioning today, you should not limit yourself at all! Go big! Imagine the world as we would all like it to be and know that our collective energy can bring this into reality!”

Another student raises her hand. “Do you want this by the end of the period, Ms. Smith?”

This answer comes more quickly to her. “No. That wouldn’t be fair. I don’t want to limit your visions. I’ll quickly post this assignment to Classroom . Have a draft in by Monday.”

The kids heads snap up. The air changes. A girl in the front, notorious among her classmates for unashamedly grade-grubbing in every class, asks, “So we can type this one?”

Ms. Smith hesitates. She’s not stupid, but she also doesn’t want to have to read hand-written drafts. “Yes. But please don’t rely totally on any support programs. AI might be able to do some of the work for you, but it has no way of manifesting it. Your ideas, your energy, must be brought into our world. You guys are the ones who can actually Fix It, and you MUST.” She looks out at the class, her eyes shining with meaning. Some of the girls are nodding their heads. No one is smiling. They all hold her eye contact until she sits down behind her own laptop. When she begins clicking and typing on her own laptop, the kids start rustling their bags to retrieve their laptops.

Before they begin typing, she says, “I’ll be pulling excerpts from the work you turn in Monday to review as a class on Friday. Go big! Make us feel your joy and relief! I’ll be grading based on the richness of your vision and the details you include that heighten our excitement and energy around your project.”

The kids recognize the solemnity in her tone. They know they won’t be able to turn this one over entirely to AI; it won’t be full of the feeling Ms. Smith looks for in these assignments.

They’ll need to use Gemini — it’s the best LLM for creative writing — and they’ll have to at least review what it comes up with and add some spice here and there.

Your daughter is relieved. She opens her laptop, goes to Gemini, prompts it and begins working on her math homework.

She knows Ms. Smith is done. She’s on her phone, probably coordinating her weekend activities, which is what she usually does when the kids are writing their Thank Yous.

She won’t get up again for the rest of the period.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Please share this with your child. Ask how her classes compare. You may come away from that conversation pleasantly surprised. You may come away from it dismayed, but at least you’ll know more.

Your daughter hates P.E., but not for the reason you might think. She tried to get out of it with her dance classes — she’s near elite for her age group, but she’s seen the local dance scene grow unhealthy and so competitive she’s lost friends over it. When she asked to take a step back from competition, you readily agreed. Still, she goes to dance three days a week. Unfortunately, the school district recently reversed its decision that used to allow students to earn P.E. credit for participating in sports outside of school. Too many kids were opting out and it was hurting P.E. enrollment which threatened the jobs of several P.E. teachers.

She goes to the locker room. She has her own P.E.locker, a metal box that slides out and holds P.E. clothes that are still relatively fresh-smelling despite it being Wednesday. She grabs her non-uniform uniform and heads to the line snaking from the P.E. bathroom stalls. The “uniform” just has to be black pants and a gray shirt. They used to require athletic shorts and a school-branded sweat-wicking tee, but many girls refused to wear the shorts because they made them feel fat and another significant cohort of girls were rolling up the waistband of the medium-length shorts to land barely below their butt cheeks. When it became a discipline problem, administration decided to let them wear any black pants and any gray shirt. The girls who still dress out mostly wear black sweats and oversized sweatshirts. Some girls wear expensive yoga pants, but they’re in the minority.

All of these girls do what your daughter did. They grab their clothes from their P.E. baskets and, despite there being plenty of room to change between the banks of lockers and sturdy benches specifically for that purpose, the girls head to the two bathroom stalls in the corner of the locker room and form a line.

There’s a boy that identifies as trans who sometimes dresses out for P.E. in the girls’ locker room. He mostly dresses like a boy at school or like a girl who is hiding her body. He hasn’t done anything aggressive. Mostly, when he comes to the locker room, he just quietly and cautiously changes in the corner, but he misses more class than he attends. None of the girls have noticed him staring. The P.E. locker room lady who supervises changing intimidates him, but she intimidates everyone.

There are no private spaces in the locker room. Though nothing bad has happened to your daughter, she just doesn’t want to change anywhere he might accidentally see her. Nobody else does either, judging from the length of the line for the relative privacy of the toilet stalls. The girls in her class never talk about it. They just get in line and wait. He’s not there today, but sometimes he walks in late so the same girls always head to the stalls.

Of course, there’s a significant chunk of the class that doesn’t bother to change for P.E. They just stay in their school clothes and scroll social media until they are finally forced out of the P.E. locker room by the locker room supervisor.

Your daughter heads to her P.E. number on the basketball court. Most of the kids still have their phones. The bell to begin their class rang ten minutes ago. The teacher, who also coaches multiple boys’ varsity sports, still isn’t out of the coaches’ office. The kids are scrolling. Some wander away from their numbers.

The one thing your daughter likes about P.E. is that when the weather is good, they get ten minutes outside in the sun. She’s got warm sweats on. She tilts her chin skyward, the sun warming her face. Her mind wanders aimlessly. It’s a nice break from the rest of her school day.

15 minutes after the bell that begins class rang, a golf cart approaches the students driven by the P.E. teacher/coach. He blows his whistle as he hits the brakes to stop the cart just in front of the P.E. numbers. The kids who were grouped in cliques chatting and scrolling, some with AirPods in, amble back to their P.E. numbers. The coach uses his cell phone to take attendance. When he’s done, he blows the whistle again for quiet, then says, “Those of you who want to run can run the track today. The rest of you may walk the track. If any of you don’t want to walk, you can sit in the bleachers. Go on.”

He uses the cart to herd them toward the track and parks at the north, narrow end of it and immediately takes out his phone.

The kids make their choices. About a third of the class sits in the bleachers and scrolls. Your daughter can’t help but notice those kids are the ones who probably most need some coaching and help in the fitness area. They always opt out. On the rare occasions the coach has worked up enough enthusiasm to urge them to some athletic endeavor they give some vague medical excuse. The coach never pushes back. Parents complain when he does.

Gaggles of girls stroll together, sometimes stopping to chat or share something on their phone with the group.

Nobody runs. It would be weird.

When your daughter makes it around the first turn to face the north end of the track, she notices the golf cart is gone. She’s not surprised; the coach often returns to his office leaving the kids totally unsupervised for 10-15 minutes outside. The kids don’t do anything very bad when he’s gone —there’s just not enough time to get into real trouble— but your daughter has seen some surreptitious vaping. Nobody tells the coach, of course.

Twenty minutes after being dropped off at the track, the kids who opted to walk have done barely two laps. Some only did one before heading for the bleachers where the majority of the class is now sitting, scrolling. A few are chatting. Your daughter has walked three laps at a pace not too fast to look like she’s a try-hard but fast enough to get her heart moving a little.

40 minutes into class, after 15 minutes of locker room time and 5 minutes of roll-call/walking to the track, she hears the coach’s whistle again from the P.E. numbers. She can just make out the boxy shape of the golf cart in the distance. He blows three sharp whistle blasts. This signals the end of class, which is 53 minutes long. He’s giving them fully 13 minutes to get dressed, even though most kids are still in their regular clothes.

20 minutes of getting ready. 20 minutes of walking or disinterested “playing". 13 minutes of getting dressed again. That’s Physical Education for your daughter.

Your daughter doesn’t hate the class because she’s uncomfortable in the locker room, though she is. It’s hard for her to articulate the reason she dislikes P.E. From a teenager’s perspective, the class would seem ideal. Yet, your daughter’s bitterness persists.

If she could put it into words, it would be these ones: she resents being forced to participate in a lie. There’s no education and little physicality, but, despite being an elite athlete and the kind of kid who would responsibly use a study hall period in a quiet library, she has no other option but to play her part in this farce.

In the winter, when they’re trapped inside and the gym is crowded, they sit along the walls of the building doing nothing/scrolling for twenty minutes while the coach works in his office before he calls them in to change early.

At least on this lovely autumn day, she got to feel the sun on her face for twenty minutes.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Please share this with your child. Ask how her classes compare. You may come away from that conversation pleasantly surprised. You may come away from it dismayed, but at least you’ll know more.

After math, your daughter heads toward the English wing. Today is a literature circle day. She hates literature circle day. Fridays are okay because the entire period is dedicated to SSR, silent, sustained reading, and even though the teacher works on her computer throughout the period, it’s a nice break for your daughter who does use that time to read a novel of her choice. Right now, she’s deep into Pride and Prejudice on the heels of Little Women. A lot of her classmates hate SSR day because they aren’t allowed to type — the teacher strictly enforces that, but they are allowed to “read” on their laptops and they can have their airpods to listen to audiobooks. A lot of them listen to music, which your daughter can hear but is able to tune out.

There were four novel choices for literature circles this semester: The Hate U Give; To Kill a Mockingbird; The Fault in Our Stars; and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Your daughter ended up in the group of kids reading To Kill a Mockingbird because it was the only title she hadn’t read yet.

She really liked the books but The Hate U Give and The Fault in Our Stars and Part-Time Indian felt… off for school. They seemed too easy. They required almost nothing of her. She knew all the words. None of the sentences were particularly complicated. They were very emotional and very informal. It would’ve been a lot easier for her if she’d chosen one of them, but she had heard about the book. It’s a major title and, well, she kind of liked the idea of reading something hard.

And she really liked the book. She got started on it in her third period class after choosing it and got through a good chunk of the first section. She liked Scout and Jem and she thought the mystery surrounding Boo was interesting. Atticus seemed like a good dad, if a little bit reserved, but he was clearly brilliant and determined to do the right thing, even if he knew it wasn’t the popular thing, even if it would cost him. Dill both made her laugh and helped her understand the Great Depression in a way that hit home. The characters were rich and full and relatable — even the ones who weren’t so nice.

But the literature circles themselves? The teacher tried to sell it as the school version of a book club. Maybe it could’ve been but the other kids would’ve had to read the books, and most of them didn’t.

There were many reasons for this.

It was an Honors class. Most students the class were able to read well. That had not been the case when she had been in the “normal” English class. When that teacher initially asked kids to read part of the first short story of the year, it was painful. Many of the kids couldn’t read any of the hard words. Their reading was was halting and labored. They didn’t pause for punctuation. They skipped entire lines and didn’t self-correct; the teacher would have to tell them to go back. It was slow —so, so, so slow. When the teacher heard your daughter read aloud, beautifully and smoothly, she walked over while the rest of the students worked independently and started a friendly conversation about books. A few days later, your daughter received a summons to her counselor who asked if she’d like to be switched into Honors English. She readily agreed.

The Honors class was better. It was more controlled. More kids appeared to pay attention when the teacher spoke. They consistently turned in assignments. The biggest difference was that the teacher didn’t give any objective tests; no reading quizzes, no vocab quizzes, no multiple choice tests. There were a lot of discussions and students received “participation” points based on the quality of their contributions and/or the number of times they spoke. She hadn’t heard of anyone getting less than a B on a novel discussion. Even if a student didn’t speak, he’d still get a 50% for showing up. He could raise his grade to an A if he brought in written responses to the major discussion questions the teacher gave students to prepare in advance of the in-class discussion.

Because of the literature circle format there weren’t any reading quizzes because there were four different books being read at once. The work happened every other day. It was posted to their Google Classroom and took the form of a list of questions the groups were supposed to talk through in groups on lit circle days.

The problem was that most of the kids knew they didn’t have to read. They could just open their laptops, which was allowed, pop open the Google doc and use AI to answer the questions by just prompting the LLM with the reading assignment, usually divided by chapters. They were supposed to discuss themes and character development and the use of literary devices, but ChatGPT did a much better job than they could do. Well, at least they thought it did. It’s hard to compare when everyone runs straight to the LLM to copy-paste its answers. As Honors kids, though, they did mostly attempt to put what GPT gave them in their own words. They felt better about that.

Your daughter tried, at first, to follow the directions. One of the other kids, another girl, did consistently read what was assigned but the other six students in their group had little to say. As they worked their way through the questions on the Google Doc and posted “their thoughts” to a Padlet, they would sometimes read what GPT gave them to each other, since a few of them had access to other LLMs. They would sort of amalgamate the answers from multiple LLMs. But it always felt weird because the kids had no context. A lot of them still thought Scout was a boy more than halfway through the novel. Most of them didn’t know Atticus was her dad and a lawyer. This wasn’t surprising; if the teacher’s prompt didn’t directly ask them for a plot point, there was no way the LLM would include it. Compute being expensive, it got right to the point.

Once your daughter and the other reader realized they were the only ones trying to come up with answers based on their reading, they quietened down and would just quietly work on posting their own ideas to the Padlet. Sometimes the other kids would wait until they were done and a few other kids had posted what they got from the GPTs and only then read those answers before leaning on them to write their own.

Sometimes, the teacher would circulate for a few minutes. When she got near, they would pretend to talk about the book as though they’d read it. The best way to do that was to ask an opinions question like, “What do you think of how Scout changed in this chapter?” and the other kids would play along.

One thing pretty much every student took pride in was bullshitting the teacher. But as soon as she sat back down at her desk, they would finish whatever minimal work they had to do on the Padlet and then go back to their phones or online games.

The one good thing your girl got out of the class was a burgeoning friendship with the other reader in her group. The frustration of working with the other kids, knowing they were cheating off an LLM and off her work too, listening to them laugh when the teacher left without comment, satisfied with their learning, and hearing them brag about how they had free afternoons and weekends because GPT made it so they never had to read made your daughter angry, though she probably wouldn’t have expressed her feelings that way. Showing anger or indignation would be social suicide. She knew better than to tell people not to copy her work or call them out for not reading the chapter for themselves. She knew to keep her mouth shut even though the other kids really bothered her, especially since a few had a higher GPA than she did which they had gotten by cheating on nearly every assignment and making near constant use of test corrections and retakes.

This is just what kids had to do. School was all hoop-jumping. Nobody really cared about any of the books. Even if they did, the only people they had to talk to about them likely didn’t read them because they didn’t have to. English class was just another competition in the tournament. Just a way to a 4.6 GPA and the chance to get into a Berkeley or a Brown or Georgetown. And it was so easy. Besides, everybody knew the real learning would happen in college.

That’s what they told themselves, anyway, as they loaded up another round of FreeFire or StumbleGuys or CandyCrush to while away whatever was left of the class period, anyway.

Discussion tests? Seriously? All you have to do is tell your teacher that discussions make you anxious and she’ll let you type up your responses at home. She has no way of knowing if they’re yours. Plagiarism and AI checkers have enormous uncertainty gaps; anything less than 80% and a parent could make a credible case that their child had used multiple online resources to research her own answer. Who could fault a kid for that?

On top of that, every student knows that if you really want to avoid trouble, all you have to do is prompt the AI to sprinkle a handful of grammatical, spelling, and/or punctuation mistakes common to high school students and you’re home free.

