Let me explain.

As teachers, we talk about classroom culture as though it’s something you design and plan for.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes, though, culture grows the way stories grow. One joke becomes another joke. A class project becomes a tradition. One plastic Jesus becomes fifty-four plastic Jesuses. An engineering challenge becomes a Ferris wheel attached to a three-foot cross.

You look up one day and realize you’ve built more than a culture. You’ve built a mythology without meaning to.

And before you keep reading, I need to borrow John Mulaney’s disclaimer. For this story to land, we’re going to need everybody to get real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly. Nothing in here is meant to offend anyone’s beliefs. Or this is gonna offend everyone’s beliefs.

I’m not really sure.

Also, I’m taking a week’s break from the more serious stuff. My birthday is coming up, and my wife and I are getting out of town for a few days, so I just don’t have the bandwidth to pick apart a specific reality of teaching this week.

I mean, I still have those thoughts, but just… this week I want to tell a story. I originally thought it was silly on its face, but there’s more to it than I realized until a couple of weeks after the year ended.

So, if we’re all cool, let me tell you how my room became infected by Jesus.

It Starts With a Snowstorm

This part isn’t entirely Jesus-connected, but it lets you know the ground I was working with here.

My region of North Carolina got snow the last week of January and into the first week of February. I don’t want to hear any of it from the northern states—we cannot handle snow down here. I know. I grew up north of Pittsburgh. I remember buses with chains on their tires and roads covered in freakng cinders for traction. That’s up north. Down here, we’ve got a few snowplows, brine, and a lot of hope.

Due to the snow, school was a no-go.

For two weeks.

We had remote workdays mixed in, so lessons were expected to be online. Asynchronous, so we’d post, and they’d work. Their work was due when we got back to school.

In physics, I was scheduled to begin my unit on two-dimensional motion, projectiles, basically.

There are tons of (boring) simulations online, and, hey, like a jillion other teachers, I could’ve offloaded my thinking and my job to Khan Academy, but… ick.

So I went to my default: storytelling (more on that coming up next week, including my manifesto). I reframed the projectile setups as stunts in an action movie. The director (I was picturing a Michael Bay type) wanted the stunts to look cool. The studio, however, insisted they be physics-accurate.

My students became the studio’s physics consultants. What’s the movie’s name?

Arc and Order.

(It’s a parabola inside joke.)

About the artwork — yes, it’s all AI-generated. Didn't/don’t deny that, and I make no (serious) bones about it to my students or anyone else I talk to about this. The images aren’t the main point of the piece, and while I do plan on addressing my use of AI in the classroom in the coming weeks, let’s not lock in on the idea that AI was used here, cool?

They responded, and responded well. When we got back to school, a couple of students told me they actually liked it.

Yeah— students saying they liked what was, in effect, homework, and thought it was fun.

Hmmm.

So, I Created a Cinematic Universe…

All of our new phenomena were worked into the larger storyline (which did not make any sense, by design). And because every cinematic universe needs marketing, I created movie “posters” for each one. Tuned up the ideas I was looking for (as over-the-top action movie from the ‘80s), and went to town.

Along the way, we started using amusement park rides as examples of Newton’s Second Law. We dissected the forces involved in Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Tower of Terror, and eventually Action Park’s infamous loop-the-loop water slide.

Somewhere along the way, I revived an old project from years earlier: Bad Idea Park. The concept was simple: scientifically sound, but objectively a bad idea. The one rule: the ride couldn’t kill anyone. We were building Bad Idea Park, not Murder Park.

Bad Idea Park became the final project: design a ride, explain the physics, sketch it, then build it.

And that’s where the Jesuses entered the story.

Fine. I’ll Buy My Own Jesus.

So as we were talking about rides, I noticed that a student had a small plastic Jesus on his desk. You know what I mean - this type of thing:

That same week in my chemistry classes, a Gummy Bear had just “accidentally” slipped and fallen into a tube of decomposing potassium chlorate (a whole other story), so gummy candy was on my mind. I learned three things: 1) Little Plastic Jesus was plastic, not candy, 2) my student actually had four of them, and 3) he wasn’t giving me one.

When I learned that last one, I said, “Fine. I’m an adult with adult money, and I’ll just order my own.” Okay. Two things I learned here: 1) Amazon sells small plastic Jesuses, but not in small quantities, and 2) fifty small plastic Jesuses are surprisingly affordable.

So I had 50 Jesuses within the week.

And somewhere along the way, Jesus - small plastic Jesus - became the class mascot.

This wasn’t proselytizing. My room also contains Ganesh, Buddha, assorted superheroes, and a Cthulhu Chia Pet, which is considerably more disturbing than you’re imagining once it starts growing “hair.”

I couldn’t keep my 50 small Jesuses on the table; otherwise, they’d start to walk away, so I found a safe place — the top of my whiteboard. Occasionally, I would loan one or two out to students. Apparently, our Pre-Calc teacher gives very hard tests, and these kids felt they needed all the help they could get.

Then something weird happened. I don’t know how, when, or why, but I now have 54 tiny Jesuses on top of my whiteboard. Look, I’m a science teacher; I’ve had more than a couple of proselytizing books published by various church organizations mysteriously show up on my desk after class over the years. There are no end of students who’ve told me that I need Jesus in my life, but add-on Jesuses? That’s new.

Their placement in the room matters — now, I can objectively tell my classes that Jesus is watching them while they’re taking a test or a quiz, or gesture toward the whiteboard and ask, “Is that what Jesus would want you to be doing right now?”

Overall, it was a silly thing, and I thought I still had control of my physics class. I was about to learn otherwise.

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The Infection Spreads

Physics classes occasionally do an egg drop lab. It fits in the standards nicely - build a vehicle for an egg such that the egg (or egg-stronaut in our case) would survive the fall from 15 feet, which is as high as we can safely go on the band’s practice riser.

My groups built their vehicles, mostly drawing from the same family of ideas I’d seen for years. And then I checked in with the group with the student who had the tiny Jesuses that started all of this. This is what things looked like prior to final checks.

Right. It’s called the God Bless, and there are our Jesuses — one with arms outstretched (jealous), blessing it before launch.

I need to introduce another element in all of this — a student in that group. Let’s call him Tyler. Tyler’s terrific in class — high 90s all the way, but I have to say, I’m not sure if he spent the whole year doing a bit or if who he is is just who he is.

On the getting-to-know-you sheet on day one, under “what would you like me to know about you?” Tyler wrote: 1) I love God, and 2) I love my country. I know what you’re thinking. No, he’s not that guy. Tyler’s a tall kid, belted shorts and tucked-in polo every day, kind of nerdy, a little socially awkward, and draws a small American flag beside his name on everything.

He believes that there are two musicians worth listening to: Frank Sinatra and Katy Perry. No, the rest of the class and I couldn’t make that work in our heads either.

During two weeks of AP testing (no announcements), Tyler started leading the Pledge for our class. By the end, three-quarters of the class was standing with him. He’d finish with “God Bless.” Someone else added “play ball.”

So, that became a thing.

There were days when I thought this kid was Andy Kaufman-ing all of us, this whole thing was performance comedy, and all of us were his straights. There was always just something in the corner of his eye, and I swear it felt like he was checking to see if we were in on the joke and having fun along with him.

Back to the egg drop, I shut down the idea of Jesus riding along with the egg (I told the group it might provide a non-physics level of protection), and they reluctantly agreed.

Of course, their egg was fine after the drop. After two drops. After four drops.

We stopped after that because they couldn’t be late for second period.

In retrospect, that was my first clue that the infection had spread.

The Jesuses Escape Containment

The semester was winding down, so we moved back into the world of Bad Idea Park. Students pitched three rides, explained the physics, then developed the strongest idea into a rider narrative describing what guests would experience.

I informed them that the movie studio behind the “Arc and Order” cinematic universe was kicking in to produce ride posters for the park.

I got some terrific ride ideas, and I generated ride posters in the same style. Some examples:

Apogee — a drop ride where riders stand and their feet are strapped in.

Extreme Centrifuge — as advertised.

Sonic Slam — truly unsafe bumper cars.

Pretty Pirate Party — either this student missed the assignment or understood it better than the rest of us.

Tunnel of Nothing — yes, I checked on this student. No, they did not need to see their counselor.

And those are just a few.

Earlier in the semester, I’d gone to Disneyland and become mildly obsessed with the Pixar Pal-a-Round on Pixar Pier. Some cars stay fixed. Others slide. It’s exactly the kind of twist on a familiar ride that I wanted my students to think about.

Watch what the cars do in the video…

When I showed the class a video of it, Tyler’s eyes lit up.

So yeah - Tyler’s ride narrative:

And the poster:

The ride was an extreme Ferris wheel attached to a giant cross. The wheel spun fast enough to launch riders into the air. During their flight, they’d pass through pearly gates and land safely in cloud-shaped padding.

Naturally, it was called Jesus Take the Wheel.

I gave everyone printed copies of their posters. They passed them around, showed them off, and laughed.

It was a good day.

Unfortunately, the project wasn’t over. They still had to build scale models.

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Our Crosses to Bear

I had a mountain of cardboard, five hot glue guns, all kinds of tape, and enough pairs of scissors to make my room dangerous. They had three days and a weekend.

You want to see a slightly cynical teen turn into a kid again: tell them to build something they designed and give them zero guidance, other than that the scale cannot exceed 1 centimeter = 1 meter. At that scale, as I told them, they could afford to go big if needed.

Tyler needed to.

Jesus Take the Wheel was 100 meters tall.

Tyler got to cutting.

The following came later and is my side of the conversation:

“What’s up, Tyler?

“Sure, as long as it’s not bigger than 1 centimeter to a meter.