When lit circle time ends, the kids move their desks back to their normal positions and work on whatever they want. Class is usually totally silent twenty minutes in as kids revert back to whatever they do on their laptops when the teacher is busy at her desk. This time though, as your daughter and her group are about to break back to their own desks, the teacher rushes over to them with a pile of handouts.

“Hey guys,” she says. “It looks like you’re done with today’s work early. I don’t want to overwhelm you or anything because you’re doing a great job discussing the book based on what I see on your padlets, but I thought you might need some more contextualization of this novel in particular. Before our next lit circle on Monday, you all should read this. There will be some questions asking you to relate this esssay to the novel.”

Your daughter was looking up and listening as the teacher passed each student in her circle the stapled article. Good; it’s not too hefty. When the teacher walks away, your daughter looks down and reads the title: “Atticus Finch Isn’t a Role Model: He’s an Artifact.” She quickly scans the article and some lines jump out at her.

“…this ignores the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird does not uplift the perspectives of Black characters, and only comments on them through a white angle…”

“…these point to a greyer area of racism in which seemingly noble people might still act in ways which uphold their underlying biases…”

“…[Atticus’s] white liberal ethics have for too long been used as a crutch in many white spaces for students to look up to…”

Your daughter dutifully opens her pencil case, pulls out a yellow highlighter and prepares to read it again, more carefully this time. She hopes she can get through at least one reading from beginning to end before the bell rings. She has a lot to do after school, but if the teacher went to the trouble of copying this for them, she better make sure she really gets it.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Share this with your kid. Ask how her classes compare. You may come away from that conversation pleasantly surprised.

Your daughter arrives at school on time, giving her dad a kiss on the cheek and popping out of the car at the curb, bag over one shoulder. She sees a friend nearby. They chat as they make their way to their lockers, which are full of textbooks most of them have never cracked, let alone taken home — everything necessary is posted to the online portal, where students also turn in digital assignments.

They meet up with a couple of other friends and share the latest TikToks/Reels they saw in the morning or late last night. They’ve already screenshotted and texted any major gossip; all that happens immediately now. Your daughter caught up on the group chat when she woke up early this morning.

One of their friend group hustles over, anxious. She forgot to turn in her assignment on Google classroom. Actually, she forgot to do the assignment. Actually, she didn’t want to do it so she brain-rotted until she passed out. One of the friend group says, “Don’t worry, I gotchu.” she whips out her phone, opens Google classroom, makes a copy of the assignment and shares it. The receiving friend makes a copy of the copy, deftly changes the file name to remove “Copy of Copy of[Name of Assignment]” and changes the name and class period at the top of the assignment to her own. (This is an assignment that didn’t have to go through the plagiarism checker. At this point, the word is out: teachers aren’t checking. Most kids get away with this hack. The teachers who do pay attention are well-known but they are vanishingly few in number. Your daughter has one of them.)

She quickly uploads it to the right Google Classroom page. “Thanks,” she says simply, before pulling out her phone to check the feed she hasn’t checked for the 6 minutes it took her to get from the drop-off area to her friends. Your daughter notices that she has one airpod in and can vaguely hear music coming through it.

The girls still have time so they head to the closest bathroom. When they enter, they can identify that there are several of a crew of girls known to be aggressive in the stalls, loudly chatting from the toilets. The word “fuck” is peppered liberally into their conversation. They are actually talking about sex. They are rumored to have a lot of it. It’s loud and the bathroom is crowded. Your daughter and her friend, without speaking, smoothly turn around and walk out. They can check their faces with their phone cameras and can wait to pee until they’re in class, when all these girls will be less likely to be in the same bathroom again. Besides, during class, your daughter always quietly opens the door to the bathroom to hear if anyone’s inside before going in. It’s just… easier that way.

The bell rings. Your daughter peels off to head to her first class, which is math. This is great for your kid. Her friends who have math in the afternoon really struggle with it. She feels fresh and ready in the morning because you take her phone away from her at 9:00p.m. on top of her not being allowed to have it near her when she does homework — too distracting. Actually, she asked for your help with that. Every time she got a notification, it would take about 3-5 minutes to get back to her homework. She can’t remember where, but one of her teachers randomly told the students one day that just having your phone beside you makes the work take longer because even if you don’t get any notifications, you can be so conditioned to pick it up, you pick it up every couple of minutes and might end up opening an app and burning ten to fifteen minutes.

She walks in, takes her seat and takes out her notebook, her laptop, and her pencil bag. The friend she sits next to in class is already there. Her laptop is out too, but she’s on her phone, scrolling. The teacher is in the back corner of the room, sitting at his desk.

The assignment for the day is written on the board.

Your daughter opens her student portal to the day’s agenda — the lessons for every day of the year are on a Google slide deck (the dates all still say 2024).

She clicks on the video lesson. It’s not her teacher, it’s a video off the Khan academy website. She watches it with captions to avoid disturbing other students. She doesn’t take notes. Still, she’s the only kid that’s already begun her work for the day when the bell rings. The teacher doesn’t get up from his seat. She glances around the room and notices that about 10 kids are missing. A few of them are chatting with friends outside the door, in no discernible rush to get inside even though the bell already rang.

She labels a piece of notebook paper with the day’s assignment; the math teacher has repeated over and over that students who do the work by hand get better grades. She’s seen that’s true. Her friends make fun of her for it, gently, of course, because they rarely do much of the homework. The teacher doesn’t punish students for turning in work late, but the homework is such a small portion of their grade most of them don’t see the point of actually doing the work like your daughter does. Her friends tell her that when they actually try to do the work, it takes them hours. Most of them use Photomath now and just copy the answers and work the app provides on paper. They fail tests and quizzes, but the teacher lets them do test corrections to bring their grade up. If they fail a test, they’re allowed to take it home and make corrections using their notes, the student portal videos, and whatever other help they might need to bump their test grade up significantly. Most of them just use PhotoMath. The teacher won’t let them raise their test grade to an A that way, but they can get to a B. The ones who want to go to college ask for extra credit to bring their grade up to an A. The teacher is always willing to give them extra practice problems for additional points.

Your daughter’s seat-mate asks for extra credit after every test. When she gets her extra credit back, it’s always marked 100%. There are never any other marks. Of course, that makes sense because she uses PhotoMath on the extra credit problems too. In a class where there was a final, this might create a problem for her, but the last two weeks of the year are dedicated to a final math project of the student’s choice instead of a comprehensive exam. The project counts as the final assessment.

Fifteen minutes into class, most of the students are there because the security guard moved through the building and ushered the kids into their rooms. No one is cited for tardiness during first period. There are just too many kids who show up late, often in pajamas. The teacher gets up and comes to the front of the room. “Your assignment is on the slide deck. Remember, there’s a 5-point quiz on Friday and the test is next week. I’ll get you the study guide after the quiz. Anybody have any questions about that?”

Nobody does.

“Okay, Let me show you how to do some problems from today’s lessons.”

He turns his back to the classroom and starts writing on the whiteboard. This your daughter does copy down. She furiously tries to keep up as he explains how to do the problems. She knows taking notes helps her. She also knows because he’s going so fast, she’ll probably have to watch videos a couple of times to get it 100%.

She works from her seat in the middle of the classroom, her desk off to the left side. As she’s listening, she notices that the kids around her have their laptops open, but most of them are doing something else. Some of them are playing online games. Some kids are watching movies through a VPN. Some are “watching” YouTube with airpods in while scrolling their phones.

She goes back to paying attention to her teacher. He finishes his demonstration within ten minutes. “I’ll leave this on the board. If you need help, come see me at my desk. There are about 30 minutes left in class. Use them wisely.”

He goes back to his desk, leans back in his chair and picks up his phone. This is pretty standard for him, but when your daughter has approached him with questions in the past, he’s been helpful. Even so, he’s known for being chill. He only reprimands students if they get too loud. They usually stay quiet. Most everybody puts their airpod back in (they usually take one out and keep one in when teachers talk anyway) as soon as he leaves the whiteboard, so there’s usually not much talking in first period anyway. Besides, it’s an Honors class. There are few “problem” kids in here.

Your daughter works diligently, using the resources linked in the agenda to help her sort out areas of confusion. She likes math and it mostly comes easy to her, so when the kids start rustling their backpacks 25 minutes later, 5 minutes early, she is done with almost all of the work and feels good about it. The kids line up at the door with three minutes left in class. That’s when she finally starts packing up to head to her next class: English.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Her students love her — except for one troubled student who she, of course, eventually turns around through both good teaching and her sweet, soft-spoken, unlimited understanding. The class respects her. The girls want to be just like her. The younger boys see her as a mother-figure. The older boys might have a crush on her, but they are reserved and respectful, demonstrating their affection by voluntarily completing physical labor at the school (chopping wood, repairs and building maintenance, etc.) and trying to outshine each other academically, which, of course, increases their excellence as young men.

Eventually, our teacher marries a successful young man in town and leaves the school to fully take on her responsibilities as a young wife and, eventually, a mother.

Teaching has long been one of the few jobs accessible to educated women. If a young woman needed to earn a living and was lucky enough to be educated, teaching was a good option for her. The subtext of this is that, yes, other jobs were available to women. Retail and factory work became available to women as cities grew. The issue was one of class: factory work was not for middle class ladies and retail work was a little too close to sales to be respectable.

So women went into teaching. But it wasn’t a permanent job — it wasn’t meant to be a permanent job. It was meant to be a placeholder, maybe even a sort of “practice run” on motherhood. That’s why the trope of the spinster schoolmarm was a joke in American literature all the way up through the 1970s.

I’m not going to David Copperfield you here, even though right now, for many reasons, I’m tempted to.

What I will say is this. I didn’t grow up in poverty, but there also wasn’t much money. My dad worked his ass off to provide for us. My mom was able to stay at home. We ate grilled chicken with a side of rice and salad pretty much every night, vacationed at grandma’s house an 8-hour road trip away, and never spent more than $100 on school clothes for the year. My brother and I would get a little pocket money from time to time and we’d walk to the local drug store to buy candy or to the toy store to look-but-never-buy. Sometimes we got to attend the $2.50 matinee at the local movie theater, which we got to either on foot or by bike. We didn’t have cable. We didn’t have a video game system. We had a computer, but other than the music from Congo Bongo likely serving as the soundtrack of my dementia-addled brain at my demise, we didn’t use it for much other than word processing.

My parents did the best they could and they gave my brother and I all the freedom in the world to make choices about what our career paths would be. They didn’t offer much guidance. My mom hadn’t worked much and my dad didn’t want us going into roofing — although I liked it and probably could have stayed and eventually taken over the administrative side completely, if I couldn’t put roofs on forever.

My best friend at the time told me I should go to community college. She wasn’t the first; more than a few of my teachers were alarmed enough when they found out I hadn’t applied anywhere to pick up the phone to talk to my mom about getting me into a university. Mom was very hands-off. She told them I’d figure it out when I needed to. My dad was working 80-hour weeks and had barely graduated high school so he had neither the time nor the experience to advise me.

So I went to community college, then got accepted to University of California, transferred, and, for many reasons, none of which was passion, went into teaching. I hadn’t loved high school, but hadn’t hated it either. (Middle school would’ve been one of Dante’s circles of hell had he experienced it, I’m sure, but high school was fine.)

I got my intern teaching credential and pretty much immediately had a job teaching 9th graders English literature in a very bad suburban high school.

I worked my butt off and got really, really good at my job. In the process, I met a man and we married. Even with his good income and the excellent one a teacher in a very bad California school can earn, we couldn’t afford a house, so we didn’t think we should have kids. That stupid house was our goal. We thought about moving to a lower cost location, but his and my pay and perqs were in California. If I’d moved to Nevada or Utah or Arizona or Colorado or Washington or anywhere else at that time, housing would still have been ridiculously expensive relative to my pay and my husband wouldn’t have been able to get near as good a job, if he was able to get a job at all.

So I kept working. And working. And the job was exhausting. My students needed so much. I was driving 30 minutes to work both ways. I got up at 4:45 to get a workout in to mentally be my best by 7:15. The students were mostly good people, but their needs were endless. For the most part, really knowing my material and loving it kept the kids in line, but there was endless bureaucracy. There was endless drama. And the worst part of it all was the lying. I won’t talk about it — again — here, but working in a bad school with minors means everybody everywhere wants to pretend everything is fine. It’s not fine. But we are endlessly pressured to act like it is.

I only dealt with adolescents. I didn’t have little kids hanging off of me. I didn’t have students who weren’t toilet-trained. I didn’t have to help kids peel their oranges or open a milk container. I never had to help someone else’s child blow their nose or button a sweater. I never had to referee a fight over a toy or console a child in hysterical tears over a skinned knee or hurt feelings.

But what I did have to deal with was frustration, apathy, and hopelessness. I had to help adolescents terribly served by the system see that with a ton of work, they could maybe read fluently eventually, even though in far too many cases, I was the only one holding them accountable for doing so. I had to convince them that it was worth it to do the work I assigned because once they had something like Romeo and Juliet under their belts, they could understand much more about Western culture. I had to walk them through why spelling mattered. I had to teach them English grammar without the help of a textbook because they’d never been taught it before, but they had to know it if they were ever going to write a coherent paragraph, let alone an entire essay.

And I had to fail and fail and fail and fail. Because no matter how good I was, no matter how hard I worked, the system lacked an incentive structure that could motivate unmotivated kids or keep most of the kids who did show up with some motivation from losing it when they saw how the school rewarded those who put in the least possible effort the same as those who put in the most work, effectively punishing the kids who were willing and able to do more.

That teacher stereotype I shared with you at the beginning of this essay is very real. The teacher is supposed to be sweet, supportive, and endlessly patient. She is supposed to offer a listening ear to any kid who is upset or hurt. She is never, ever, ever supposed to lose her temper. Most importantly, she is not supposed to show frustration with kids who aren’t doing what they’re asked to do. She is supposed to endlessly, patiently, redirect.

I never did lose my temper with the kids, but I would lose it — and frequently — with the system. I totally understood why students reacted to it the way they did. Occasionally, I would have to talk a kid down. Sometimes I’d get the opportunity to point out the perverseness of the school system and still urge the kid in front of me to do whatever he could to take a real education, whether inside or outside the school.

But overall, I was furious, all the time. The great thing about my growing up was that we weren’t allowed to be visibly mad, but we were encouraged to be funny. My ability to joke, endlessly, made high-frustration classroom situations an opportunity for all of us to laugh. If there’s a secret sauce to highly effective teaching in the modern classroom, it’s laughter.

Meanwhile, after ten years in the classroom, my husband and I had saved up a bunch of money. We rented a tiny, janky little house in a marginal neighborhood, to do it, but our savings still wasn’t enough to buy anything. So then I had my first child. I took the end of the year and summer off to be with him, and then I had to find childcare. Every daycare option looked terrible. I wanted to stay home, but there was no financial way to do that and make any progress toward buying a house.

I checked all the mom boxes with my precious newborn, but during the school year, I had a really, really hard time being present. I cuddled that kid and we went for walks with the dog and in the baby carrier, but when things got emotional, I would just check out. I had no reserves for him. He felt like a burden rather than this amazing gift I was lucky enough to have been given. I could hold him when he cried and soothe him, but I had so little in the tank when I came home I didn’t want to talk to my husband. I rarely played with my little one. I was happy to strap him to me while I ran errands and did laundry and made dinner. I did all the required mom things, but the things that should have been joyful? They required energy I just didn’t have.

And maybe this is just typical mom-guilt. But there was something so sinister about it. In my head, as a teacher, I was giving so much to my students all day long and they needed so much and I tried — God, how I tried — to meet their needs. I fretted over them. I knew there was no way to backfill all they’d missed, but as much as I failed, I often succeeded, unfortunately.

I’d find out in little ways after they’d left how much their families saw and appreciated what I’d done for their kids. I’d hear from their cousins or younger siblings how excited they were to take my class because they’d heard so much about it. We had so much fun. Different kids’ mileage would vary, but they all claimed to learn a lot in my class.

It was my success that created the problem. I was good enough to see what worked. I recognized and diagnosed their deficits and realized I was probably the only person who would seriously attempt to create an environment in which a student might successfully address them. But I was fighting everything. I was fighting admin. I was fighting tech. I was fighting culture. I was fighting my colleagues. I was fighting the textbook companies. In 2013, I started having to really fight the iPhone. By 2015, I was fighting improper use of student laptops too.

There was a day early in my career where I was talking to my dad about how insanely backward everything seemed at work. My dad, always exhausted by the physical labor in his day-to-day, looked at me and flatly said, “You’re going to lose the war, but you can win a battle here and there.”

Maybe it was wrong of him to say that. As a lit major, I’m the kind of person to take a metaphor like that way too seriously. But once he said it, I understood that I was at war, that I was massively outnumbered, but that we both believed I had the tools necessary to defend and, maybe, free some of my students.

That’s where biology comes in. When kids are as behind as my students were, and they come from a culture that puts tribe over pretty much everything else, the only way you can get a kid who is way behind to buy into his own education is to care more than he does, which I have heard pretty much every teacher say they refuse to do. I was also cagey enough to know something most teachers don’t realize: you can’t show you care by emoting. You have to GRIND. Kids only believe doers. Talkers are a dime a dozen in schools. My dad had taught me what grinding looked like. Thank God for him.

Okay. This all sounds just like a teacher movie. Tell us something we don’t know, DT.

Sure. What you don’t know is that you don’t just get to grind out the work if you’re a woman. If you’re a woman and a mother, you’re also receiving constantly. You’re seeing the girl valiantly hold back her tears because her pregnancy test was positive and she suspects her boyfriend will be gone as soon she tells him; she realizes too late she’s probably doomed herself to repeat her own mom’s life. You’re receiving waves of fear off the kid who has a fight set up at the local park as soon as school gets out. You’re receiving the apathy of the kid who’s failed every English class so far. You’re receiving the frustration of the dyslexic kid. You’re receiving the energy of the ADHD kid who wants to stay in his seat because he respects you and your class but he just can’t focus on the notes or the reading right now. Even the kids who don’t present a particular problem do present a particular problem because you know their gains would be significantly increased if you could focus only on academics and not have to account for all the emotions and fears and stressors in the room all the time.

Everything in you wants to respond to all of those kids because they’re in front of you and they need someone like you and you care about what happens to them, if not personally because they’re related to you, but globally because they are going to create the world you leave to your children.

But there are 37 of them.

There are 37 of them.

And in about an hour, there will be 37 more.

And because of your biology, even though you are rational and you know the kids don’t belong to you, you will feel their pain. The frustration on their faces will register in you and you will feel responsible to attend to it.

And because I was successful with so many students, I didn’t just shut down, which was the mechanism most of my colleagues adopted. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve heard some variation of this: “I put the work out. If they try, fine. I’ll look at it, grade some of it and then move on. If they can keep up, great. If they can’t, I’ll make sure they pass so I don’t have to fight admin, counseling, or parents.”

That’s dishonest, but not mercenary; it’s a defensive response from someone who lacks a coherent strategy to navigate a broken system.

Call me whatever you want. Neurotic? Sure. Grandiose? Yup. Misguided? Almost certainly. Stupid? If you’ve read my other essays and you know what I’ve seen and what I’ve concluded about the system then, yes, stupid is accurate.

All I can say in my defense is that my students are real human beings living real lives in the real world. Their parents — and the wider community of the state and nation — pay me handsomely to ensure they end up able to further American ideals by being able to access the American dream to some extent. I have the skills to do it. And data drives where my energy goes — but because I’m a woman, a lot of the day-to-day data is coming in the form of energy, directly from the kids themselves, in the same way it comes through to any mother.

My very female ability to intuit student discomfort plus the skills and knowledge necessary to address major disparities in student ability is actually a terrible, terrible thing for a mother who is also a teacher.

If you know you can do something, and if the people who need you to do it are more-or-less blameless minors, and if the entire country is paying you to help them, anybody with an ounce of morality will do it.

So I did.

It came at a great cost to my family, though I can’t honestly quantify how great. If I had been a little dumber, if I cared a little bit less, if I could do what my male colleagues could do (and I’m not dragging them for this) and just say, “This goes in the work box. I did my eight hours; this is all they get from me,” I would have been measurably better off. Many of my male colleagues told me I should only work the hours they pay me for and leave. The best of the men were conscientious and usually professional-looking, but student outcomes in their rooms were unremarkable. Yes, the classroom was managed. Yes, lessons were delivered. Yes, tests were given. Yes, papers were graded. Learning? That was hit-and-miss.

The men’s approach, I must admit, is likely the right tack because it may be the only one that allows the mental and emotional space to be present for your family, which is the whole point of working anyway, at least so far as the continuation of the human species is concerned. I’d judge it ethical as well. But to a mother, it feels like failure.

Mother Teachers fall into two types:

1. The Anxious Mom: Working her ass off, stressed, and demoralized because the system constantly seems to undermine her efforts. In her head, there’s a countdown timer flashing red; she just doesn’t have enough time to give her students what they need before they leave.

2. The Chill Aunt: So relaxed the kids all love her, but she’s taken more of a nanny approach to her job, knowing the kids aren’t coming home with her, so what’s the point of taking a hard line on anything? Better to be loved. This one has a countdown timer too: the countdown to 3:00pm and her own kids.

But here’s the rub, and it might be counterintuitive. BOTH types struggle to be present for their own children.

Type 1 is exhausted and so emotionally spent from the day that she struggles when it’s time to focus on her own family. The children of good teachers are often oddly neglected. Plus, she has papers to grade and lessons to plan after she does the shopping/cooking/tidying because she gets off at 3, whereas hubby probably does not, or she’s a single mom. This lady does not get anywhere near enough sleep. It takes her a few weeks of summer to decompress. Then, a few weeks before summer’s over, the nerves start acting up again. But, hey, she does have summer.

Type 2 knows that if she worked a little harder, she could get better results, feels guilt about not working harder, but isn’t sure anything she does would make much of a difference; she sees the Type 1s banging their heads against the wall. She probably used to be a Type 1. Type 2 is very clear that these are not her children (unlike teacher #1 who seems a bit confused on this point) but the distance between the teacher she wanted to be and the teacher she has become is vast and increasing. Guilt weighs on her, even though she’s usually flip in conversation about the job. Her attitude is much more common on any campus, though she and her Type 2 peers on an elementary campus will talk the talk of the Type 1, even if they don’t walk the walk. When she gets home, she should have energy for her kids, but the habit of keeping emotional distance from kids all day at school bleeds into her parenting. In my experience, Type 2s are more likely to be on SSRIs or to skip dinner for a bottle of chardonnay and a bag of microwave popcorn.

Hilariously, each of these two types wishes she could be more like the other.

Regardless of their chosen coping mechanism, when you see either a 1 or a 2 with her family, you see the same thing: a neglected spouse and children hungry for mom’s attention.

This post has gone on longer than I wanted it to and I’m on vacation with my kids, who clearly deserve more of my time.

But here’s my point: mothers who teach sacrifice way more than their male colleagues. If we had men who were willing to go into the profession—and there are many good reasons they avoid it—who were allowed to enforce classroom rules and were even moderately-skilled in the principles of direct instruction, I believe we’d have much better academic outcomes nationally. Unfortunately, economic reality and industry norms make teaching an undesirable career for men.

I guess what my dad said was right. I’m going to lose the war, but every day, I win some battles.

If I knew what I know now, I’d probably have quit after my first was born, moved somewhere cheap, stuck to a tight budget, homeschooled all my kids, and not taken on this fight. Obviously, I didn’t do that, so I understand if you don’t either.

If you’re a woman, and you’re a teacher, just know you may get professional accolades or you may not. You may have students come back to thank you years later or you may never see any student once they leave your room in June. You’ll never be sure which battles you won. When you retire, you won’t know how much you contributed to the war. You’ll never know if your sacrifices were worth it because a large part of those sacrifices will have to be borne by your family.

Hopefully, they’re on board and you have enough slack in the budget for the occasional bottle of red.

Either way — Godspeed, mama.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

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I said “Hi” back and he hit me with, “What the f*** do I do about my kids’ education?”

He had short-listed four options, three private and one public.

After we walked through them, I realized that the advice I gave him could be instructive to all of you.

Step 1: Investigate the school’s pedagogy.

This guy knew what each school would cost, but had only a vague idea of how each school would teach their children.

You need to know this. While a sense of the difference between the schools and knowledge of what type of parent sends their kids to each type of school is helpful, you also need to weigh whether your family’s values align with a school’s pedagogical approach. Your kid will spend all day with children whose families’ values do align, and with teachers who are paid to reinforce those values. That’s going to leave a mark, so choose what matches your ethos.

Keep in mind that the school’s ability to carry out its pedagogical vision can vary wildly as it’s dependent on the quality of its personnel and its funding. In the case of public schools and public charters, the lack of real accountability and overarching policy common to taxpayer-funded schools will hamstring any pedagogical approach adopted. Again, some of these schools work tirelessly to hold the line. Others just pay lip-service to their stated aims.

Keep in mind that most pedagogical approaches are possible fully online and all can be hybrid (some days students attend in-person, some days they work from home). The more time you spend guiding the education of your own child, the more likely they are to actually get one.

Here’s a rundown of options other than your typical, neighborhood brick-and-mortar school:

• Montessori: Children work at their own pace in mixed-age classrooms with full choice as to what activities they will undertake and when. Montessori is more or less structured play with activities meant to challenge children at different levels of development. Be careful though: lots of schools claim to be Montessori and fill rooms with unpainted wooden objects, but ignore Maria Montessori’s philosophy, which was coherent. REAL Montessori schools are amazing places, but they’re also very rare. Any public school claiming to be a Montessori school is almost certainly doing so disingenuously.

• Waldorf: These are schools for hippie kids. The aesthetic is soothing —think soft textures and natural colors— and designed to encourage creativity. Creativity, in fact, is the name of the game. Waldorf is also big on movement and play. There are definitely real academics here—teachers are knowledgeable and are expected to deliver extended direct instruction—but the approach is different and students are meant to process learning in ways that are expressive, creative, and ultimately personal. Waldorf schools are nature-oriented. Many have seasonal celebrations; think Gaia, not Santa, though. Technology is minimized. Ironically, Waldorf schools are very popular among tech CEOs, which says something about the way they raise their children vs. how they would prefer you raise yours.

• Classical: Rigor, recitation, cold-calling, reading, reading, reading, and writing. In my room, classical is hard-ass, old-school, no-excuses education. Classical schools are built around the idea that a love for what is Good, True, and Beautiful must be purposefully inculcated in all children, which is done through classic texts and foundational knowledge of Western civ. The Founders considered such education necessary to the maintenance of our Republic. However, classical classrooms are not suited to the modern indulged child; they nope out fast. Accountable Socratic dialogue is the key to in-class instruction. There is little to no technology, though this can very from school to school. (My students write very often and their formal assessments generally take the form of in-class essays.) In recent years, classical education has seen a resurgence, especially among Christians, though in my experience, that’s more about Christians running away from public schools antagonistic to their beliefs than their love for the trivium. Many families eventually come fully on-board, but others are frustrated to find out that a Mission-aligned classical school is very, very different from a high-rigor conventional public school.

• STEM: STEM schools are hands-on. Problem-solving activities drive learning, usually with the goal of preparing students for careers in tech. These schools usually are 1:1 device schools, i.e., every kid gets a laptop/tablet. Public STEM magnet schools and charter schools cover the humanities, but spend more energy on science and math learning, by design.

• AI-based: Relatively new, these schools claim that with adaptive technology students learn more, faster. AI meets the student where they are exactly, patiently spiraling through the curriculum at the pace of the student, reteaching and testing as necessary. Many employ a model wherein students complete core academic work in a few hours in the morning, then are freed to work on projects, sports, or other academic enrichment. The buzz on social media is that these schools are amazing, life-changing, and valuable — if not affordable — but I’m not sure how much of that is real and how much is marketing.

• Project-Based Learning: The idea behind PBL schools is that students learn through in-depth projects which address real-world problems. This approach is meant to emphasize collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. As much as I wanted this to be awesome, the logistics of this approach mean your child is always doing a project, usually in a group. In a public school, I’m pretty sure you can imagine what that looks like. Still, some schools get outsized results based on solid curriculum and clear guidelines for administrators, like Acton Academies.

• Religious: Faith will be integrated into the daily life of the school. Such schools can be associated with any religion, from Catholicism to Islam to Judaism, not to mention the many, many Protestant sects. In the United States, these are all private schools. The primary goal of religious schools is usually to ensure the students are raised with a strong foundation in their faith, the tenets of their belief driving instruction and assessment. Religious schools sometimes are quite academically rigorous and sometimes not rigorous at all.

• Democratic Schools: These are exceedingly rare, but they are the communes of schooling. They emphasize autonomy, discussion, and collegial decision-making. Students are empowered to use democratic methods — lots and lots of talking — about any issues that crop up at school. Students choose their own curriculum and have enormous agency in their own education. Often, there are few formal classes. Even when there are, students are free to run their day how they see fit. Students who attend these schools and the parents who send their kids to them seem to love them.