“Okay - well, I guess it’s going to be big.

…

“Yeah, I was worried about it standing up if it’s just a single piece of cardboard.

…

“Yes, you can make it three-dimensional.”

When I said that last part, I saw the reality: I was going to have a 39-inch cross in my room.

With a Ferris wheel attached to it.

Other rides were coming along great — even the tough roller coaster builds and Pretty Pirate Party. I should add that one of the tiny Jesuses (not one of mine) ended up riding Medieval Mayhem. I did not discover this until the model was complete.

The weekend hit, and Tyler asked if he could take his home to finish it. I said sure.

Monday came, and Tyler was busy working on his Ferris wheel in class. I asked him where his cross was, since I had expected to see if all was finished that day. Tyler said it was, but he just didn’t feel like carrying it.

It was the end of the year, and my judgment was probably off, so I went for it:

“Tyler, you know who else didn’t want to carry a cross, but had to anyway?”

Tyler knew exactly where that was going.

He looks at me, sighs, and says, “Jesus.”

“Yes, Jesus, Tyler. He’s watching you now, and he’s so, so disappointed.”

Tyler laughed, and the room laughed.

The next day, the cross came in, the wheel was finished, and Jesus Take the Wheel was assembled, along with the pearly gates and the cotton-ball model of the safety pad—the clouds. The class had a chance to set up and talk about all of their rides, but Tyler’s got the most laughs and attention.

So that’s how my room ended the year, with 54 Jesuses in the front and a three-foot-high cross (with a Ferris wheel attached) in the back. Jesus all around.

It was Never About the Jesuses.

The title of this piece is “My Room Is Infected by Jesus.”

Yeah, that wasn’t the real “infection.”

In my teaching memories, this class will be legendary. Yes, there was Tyler, but he wasn’t alone, nor the dominant voice in the class.

There were my two Hispanic students who tried to teach me Spanish, but gave up when I argued with them about adding gender to nouns. I rejected the idea that a table would be a feminine noun, so we came up with the muy macho “El Meso.”

There was my near-silent table of really smart girls - the Brain Trust - whom I’d check with if “the boys” were swearing a wrong answer was right. The young male ego dies a little when a girl just looks at their work, shakes their head, and says, “No.”

No, the infection wasn’t about “bringing religion back to public schools” or any such nonsense like that.

This class was infected by authenticity, creativity, trust, inside jokes, and shared stories.

My room was filled with students feeling safe enough to be themselves. The Jesuses were just the symptom.

I spent far too long trying to be the unflappable teacher — always right, always on point, always “in charge.” Fifty-four Jesuses later, I have again been reminded that I was not entirely in charge. This was all about what happens when people stop worrying about looking cool, myself included.

It’s about what happens when a teacher is both self-confident and comfortable enough to be a little ridiculous, and students realize they can be themselves too. And no — none of this can be taught.

For those who’ve been reading for a while, yes, this is connected to It Takes Ten Years to Grow a Teacher and Why Schools Keep Learning the Same Lessons. Teachers need time to learn who they are and to learn that vulnerability is a feature, not a bug. They need the room (and grace) to screw up, a mentor to tell them, “Sure, go for it,” when they come up with a crazy-sounding idea, and help to kick the tires.

This class’ culture was hard-won. It’s taken me years, but now I have more hits than misses. I can create a room where…

Tyler could be Tyler.

The kid with the original Jesus could be the kid with the original Jesus.

Someone could say, “play ball” after the Pledge.

Someone could design a ride called Pretty Pirate Party.

The Brain Trust could be the Brain Trust.

Nobody was trying to win a popularity contest. Nobody was trying to be somebody else. And they all became friends.

Oh, and the rides aren’t done yet. Every fall, our school - a magnet school - hosts recruitment nights, and I’ve told the class I’m keeping the rides so they can polish them up and show them off.

I have no idea if Jesus Take the Wheel will bring students in or drive students away, but it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

We talk about classroom culture as something we build, but looking back, I think it’s something we permit. We create enough trust, enough safety, and enough room for people to show up as themselves.

After that, culture grows on its own.

The classroom is where I do the work.

The Science Of is where I chase the questions.

If you’d like more stories about science, dinosaurs, asteroids, history, space, comics, and the strange connections hiding between them, come join me over there.

Well, shoot. I think I accidentally got obsessed.

Last time, I wrote a response to Jennifer Smith’s “Why Gen X Teachers Shouldn’t be in the Classroom.”

Following that, a few readers—and even Jennifer herself—posed some version of the same question: okay, if Gen X teachers are repositories of expertise and moving them into more traditional leadership positions isn’t the thing, then what is?

If expert teachers remain in classrooms, how should their expertise spread?

Many teachers read books about teaching. I tend to gravitate toward Adam Grant and Seth Godin. I’m fascinated by organizations—how they learn, adapt, stagnate, and sometimes die. So I rabbit-holed.

Rebel and anti-authoritarian that I am1, I first saw this as a leadership problem, and while leadership owns some of it, this is more a question of organizational learning.

Every year, schools expend enormous time, energy, and resources trying to recruit talent.

Much less often, they ask a different question: how do we keep the expertise we’ve already developed?

Not the experts themselves, necessarily, but the expertise. People retire. People move. People leave. How can an organization retain and share the knowledge and experience of its teachers?

All of this starts with a history lesson.

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The Factory Setting

Public education in the United States owes a lot to the Industrial Age. Whether or not schools were designed to produce workers for factories is something that historians can debate, but the similarities between schools and factories are there:

• Whistles for the factory, bells for the schools.

• A boss for the factory, a principal for the school.

• Workers are grouped by task in the factory, and students are grouped by age and course in schools.

• Workers with designated times for meals and breaks, students in rows with designated times for meals and breaks.

Like factories, schools are organized hierarchically - assistant administrators report to the administrator in charge (who then reports to the off-site bosses).

Organizing schools like factories makes a lot of sense—if your goal is consistency and compliance. But we left the "factory town" version of the Industrial Age decades ago and never really updated the model. Heck, we probably should have updated it twice since then and be looking at whatever public education 4.0 turns out to be2.

We treat public education like the Ship of Theseus3, but elements of its Industrial Age origins hang on, like barnacles4. The one that affects the flow of expertise is the hierarchy.

Don't get me wrong—most organizations need a hierarchy, but a school is not a factory, and the world is no longer in the Industrial Age. Schools are—or should be—places that learn. The pieces inside (the professionals) should learn from one another, adapt and refine, experiment, and improve. Expertise grows inside the organization.

But the organization doesn’t know what to do with it.

Hierarchies are good at communicating instructions: be at your door to greet students, turn in grades by Friday, complete your bloodborne pathogen training module by Tuesday, but they aren’t built to spread knowledge. If the district says everyone needs to do x differently starting tomorrow. Cool - message sent, communicated, received, and compliance should happen. If the district says scores must improve by the end of next semester…um…how?

Which is how we get meetings that last until the heat death of the universe and one-size-fits-all approaches to teaching5. Gotta love the hierarchy — they think that expertise and knowledge can move on the same pathways used to tell us the protocol for emailing parents. Spoiler: it can’t, but bless their hearts for trying.

Then we do it again next month.

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The Leak

Expertise leaves with faculty members. People move, quit, retire, and transfer schools6. Sometimes, they take their lesson plans and pacing guides with them, which sucks, but that’s information. Information is easy to get, store, copy, and even replace. Expertise is not information.

Information is the curriculum guide. It’s the standards that you’re expected to teach. Expertise is knowing how to tweak the district’s pacing guide to fit your students. It’s the assessment finesse that gets the best out of students, rather than just “okay.” It’s seeing a look from a student and knowing whether to leave them alone because they almost have the solution or jump in with a flashlight and breadcrumbs because they’re hopelessly lost. It’s knowing you need at least an hour to cool down before responding to that parent’s email. It’s content tweaks and lab adjustments. And sometimes it's knowing when to throw out the day's lesson, pull up a chair, and ask, "Okay, what's going on?" because something feels off.

It’s a million little things that, taken together over the decades of a teacher’s career, could fill books.

An example. One of my education heroes is my uncle, Joe Carl7.

He’s taught band at Sumner High School in Sumner, Washington, for (checks math) 36 years, plus 12 years teaching at other schools. That's 48 years of mistakes, adjustments, observations, hard-won lessons, best practices, and probably field-stripping a clarinet in the middle of a halftime show.

Someday, he’ll retire. Where does that expertise go? How much of it survives?

Hell, I watched a good friend retire last month after his 30-year run, and good God, he was a treasure trove of insight and knowledge, inspiring kids8, building relationships with students, keeping a department together, and challenging leadership when leadership needed challenging. He’d drop amazing teaching insights through his kind of lazy southern drawl, and…

All that’s gone.

I mean, my friend’s not dead, but everything that made him such a good teacher, down to his VCR...

is gone9.

Gonna miss him, but man - what these kids next year won’t get.

Why Aren’t We Fixing This?

Schools are stuffed with expertise. They run on hierarchies that can transmit information efficiently, but not knowledge. And every year, some of that expertise walks out the door.

None of this is new. So why don’t we fix it? Public education isn’t great at building things that work, but this? Expertise seems important.

But there are issues.

One: Expertise reveals problems.

A teacher develops a better lesson than the prescribed one. Another revises the pacing guide to better build the content and help students intuitively grasp it. A third develops a different teaching style that works 10 out of 10 times. That’s expertise.

But what does that say?

Improvements are needed in the lessons, the pacing guide, and the current teaching style. That’s uncomfortable if the organization is invested in the purchased lessons, the content specialists worked on the pacing guide for months, and 5E is how science instruction is expected to be taught in all rooms, amen.

Expertise often stands against the status quo. Organizations love innovation in the abstract. It's much harder when that innovation suggests the current way of doing things isn't the best way10.

Case in point, I don’t write “Essential Questions” on my board anymore. I think they’re stupid, and for the kids, they became furniture. I came up with something better, even though my leadership says they’re looking for that when11 they come into a room. Do I ride in, Quixote-like, and let leadership know that the way we’ve been told to do things might not be the best? Heck no. Not a hill worth dying on.

That makes it hidden expertise—knowledge that doesn’t spread because the cost of sharing it outweighs the benefit. Which means I may be part of the problem12.

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Two: Expertise reveals that consistency =/= quality.

Man, that’s the nice way of saying it.

Everybody loves consistency. Leadership. Teachers. Students. Parents. Who doesn’t like to know that what happened yesterday will happen today as well? I once had a principal who literally said he should be able to walk from one biology classroom to another, and the second teacher should basically be finishing the sentence the teacher in the other room started. Yeah, that poor, confused soul is no longer a principal.

Anyway, consistency can be good. We've also lived through enough miracle cures, silver bullets, and recycled ideas with new names that skepticism is often the default response. And that’s fair. Needed, to an extent. Not every new idea deserves a parade.

But repeated skepticism can easily turn into institutional cynicism.

I’ve worked with far more people who will tell you exactly why something won’t work than those who are interested in figuring out how it might.

When skepticism leans towards cynicism, and that starts running the show, that’s gatekeeping.

I have very little patience for gatekeepers. For the life of me, I can’t understand how they can show up in education13. Aren’t we telling our kids every day to question assumptions, be curious, challenge me when I say something that sounds like bullshit, test ideas, and make mistakes and learn from them?

Why then, when we have meetings, does everyone become a risk-management specialist?

Our entire profession is built on learning, yet I’ve been in organizations that seem dead-set on protecting themselves from it. After a while, you start to wonder whether we're preserving best practices or just preserving practices. Whether we care about “producing excellence14” or just maintaining the status quo.

In business, “We’ve always done it this way” is usually the beginning of a problem. At least, it’s never the solution the speaker thinks it is15.

In education, it sometimes feels like a leadership competency.

Probably taught by Voldemort.

So How Do We Fix This?

The pieces are easy.

No one has to leave the classroom (unless they want to).

Expertise is already spreading through schools, but schools rarely notice it, support it, or reduce friction in its way.

The moments that shaped me as a teacher almost always came from other teachers. To this day, I still maintain that not a single word uttered by anyone in the hierarchy between the superintendent and me has changed how I teach my class.

All of my transformative moments came from other teachers when I walked into their room after school, a cyclone of frustration about a kid, a lesson, and an assessment that missed the mark. A word of advice before starting class. A resource that made me stop and think, “Well, that would’ve saved me a lot of time had I known that five years ago.”

Expertise flows in networks.

And our networks are sharing it all the time. We steal from each other constantly. We borrow ideas, adapt them, and solve problems together.

That’s teaching.

The best school I ever worked at wasn't the one with the highest EOC scores. It was the one where people talked to each other. Doors were open. Ideas moved around. Nobody acted like they owned a good idea just because they happened to think of it first.

So—how to make this work school-wide?

First, schools have to admit that expertise transfer is part of the job.

Then, the organization has to make it work.

The means of expertise flow cannot be seen as favors, as extras, as off-time things you can do if you want to. It has to be baked into the school’s design and the flow of the school calendar.

The musts — for expertise to spread in a school and larger district, you must have:

• Open Classrooms: Colleagues can (and are expected to) observe each other whenever it is convenient for both the observee and the observer. Everyone can learn something from someone. If you put a form to this that one party or the other has to fill out, you’ve killed it. Now it’s just more performative compliance.

• Protected Mentorship Time: Direct, person-to-person knowledge sharing. As a feature, not an add-in for when you have time, or as a reason to stay late. Information dumps, downloads, letting off steam, brainstorming. All here, with a colleague.

  • Also, an overall plan for the semester and year should be carefully designed to tie specific issues to seasons in which they arise. Not just “grades are due at the end of the quarter,” but “Hey - October will feel like the longest damn month ever, and it’s okay. We’re all feeling it.” Protected time.

• Resource Libraries: Schools should have Wikis to store and share institutional knowledge. Full stop. This needs to happen. Digital libraries of assessments, lessons, notes, slide decks. Open and available. Oh, and if anyone from any IT is reading this, and getting all horny at the idea of a collection of generated resources that an AI Agent can crawl over and be trained to create all new resources for the district, kindly go fuck yourself.

• Cross-school Visits: Again, no real explanation needed- just time and availability, during contract hours, not having to show up after the contract day is over. Exchange ideas.

• Conference Support: In every other profession, professionals have professional organizations and professional conferences. These are huge concentrations of expertise. Schools and districts that don’t fund their teachers to attend and/or present at state and national conferences are cutting off their nose to spite their face. We should be cultivating experts.

None of this is revolutionary. Most teachers already know it.

I knew it too. I mean, I’m annoyed at how fucking simple it is.

I bet a lot of other teachers in my building and district know this as well. But that doesn’t mean we have it. Again, schools can say they celebrate innovation and teacher leaders, but when follow-up questions get asked: “How often do you allow teachers to work with peers? To share resources? Given them unstructured time for collaboration? Pay for them to attend conferences?”

The answers start to get a little “Um…” and “Uhh,” and things that have nothing to do with the question start to get mentioned. Maybe even…

jargon.

And two more things that have to be in the list of non-negotiables for expertise to spread:

• Egos stay at the door, and everyone understands the importance of the job. If you don't want to share a resource because it's what makes your class special, are you saying you can't come up with another one? And why can’t other teachers and students benefit from it?

• Accountability is intrinsic. The minute you put an admin in these places, sharing becomes performative, and everyone tries to please the non-expert in the room whose interest is not in learning from teachers but in ticking off boxes on a list. Trust us to do the right thing. We’re not just experts; we’re professionals.

Nothing above requires con$ultants or a strategic plan with a six-figure price tag. People tend to share what works and their expertise naturally.

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The question is whether we actually want expertise to spread, and if we do, what we're willing to do about it. Saying it doesn’t help, action does.

When I run in the mornings, I’ve been looking at a lot of trees people have in their front yards, and I realized something. The best time to plant a tree isn’t after the old one with the thick16 trunk falls down.

It’s while the old one is still standing there doing tree stuff. And maybe it lasts way longer than you thought it would. Worst case, you end up with more big trees in your yard.

So yeah— someday, my Uncle Joe will retire, and someone will replace him. That’s the easy part. The harder part is what happens to the thirty-six-plus years of knowledge walking out the door with him?

I know how we answered that at my school when my friend retired this year. What happened to his knowledge? Nothing. It left with him.

If a business lost thirty+ years of institutional knowledge every time an employee retired, we’d call it a crisis.

In education, we call it June.

The classroom is where I do the work.

The Science Of is where I chase the questions.

If you’d like more stories about science, dinosaurs, asteroids, history, space, comics, and the strange connections hiding between them, come join me over there.

Okay, I’m not sure how this works.

I’ve been at Substack for (checks history) about two years now1 and I saw something in my feed the other day that got me thinking.

Do we do answer backs?

Maybe other people responded when this article first went up (August 12, 2025), but this one landed close to home.

The post is/was Jennifer Smith’s “Why Gen X Shouldn’t Be in the Classroom.”

Oh, I get it. I do. The title was designed (and maybe A/B tested) to get responses, and here I am pushing the lever exactly like I’m supposed to.

This article isn’t a Kendrick track aimed at Drake. I don't have beef with Jennifer. I don’t think we’ve ever even spoken. The article rings a bell hard with the title and then, its work done, settles into a thoughtful argument.

At its heart, Jennifer argues that education wastes expertise. Experienced teachers accumulate knowledge and skills that could benefit entire schools and districts, yet the profession offers few pathways beyond the classroom other than administration. She argues that schools should create specialized leadership roles that allow veteran educators to influence curriculum, mentoring, innovation, and school improvement without forcing them onto the traditional administrative track.

Honestly, I agree with almost all of that. In fact, if education worked the way most professions work, I'd probably agree with all of it. But Jennifer’s proposal assumes a profession that is structurally healthier than the one we actually have. And once you start looking at the profession as it exists, not as we wish it existed, many reasons emerge for why Gen X teachers remain in the classroom.

But first…

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Who Are Gen X Teachers Again?

By demographics, Generation X is the children of the Silent Generation and/or the Baby Boomers. Pick any meme or TikTok explanation of who Gen X is that you like, but in terms of numbers, we’re talking about folks born between 1965 and 1980. In schools, those are teachers aged roughly 46 to 61 (as of 2026).

Some of us started hitting 30 years in the classroom around 2017. Most will reach that milestone over the next decade or so, often with one eye on the "Rule of 85" (age plus years of service equals 85) and the pension benefits that come with it.

Retirement as a teacher is its own anxiety-inducing quagmire, and I'm really not interested in wandering into that swamp today. The one thing I do know is that it’s never too early to start planning.

Some of us got into teaching right out of college. Some (like me) came to teaching as a second (or third) career through a variety of programs. Mine was "lateral entry," though the name and rules have changed about three times since then.

As a group, Gen X teachers represent a significant age demographic in American public education, where the average teacher is about 43 years old2. Population shifts and fewer people entering the profession will change those numbers over time. Still, the average age of teachers is more likely to rise than fall—even as Gen X reaches full retirement age and job dissatisfaction remains high.

So we're here. And for the foreseeable future, public education is going to rise or fall with a lot of Gen X teachers still standing in front of classrooms. We are, increasingly, the people who remember how the system worked before the latest reform, initiative, platform, framework, dashboard, screens, and the crisis of the week.