Okay, now that I’ve given you the rundown of most pedagogical approaches, and you’ve selected what you think fits best with how you want your children to mature, here’s how you should proceed.

Step 2: Read each school’s Mission Statement.

There’s really only one reason to read the Mission statement, since they are rarely followed strictly. The Mission statement tells you the prevailing attitude of the leadership at the school and, to a certain extent, signals what the school district’s priorities are.

Example 1: Weak, but probably not dangerous.

“The mission of __________ is to provide a purposeful teaching and learning environment, which challenges our students to achieve academic, artistic, personal and civic excellence. We believe that the most promising strategy for achieving the mission of __________ is to function as a collaborative professional learning community.”

This is fine. I have one concern. Do you see it?

Where are these people focusing: on the kids or the staff?

Example 2: Solid, not great.

“__________ mission is to create a community that fosters academic success, personal responsibility, and community respect by providing diverse opportunities to develop students’ interests and abilities.”

This is what the average parent wants: academic success, personal responsibility, and respect.

Is there some subtle messaging in that last sentence? Maybe, but as long as the priorities remain aligned as listed in the mission statement, I’d be okay with it given no option that would better serve my family’s goals.

Example 3: Spidey Senses Tingling

“__________ is a diverse and inclusive community dedicated to the intellectual, personal, and social growth of each student. We develop critical thinkers, problem solvers, and compassionate, globally-minded citizens who use their knowledge and skills to contribute to a just and equitable society.”

The first sentence is fine and would keep most parents on board. The second begins well, but then starts coding for leftist policy.

When you see the word “compassion” it means restorative justice, i.e., compassion directed at the perpetrator, i.e., zero discipline in the classroom.

When you hear “globally-minded” we’re talking oppressed/oppressor dynamics in the classroom.

The last clause? Anytime I see variants of the words “equity” and “justice” in the mission, I assume that academic standards are ambiguous at best, nonexistent at worst. While this sounds good at first (easy A, amirite?) what it means in practice is that your child will arrive at an expensive college totally unprepared for any major that requires big brains and hard work.

Example 4: Klaxons Are Sounding

“_________ is committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and equitable learning environment where all students are empowered to become responsible global citizens. We cultivate critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and digital literacy to prepare students for active participation in a diverse, interconnected world.”

Yeah. If I saw this one, I’d run. I don’t care what the academic outcomes look like. Besides, places like this thrive on grade inflation; otherwise they fail the “equity” part of the mission.

If you want a clearer understanding of what I mean about Mission Statement examples 3 and 4, you can read this:

Example 5: Run. Run as far and as fast as you can.

“__________ is committed to creating a culture of academic excellence and personal growth, fostering a sense of belonging for all students. We empower our diverse student body to become critical thinkers, compassionate leaders, and responsible global citizens prepared for success in a dynamic world.”

I’ll leave this one to fellow Dissident, Paul Rossi.

Step 3: Visit the school.

This is much trickier than it sounds. You’re basically getting pitched the most expensive timeshare of your life and the salesman is desperate to make the sale (although representatives of high-tuition private schools will pretend they don’t care).

They are going to paint you the rosiest possible outcome. They are only going to take you to the classrooms of the best teachers, if they allow you to see classrooms at all. Many public schools will not allow you to enter any student zone for “safety” reasons.

Here’s the thing: tours don’t tell you all that much, unless you’re allowed free movement on campus and can remain there all day. I don’t know of any school permitting this. If your spouse is into protocol and box-checking, then go ahead and go. You are looking for red flags. Here is where you’ll find them.

• Are the students or the staff in control of the school? Look for non-verbal cues.

  • Do students move aside when an adult walks through?

  • Do kids acknowledge adult eye contact with a smile or a nod?

  • Are they playing/talking when they’re together outside of class or are they on devices?

• Are the classes orderly? Kids need a quiet environment to concentrate. It doesn’t always have to be silent, but you should be able to tell from student behavior what the expectations are for in-class behavior. If students are sitting on desks, chatting, their backs to the teacher, your kid is going to be in for a bad time when it comes to learning.

• How are the teachers dressed? I get tennis shoes on elementary teachers, but other than that, business casual should be the norm. If you see athleisure or sloppy casual, that tells you how the principal runs the school. When you see a lack of baseline standards of professionalism, administration is too hands-off. That does not bode well for classroom discipline or instruction.

• How healthy does the staff look? Almost no one talks about this, but it matters. Poor teacher attendance really hurt kids. Teachers who use coping mechanisms like drinking and compulsive eating as a band-aid on workplace stress (understandable, because stress can be astronomical in a dysfunctional school) frequently miss work. Excessive teacher absence usually goes unpunished because the contract allows for it in states with strong unions. Frequent teacher absences result in poor student outcomes. Obesity, desk-bound “teaching”, and/or low-energy instruction are indications the staff are beaten down. You do not want your kid in such a school.

Step 4: Interview the principal.

The most important things you need to know about the school are the things almost no parent asks about, let alone investigates fully: curriculum and instruction. Parents just assume the school teaches the state standards. While schools are tasked with exactly that, the materials and approach they use to do so can vary widely. In some schools, they may follow a path that will frustrate your family’s educational goals.

After you schedule a meeting with the principal, send a pre-meeting email letting her know you want the following information at the meeting:

What does the instructional calendar for your child’s grade look like? In other words, what units do teachers follow in which months?

If the principal can’t present an answer to this question at the meeting, you are in trouble. If the principal directs you to the teacher, fine. But if you reach out to the teacher and don’t hear back, you’re REALLY in trouble. Either the teacher doesn’t know her calendar, or she ignores it. In that case, your kid is at her mercy entirely and you won’t know what to expect.

Which textbooks do you use for history? for science? for English? Which novels, if any, will your child be expected to read?

You can also call the District office and ask what books are used at each grade level. Actually, having said that, drive your butt over there and ask the district in person. The office will likely ignore your email or voice mail. If you’re there, you can tell them, politely, you’re not leaving until they tell you which books have been approved by the elected Board for use with students. Ask to borrow a copy. If they don’t loan you one, look on Amazon for reviews. If you don’t find any helpful information from other parents, I’d hit up eBay and see if I could find used copies so I could review them personally.

Novels as part of the curriculum are a good sign. However, all novels are not created equal. Once you know the titles your child will be reading, mosey on over to Commonsense Media to see if the novels in the curricular plan support the values you’re working to inculcate in your child at home.

Is this a 1:1 device school? Do teachers use laptops/iPads in the classroom or are students working on paper?

I’m not here to tell you what to do about this, but I am absolutely here to disabuse you of any foolish notion that teachers will deploy iPads/laptops effectively in the classroom. If the kids are in middle school, that device is primarily going to be used for their entertainment. The teacher might intend to use it otherwise, but the second those things are in your kids’ hands, the ability to police their use becomes unmanageable.

When every student has a school-issued device, your kid is free to fart around on the internet during class and get the work done when and if (and it’s a big if) it has a noticeable effect on his grade. Because of Equitable Grading practices, student work is accepted at a Shakira-esque standard, i.e., “whatever, whenever.”

How do I know this? Because I watched it happen across all the students in my 1:1 device high schools and with my oldest child. After I realized that 1:1 devices were a huge waste of his time and saw that my high school students were performing markedly worse than they had before 1:1 device adoption, I threw in the towel, summarily yanked my children out of the public schools entirely, kissed over $1 million in pension benefits goodbye, and took a 20% pay cut to sign a teaching contract with a device-free classical school that could take my kids too.

Tech in the classroom facilitates lessons you don’t want littles learning, at all, and that you don’t want enforced in your pre-teens and adolescents; they are absolute poison to human success. I wrote about all of that in the article below, so I’ll shut up about it now, but you should read the article (and give me an “Amen” because you know I’m right).

Does the school primarily use Project-based or Discovery Learning?

My son was enrolled in the District’s vaunted Project Based Learning flagship school for 6th grade. I’d tried to get a job in that school, but was edged out of the interview process because, no joke, they had to move one of my colleagues who was having an affair with a principal on-site, blowing up both of their marriages. Good times. End result, I stayed at my high school worksite and my kid went to the 6-12 magnet. This is relevant because (1) it gives you a glimpse into hiring at public schools and (2) had I been hired there, I would have resigned sooner.

Anyway, I put my kid in the school because I was a true believer. I went to all the Project-Based Learning trainings. I ran trainings at my site. I had implemented PBL in my economics classes at the time and, no it wasn’t great, but like Boxer in Animal Farm, I thought if I just worked harder things would get better for all of us.

And then the evidence rolled in, courtesy of my gifted, motivated son, that PBL wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t just me not being good enough as an experienced, highly-credentialed, teacher using it in my own classroom, it was the fact that the system couldn’t support project-based learning at scale, despite the District spending nearly $50 million to open the school and roll it out.

This is what happened. In his math class, he was given his first project at the very beginning of the year. He knew his classmates, so he chose another talented math student with whom to work. They finished the project in two class periods.

The due date was four weeks out.

Their plan was to game and peep YouTube for the remainder of the project time. When I found out, I yanked him and put him in the conventional middle school adjacent to the high school where I worked. From there, I began the process of begging the head of the tech department at the district office to allow me to block access to YouTube and Google Games at least, which I was promised could be done, for my own kids if not the school population at large. Every school in the District issued devices to every child, including kindergartners.

Remember: I was a respected employee in the same District, and the tech lead and I were friendly.

I never could limit my own children’s access.

I’m sure there are some schools who do PBL well. Acton Academy comes to mind, though owner-operators of franchised private schools like those in the Acton system will have different success rates based on their fidelity to the model and staffing.

A public school touting PBL? I wouldn’t trust it, but investigate for yourself. Start by asking for samples of the project requirements given to students across subjects. If the school can’t/won’t share these with you, that’s a red flag. If they do give you access to them, go over them and see if they feel appropriate for your child’s age. Make sure to check the resource list as well; in the English or History classroom, the sources of the information curated by the teacher will tell you a lot about the tenor of the class. I’d be okay with the typical university website; I’d be concerned if they were pulling resources from political activist non-profits. You’ll have to actually read the resources to know if they are since the names of these organizations lean Orwellian.

If the projects themselves seem like something your smart kid could knock out fast, you’re going to have the same problem I had with my eldest child. The opposite can also be true. Some of my friends whose children remained at that school told horror stories of their kids crying miserably on multiple Thursday nights a month and parents intervening to “help” with the project due the Friday because, you guessed it, their kid’s time in school was spent scrolling/playing on their school-issued device instead of working consistently on a long-term project.

Of course, your kid might not tell you he is able to spend the bulk of his time in school building a dopamine-addiction you’ll have to fight like hell, and won’t be able to fix if you keep sending him to a school with more or less unlimited internet access. I wrote about that in the article below, if you want to know more.

Does the teacher contract specify that teachers have pedagogical freedom? If not, does it specify that they are allowed to select “supplemental instructional materials”?

“Pedagogical freedom” is how most of the evil in public K-12 schools spreads. Well-meaning, compassionate but, at the end of the day, ignorant teachers exercise their pedagogical freedom to select materials that serve their worldview, in hopes it will imprint their beliefs onto your children. You cannot opt out of this if you want your child’s grades to remain high. I’ve watched families try; it rarely goes well. That’s a big part of the reason ideologues are drawn to public education: they’re able to leverage the coercive power of grades to get your kid regurgitating their beliefs, knowing that if anyone repeats something enough, even a bald-faced lie, people will eventually begin to believe it.

The principal may tell you that pedagogical freedom is not written into the teacher contract. She may say teachers are expected to stick to the curriculum, but you’re going to have to ask the second question: are teachers allowed to select supplementary instructional materials? If teachers are allowed to add readings, worksheets, videos, etc., to “enrich” the curriculum or “differentiate” instruction, that’s a vector for the teacher to insert her beliefs into the day’s learning.

As much as teachers moan about having to stick to a particular “script”, few lessons are actually scripted. However, teachers are expected to follow curriculum in our republican school system, where the community elects representatives to the school board to steward the education of voters’ children, especially the selection of textbooks and other instructional materials.

If you’re not going to pay attention to what your child is reading, watching, and listening to, then by all means, just pick whatever school is closest. Otherwise, you have some work to do.

How does the school score on the state tests in literacy?

If a significant number of the students are not proficient readers, all the instruction will be slowed to meet the needs of poor performers. Ideally, you’d have no more than 10% of students behind, but in public schools, that’s just not realistic; it’s going to be closer to 30%. A really good teacher can work around that, but few teachers in any school are actually that good.

The problem is that damn near every public school has this problem and a lot of the charters do too. No matter how good the instructional materials are (curriculum), if the kids in the classes aren’t at least close to on-level, your kid’s learning will suffer.

What’s the percentage of Special Education students enrolled in the school ?

A high enough percentage of IEPs can destroy the academic standards in a school. I have taught Special Ed students with enormous success in my career, but doing it well in the current system takes huge effort most teachers won’t put in. Despite my success, I still got pushback from parents who believed accommodations meant their child was guaranteed an A or B, not to mention having to deal with administrators who would rather grade inflate away instructional concerns than hold the line on academic standards, let alone Federal law. I said it, I’m not taking it back, and if you want to know more, you can read here:

Step 5: Choose Wisely

Your child’s education is the most important project of your life. It absolutely will determine their lifetime happiness and success.

Can your kid get a real education in any school, even a terrible one?

She sure can, but you’re going to have to work enormously hard to fill in gaps and pick up the pieces stemming from systemic dysfunction.

Can your kid get a great education in a school that’s not aligned to your family’s values?

She sure can, but you’re going to end up with a child you love but who you might not like very much and who very well may decide she doesn’t like you.

I’ve written this guide to help as many of you get the best possible education for your children as you can. You will have to work to get it, just like anything else worth having in this life.

I’ll leave you with one question: might it not be worthwhile, in the face of the headwinds I listed above, to just direct the whole project yourself? The technology is there now to make it manageable. The extra time with a kid you love is a payoff most people would kill to have, if only looking in the rear-view mirror.

It’s on the table in front of you, there for the taking.

If you appreciated this article and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

From these lessons, we teachers experience the ecstasy of victory or the agony of defeat.

Teaching the Declaration of Independence to 7th graders in a classical school is my Saratoga.

Generally, my students enjoy it, even though I’m a pain in the butt about it. We get deep into the language. We read it over many times. We break it down, phrase by phrase, so the kids really grok what Jefferson wrote. I run numerous Socratic dialogues on it, and I directly teach them why its crucial to American greatness.

Now, I’ve taught American history before. I taught it in conventional public high schools to juniors. I did an okay job there. Those kids respected the effort I put in and asked of them in return, but they didn’t get it the way my 7th graders do.

And here’s why: I require my 7th graders to recite it from memory.

It’s the hardest recitation in our curriculum. It’s by far the longest. It’s not poetry, so the kids can’t count on meter or rhyme — though Jefferson did write it beautifully (with help, of course.)

Still, there’s magic in these words, and nothing will bring that fact home to you faster than listening to a nervous 7th grader roll through it, from beginning to end, their confidence growing as they make their way through the lines from memory, sometimes tripping over words like “usurpations” and sometimes moving so smoothly through it you can hardly believe your ears.

There was a boy in my class a few years back. He was brilliant, but deep on the spectrum. He’d sometimes get up in class and run around the perimeter of the room while I lectured. (The other students knew not to react, and he would return to his seat after a few laps or I’d ask him to head to the Resource Room if he needed more time.)

I ran into his mother one evening and she related this story:

“[Ben] was in the car with his dad, listening to NPR. There was a panel discussion and one of the panelists quoted the Declaration. [Ben] looked over at his dad and said, ‘That’s not right, Dad. It goes like this’ and proceeded to rattle the whole thing off from the front seat of our minivan.” She teared up as she told me this, then thanked me, and walked away quickly, a little overcome.

The Declaration is written on Ben’s heart.

It’s time you write it on yours.

Here’s help.

The Declaration Of Independence | Lesson Plan

1.49MB ∙ PDF file

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If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

If your children are old enough, though, consider going beyond a mere reading using this lesson plan. This is the kind of work I do with my students in my current classical school and what I have done with Honors and AP students in conventional public high schools. It might feel like a bit much, but you can pick and choose. Here’s what I’ve included:

• The poem (with sidebar explanations of allusion)

• Link to a professional reading of the poem on YouTube

• Suggested works of art to view and connect to Longfellow’s words

• Practice exercises to help your children acquire new vocabulary from the poem, including a creative writing exercise

• Brief discussion questions to help your children understand the poem’s meaning

• A final discussion question/writing prompt at three levels of difficulty to further engage with the poem and practice analytical thinking.

The Children's Hour | Lesson Plan

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Finally, you may want to ask your child(ren) to memorize this and recite it for an audience. After Sunday dinner with family is a great time, but FaceTime with grandpa and grandma works too. Your kids may not love this poem right away, but they will enjoy it; the meter is excellent. Still, my bet is that this piece by Longfellow will spring to mind again when your children have their own children; the memory of hearing mom or dad read it and talk it over with them will remind them to cherish the moment and, more than likely, think back on this time with new appreciation and deeper understanding.

Let me know if you found this useful or if it feels like overkill. This is close to what I do with my classes; I was hoping to scale it down some so it could be useful to parents educating their children at home, no matter what age.

I’ll put out more of these as summer rolls on. I certainly hope tonight that you enjoy the Children’s Hour.

If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

Grammar school is called grammar school for a reason. It teaches the “grammar” of subjects, i.e., the language particular to those subjects. Despite the largely fruitless effort to make every subject taught in elementary school “skills-based”, the whole point of grammar school is memorization; the brains of kids that age are geared for just that. This is why people call young children little sponges. They can hold onto all kinds of information. They can’t tell you why you shouldn’t pet a rattlesnake without being explicitly told why, but they can tell you all about one if they’ve seen a picture in a book or read about them. Writing here is very much limited to recall of facts.

Memorized information, i.e., knowledge, opens the door to the logic stage where a child will start to think about how a black widow spider and a rattlesnake and a mongoose and maybe their mean Uncle Joe are all related: they shouldn’t be toyed with. A child’s ability to use logic blossoms in upper elementary grades. Yes, your mileage will vary. Some kids are able to suss out hows and whys earlier and some take longer to make inferences, analyze, and judge. The more knowledge a kid has, the sooner they will be able to begin to do this as their brain has many pieces of disparate pieces of information to connect. Writing at this stage is going to be more about explaining. You’ll see if/then statements, transition words like “thus,” “so,” and “however”, and ordination like “first”, “next”, and “finally”.

Then we hit rhetoric. This is the stage where a student learns to express herself persuasively. Of course, this is built on the the logic stage so that what she says or writes is reasonable, rational, and well-ordered and, obviously, the grammar stage where she employs all that hard-won knowledge so that her arguments are not mere sophistry.

Without the grammar stage, the place where the kid picks up the words requisite to understanding subject matter, then the words needed to understand and express the hows and whys of things in the logic stage, and most certainly, the level of diction required to persuade an audience of the rightness of her argument (and, more importantly, to test whether what she believes is, in fact, right), your kid is left unmoored.

That brings us back to vocabulary.

You’re going to hate me for saying this, but the answer is simple (if not necessarily easy): read. Read everything you can to your child before she can read and fill your home with high-quality books (from the library or used booksellers on eBay) when she can read on her own.

How do you determine high-quality? I did it for you, here:

Teaching Younger Children

If you read quality literature to a young child, she is going to learn so many words. You can speed this process if you make an effort to elevate your own diction by sprinkling high-level words in every day conversation with her and with others when she’s present.

How do we magnify the gains from great literature? We add subject knowledge.

I’m not an expert on homeschool curricula, I want to be clear about that. There are plenty of people you can reach out to for help, and I recommend looking for local resources first to connect you with a community of like-minded people.

What I AM an expert on is learning inside (not great) and outside (can be a lot better) of school. So I’m going to give you this one free resource, just to get you started. I truly believe that if I had had something like this as a kid, I would be much further along intellectually myself. Knowledge delivers compounding returns; the more you learn early on, the better off you are in the long-run.

Story time: I really don’t remember learning much in school. My mom reports that I was constantly in trouble for “helping” other students because I finished my work quickly and accurately throughout grade school. Answers were always obvious to me. I don’t remember struggling with anything until geometry in high school, but I had a spectacularly bad teacher who spent way more class time talking about the sport he coached than math. I read voraciously as a kid and that’s what I credit with my academic success. I’d already gleaned most of the stuff we were learning in elementary school, and the rest I could either figure out on my own or bluff my way through. My parents were not overly interested in my academic development, but my mom was willing to take me to the library. I stuck with what I knew and loved: stories.

But as we have established, I am a weird hyper-nerd who grew up in rare circumstances. And here’s the rub: even though I was mostly educated in the late 80s and 90s before school really jumped the shark on enforcement of academic and behavioral standards, I don’t think school was all that great. I spent most of it reading books of my own choice under my desk. My teachers in middle and high school rarely moved out from behind their desks so as long as I got whatever they’d written on the board done they left me alone. This was fine, but it was also a helluvalot of wasted time. Had anyone directly instructed me in actual literature and history rather than letting me float through unchallenging school by dint of what I read on my own in popular fiction, my life would be very different.

So here’s the intervention. If you’re taking the reins on your kid’s education, you can do far better than 7-year-old me because you have free, unlimited access to this gem: The Core Knowledge Foundation.

Education superstar E.D. Hirsch realized long ago that education in American was failing because our schools weren’t imparting what he termed “Cultural Literacy”, the body of knowledge, facts, concepts, and cultural references that people need to effectively communicate and function within our society. Hirsch did the enormous work of gathering this knowledge, laying it out in grade-by-grade format and then, of all things, making it absolutely free for everyone to access. Parents can download the units and Teacher's Guide, review the recommended Teacher’s Guide herself to find the questions and activities that best serve the family’s goals and the kid’s academic level and, (after blocking wifi access), give their literate child the student version to read. Talk, review, write, et voila! your child has a GREAT foundation for additional education.

If you want to go fully screen free — which I wholeheartedly recommend — you can buy the texts and activity books by grade level or homeschool sets by grade level directly from the Core Knowledge Foundation or, if you don’t have a lot of excess cash floating around, used on eBay. (This is not a paid endorsement; I just know Hirsch’s work and think it’s a good starting point for most families.)

Are the materials perfect? Nope. Is it possible you’ll run into something you don’t like about them? Yup. So choose where you want to focus and to what you’ll give shorter shrift. Know that CKF releases this to schools around the nation, so they try to remain neutral, but they’re also doing their best to adhere to all state standards, some of which are less neutral (think California).

The bottom line is that knowledge IS vocabulary. Start with knowledge, and then run with the huge logistical advantage you have over the typical public school. You see, you can help your child experience then apply all this knowledge in real life. You can take your kid to places where she can see and touch and taste and smell these things, a feat schools frequently cannot for multiple logistical reasons. You can pull up videos to help her understand the information and sit with her and talk to her about them (and not let YouTube choose what she learns). You can bring in related storybooks and poems and art and music that will help her understand concepts at a much deeper level. You can take your little girl to a local farm or on a walk in a forest or beside the sea or on a weekend trip to a frontier town so she can see and touch the things the words in her readings represent. When your kid gets really excited about something you can’t visit, you can head to the library and get mountains of books that will allow her to explore the subject in more depth, something no school has time for, no matter how well-meaning the teachers.

And in so doing, you will exponentially increase her vocabulary and, therefore, what she brings to the next thing you study together.

And don’t even get me started on your greatest advantage: the ability to pace your lessons to the speed of your individual child. Oh, what I could do with that gift!

Teaching Older Children

If you have an older child who is not an avid reader, and who may not have a high level of cultural literacy, or who does struggle to read, I’d probably still recommend looping back to Core Knowledge, but hitting only 6th-8th grade units. The Core Knowledge curriculum spirals, which means it revisits previously covered topics, deepening them as a child ages. (Note: if you have a kid who’s behind, go back three years from their grade level. So if you have a 5th grader, start with 3rd grade CK units. Those will be accessible to your child. Please sit near them if you can. A kid with a weak foundation needs non-judgmental, immediate corrective feedback. When you get frustrated or disappointed in his performance, try to keep in mind it’s probably not his fault if he learned little, the schools are that bad.)

Having said that, my travels in the teaching of adolescents have taught me that asking a kid to move through a textbook while using the Cornell Notes process (followed up with the Core Knowledge quizzes and tests) to ensure he holds onto the bulk of his learning may cause a war in your house. Still, I’ll tell you that my children’s summer freedom is conditional on them learning a few topics using Cornell Notes while I track their progress daily. This may be too big of an ask at first, but I’d try. The reason your kid “hates” school is not an actual antipathy to learning. He thinks he’s not good at it, but you can show him that he can be. Pick a high interest topic, print out the reading so he doesn’t get screen-distracted, give him a highlighter and then ask him for a page of Cornell Notes, with a summary. He’s going to get a LOT of topic-specific vocab out of that.

For the kid who refuses, or for parents who are too stressed to take on this fight right now (you can’t avoid it forever though, mom and dad) follow the step-by-step prescription below. Yes, you will still have to fight the screens if he’s accustomed to them or you’ll never get him reading. (If you want to understand why you must cut him off, read my piece On Screens, Schools and Your Child.)

Explicit, Reading-based Vocabulary Instruction

Don’t bother with junk reading of book series your kid already likes like Dog Man and Cat Kid or Diary of a Wimpy Kid, no matter how tempting it is. Your kid won’t grow from it and it emphasizes the idea that reading is unnecessary; that it’s just for fun, not part of the crucible of soul-formation. I’ve got lists of great literature here:

And I’ve got books that are tied to American history, both fiction and nonfiction, here:

You know your kid and you know yourself, so peruse the book lists above. Keep your child’s interests foremost in your mind, but also look for books you’d be willing to read as he does; you’ll have to read them too if you want to get traction. Choose four or five titles and share them with him. It might help if you can actually get physical copies of the books for him to read so he can try a chapter or two.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the many kids who don’t seem to have any interests. They watch videos and shorts and play games but don’t seem to be into anything. Here’s where I get a little sexist. Boys like adventure stories. They like to see other boys do badass things. Choose books that are full of that. Girls tend to like relationship stories that explore emotions. Go with those. Yes, there are beautiful crossover stories like Charlotte’s Web and Little House on the Prairie with strong appeal to both sexes, but if you’re just trying to get a kid interested enough to improve in reading, there aren’t enough of those to choose from.

So how do you go about beefing up an adolescent’s vocabulary? Like this:

1. Read a chapter of the book you selected in advance. Highlight passages that best reflect your family’s set of values. These are the reasons your kid is reading. Check these for high-value vocabulary words and underline them. Keep it at 10 or fewer per chapter. If you’re just starting out, I’d keep it at 5. For my students, I create handouts with the word, its part of speech, and an example sentence from or related to the story. I’d definitely do this for a struggling reader too. You can prompt AI to do most of this work for you, but you should always, always review what it comes up with before you print it out for your kid. I have seen wonky definitions and LLMs have hallucinated quotes, then cited them as if they actually exist in the text. Ugh. Here’s what mine looked like for Act III of Romeo and Juliet.

   

2. Give your kid this vocabulary list and ask him to read the words, definitions, and examples and mark any words that he doesn’t understand with a question mark. Go over them with him. Give him synonyms (words that mean about the same) and antonyms. If you’ve got a great vocabulary, give him lots of related words, explaining the nuanced differences that tell you when you should use one word vs. another. For example, with the words above, explain how beguile is different from manipulate. Those are fun discussions that emphasize the importance of the words we choose in a particular context.

3. Give your kid the opportunity to practice with the word. Here’s one example of how I do that with a class of 30. Remember to go over it with him. The most important thing you’ll do here is find his errors and urge him to go back to the vocab list you generated when he finishes. DO NOT let him ignore the definition sheet and just guess, but it’s appropriate to offer sympathy if that’s what he does at first. In school, kids get away with guessing and rarely have their misconceptions corrected. A lack of meaningful feedback is why many kids are slow to learn, but it’s one YOU can fix immediately with your own child. And don’t forget to heap on the praise!

   

4. I do oral practice after this step too. I ask students to associate characters from movies or plot points from well-known stories with the words above. I do this with whatever novel we’re currently reading, but that might be tough for your non-reading child at first. Start by letting him choose some words and see if he can do a few. You could also prompt him. I might say something like, “Which of these words apply to Cuzco from the Emperor’s New Groove and why? Which ones apply more to Pacha?” Praise, praise, praise anything he gets right and correct his misconceptions, gently, if he misattributes a word. Learning is all about the number of touch points you have with new information. The more times you access it, the more meaningfully you process it, the more likely you are to hold on to it.

5. Now, let him read. Give him a day or so. It’s important that he get a chance to see the vocab in context and take a breather before he practices with it again. His brain needs to practice remembering the words and he can’t do that unless he’s been away from them for a while. So, once he has read the chapter, send him back to the vocab. He should have a little more familiarity with it after seeing those words in context. Give him a different practice sheet. Again, LLMs are your friend here. Be sure to review what AI came up with for accuracy and appropriateness (and that it doesn’t make the answers too obvious — it does that too sometimes) before you give him the sheet. Again, make sure you go over his answers. And remember to praise him here! This is where he’s doing the harder work of applying the term in context. When he gets something wrong, mark it and make him go back, look at the words he missed and, ideally, explain to you why he got them confused. (You may find out the sentence was a bit ambiguous when you hear his explanation — for an example of that, look at #2. AI, while helpful, is not the answer to human education.)