There are three broad categories of reasons why we stay.

Reason 1: The Pipeline Problem

If not us, then who?

No, seriously. Who?

Touching back on Jennifer’s article for a moment, it assumes a surplus of experienced educators waiting to be redeployed into leadership pathways, along with a large influx of baby teachers to take their places in classrooms. That’s not my lived experience at all. Every year we have openings, and every year we struggle to fill them.

Many times, we rely on experienced teachers from other schools in the district or out of district to fill our staffing gaps. “Experienced” most often means Gen X, just from other schools (which now go into an expertise deficit).

The reasons we don’t have a surplus of experienced educators are… well, we can all recite them by heart.

• Teacher shortages in general: Every year, districts scramble to cover vacancies, combine classes, increase class sizes (we’re now at 40!), or ask existing teachers to absorb more responsibility (“Do more with less!”). Before we move experienced teachers into new leadership roles, we have to confront a simple reality: someone still has to teach the students.

• Declining enrollment in teacher prep programs: After years of taking hits from every direction, fewer people are choosing teaching as a profession. The pipeline feeding the profession is narrower than it used to be. You can't build a deep bench of future experts if fewer people step onto the field.

• High attrition among early-career teachers: It takes 10 years to grow a good teacher. Many new teachers never reach the point where they become experts. A significant percentage leave within their first five years. That's not enough time to master classroom management, curriculum design, assessment, parent communication, and the thousand other skills that make teaching look effortless from the outside.

• Political hostility: Teaching has become a profession where strangers feel comfortable explaining to us how schools work. Curriculum decisions become political footballs. Teachers are accused of indoctrination, laziness, incompetence, or worse. It is difficult to recruit people into a profession that increasingly finds itself cast as a cultural villain rather than a public good.

• Compensation issues: No teacher gets rich teaching, and most of us knew that going in3. The problem isn't that teachers expected to be millionaires. The problem is that compensation often fails to keep pace with the expertise, responsibility, and education the profession demands4. At some point, idealism collides with mortgage payments, childcare costs, and retirement planning.

• Burnout: Teaching asks people to be educators, counselors, mediators, data analysts, customer service representatives, technology troubleshooters, and occasionally miracle workers. Most teachers can handle any one of those jobs. The challenge is being asked to perform all of them simultaneously, year after year. Eventually, even the people who love the work start looking for an exit ramp.

None of these problems are new. None of them is particularly controversial. And all of them make it harder to produce the very pool of experienced educators that Jennifer's proposal depends on.

Many Gen X teachers aren’t remaining in classrooms because they’re trapped there. They’re remaining because somebody has to. We're the last generation with a clear memory of schools before smartphones. We remember classrooms that weren't mediated through screens. We remember when public education was widely regarded as one of the country’s strengths rather than a favorite punching bag.

I hate martyr-teacher culture with the heat of a million suns. But I also know that many of us are still here because we believe public education is worth fighting for.

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Reason 2: The Confidence Problem

We’ve become a profession that no longer trusts itself.

Some days I think that's by design. Other days, I think it's because too many people who couldn't make it work in classrooms found their way into positions where they could tell classroom teachers how to do their jobs.

Hypothetical leadership pathways like Jennifer suggests assume teachers are viewed, and view themselves, as professionals whose expertise is valuable. But the larger education system has spent decades undermining teacher authority.

What we're left with is a profession increasingly built on baby-birding: here's your lesson, here's your content, here's your gamified EdTech tool. Now go teach. And don't think too hard—we've got that part covered.

No wonder some teachers are terrified AI will replace them. We've spent years treating them like they're replaceable and driving home the message that what they do isn’t anything special.

It takes years for the scales to fall from our eyes—if they ever do—and for us to realize that we are the experts. In our content. In our pedagogy. In teaching itself. Saying that out loud feels almost rebellious because teachers aren't really supposed to think that way.

“But wait,” you say. “Are you saying there’s no room for improvement?”

I know, I know. "A culture of continuous improvement5." We can all get better. Sure. Have you noticed that when people talk about continuous improvement, they often don’t mean themselves? Somehow "we" always turns into "you." Or, at the very least, the pathway for how they’re going to improve themselves is never mentioned or listed with bullet points like ours.

The thing about Gen X is that we’ve started to realize all of this—we know more about teaching (and often running a school) than the people who are telling us how to teach. It’s why we can be a riot at meetings6. Part of our charm.

But let’s run down the interlocking gears of “how to destroy teachers’ confidence 101.”

• Constant evaluation: We are one of the few professions where someone can walk into your workplace for twenty minutes, twice a year, and generate paperwork suggesting they know how effective you are. Do that long enough, and you start questioning your own judgment. And sanity.

• Scripted curricula: At some point, "support" became a binder that told professionals exactly which page they should be on this Tuesday. It's difficult to feel like an expert when you're treated like a delivery system.

• Political attacks: Depending on the week, we're either indoctrinating children, lowering standards, destroying America, or all three at once. It turns out that being treated as a cultural villain isn't great for professional confidence.

• Public distrust: Every teacher has heard some version of, "Well, when I was in school..." as if attending high school once qualifies someone to redesign education. We work in a profession where everyone thinks they're an expert because they were once a student.

• Consultants: I've sat through presentations by people explaining engagement, motivation, and learning, with no idea what it's like to teach three classes back-to-back on a Tuesday in October. Expertise somehow always seems to belong to the person with the PowerPoint, regardless of how many years they’ve been out of the classroom.

• Initiative fatigue: If you've taught long enough, you've watched the Next Big Thing arrive, save education, and quietly disappear three years later. After a while, survival looks less like enthusiasm and more like waiting to see if this one sticks.

• Decision-making concentrated elsewhere: The people closest to the students are often the furthest from the decisions. Nothing undermines professional confidence faster than being told your input is valued right before someone else decides for you.

So yes, I agree with Jennifer's central point. There is an enormous amount of expertise sitting in American classrooms right now. But the number of teachers who possess expertise is much larger than the number who have been allowed to feel like experts.

You cannot build leadership structures on top of a profession that has been systematically taught to doubt its own judgment.

Reason 3: The Destination Problem

At the end of the day, some of us are already where we want to be.

Like a jillion other people, I read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. I’m not going to spill any major spoilers7, but my main takeaway from it was something that I adapted to my job and have expressed to many people:

Sometimes you find that you’re in the right place, doing the right thing for the right people at the right time. And you decide to stay8.

Is teaching in a public school high school classroom perfect? Nope. Not by a long shot. Would I ever leave it? Nope. Not by a long shot.

I matter here.

People I’ve run into who scoff at that9, I think, are looking for a fight or something I’m not going to give them. But ultimately, I feel sad for them. The fact that they get angry at me isn’t rooted in my shortcomings. It’s rooted in their jealousy.

And I’m not saying that’s what Jennifer’s article was implying. Not at all.

But the article assumes that advancement means leaving the classroom in exchange for broader influence.

Many veteran teachers reject that assumption, based on lived experience.

We’ve all seen teacher leaders move into leadership roles and become spineless. Ineffective. A cog in the larger machine we used to rail against over beers after a particularly awful week of bad leadership decisions and micromanagement from above.

Oftentimes, there’s a reason a school system isn’t moving in a progressive direction that benefits all — the district is too heavily invested in going the other way, despite data and evidence showing it’s wrong. And crusader teachers who challenged the system? Gristle under the district’s treads.

That’s not true of everyone, of course. Some become outstanding administrators and leaders. But after approaching thirty years in education, many Gen X teachers have had a front-row seat to what “moving up” actually looks like. And for a lot of us, it turns out the reasons we stay in classrooms are more complicated than a lack of ambition.

• The classroom is the work: For many of us, the classroom isn't a stepping stone to something else. It's the thing. We didn't spend decades learning how students think, learn, struggle, and succeed only to spend our days in meetings about spreadsheets and making sure we follow district mandates to the letter.

• Patronage and politics often influence advancement: We all want to believe promotions are based entirely on merit. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're based on relationships, visibility, timing, and knowing which initiatives to support at the right moment enthusiastically. And having the correct patron in the district offices to make sure you get that coveted assignment, whether you’re qualified or not.

• Some teachers have already seen management and consciously opted out: A lot of veteran teachers aren't refusing leadership because they're afraid of it. They've watched it up close for years and made an informed decision that they'd rather work with students than manage adults.

• Not enough positions exist anyway: Again, even if Jennifer's model were implemented tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough positions for every experienced teacher who might qualify. A ladder isn't much of a solution when only a handful of people can climb it. Gen X is and will be for years, a large chunk of the teacher workforce.

I wish more people knew this, both on the outside and the inside of the job, but the classroom is not the minor leagues for leadership. It’s a weird thing when you catch a whiff of that idea, that the reward for becoming great at teaching is leaving teaching10.

For many of us Gen Xers, we remain in classrooms not because we lack ambition, but because we have already decided where we can make the greatest difference. We’ve seen the leadership world, even Jennifer’s hypothetical one11, and have said, “no.”

Holding the Line

So…yeah. Hope this doesn’t come off as a diss track, but that title of Jennifer’s piece…

“Why Gen X Shouldn’t Be In the Classroom”

…it did its job. It was provocative. I was provoked.

She's right about her central idea: our education system underutilizes expertise.

But the answer isn’t to start hollowing out our classrooms by moving some of the most effective teachers into new leadership positions. Before we create any new leadership pathways, we have to answer three harder questions:

• Who is replacing the experts we move out of classrooms?

• How do we rebuild a profession that no longer trusts its own expertise?

• Why do we assume the classroom is a place people should eventually leave?