   

6. Now you get to discuss what he read. Get the book and the vocabulary list. Your focus here is not on the vocab, but remember that it will be fresh in his mind after you’ve reviewed his vocab. Your conversation should center on the excerpts from the chapter you think will help him learn the things that will help him most as he matures. Here’s the vocabulary trick: use as many of the vocabulary words as you can during this discussion. Prompt him to use them too, as in, “Do you find Lord Capulet’s behavior abhorrent in this act or would it make sense to you, if you were Juliet’s dad?” I find winking and raising my eyebrows repeatedly when I say the word will make a kid laugh and remember the word; Dad Jokes are a huge advantage here. Note: This part of the process is going to stretch you too. You’re going to have to tie the vocabulary you chose to your discussion and some of the words you selected may not be words you employ very often. One of the great benefits of homeschooling is that you learn along with your kid. It’s the best part of my summer, frankly.

7. Okay. The final boss: the vocabulary story. (If you’re following my Cornell Notes plan, your kid would be writing a summary of the chapter first before he does this next thing, but I think it’s fun to do this as a separate writing exercise too.) I gave my students the prompt below for Act III of Romeo and Juliet.

   

   Once your child is done writing, read the story quietly. SMILE OFTEN. Let him know you love his story before you correct anything. Read the lines he wrote that made you giggle or that were beautiful aloud.

8. As for corrections, my students’ most frequent error is to forget to add an adjective ending to change a noun. I see phrasing like “the valor knight” often. Such mistakes offer a springboard for a simple grammar lesson on adjectives and nouns, to teach that only an adjective can modify a noun. And even if you don’t have that language in your own arsenal, you’ll recognize that something is wrong in the way your child used the word. It’s very important that you have him correct his mistakes here. When you see something is wrong, don’t just tell him. Teach him how to fix it and make sure he physically corrects the mistake. Poor practice trains in poor habits; you definitely don’t want to do that.

9. The last thing that I’d recommend for a homeschooler (and something I should do in my classroom but didn’t this year) is to put these words on a big piece of paper somewhere visible and then make the effort to use them in conversation as often as possible. As much as possible, make it a game. Ask him to use some vocab words to describe his dinner as though he were a restaurant critic or if it was the first meal his girlfriend had made him. There are SO MANY WAYS to play with language; make it playful and he’ll learn faster.

This post was surprisingly hard to finish. I hope you find it helpful. As always, you can reach out to me via chat here if you have any specific questions.

If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

I wish that was just down to my personal brilliance, but it’s not. It’s because a few years ago after a dalliance with neuroscience, I adopted Cornell Notes for my classroom and explicitly taught students how to use them.

Cornell note-taking (plus the Feynman test) are pretty much the only paper-based activities you need to educate a child at home. The Cornell Notes method is the best processing method I’ve come across in 23 years of teaching. If you can pair Cornell Notes with an end-of-unit written assessment (more on that coming soon), it’s highly likely your child will be light years ahead of his peers.

How do you do this at home? Let me walk you through it.

What are Cornell Notes?

First, what the heck are Cornell notes? Here’s a handy image for you to get familiar with before I explain. This image is titled, labeled and goes step-by-step through the process. Take a minute to read through this, and then I’ll explain.

Okay, so if you read through that, you can see that this is a pretty advanced breakdown, probably for college students, so let’s scale it back some.

You start with paper. Easy enough, right?

Then you separate the paper unto unequal columns, one much larger than the other. Why? Because the chungus on the right is for your kid to record his takeaways from the reading.

I can hear some of you objecting already. Wait a second, DT. That diagram says this is for lecture. I’m not lecturing. And why do I have to make my kid take notes on what he reads? Can’t we just read?

Oh ho ho. It seems we have just stumbled upon one of the main reasons our own K12 years bore little fruit. You and I did just read… and promptly forgot. We were sometimes required to answer a few comprehension questions after reading, the necessary text often helpfully bolded or italicized in our textbooks. So we didn’t actually read, we just scanned the text to get our homework done. We missed the connections that a good writer can help us make — which improve the strength of memory — by blowing through the text.

Today, in schools where kids are given tablets or laptops, students use AI to skip even scanning the text, so if we actually want our own children to learn, we’re going to have to go medieval on their butts, or at least head back to the 1950s with Dr. Walter Pauk, who invented the process of Cornell note-taking when he was a TA at Cornell University.

Start by selecting the information you want your child to retain. This summer, I’ll be training my 11-year-old. (He’s on his way home from grandma’s house right now, so we’ll get started bright and early Monday morning.)

This is how I’ll go about it.

Reading Is the Thing

While I could lecture in history and literature, I’m not going to. I’m going to teach my kids that physical books, carefully chosen, are a better source of information than somebody whose CV I can’t properly vet. Reading also helps us focus on the task at hand by minimizing distractions. I know YouTube can be a good tool, but for younger kids, it’s a distraction machine. Plus taking notes from video is tough unless you’re adept at note-taking already.

First, I’m going to walk my kid through the text. I’ll point out how it’s organized. Let’s look at the history book he’ll be using (and the one I’ll be reading to my 7-year-old).

For history, I’m going to keep this work very simple. He will have a single spiral bound notebook and we’ll separate his notes by unit. His first unit is on the Renaissance. I’ll have him read through some background on the medieval period and maybe give him a few notes to provide context for this topic, but then he’ll be responsible for reading and highlighting the important ideas from a section like this one.

Highlighting a textbook? Heck yeah! I buy used books (eBay is your friend) so that my kids can write in them. Well, then why does the kid need to take notes if he can highlight, DT? I can already see I’m going to have a full-blown insurrection on my hands for asking my kid to work through summer!

Because handwriting leads to increased brain activity, with positive effects on learning and memory.

My son will annotate the text and then use his annotations to write Cornell notes to cover the What, Who, Where, When, and How/Why of each unit. To learn that basic set of facts is his primary task and what I’ll be looking for in his notes.

He’ll start by reading these pages. After the first reading, I’ll ASK him:

• What was the Renaissance?

• When did it happen?;

• Who was involved?;

• Where did this happen?;

• How did the Renaissance play out?; and, most importantly,

• Why does it matter?

If he can’t answer all of these questions from the information he highlighted, I’ll direct him back to the text to find the missing pieces. His answers to these questions will become his notes.

So, within the first contact with this information, I’ve sneakily tricked him into reviewing it multiple times.

1. First reading.

2. Answering the 5 W questions orally.

3. (Possible) If he can’t answer, review.

The Notes Section

Once he has verbalized answers to these questions, I’ll have him look back through what he highlighted and make a pencil mark next to what deserves to be recorded in his notes. (4th contact).

Then we get to the actual writing down of what he’s highlighted and deemed important. He’s going to do that in the Notes section. He’ll use bullets, and I’ll teach him to indent if he’s writing a sub-fact that he found personally interesting (which I’ll also encourage him to do). This will give him a fifth contact with each piece of information.

The Cue Section

After he’s completed the note section, I’ll ask my son to look again at each piece of information he wrote down and compose a question that is fully answered by that information. He’ll write each question beside the notes that answer it. The purpose of this alignment is so that when he reviews, if he can’t recall the answer, it’s literally right there.

The process of creating cue questions will be his fifth contact with the information and, importantly, an opportunity to process the information in a different way. A student who has to transform facts into questions must clarify what he understands. When he gets better at discerning the most relevant facts from details, writing cue questions will help him identify connections between seemingly disconnected facts.

This is where we really start to see memory stick. It’s when you DO something to change or manipulate the information in your own head that recall becomes fast and easy. There is labor in learning. That labor builds memory. I know my students are really starting to “get” a concept when they can look at a topic and write a question that forces recall of more than one fact at a time. For instance, if we were studying, say, The Little Red Hen, a student could ask a question like, “What was the first thing the hen asked for help with?” This is a fine question, but you know they’re really engaged when they get to the bottom of their notes and ask a question like, “Was the little red hen selfish?”

That’s a higher level of thinking. Don’t be discouraged if your kid can’t do that right off the bat. Let them get used to asking “right there” questions in their own notes.

Your next job will be to review the questions with your child after they’re written down. This is the 6th contact your child has with this information. Ask him to read his questions to you. If you know the material — and you should read whatever he’s reading too so you can help him — help him correct questions that are weak.

I always ask students to volunteer their cue questions and give positive feedback for any that are directly answered by the notes. When they’re not very good, I ask the class how we could make the question better, which usually means how we could change the question so that it’s answered by the notes. So back to The Little Red Hen. A student might ask a question like, “Why didn’t the other animals help the hen?” That question isn’t answered by what’s in the text. Your kid may recognize that the cat and the duck and the pig are lazy, but the text never directly says that. If it’s not in his notes, it shouldn’t be a cue question.

As your child improves in this process of determining the key aspects of the text, you can also encourage him to write complex questions that cover more than a single piece of information, but you’ll definitely need to help with this at first. Feedback is critical to overall performance. You’re doing a hugely important job by offering it for two reasons:

1. So that he can learn to take corrective feedback as a positive and

2. So the he is reinforced that he is on the right track.

As you listen to him read out his cue questions, your primary job is to make sure your kid isn’t missing answers to any of the five key questions. If he is, have him go back. If the piece is complex, e.g., there is more than one “who” or “what”, etc., you may have to have him go back and write more notes, but what you’re teaching might be the most important (and, in public schools, most often skipped) skill: discernment. It’s easy for kids to get stuck in the weeds. Don’t let them. Stick to the primary facts, though if your kid is having fun, details can be discussed and noted too, but this is where you teach them primary vs. supporting facts.

Always be on the lookout to level them up and ask a more difficult question that requires them to connect information. When I ask questions that I know might be beyond a student’s capacity, I preface it with, “This is tricky, but what do you think this means?” And when he tries, as long as I can see the attempt was honest I give them some version of “Not quite, but I can see your train of thought. Good attempt.” If they get it right, you have more data to push further in the future. If they shrug and say, “I don’t know” you can either let it go, or try to break the question down into something more manageable. Don’t be too critical, but make sure they know you expect them to improve over time as they learn more.

Now you’re at contact 7. Take his notebook from him and tell him it’s quiz time. Ask your child the questions he wrote down in the cue section of his notes. Here’s the thing: he’s going to be able to answer them, and he’s going to feel really good about that. If he can’t answer one, give him back his notes with no judgment and ask him to find the answer there. (That’s another contact!) In doing so, you’re teaching him that his own notes are a valuable resource for studying. When he takes good notes, he doesn’t have to go all the way back to the text and read through the whole thing again.

Many students see notes as a heavy upfront investment, but when the process is mastered, they improve learning overall and will vault a student ahead of kids who rely on a teacher (or an LLM) to tell them which iinformation was key and which was a supporting detail.

The Summary

After you've reviewed and separated big ideas from supporting details, your child will write a summary of what he learned. This is the eighth contact with the information in one session.

If your kiddo is young, you’re going to want to give him a sentence starter to help him write his paragraph.

• The Renaissance was _____.

• “The Little Red Hen” is _____.

Then have him write the rest of their who, what, when, where, how, and why it matters answers as a paragraph of complete sentences for someone younger. This is important. Tell him to imagine that he’s explaining to a kid who’s 3 or 4 years his junior. This forces your child to reshape the information in his own head, to break it down and reconstruct it for a less knowledgeable audience. This is where real, deep learning can occur. It will also help diagnose any areas of confusion or vocabulary he doesn’t fully understand. It might send him back to the text for answers. That is a great outcome (even if it annoys him).

When he’s finished his summary, have your child read it out loud for you. Reading aloud allows him to catch grammatical errors in his writing. If your son doesn’t catch one of his mistakes as he’s reading, stop him and help him address the error. I’d also review spelling when he finishes reading to you. Address any errors there by circling the misspelled word and helping him rewrite the word correctly.

And here’s your final step, which may sound silly if he’s an adolescent, but do it anyway: when he’s all done with his assignment, put a big old smiley face on it (extra points for cheesy teacher stickers or scratch ‘n’ sniff), tell him you’re proud of him, and give him a hug. That positive reinforcement matters more than you think. If you really want to level up, get grandma or grandpa or a favorite uncle on FaceTime, have him read his summary to them and praise him to the heavens with, “Wow, I never knew that!” or “Thanks for reminding me about that.”

So, besides having eight opportunities to engage with the information you want him to learn, Cornell Notes also allows you to sneak in lessons in composition, in grammar, mechanics, and usage, and in public speaking. Winning.

Review

You must forget to learn. That sounds weird. Allow me to explain.

Learning is the ability to recall information. In order to recall it, you have to forget it. Before you review, you must allow your child time to forget. If you’re doing this at home, save review of the material for at least a day. Begin every day’s session with a review of prior material; this is why having a single notebook for each subject is helpful. Go back a few pages, not just one, and ask those cue questions, then move forward to the more recent material.

Kids love to show what they know. They feel real joy when they get things right. Case in point: just checked my eldest’s sentence diagramming skills. Even though he whinged about me making him do it during summer vacation, the fact that he remembered so much of what I taught him two years ago put a smirk of confidence on his face, try as he did to hide it from his annoying mom.

If you review with your child, you’ll experience the joy of watching his face as his brain works to bring back ideas from preceding days’ work. When he fumbles, you can prompt him using his notes. If you’re familiar with the material, you can ask him bonus questions — just be sure to gear them appropriately; you’re building his confidence here. Don’t try to stump him.

The traditional method of review using Cornell Notes is for the student to use the notes on his own, simply covering the notes section and asking himself his cue questions. If you can’t do it with him, delegate this job to a literate younger sibling; they love it too and they might accidentally pick some things up as they try to catch out big brother/sister.

The Notebook

Tonight my son is going to an end-of-year Burn Party. I’d never heard of one of these before, but it’s a tradition among the students at his new school. The students take all their work from the year, light a huge bonfire, and throw it all in.

This is a dagger to a teacher’s heart. My son wants to go and I want him to have fun, but obviously when he told me about it I was dismayed that he put such little stock in his work this year that he would want to watch it all go up in smoke.

Then I went into his room to dump his clean laundry on his bed.

In several open folders there lay disorganized piles of notes, the Cornell Notes I’d taught him to take but which most of his teachers this year didn’t require.

He did it anyway.

The notes aren’t as organized as I’d like them to be, but they were separated from the worksheets and one-question quizzes and multiple choice tests from his school year. Those got packed into his backpack and are headed for the bonfire.

The notes, apparently, will stay in his folders in his room.

The work matters to him.

The knowledge matters to him.

I hope that your family can use Cornell Notes to make the process of learning mean more to your kids too.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you try this but need additional support, feel free to head on over to my chat (linked here) to share your questions, comment below, or shoot me an email. More content teaching the basics of teaching and how I’ve found success with my students and my children will be coming all summer long.

With warm regard,

DT

If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

• Are teachers in middle and high schools required to give a final exam?

• If so, how are students held accountable for their performance on the final exam?

• Under what conditions are final exams administered? Are they open-book? open-note? objective test items or subjective test items?

• Have you audited the local high school’s final exams?

• Can we see a sample final from each core class from previous years?

• Do the finals align with the Board-adopted and tax-revenue-funded curriculum?

• What are the average scores on each final from previous years? (Yes, this data exists, and you can ask for it with student names redacted.)

Start asking questions. If the Board comes back with, “It’s up to the teacher” you’re going to have problems. End of course exams are important for accountability across all school-related groups. Making them optional is cover for malpractice.

Think about it this way: if your kid doesn’t know much about math, but has gotten As in his math courses, the final exam might be the only way you’d find out before he signed up for a 6-figure debt-load at a university. You do not want your child starting a STEM major but changing to a soft major with weak job prospects when she realizes she can’t do the work.

The lack of accountability with regard to what students actually know and can do has major implications for students, their families, and our nation as a whole. We MUST test for it.

And we have to start holding the paid employees we entrust with our children accountable for testing our kids honestly. Only then can we begin to address the systemic failure common to America’s “free” public schools.

Step 5: Districts will administer comprehensive, objective final exams across all subject-specific classes.

Elected school board members must begin their tenure with the end in mind.

They must hire a superintendent who they believe is well-suited to that end.

They must develop a system of accountability for the superintendent, principals, and teachers; the paid stakeholders, i.e. District employees, must develop and follow policy to serve that end.

I've outlined four policies thus far that I believe communities can implement at any time (though it's easiest if you begin planning in summer for the ensuing school year):

1. The Majority of the Class Must Come First on the necessity of removing incorrigible students from the classroom to defend academic opportunity for the majority of learners.

2. The Principal on Patrol places a school leader where he most needs to be, in and around classrooms, supporting teachers.

3. The What, Why and How of Universal Manual Note-taking because a learner isn't learning until they do something with the information delivered by the teacher.

4. The use of Regular Gradebook Audits to hold teachers accountable for maintaining an instruction-practice-feedback-assessment cycle that scales.

Now we move on to something that used to be obviously necessary to teachers and the community but which, at many schools, has fallen by the wayside, largely, I suspect, to protect administrators from accountability for student learning outcomes.

The Comprehensive Final Exam

Final exams are non-negotiable. They should be comprehensive, objective , quickly-scorable multiple choice exams. They should never be a project or essay completed at home and graded subjectively.

Over the course of my 20-year career in conventional public high schools, I watched as teachers quietly dropped the final exam. Teachers were permitted --at times, subtly encouraged-- to drop their comprehensive final examination and give instead a test only on the final unit covered in class or worse, in my opinion, a final project that freed up the final two weeks of school for the teacher. The kids would spend a week doing "group-work" and the final week of school was reserved for project presentations.

Of course, there were also teachers who had fully given up and showed movies for the last week of school so they could catch up on the grading they had put off for many reasons, not the least of which is the pointlessness of grading student work given the prevalence of Equitable Grading Policies that fully train students against effective work habits and undermine the cycle of learning facilitated by full-class instruction, in-class practice, feedback, additional practice as necessary and regular low-stakes assessments. The lie of equitable grading is that the teacher can do that on 30 different timelines, each individualized to every student.

Students deserve the opportunity to show exactly what knowledge they held on to in a year. Yes, they gripe. OF COURSE they gripe. But I'll tell you what: when you don't test the kids, you're saying that what they learned doesn't matter and nothing is more de-motivating than that.

We tell them learning is their job then withhold the final job review. That's cruel. It serves only the adults in the system who can then pretend everything's just fine, even though national and state tests (and, increasingly, alarming reports of student incompetence even in elite universities) increasingly reveal massive failures across K12 nationwide. Yes, I recognize that California is a particularly poor performer, but it's not alone. And for all the Eduspeak about equity and justice for marginalized communities, the students in that category arguably suffer the most under the reign of the Feelings-First dogma of the education establishment.

The Test

To be clear, I am not talking about standardized, state-mandated tests. I am talking about a cumulative final specific to every middle and high school course offered in the school district, aligned to the curriculum adopted by the school board. The test should be on paper, completed by hand on a quick-to-grade answer sheet. There are plenty of apps like ZipGrade now available to make this possible even for a team of parent volunteers with a handful of cell phones.

I hate to have to say this, but it should probably be written and scored by a third-party contractor. Districtwide cheating on standardized tests to protect adult jobs/pay is an unfortunate reality, the Atlanta and Chicago public school districts being notable examples. All District employees having anything to do with handling or proctoring the test should sign a document clearly outlining security and ethical requirements for the administration of the test, with the penalty for cheating being immediate dismissal.

The test should be written at a level of basic knowledge of the material in the adopted curriculum. In other words, we should expect a C student to pass the test with a C or better. It should not be a test of the ability to think; it should be a test of what students should reasonably be expected to know after a year of instruction using materials approved by the school board.

The final test should count for 10%-20% of a student's final grade so the students have skin in the game too.

Test data should be delivered within 24 hours of scoring (which should happen within 48 hours of the test date) and made available to all stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, and principals. All stakeholders need to see what knowledge students are retaining.

The administration, from the District level down to the site principal, should shoulder the weight of accountability for test results. They have the most power to ensure teachers employ solid instructional practices, require training for them if they do not, and to protect the learning environment from disruption. Frankly, Superintendents should be held contractually to maintain the baseline in well-performing districts or marginally improve district-wide results where the student body performs poorly.

Teachers need end of year test data to reflect thoughtfully on their teaching practices and shore up areas of individual weakness, approaching lead teachers and administrators for specific training that ultimately supports all of their students.

Parents need end of year test data so that they have full awareness of what their children know and can do. Sadly, grades no longer communicate achievement because there's far too much lying happening there now too, incentivized by backward educational policy. Parents are also the ones most likely to be able to influence the Board -- which controls the Superintendent-- to make necessary personnel and policy changes for the benefit of their children and, again, ultimately ALL the children in a community.

Content area teams should spend one of the teacher-only days after the close of the school year debriefing the results of the test, looking at where their teaching was weak and making plans to support each other to more effectively teach course material. If the data coming back demonstrates significant student weakness, that should signal to leadership that big changes need to be made, possibly at the lower elementary levels. In other words, the data will often back up what the teachers in the District are quietly saying but which, right now, administrators may plausibly deny when parents rightly ask why these weaknesses are not being directly addressed.

Administrators should use the data to weigh the efficacy of policy. The data should drive careful scrutiny of the District's allocation of scarce resources, including personnel and funds spent on consultants and outside training.

The Benefits of a Comprehensive Final

Our world is dominated by data. Humanity is doing everything it can to manage information in ways that allow individuals to make better decisions. The human race is taking enormous risks right now with AI in order to try to benefit from all the data everywhere at once.

And yet in the one place where it really matters, the place where we send the people most precious to us for what is arguably the most important period of their lives, the time when their brain is capable of the most growth, we aren't using data at all or rely on metrics that can be heavily gamed and, all too often, are.

Schools must reimplement well-defined touchstones for parents and children to understand how well and how much they are learning so families can take corrective action if they are unhappy with the results.

Teachers need to see if what they think is working is actually working and given the agency to make changes in the best interests of the majority of their students.

Principals need to be forced to look at hard data and held accountable for doing the very difficult work of changing school culture so that it prioritizes excellence as opposed to one that simply exists to minimize friction for site and district leadership.

Communities must be able to measure the efficacy of the adults —often very well-remunerated adults— to whom they have entrusted the future success of the community.

Until then, our schools will continue to under-serve all students, resulting in nearly unimaginable opportunity cost that is hidden from parents and rarely discussed by anyone with the power to address it.

It doesn't have to be like this. Truly. Still, turning this ship around is a huge undertaking. It's going to take each one of us, prioritizing our own children, and leveraging all the pressure we can bring to bear on a system that, for too long, sees sources of revenue where it should see the shining faces that are the future of our nation and of human liberty.

If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control over their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.

I have only seen gradebook audits when an administrator is looking to get rid of a particular teacher, but even when a principal does take a gander at the gradebook, the information there is rarely used to identify teachers who need support and/or redirection, though it easily could be.

I’ve laid out the case and the process for this below.

NOTE: For those of you following me for guidance on how you can help your child overcome the full system failure that motivated this nearly 5,000-word essay, hang tight: I’ve got something good scheduled for you this week.

Step 4: One site principal will periodically audit each teacher's gradebook to incentivize consistent formative assessment, immediate critical feedback for all students, and clear communication of student performance to families.

Grades are a tool to communicate a student's progress in skill and knowledge over a period of time. Now, due to apocalyptically bad K12 policy, grades have morphed into a proxy for many things: compliance, behavior, school leaders' prioritization of equal outcomes over equal opportunity, and, in too many cases, how demoralized a classroom teacher has become.

This has to stop.

Families are being lulled (lied) into a false sense of security. They are told that their children are learning what they should, in both knowledge and skill, practicing tasks that strengthen both, and studying that information for quizzes and tests with the dual purpose of leaving school with improved executive function and the ability to read, write, calculate, and argue a position as well as a solid foundation of knowledge upon which she can build. Parents believe teachers are properly incentivizing students to attend to lessons then process what they learn in class through practice (i.e., classwork and homework). Parents also believe students are getting and responding to critical feedback on that work, which will, in turn, support achievement on quizzes, tests, and projects.

I do not believe this is accomplished any longer across most middle and high school campuses for a variety of reasons. It must be addressed and I aim to do it here, mainly so no one can say I wasn't solutions-oriented all this time.

The main problem I see is a lack of accountability. The problem: how do you ensure this process occurs consistently across all classrooms at a site with upward of 70 teachers?

Visit every class, every day, keeping track of what's going on in every class?

Nope. Logistically impossible.

Ask teachers to submit daily lesson plans then read them and offer feedback on them all? Also improbably; it’s too labor-intensive for the reviewer.

There's no guarantee a teacher that writes a lesson plan will follow it. I've been at sites whose principals require that teachers submit weekly lesson plans. A small percentage of teachers will break their backs to comply -- but the time it takes to record the many, many components of an effective lesson takes away from the important work of grading and adjusting lessons to respond to student misconceptions or weaknesses.

Then there is the not-insignificant number of teachers savvy enough to send in the exact same lesson plan every week, knowing the odds are good the principal's not really looking, just ensuring compliance with a cursory check of a file folder or his inbox and knowing full well that if he ever calls them on it, they can just say they accidentally sent the wrong file. Then there's the majority who will just stop sending plans in at some point, knowing the principal won't continue checking more than a few weeks beyond the issuance of such a directive. They've seen all this before.

So how do we make sure teachers are teaching the concepts, correcting misconceptions, and incentivizing all students to study the materials on their own to maximize learning?

The answer: Assign a principal to audit teacher gradebooks on a 3-week rotation and provide feedback to each teacher on her practice. (I've also given specific guidelines as to what the individual components should look like, so if a principal needs to take a closer look at teacher work product, he knows what to look for. (If you just want the reform policy, read the "Universal Gradebook Expectations" and "The Gradebook Auditing Process" sections below; this monster is pushing 4800 words.)

Universal Gradebook Expectations

Each teacher's gradebooks should reflect the following:

1. All teachers guide students as they take notes during instruction and structure their class so that students use those notes as support while doing classwork and homework and in review when preparing for quizzes and tests.

2. Students will be assigned 2-3 graded practices on the concept covered in notes. Teachers will mark student misconceptions (but not necessarily comment on them all) and return student work, graded, within 24-48 hours, following up with re-teaching and additional practice when warranted.

3. A low-stakes, closed-note quiz will follow assigned and corrected practices.

4. This 2-3 assignment ➡️ quiz process will repeat 3-4 times and culminate in a closed note unit test of concepts covered during this process.

Manual Note-Taking

I went into greater detail on this topic in Reform #3: Universal Manual Note-taking, but I'll recap briefly here. Notes are necessary. A strong student will not only take notes in class, she'll also take notes on any readings she does at home. This is rarely required anymore. It's also rare to walk around a school and see a teacher writing notes on the board as she lectures. Instead, teachers project a Powerpoint, which means the students are attending to the slide deck and not the teacher. That's a loss.

Best practices on note-taking are embodied in the Cornell Note format, which involves more than just copying bulleted points off the screen. Cornell Notes give a structure that incentivizes the teacher to pause at natural breaks in a lecture and give time for students to review what they've recorded so far, then write a question that can be answered by the notes. You can improve their recall further by asking students to share their questions out loud and offering feedback on the quality of question. The teacher can use those shared questions to review with the whole class. For an even bigger payoff, show students how to change a "right-there" question to a meta question that forces students to synthesize more of the notes.

In any content area class, note-taking should be an expected activity whenever new information or skills are presented. For math teachers, I strongly recommend pre-creating guided notes in Cornell Note format. Kids use a lot of working memory copying down example equations. Instead, give them the equation with the expectation that they label the directions for each step. This way, you can ensure students are listening to you and watching you work through a problem, getting the steps recorded that will help them complete their math homework later.

If you just give them all the notes, they won't listen to you explain what's on the notes. If you ask them to copy everything, they're looking at what's on the board and not listening or watching you work your way through the problem. Pre-writing notes that they have to partially fill in solves for both of those problems. Yes, it's more planning for the math teachers, but it should mean more focused practice which means less time spent on homework overall.

Administrators frequently decry the number of parents who call them complaining that they have no idea what their child is working on. Parents often want to help, but don't know how. Note-taking means kids are more familiar with the work and have a road map for success that they participated in making, so the skills should be stickier when practiced independently. Notes are concrete artifacts of what’s happening in class, improving school-parent communication and giving parents the information they need to actively support their child at home.

While students compose their summaries, the teacher should walk around, encouraging students to begin, prompting them if necessary, and offering praise and feedback as in, "You left out _____. That's a crucial part of today's work. Where could you slide a sentence in covering it?" Do not let them skip this step. Alternatively, you could ask them to write their summary at the beginning of the next class as a "Do-Now" activity.