I don’t have perfect answers to any of those questions. If I did, I’d probably be writing policy papers12 instead of a Substack. But after nearly two decades in education, I've become convinced of one thing: the classroom is not where expertise hides. It's where expertise lives.

Every day across the country, there are teachers quietly doing remarkable work. They’re mentoring younger colleagues between classes. They’re redesigning lessons. They’re solving problems no consultant, politician, vendor, or AI tool knows exist yet. They’re leading already. They happen to be doing it from Room 214 instead of an office.

Maybe Jennifer’s vision is part of the future. I hope it is. I hope we find better ways to recognize expertise, share knowledge, and create paths for teachers who want them. Public education desperately needs more opportunities, more trust, and more reasons for talented people to stay.

But I also hope we never lose sight of something equally important.

Some of the most ambitious, knowledgeable, and influential educators in the country are exactly where they want to be.

Not because they’re stuck. Not because they couldn’t move up. Because after seeing the whole chessboard, they’ve decided the classroom is still the square where they can do the most good.

So for now, we'll keep holding the line.

Because somebody has to.

So, for many of us aging Gen Xers, we’ll keep on doing what we’re doing. Teaching kids. Sharing what we've learned. Trying to leave the profession a little better than we found it. And believing, stubbornly, irrationally, and against all available evidence on some days, that public education is still worth fighting for.

The classroom is where I do the work.

The Science Of is where I chase the questions.

If you’d like more stories about science, history, space, comics, and the strange connections hiding between them, come join me over there.

I haven’t been here in a little while because, honestly, I’ve been living the subject of this article.

If you’re a teacher or if you live with one, you already know what May looks like. This month ranks right up there with October and February as one of the worst months of the year. Maybe the worst.

From the outside, this looks backward. The school year is ending. Summer is visible on the horizon. Shouldn’t teachers be excited? But by May, many teachers are too exhausted to even perform excitement correctly. It’s frustrating because we can feel its wrongness, its backwardness. And often, trying to explain it to a partner who’s not a teacher, or friends who aren’t in the job, why you’d rather go home and go to bed at 7:00 pm on the last day of school instead of partying is tough.

I’m pretty sure there are t-shirts: “Ain’t no tired like teacher tired.”

And before we get into this, none of this is to say that teachers are more tired, or that teaching is unique in running those who do the job far into the red. This is just about teachers. And of course, if you are a teacher, your mileage may vary. This isn’t a competition over who works hardest. It’s simply an explanation of a phenomenon many teachers recognize immediately.

Let’s explain this while my brain still has enough RAM left to open another tab.

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We All Look Tired in the Same Way

By mid to late May, schools start moving in different ways (FYI—your timing may vary depending on your district calendar). Halls get quieter; teachers rush to grade material; the testing schedule supersedes the regular schedule; patterns get disrupted; and teachers rush to grade final materials.

It’s kind of what you’d expect.

But when you specifically look at the teachers, there’s something more. We start moving differently. Slower. Quieter. Like every task suddenly weighs a little more than it should. There’s the faraway stare. We just… sit quietly during planning. Conversations with others trail off into…what were we talking about again? Forgetting why you walked into a room. Forgetting to go to meetings. Walking papers to the front office feels like walking down an infinite hallway.

The exhaustion is inverted.

Starting things is exponentially harder. Everything falls into the bucket of “I’ll get to it tomorrow.” The work is decreasing linearly, but the effort required to do the work is increasing. Every task has a startup cost.

You go to work—usually a few minutes later than you did in the height of the year—and leave a few minutes earlier, but you’re exhausted. Even—especially—on the days when your primary responsibility is sitting silently in a room while thirty students take a math End-of-Course exam.

On the personal side, right now I’ve got a list of twelve things I need to do to close down my room for the year. Just twelve things. Back in March, I would have knocked those out in an afternoon. Now? I have to hype myself up like I’m climbing Everest. You can do this. And every time I actually finish one of the tasks, I’m almost annoyed by how easy it was in retrospect. The hard part isn’t the task itself. It’s the getting started.

It’s strange the first time it happens to you. By your fifth or tenth May, you realize it’s practically seasonal.

This Isn’t Laziness

It’s easy to look at teachers in May and misread what you’re seeing. Honestly, we misread this too, and sometimes feel deep guilt because we can’t perform at the same level we’ve been performing at all year.

This specific May exhaustion is not simple disengagement or apathy. This isn’t teachers checking out. It’s not coasting, countdown behavior, or teachers already mentally checked out for summer with flip-flops on and margaritas in hand.

We’re not disengaging. We’re still here. The end of the year finally puts a period at the end of the sentence. Our systems are finally dealing with the year’s accumulated exhaustion.

The urgency of the school year fades away before the exhaustion does.

Teachers have been running at full tilt for ten months. Every day is vigilance and doing emotional work and regulation, in addition to the normal demands of the job: supervision, cognitive switching, parent emails, grading, planning, hallway duty, dealing with constant low-grade interruptions, lesson pivots, decision fatigue, and maintaining emotional steadiness for students even when you don’t particularly feel steady yourself.

And teaching rarely allows closure.

Tomorrow starts before today ends.

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Just This Year…

For me personally, this year was a bit of a banger. Unfortunately, not an especially unusual one.

I was going into the school year, still working through my Dad’s passing three months earlier. Our district had huge budget problems that were hanging over us like the sword of Damocles.

Within the first month of school, we had a student commit suicide, and there were mass district-wide layoffs with uncertainty about future cuts in the coming months. Like many other regions of the country, rumors and sightings of ICE agents sent waves of fear through students. Our district leadership was tone-deaf in their communication, as they seemed to reach a new level of disconnection from the day-to-day business of the district’s schools.

We had two weeks of snow days in January-February. Measles were for sure coming to ravage our school. A teacher was removed from the school under police escort, and we were told not to talk to our students (who had questions and were very upset) about it. Attendance started spotty and grew spottier still.

And by April, the start-of-year community goodwill had evaporated. When a large number of teachers traveled to our state capitol on May 1st, prompting the district to close schools for the day, there was no shortage of barbs and outright hate aimed at teachers on social media and from community members, along with rumors of state or district retribution for those who rallied.

Somewhere in there, I attended and presented at the National Science Teaching Association national conference and was out for four days. It was an amazing four days of learning, networking, and doing what I am supposed to be doing as a science teacher—developing my skills and understanding. And I still feel guilty because I was away from my class for four days.

Oh, and I had jury duty too. When the D.A. said the case would last a week…full-blown anxiety attack. I couldn’t be away from my students for that long. Not after snow days and my conference. Had to stand up in open court and explain why I needed a deferral as a teacher, and my kids needed me. I still have nightmares about having to do that.

Throughout the year, we had the “business as usual” nonsense of pointless meetings, mandatory online training, instructional-time interruptions for schedule changes, weekly meetings about… data (I think?), more testing training sessions, occasional emergencies, reminders that we’re not doing enough, random security theater, and more.

One hour, you are helping students process grief and confusion. The next, you’re in a meeting about testing security, the ethics of standardized exams, and how your license will be forfeit if even the smallest screwup is caught.

And all of that was against a national backdrop that rarely felt calm, stable, or economically secure.

The frightening part is how normal this all started to feel. People ask you how you’re doing, and you just say, “Eh…I’m okay.”

And then I go home and watch The Pitt to decompress and relax.

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Just Keep Teaching, Just Keep Teaching

So that happened. But as I’ve been getting at, processing time is a luxury.

My experiences this year aren’t special, nor are they by any means the worst a teacher has gone through. We’re people, we come into the job with baggage that we’re dealing with in our own lives. And the job goes on.

There’s no time to grieve, to recover, to reflect, to try and stabilize or metabolize stress because there’s always the next class, the next meeting, the next email, the next mandate, the next emergency, the next lesson.

Loops that get opened are rarely ever closed. For instance: the measles. As mentioned earlier, we were told in a meeting that it wasn’t a matter of if measles would show up in schools, but when. Warnings went out. Protocols were discussed. Anxiety entered the system. And then…nothing really happened. The outbreak fizzled, schools weren’t ravaged, and life moved on. But there was never a follow-up conversation saying, “Hey, looks like the threat has diminished. You can probably take that off your worry list.” The alert entered the nervous system; the resolution never really did.

And officially, we’ve never been given a reason why the teacher was escorted out by police, never to be seen again.

But that’s the larger pattern. Schools are designed to keep moving forward, even when the people inside them haven’t had time to emotionally catch up.

If you’re lucky, you’ll find a colleague who is a shoulder to lean on, a listening ear. Maybe a department that pulls together. Maybe just a moment of quiet to catch your breath.

Sometimes those moments are enough to carry you through the week.

The system assumes infinite emotional elasticity. There is no protected time for becoming human again. In the system, you are a teacher. You are a professional. You show up, you work. The expectation is simple: show up tomorrow and do it again.

In education, continuity is non-negotiable.

Accumulated Load = May Exhaustion

Even without the crises, the job itself is cognitively relentless. Teaching requires constant mental input in the form of cognitive switching, content recall, and decision-making. There have been studies suggesting teaching may involve more minute-to-minute decision-making than some high-intensity medical professions (I told you I watched The Pitt to decompress, right?).

The human nervous system is remarkably adaptable. It has to be. Teachers would not survive a school year otherwise. But adaptability has a cost.

The human brain and body are not especially good at distinguishing between physical emergencies and sustained psychological vigilance. If you spend ten months constantly alert, constantly switching tasks, constantly regulating emotion, constantly anticipating the next interruption or problem, eventually your body starts treating that state as normal.

And teaching is a profession built almost entirely around sustained activation.

A teacher can go from explaining chemical bonds, to de-escalating a student conflict, to answering emails from parents, to hallway duty, to an IEP meeting, to covering another class during planning, to trying to comfort a grieving student, to entering grades, to adapting tomorrow’s lesson because half the class was absent due to testing—all before lunch.