Graded Practice (Formative Assessment)

A "Do-Now" at the beginning of each period has two purposes. It is an opportunity for students to review the previous day's work and a hook into the day's lesson. The "Do Now" gives the teacher a moment to take attendance and get ready to teach new concepts, while anchoring students in the work from the day before. This practice should result in a stronger base of knowledge as students gain additional touch points with information through processing and review while completing the "Do Now" task.

The Do-Now should require that students review their notes and summaries from the day before and apply what they learned to the new question. Toward the end of the Do Now time, the teacher should circulate the room with a clipboard, marking off the students who completed the work. Then she should review it with the class, encouraging students to correct any misconceptions they had and add missing information.

The Do Now is one option for a graded assignment as it allows you to check their understanding of the previous day's material after 24-48 hours of "forgetting" time.

Another option for graded practice is the exit ticket. Leave students 5 minutes at the end of class with a carefully constructed question that asks them to tie together the day's learning. Tell students to pack up after they're done with their exit ticket, then have them drop it off on the way out the door.

For both the Do Now and the Exit Ticket, I strongly recommend the following grading practice for simplicity and in order to provide effective feedback for the entire class.

Read the student work. I generally mark the papers in two ways. When I see an accurate statement, I write a check mark next to it. When I read a misconception, I place the sentence in brackets and write a question mark next to it if it's unclear or confused and an ❌ beside it if it's incorrect.

Next, I separate students work into piles by quality: (1) nuanced and clear, (2) comprehensive, and (3) incomplete. The "nuanced and clears" get a ☑️+ on the top and a score of 9-10 in the gradebook.

If the work is comprehensive, i.e., it covers the major components of the topic, I indicate that with a ☑️ and a score of 7-8. A student cannot get this score if they miss any major aspect of the question.

If the work is missing a major concept, it gets a ☑️- (check-minus), which is usually a 6 in the gradebook, but can be a 5 if the student showed little effort.

If the work isn't turned in, it gets a 0; I don't care what the principal says. (Teachers who want to be nicer about this can use a four-point scale so a kid who turns nothing in is penalized less percentage-wise, but it will also penalize the check and check-minus kids with a lower overall percentage. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.)

I'm very specific here because I want anyone reading my gradebook to reckon with the fact that work turned in does not automatically get full points for completion. A gradebook full of 10 out of 10s followed by Fs on quizzes and tests is a huge tell that the teacher is failing to provide corrective feedback.

By giving full marks for every assignment (usually to avoid grading them all, and now, to be fair, often because teachers feel powerless in the face of AI-enabled cheating), teachers set up the kids for failure. Full credit can and should be interpreted as perfect work. A student generally won't look for her own mistakes, so how can she correct her misunderstandings before the test if she keeps receiving perfect scores on practice assignments?

Corrective feedback on each individual's assignment is the most effective way we have to individualize teaching to address student weaknesses in the current public schooling model. Sure, you can let a student choose a project topic, but in my opinion, such forms of individuation require way too much class time when you look at the amount of information students are expected to learn in any given school year. Literacy matters and isn't built on phonics past the 3rd grade; it's built on shared knowledge across a culture which means that knowledge must be transmitted effectively and practiced enough to ensure long-term retention.

Back to grading. The three scoring piles are important to me as a teacher because I want to see 70% or better in the check or check-plus piles. If I don't see that, the concept needs additional teaching and more practice. When a teacher does this right, it's easy to for her to determine when the kids aren't getting it. It makes her decision to reteach obvious. It also makes it clearer to her when she may need to find aother way to teach a concept and reach out for help. THIS IS A WIN, especially in a class like math where the skills stack over time.

I like grading Do-Nows and Exit Tickets because it also gives me the opportunity to support literacy in non-ELA classes. Generally, my Do Nows and Exit Tickets are short essay questions. Occasionally, I'll ask students to create a flow chart to show how ideas or concepts progress or to chart the steps of a particular skill. Both options give me a chance to diagnose areas where poor literacy may be impeding understanding or the student's ability to communicate understanding.

Occasionally, I give students lists of review questions. If there are a lot of review questions, I choose 2-3 to read closely and mark only those with the check-plus/check/check-minus grade. I'm looking for understanding of concepts that will be on the next topical quiz -- because that's where students and parents are going to look first for indications of overall success in the class.

Endless novelty in education isn't necessary and, I'd argue, harms the institution of public schooling overall. Consistency of expectations and assignments has way bigger payoffs than trying to reduce "boredom" which students often express in order to mask feelings of incompetence. Here is a brief menu of practice tasks (i.e., formative assessments) teachers can employ in any subject area and, most importantly, facilitate a quick turnaround time so students can address their mistakes before moving on to a new topic or skill.

• Cornell Notes summaries

• "Do Now"

• Exit Tickets

• Review Questions (select 2-3 questions to grade to minimize grading time and provide all students specific corrective feedback)

Regular Quizzes

Students should expect regular quizzes. Quizzes incentivize the student to review their work and the teacher's marks, which helps them retain the information.

Quizzes should always be conducted in class and on paper. I never give open-note quizzes because that sends the messages that students don't need to study. Whether this is or is not the case doesn't matter: student perception that they don't need to study because they can use their notes will drive their decision-making process.

Always announce the quiz the class before and tell them which topics might appear on it; never more than three concepts you've covered during recent instruction. This helps students chunk their review meaningfully in preparation for the quiz. A teacher who uses this process strategically, will also help students study effectively for the unit test over time.

The quiz should be short. It needs detailed grading, so a teacher should avoid overwhelming herself with questions that need her review. Ideally, she offers feedback to help students sort out their personal misconceptions and/or misapplications. Below is an example of the feedback I provide on sentence diagramming quizzes. Most of my students can immediately see where they went wrong. I return the quizzes and they revise their work according to their notes on the quiz in another color ink. They turn this in as a practice assignment and earn a few pints back. This incentivizes them to learn from their mistakes. Allowing rewrites on a quiz for practice points (NOT a retake of the quiz for a higher score) helps the students do better on the unit test.

If a large portion of the class errs in the same way, the teacher should re-teach the portion of the topic students didn't understand.

When teachers give frequent low-stakes quizzes and use them to inform their instructional choices, their teaching improves; assessments are not just for students.

Quizzes and tests should be weighted more heavily in teachers gradebooks. In middle school, my grades are weighted 40% practice, 50% quizzes/tests, 10% Final exam; in High School it's 20/60/20.) This should be school policy; it should not be up to the individual teacher.

Heavier weighting of quizzes and tests is necessary. In too many schools, kids get away with doing only practice, getting full credit for turning it in rather than for the depth of learning they actually demonstrate, failing the tests and somehow, magically, still get As and Bs -- usually because of equitable grading practices and/or pressure from administrators and parents. Weighting of tests and quizzes at a higher percentage means that a student can't skate by copying off her friends or using chatGPT, Gauth, or other student-friendly LLMs. In-class, on-paper tests increase accountability for all stakeholders.

The vast majority of students will not retain their learning without multiple practices, timely corrective feedback, and directed studying. This used to be common knowledge, supported by tradition which is now supported by neuroscience. We need to re-institute this expectation; it's better for all students.

The Unit Test

Every teacher must begin instruction with the end in mind. She should know what knowledge and skills are necessary to understand this portion of her course.

Her quizzes should test student recall of the information she's presented and the skills they’ve practiced. Her practice assignments should give students at least three exposures to the information she needs them to recall. The notes she asks students to take should be a clear roadmap to the unit test. Daily instruction should include recall of prior learning -- which is best accomplished through review of notes and cold-calling. Everything on the test should be in her students' notes, or pulled from teacher provided readings that were discussed and annotated in class, though in upper grades reading will most likely have to be assigned as homework, with structures that hold students accountable for reading. (I love a low-stakes reading quiz or simply checking student annotations which can be as simple as highlighting and marking those highlights with a * or a ? to drive the next day's discussion.)

A student who has attended to notes and lecture and readings, has completed the practice assignments, and studied for quizzes should NEVER be surprised by questions on a test. If a teacher has done her job well, students who have done the work should be scoring Cs or better. (Please read that sentence again: it's a big caveat given the degradation of academic standards across America's schools in the name of "trauma" and/or "equity".)

A teacher should BEGIN her unit by handing out a study guide that clearly maps what students need to know and be able to do. The study guide should be detailed, but not give answers to the test. I go so far as to include a number of possible essay questions (leveled by difficulty and possible grade so students have agency) that I ask students to prepare in advance of the test.

Students are never allowed to use their study guides or notes on the test. It is worth repeating that no matter how a teacher may rationalize an open-note quiz or test, an immature student will see open notes as a reason not to read the material (notes can be copied), not to listen to lecture (why? I'll copy someone else’s notes), or study consistently (don't need to spend time studying when the notes are on my desk during the test). The point of the test IS the studying. Read that again and think on it; you'll get it.

Study guides should also never be fill-in-the-blank worksheets. My study guides direct students back to their notes and readings (which incentivizes careful note-taking/annotation). They should be able to find everything listed on their study guides in their notes and/or readings. Sometimes, when we review before the test, students point out things I didn't cover that are listed on the study guide. When they’re right, I either delay the test to cover the information I missed or remove related questions from the test.

I have known far, far too many teachers who give almost an exact copy of the study guide as their test and all the answers to the study guide in a "review" the day before the test. Those teachers are communicating to their students they not only do not have to listen or do the practice or worry about quizzes, they could miss most days of school as long as they show up the day before the test to get all the information that will be on the test. This is a terrible message and absolutely contributes to absenteeism in your schools. Ask the teenagers you know if they've had a class where the teacher did this. I would not be surprised if they told you many of their teachers do it, though the practice is most common in science and history classes.

The format of the test should be Multiple choice. Why? The teacher deserves a break and the students deserve to get their test back quickly. NOTHING is more incentivizing to a kid then working hard and seeing the fruits of her labor rapidly. My students celebrate their wins when they get their tests back and they are very interested in seeing where and how they got things wrong. They ask great questions after the test and sometimes I realize that one or two of my questions was hot garbage and revise not only their scores, but also end up with better test questions for the next time I teach the unit.

If the teacher has been doing her job of guiding students through notes and readings, offering meaningful practice, providing actionable feedback, and using quizzes to inform her practice and reteach concepts, she shouldn't have to break her back to grade the test.

While I do think the vast majority of the test should be multiple choice, there should be a bit of lifting for the teacher on a few essay questions. (I have my students write a full in-class timed essay with every test I give, but I'm old and salty and have the chops to cope with the grading this entails.)

Most teachers should carefully craft 2-3 essay questions which require students to combine multiple concepts form the unit into one coherent response. As she grades, she should use a simple check mark when a student adequately covers a concept and ties it meaningfully to the topic. This should be relatively quick.

The other recommendation I have is that on each test, the teacher creates a "Brain Dump" area where students can make a bulleted list of information they knew that was not on the test. This can be a place where the teacher uses discretion for students who may not do as well on the multiple choice portion of the exam, but attended to the material covered in class, completed the practice work and studied for the test.

The final test should never be a project or group work. I promise: competent teaching results in students who WANT to take a timed test. They are so proud when their grades improve over time. Tests help build the kind of real confidence that allows students to eventually realize their own inherent greatness. Kids LOVE to know things and be able to do things and generally feel competent.

When school leaders look the other way when teachers give assessments that can be gamed by students, you rob them of the feeling of accomplishment crucial to a happy(ish) adolescence and you disincentivize them from building the kind of self-discipline that is the making of the man.

The Gradebook Auditing Process

This is laughably easy now that you know what you're looking for. Note that you probably can't start it until about 4 weeks into the first quarter of the school year. Also, your school should have a clear policy on how late, missing, and incomplete work will be dealt with that is clearly communicated to staff. Don't leave those things to teacher discretion; loose policy here will result in bad data later.

Print out the teacher's gradebook. Highlight quizzes in one color and tests in another. Leave practice assignments unmarked. If there are few quizzes and/or tests, note it.

Create a checklist with these 7 characteristics for whichever teacher gradebooks you're reviewing this period.

1. Overall Class Grades: Look at overall grades in the class. If everyone has an A or everyone has an F, you have a problem on your hands. You might also have a problem on your hands if the grades are heavily weighted toward As and Bs; that may be a teacher calibrating grading practices to avoid conflict. Continue through the process below to come to an evidence-based conclusion and plan a necessary intervention.

2. Weighted Gradebook Categories: Does the teacher have gradebook categories differentiated into three categories: practice and quizzes and tests? If not, direct the teacher to correct this immediately and assign weights to her grades before continuing the audit. If you don't know how to do this in your grading program, learn the process and train teachers in it to support clear communication of student learning outcomes.

3. Assessment Grades: Check the grades on quizzes and tests. If they are round numbers, (15, 20, 25) ask the teacher to share a few assessments with you. Teachers should be offering a majority of objective questions since standards are content-specific. If your district has adopted "mastery-" or "skills-" or "standards-based" grading, understand that skills are based on content knowledge so objective questions should still be heavily employed. If they're sending back essay questions or project prompts only, you will have to determine how they're assigning grades on these assessments: for competence or completion?

4. Quiz Count: Make sure there are at least three quizzes before a unit test. If not, discuss with the teacher how she's ensuring the students have had enough practice under similar conditions to the test before the actual test.

5. Practice Assignments: Count the practice assignments between quizzes. If there are at least two, move on. If there are none, that's a red flag that the students are not receiving corrective feedback on their practice assignments or, worse, that they are not being held accountable for completing practice assignments.

6. Practice Assignment Grades: Check the grades on practice assignments. If they're all full credit or zeroes, you need to have a talk with the teacher. If you realize a number of teachers are using this practice, schedule a training for those teachers. Keep it brief. Explain why full credit on practice assignments is a red flag and will create problems for them with parents (and you) later. Give them the check-plus, check, check-minus system and explain that you expect to see those marks reflected in points assigned in the gradebook.

Some Audit Considerations

Calibrating gradebook expectations will take time. It's going to require difficult conversations with people who are resistant to change because they haven't been held accountable for practices like this for the entire length of their career.

Habit formation has always been the biggest hurdle in education. With the implementation of 1:1 device policies in schools, the battle has become more pitched than ever before as teachers are all too often required to use a tool for learning that many students' brains are trained to see only as a source of entertainment.

It's going to take clear guidelines and accountability to turn this ship around and properly incentivize students to take learning seriously again. Teachers are sergeants on the front-line of this battle. Administrators need to be competent lieutenants.

The gradebook is the map of battle that lays bare each teacher's strategy and tactics. Parents deserve to know whether the teachers' plans have been effective or not in advancing their child down the field toward ultimate success.

The administrator is the party responsible for ensuring that those plans are sound and, if not, issuing the orders and providing the training that will result in them becoming so.

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