That kind of cognitive switching burns enormous amounts of mental energy. It’s expensive emotionally, too.

Teachers are constantly regulating themselves for the benefit of others. You cannot snap at students because you’re having a terrible day. You cannot spiral emotionally because the lesson still has to happen. You cannot disappear into grief, anger, anxiety, or exhaustion because thirty people are sitting in front of you waiting for stability.

Even if you have to perform that stability.

And over time, that sustained activation starts to accumulate in the background, like interest on a loan.

The structure of the school year doesn’t allow recovery. Schools are built around continuity, not processing. The next bell rings. The next class arrives. The next email comes in. The next mandate gets dropped into your inbox at 5:37 PM on a Thursday.

A student dies. Third period still starts at 12:10. Layoffs happen. Grades are still due Friday. You get devastating personal news. The lesson still has to happen.

The expectation is simple: show up tomorrow and do it again.

And for months, we do.

During most of the school year, urgency acts like a stimulant. There’s always another deadline, another lesson, another problem that has to be solved immediately. Even the normal chaos of a school day can be kind of addicting because everything is always changing and different. Momentum carries you much farther than you realize.

But by May, the horizon becomes visible. The emergency energy starts fading.

The exhaustion doesn’t.

When May arrives, the urgency begins to loosen its grip, and the body finally starts collecting debts it deferred all year long.

Also, by May, the exhaustion is no longer just mental. It settles into the body, too. Many of us know we’re going to get sick right after school ends. We’re sleeping (or wanting to sleep) more than we usually do. Headaches. Muscle fatigue. Brain fog.

That’s why, by May, teachers sit quietly in their classrooms during planning periods instead of socializing. It’s why answering one more email suddenly feels impossible. It’s why walking papers to the front office feels like a journey across Mordor. It’s why teachers stare at computer screens for thirty seconds before remembering what they opened the tab for.

It’s why small tasks suddenly develop enormous startup costs. May isn’t when teachers stop caring.

It’s when accumulated impact finally becomes visible.

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Summer “Vacation”

At this point, we should probably address a misconception held by many outside of education:

Teachers are not paid for summer break.

We are paid for the ten months we work, and that salary has to be distributed across twelve months. In some districts or financial arrangements, that distribution happens automatically. In others, teachers have to budget for it themselves. We all know stories of first-year teachers who didn’t realize this and, in May, find themselves in an emergency job hunt.

For a vast number of teachers, summer often means second jobs like tutoring, curriculum writing, teaching summer school, any number of teaching-adjacent jobs in the community: day cares, church programs, or science camps; or just…jobs. It’s also time to catch up on medical appointments, rebuild courses, learn content for new courses, recover, and try to restore ourselves before August rolls around.

Vacations (if any) are often scheduled between those things. As the child of teachers, I remember family trips built around conferences and summer obligations. Later, my wife and I did the same thing with our son.

What many people interpret as ‘time off’ is often recovery time from a profession built around compressed, sustained output. By June, many teachers are not looking for luxury. They are looking for nervous-system recovery.

But there’s still a strange cultural pressure surrounding teachers’ summers. Teachers are expected to either justify the time or apologize for it. Nearly every teacher has heard some version of ‘must be nice’ in response to the idea of a “paid” summer break.

Or more corrosively, teachers are often reminded that ‘you knew what this job was when you signed up for it.’ And many of us did.

But the profession itself has changed underneath us. Salary schedules have been unilaterally changed (and not for the better, according to the pay scale in effect when I started. I should be making about $10K more than I am now under the “revised” scale). Responsibilities expanded. Staffing shrank. Planning time evaporated. Benefits changed. Expectations increased. The emotional demands of the job intensified while public trust in teachers eroded.

Which is part of why the conversation around teacher summers often feels so disconnected from the lived reality of the profession. Many teachers are not ending the year rested. They are arriving at the end of it depleted.

Summer is often less an escape from labor than a recovery from compressed labor.

For many teachers, the work does not end so much as change uniforms.

The Teacher in May…

So if a teacher you know seems quieter in May—slower to answer texts, staring off for a moment too long in the grocery store or halfway through a conversation, sitting silently in their classroom during planning instead of talking—understand that what you are probably seeing is not laziness, disengagement, or someone mentally halfway to a beach somewhere.

You are watching someone come down from a very long stretch of sustained vigilance.

You are watching the accumulated impact become visible.

And if you are a teacher reading this, feeling guilty because you can’t seem to move as fast, think as clearly, or initiate tasks the way you could back in October, understand that there’s nothing “wrong” with you.

You are tired in a way that only really makes sense once you understand what the job actually asks people to carry for ten straight months.

The strange thing about teaching is that the work is often invisible even as it happens. From the outside, people see summers, holidays, and pre-5:00 pm school dismissal times. They don’t see the cognitive switching, the emotional regulation, the constant vigilance, the accumulated grief, the decision fatigue, the Sundays, the weeknight grading and planning that follows teachers home at night, the recovery time, or the strange expectation that teachers absorb instability without ever letting students feel the full weight of it.

But teachers see it in one another immediately. We recognize our May versions: the slower walk down the hallway, the thousand-yard stare during meetings, and the sitting quietly at a desk before the first class starts. The look of people approaching the end of a very long burn.

And maybe that’s the simplest explanation for all of this: May isn’t when teachers stop caring.

It’s when the cost of caring finally becomes visible.

Oh, and one last thing—especially for newer teachers: hydrate, get good sleep, and try to take good care of yourself over the next few weeks. When the school year ends, that adrenaline & cortisol cocktail that’s been carrying you since August starts fading out, and for a lot of teachers, the immune system crash comes right behind it. There’s a reason so many of us get sick right after school lets out. I’ve already had mine.

Man, I hope I don’t come off sounding like the old man yelling at clouds here…

I have a student in class. This story may sound familiar.

I pass out an assignment, get the class started on a problem, and tell them to get to work on it (my colloquialism is usually, “time for me to push you out of the nest, baby birds…”), and with this student… nothing starts.

Okay, it’s not a student—it’s a handful. Seeing them sets off no alarms. They’re not my 504 or IEP kids. Not defiant, not on their phones, not causing trouble.

They’re just…there.

Across the room, my groups of go-getters are getting going, and others start working—digging through notes or just getting pencil to paper. But among these kids, there’s a pocket of stillness.

“You okay there, _____?”

“Hmmm? Oh—yeah, I was just…”

Pencil in hand, just…staring.

And if I don’t circle back, it just continues. Heads down, or staring. A flat presence.

If I want to get work out of them, I have to sit beside them and push them every step. But if I’m not there, there’s no start. It’s as if something never flips—from “this is in front of me” to “I should do something about it.”

A lot of us label this as distraction, but it doesn’t feel like distraction. No phones out, nothing obviously pulling them away.

In this case, there’s no push. No start, and no desire to start.

And I’m seeing it more.

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The Alternate Reality Mr. Brady

In another universe, I’m an English teacher and a best-selling writer. And that Mr. Brady loves his classics. Sometimes his thoughts leak into mine.

Driving to work the other day, I found myself thinking about The Odyssey. I just hope he liked the acid-base neutralization ideas that I offered in exchange.

The idea that stuck with me was the Lotus-eaters.

A quick revisit: The Odyssey isn’t just a travel story about a guy who can’t find his way home after the Trojan War. It’s a sequence of threats to identity. Every stop tests a different way a person can stop being who they’re supposed to be. Book 9’s Lotus-eaters are the lowest-energy version of that threat.

The Lotus-eaters aren’t monsters, like Circe or the Cyclops. They’re just…there. Odysseus has a goal, a plan. They don’t. They eat a honey-sweet plant, and they lose purpose. When Odysseus’ men eat it, they no longer want to go home — the one thing they’ve wanted the entire time.

No trap. No force. No enemy. Just a loss of desire.

Nothing is important anymore. The men lose their place—home, community, responsibility. They check out. And nothing Odysseus says can reach them. No reason, no logic. Their journey ends—not because they arrived, but because they no longer wanted to continue. Why bother? They were fine where they were.

The Lotus does not kill the body. It kills the thread connecting a person to home, duty, history, and self.

Odysseus isn’t having that and is brutal with his men. He drags them back to the ship and chains them to the benches to keep them there.

To them, he’s ripping them from peace.
To him, he’s saving them.

But let’s be clear—the Lotus-eaters are not “addicts” in the after-school-special sense. They’re not nihilistic or filled with despair about the futility of their journey or the future ahead of them. They’re people who found a soft world where nothing demands anything of them. No struggle. No grief. No friction. No longing. No future. Just enough sweetness to make leaving feel absurd.

Kind of hits you right in the face, doesn’t it?

There’s a reason they’re called classics.

Don’t Take The Easy Way Out

At this point, there’s a road that’s easy to go down: just start pointing fingers. All of them. Blame the phones. Blame social media, AI, video games, parents, or participation trophy culture. Pick something, point at it, shrug shoulders, and move on. I’ve done it.

But that doesn’t hold up in the room.

I see this when the phones are in the rack at the front of the room, when the Chromebooks are closed. When there is nothing obvious pulling them away. The moment is still there. The assignment is in front of them. The pencil is in their hand. And nothing starts.

And the part I cannot shake is that the structure of school is not all that different from what I just described in The Odyssey.

We’ve spent years smoothing the path for them, rather than preparing them for the path forward. Countless hours devoted to making things clearer, smoother, and more accessible. Directions are broken into steps. Assignments are chunked. Rubrics spell out what success looks like. There are safety nets everywhere. Retakes, revisions, partial credit, credit recovery, a path back from almost any mistake.

The intent is good. We want them to succeed. But the easiest, cheapest, ‘look, we made a difference’ move is to remove friction from the path.

Friction is not just what makes work harder. It is what makes someone begin, and learning happen.

That first moment of uncertainty, where you do not quite know what to do, is not a flaw. It is the start of thinking. It is where effort begins.

We have been removing that moment.

When you remove it often enough, you do not get more motivated students. You get students who wait. Given friction, why engage?

Students who sit with something in front of them and do not know how to begin, unless the path is already laid out. Students have learned, over time, that if they wait long enough, the next step will be given to them.

We trained that. We created that world.

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Of Running and Chemistry Labs.

I think about this a lot when I’m running.

There’s a line from Steven Pressfield that sticks with me. He talks about getting up early and doing hard workouts, not for fitness, but as rehearsal. Rehearsal for doing something you do not want to do. For doing something uncomfortable, for sitting down later and starting the real work.

That’s what this is. Starting is not automatic. It is practiced.

Pressfield’s friend, Randall Wallace, calls them “little successes.” Small things done early that build momentum. Not impressive. Not flashy. Just enough to get moving before the harder work shows up.

That is the part that connects for me. If I spend enough time doing hard things on purpose, I get better at starting hard things. If I spend enough time avoiding them, I get better at that, too.

My students are not any different. Why should they be?

I see this every time I change the structure.

Give them a lab that is not a recipe, where there is no step-by-step, no “add this, then this,” and watch what happens. They have the content. They have the tools. They have seen pieces of this before. Now they have to decide what matters and what does not. They have to choose a starting point.

Many of them stall. Not because they cannot think, but because they are not used to initiating the thinking. They are used to following it.

Give them a daisy-chained problem, where one step feeds the next and an early mistake carries forward, and the same pattern shows up. They can do each individual step if I isolate it. They have seen all the parts. But stringing them together, deciding what to use and when, maybe pulling in something from a previous unit, that is where things break down. Keeping it moving without a map is the problem.

They wait.

I see it in how they answer questions, too. Ask something in the same form we practiced, and they can run it back almost word-for-word. The structure is familiar, the path is clear, and they move.

Turn the question sideways, ask it from a different angle, the room goes quiet, and the grades drop. It’s the same content, they’re the same students, but my demand is different.

One requires recognition. The other requires construction.

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Somewhere Along the Way, We Taught Them to Wait

We’ve gotten very good at teaching students how to follow a path. We haven’t been nearly as good at teaching them how to start one. We’ve accepted the line that they don’t like to sit with discomfort, and have moved to remove it if we can, from home to school to jobs.

But the thing is, the kids are not broken. They’re responding the way any organism responds to its environment. Build an environment where friction is removed, delay is minimized, and failure has little cost, and you should expect a preference for ease. You should expect hesitation when ease is not immediately available.

And school is not the only environment shaping that response.

The rest of their day is built the same way. Faster, smoother, easier to enter, and easier to leave.

They’re getting very good at living in that kind of world, one that offers them honey-sweet Lotus to eat.

You should expect stillness in the face of difficulty or anything requiring orthogonal thinking.

When something exists that removes friction completely, that fills time without uncertainty or effort, it doesn’t feel like a distraction. It feels like a better version of the same environment.

Of course they choose it. Of course they hesitate when it is not there. Most adults would make the same choice. We do make the same choice. Given an option between something that asks nothing and something that asks for effort, we are not as different from them as we like to think. The difference between them and us is that we created and perpetuated this world. It’s our responsibility to change it.

The Lotus-eaters are not a distant story. They’re sitting in our classrooms.

The assignment is in front of them. The pencil is in their hand. Nothing is pulling them away.

And, nothing starts.

They are not checked out. They are not acting out. They are not defiant.

They just … are.

No, Seriously, WTF?

It’s all very peculiar. We love stories about underdogs who face real setbacks and overcome them through their abilities. Medical dramas are popular, and Ryan and Rocky are cute and all, and part of it may be a reaction to the world we live in today, but there’s a deeper reason why The Pitt and Project Hail Mary do so well.

We idolize people who have overcome obstacles and kept moving forward. The world we have today, the inventions we cherish was/were not created by people who had every obstacle in their path removed.

Our response to those stories of struggles and uphill battles, many of which we still tell, is to remove obstacles for our kids and hope they do the same as our heroes.

What?

We created the island with the Lotus available for consumption, toss our kids on it, and somehow expect Odysseus to stride off of it as the end result?

How?

It’s the struggle that makes them.

It’s our time now to be those heroes. We built the environment that taught them to wait; it’s not serving them, so that’s the work in front of us now. Not finding something new to blame. Not searching for the next tool or strategy, or kicking the can down the road. Rather, building classrooms where starting is expected, where friction is part of the process, and where the first move belongs to them.

Because if nothing changes, we should not expect them to.

Dragging them back to the Ship

So what do I do with this?

In my room, the answer is not complicated, but it is deliberate.

I start by treating “beginning” as something that has to be taught. The first minute matters. I give them a clear first move. Not the whole path, just the start. Circle something. Write something. Try something.

As I put it, “just get the wheels turning, and something will catch.” I create pilot-style checklists for complex problems.

I don’t rush in to rescue. I give it a minute. Sometimes two. Long enough that they have to decide to do something without me. “Ask three before you ask me,” fits in here.

I tell them not to lock up because it’s “chemistry” or “physics,” and those subjects are tough and scary. Yeah, this should feel a little uncomfortable at first. That’s not a problem. That is where thinking starts.

I ask questions that do not look exactly like the ones we practiced. Same content, different angle. They have to build something, not just recognize it.

And I leave some things unsmoothed on purpose. Not every lab is a recipe or a problem that’s mapped out. There has to be a place where they have to decide how to begin.

None of this is flashy. It does not look like engagement as we have come to define it. It looks slower. It looks quieter. It looks like kids sitting with something and working their way into it.

It also works.

You start to see movement. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But you see more kids cross that line on their own. You see fewer of those pockets of stillness. They get better at what they rehearse.

That is what I can control.

At the school level, this gets harder because it is no longer just about one room.

If we say we value thinking, then we have to build time for it. That means fewer interruptions, longer stretches where students can actually sit with something without being pulled in five different directions.

It means agreeing, at least in part, on what we are trying to build. Not just coverage. Not just completion. Initiation. Persistence. The ability to start when the path is not obvious.

It means developing and protecting work that is not pre-scripted. Labs that are not recipes. Problems that are not already solved before students touch them. Those cannot be the exception. They have to be part of the design.

It also means being honest about what our assessments are actually measuring. If every question looks like the ones we practiced, then we are measuring recognition. We should not be surprised when students struggle the moment something looks different.

And this is where the conversation usually drifts toward “engagement.”

More engaging lessons. More hooks. More spectacle.

That’s not the answer.

A demo can get a kid to look up. It cannot teach them how to begin.

If anything, we have to be careful not to replace one version of passivity with another. Students who sit back and watch something impressive are still sitting back. We need to keep things engaging while reintroducing friction.

At the district level, the stakes are higher, and so is the responsibility.

This is where the conditions get set.

Policies around grading, retakes, and credit recovery matter. Not because they are right or wrong in isolation, but because of the patterns they create. If every failure can be undone without changing the approach or incurring meaningful consequences, then waiting becomes a strategy. And outside of school, there is very little that pushes back against that. Convenience is the default. Immediate is expected. Waiting feels wrong.

Curriculum design matters. If every task comes pre-scaffolded, pre-chunked, and pre-decided, then we are not teaching students how to think. We are teaching them pattern recognition and how to follow directions very well.

Professional development matters. If the focus is always on engagement strategies, then we are optimizing for attention, not initiation. Designing tasks with a clear first move, fading supports over time, writing questions that force students to decide how to begin, those should not be side conversations. That should be the work.

And at some point, there has to be an honest question asked.

What are we actually optimizing for?

If the answer is completion rates, pass rates, and the appearance of success, then what we are seeing in classrooms makes sense. We built a system that removes friction and rewards waiting for the next step. Students responded exactly the way you would expect.

People in charge should have known better. None of this is new. The relationship between environment and behavior is not complicated. If you remove the need to act, people will act less. Our students have grown to want and expect a world without friction.

So if we want something different, the system has to expect something different.

Not perfection. Not a constant struggle. But moments where students have to decide to begin without being walked there.

That is uncomfortable. It will not look as clean. It will not produce instant results. But it will produce students who move. And that, at the end of the day, is the point.

We trained them to wait.
They’re practicing that everywhere.
We can train them to start.

We can help them off the island.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that winning Teacher of the Year was something I wanted. I can remember the moment, actually. I bought a book—Ask a Science Teacher by Larry Scheckel. Good book. On the back, his bio mentioned he’d been named Teacher of the Year.

That stuck with me. I remember thinking: That seems like a good place to start.

In my district, it basically runs as a staff vote—nominations, testimonials, and by December, a name gets called. I got nominated six times.

Lost all six.

For a while, my email signature actually read: “Six-Time Teacher of the Year Loser.” It got laughs. It felt self-aware, like I was in on the joke.

But every December there’d be another announcement, another name, another round of applause echoing down the hallway—and if I’m being honest, it started to sting more than I wanted it to. I took the line off my email signature. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that what I really wanted wasn’t the title.

It was the validation.

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What Was I Chasing, Really?

Teaching has a way of leaving questions open. You can have a great day and still walk out wondering if it actually landed. You can care deeply about what you’re building and still feel like you’re guessing more than you’d like. I can strut out of my building on a “teacher’s high,” second-guess myself all the way home, and spend the evening on the couch, convinced I’m probably doing more harm than good.

So when something shows up that looks like an answer—something that says, yes, this counts, this matters—it’s hard not to reach for it.

I don’t think I’m alone in that.

That’s the quiet question that follows you around in this job: Am I any good at this? And it doesn’t always get answered in a way that sticks. For a while, I thought Teacher of the Year might be that answer. A kind of finish line—a flag in the sand.

It turns out it’s more like a mirror. It doesn’t just tell you how you’re doing—it shows you what you’ve been measuring yourself against.

Unpacking Teacher of the Year

Once I started really looking at it, the whole thing shifted. Because if you strip the romance off it, Teacher of the Year isn’t some careful, long-term evaluation of impact. It’s a vote. It’s a set of stories people tell about a teacher that others recognize quickly enough to agree with.

Which means, at its core, it’s a kind of consensus.

And consensus has a bias. It doesn’t necessarily pick the best—it picks what’s easiest to understand, what fits a story people already believe about what a “great teacher” looks like.

So the award ends up doing something subtle but important. It doesn’t just recognize a teacher—it points to a version of teaching and says, “This right here, this is what we value.”

And there’s another layer to that we don’t always say out loud, but we all know. We tend to reward the teachers who give everything. The ones who stay late, take on more, carry more than they probably should—the ones who let the job expand until it fills whatever space is available in their lives.

I was going to say I have a begrudging admiration for teachers like that—but mid-sentence, I caught myself. Delete.

I don’t. I don’t have respect or admiration for teachers who kill themselves for this job. I have worry. I have pity. Like the ghost of Christmas Present, I can see the future: “I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney corner…”

My friend, Sarah Jaffe, has written many books, and the one that applies here is Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. It applies. You should read it.

Because somewhere along the way, we started to confuse exhaustion with excellence. Self-sacrifice instead of self-preservation.

But to be honest, I’ve felt that pull too—the idea that doing it “right” means giving more, staying longer, saying yes more often. As I’ve gotten older in the job and seen more and more friends burn out, I don’t think that’s the way to be good at this. I’m not even sure it’s sustainable.

So the question changed.

Not why didn’t I win?

But do I actually want to be the kind of teacher this system can easily recognize?

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The Platform (And Its Cost)

To be fair, there is an argument for it.

Teacher of the Year comes with a platform. It gives you a little more reach, a chance to say something that carries beyond your classroom. I’ve seen people use that well, and I respect it. But I’ve also seen what tends to happen to that platform over time. It gets polished. A little more careful. Shaped, sometimes subtly, into something that fits the room it’s being presented in.

Not because people are being fake, but because there’s an expectation about how you’re supposed to sound once you’re representing something larger than yourself.

And that’s where I started to hesitate.

A platform only matters if you can stand on it without sanding down what you believe. I’m not sure I’d be very good at that version of it—or maybe more honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to become good at it. And if I ever got to that platform, they might tell me I can’t curse.

Oh, hell no.

The Validation Trap

As I mentioned earlier, at some point, I had to be honest with myself, and (together with my therapist) we got to the root of the issue: I wanted validation. I came to teaching as a second-and-a-half career, and some days, even sixteen years in, I still can feel like an imposter.

And what I didn’t see at first was how easy it is to start taking your cues from wherever that validation comes. You notice what gets recognized, what gets praised, what gets lifted up, and without ever making a big decision about it, you start drifting in that direction.

Not because you’re trying to sell out. Just because you’re human.

But over time, that drift adds up. You adjust a little here, a little there, and one day you realize you’ve been shaping yourself to fit something you never actually chose.

And then it turns: if you let the system tell you you’re good, you eventually have to let it tell you who you are and who to be. I could feel that happening, just enough to make me stop and pay attention.

The Mold and My Classroom

Around the same time, I started noticing something else: there’s a mold.

No one hands it to you, but you can see it in who gets highlighted and how they’re described. There’s a certain kind of classroom that translates easily—clean, polished, easy to walk into and understand in a few minutes.

And then there’s my room on a random Tuesday. Plants are growing in simulated Martian soil in the back. Stacks of Explainers I’m getting to. Books everywhere—textbooks, sci-fi, graphic novels, The Science of Rick and Morty tucked in there because of course it is (I wrote it). An inflatable Mjolnir for…let’s just say, “motivation.” Something hanging from the ceiling that will eventually be part of a high-altitude balloon launch. A bag of trilobite fossils. Models of spaceships. Action figures. Captain America’s shield. Physics equipment that’s exactly where it needs to be, even if it doesn’t look like it. An orphaned, but well-used Periodic Table on a desk.

It’s not clean, but it’s not a mess either.

It’s in motion.

Things are being built, tested, argued over, and figured out in real time. It doesn’t always resolve neatly by the end of the period, and it probably doesn’t photograph especially well.

But there’s thinking happening. Real thinking. On my part and the kids. We’re all trying to get better at what we’re doing.

And if you walked in and tried to take it all in at once, I don’t know that it would read as “Teacher of the Year.”

That used to bother me.

It doesn’t anymore.

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Map Followers vs. Map Makers

The more I’ve sat with it, the more I think this comes down to something pretty simple.

Systems are built to reward consistency. That makes sense—consistency is easier to evaluate, easier to defend, easier to scale. But consistency tends to favor people who follow the map.

Some of the best teaching I’ve ever seen doesn’t come from the map. It comes from the detour, the adjustment you make in the middle of a lesson when something isn’t landing, the risk you take when you try something new and aren’t entirely sure how it’s going to go. That lesson you deliver, and halfway through, you find yourself thinking, “Huh…they’re really getting this. I wonder if they realize I thought it up in my car on the way to work?”

That kind of teaching is harder to standardize, harder to measure, and a lot harder to package into something everyone immediately agrees on. Do this job long enough, and you start to trust those snap decisions. You just know. Can’t fully explain it, but you know.

The system doesn’t need more people who can follow the map.

It needs more people willing to draw one.

It’s counterintuitive to the extreme, but systems like education don’t tend to reward mapmakers. They reward map followers.

You Know What? I Don’t Want It.

At some point, this stopped being about whether I could get it and became about what getting it would actually mean. And once I followed that all the way through, the answer was a lot clearer than I expected.

I don’t want to be Teacher of the Year.

Not if it means becoming the kind of teacher that wins it. Not if it means sanding down the parts of my classroom that don’t translate cleanly from the outside or trading real, in-progress thinking for something that just looks better. Not if it means coloring inside the lines.

This isn’t about anyone else. Some great teachers have been recognized that way.

It’s about me finally being honest about what I value—and what I’m not willing to trade to get a title. Because somewhere in all of this, something flipped.

I didn’t lose Teacher of the Year.

I think I kept something.

And once I saw it that way, it stopped feeling like a loss and started feeling like a choice. I’m not an “award-winning” teacher. I’m too unpolished for that.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a good teacher.

I’m a fucking amazing teacher.

And I’m also frustrated—constantly—that I’m not as good as I want to be. SO the work continues.

If It Happens Anyway…

I do have this feeling, though, that writing this guarantees I’ll win it someday. The universe has a sense of humor like that. And if that happens—if they call my name, hand me the plaque, take the picture—I’ll take it for what it is.

But it won’t mean what it used to mean to me. It won’t mean I finally figured out how to fit.

If anything, it’ll mean the opposite. That I stayed the teacher I am—messy, a little off-script, building things in real time—and somehow that counted anyway.

If I ever do become Teacher of the Year, it won’t be because I fit the mold. It’ll be because, for a moment, the mold cracked.

A friend once told me, “Look, if you ever win Teacher of the Year, that means something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with the system.”

It’s taken a while, but I finally understand what she meant.

She could see me clearly before I could see myself.

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You Have My Permission, For What It’s Worth

So if you’ve been chasing it—quietly or not—I get it.

You don’t have to chase every title your system or other groups offer you. If you’ve got a goal in mind, and reaching that goal needs all the awards you can pile up, cool. You go and do you.

But hear me out: you don’t have to become more acceptable to be more effective, or smooth out the parts of your teaching that are still alive just so they make sense to someone passing through for a few minutes, or can be written up in less than 300 words on a Google form ballot.

The work that matters most in this job often doesn’t translate cleanly. It doesn’t always show up well in a vote or a write-up.

That doesn’t make it less.

Some of the best teachers I know will never be Teacher of the Year—not because they couldn’t be, but because they built something that doesn’t fit neatly into what gets recognized.

And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that’s not a flaw, it’s the point.

So if your classroom doesn’t always look the way it’s “supposed” to, if your best work doesn’t always read well from the outside, if you’ve felt that gap between what you value and what gets rewarded, if you bristle from time to time at how things run, you’re not behind.

You might be exactly where the work actually is—doing what matters for the people who need it most.

Go out and kick ass, non-award-winning teacher.

One of the lines I say most often in my classroom goes something like this:

“When you grow up and become a high school science teacher…”

I usually say it when I’m doing something a little strange. Or when a student asks why we’re learning something a certain way. Or when I’m explaining a decision that doesn’t quite fit what they expect school to look like—when they start to see what’s going on behind the curtain.

“When you grow up and become a high school science teacher,” I’ll say, “this will make sense.”

In the first few years, it was mostly a joke. The students would laugh. Someone would say, “Yeah, that’s not happening.” We’d move on.

But I’ve said it thousands of times now, to hundreds of students.

And somewhere along the way, it stopped being a joke.

Because most students have never seriously considered becoming teachers. And here I am, talking about it like it’s a completely normal future—like it’s something capable, curious people might reasonably grow up to do.

That line cracks the soil a little bit. It plants a seed.

And I mean it every time I say it.

You should seriously consider becoming a teacher.

Not as a fallback. Not as a backup plan.

As a first choice.

And if that sounds strange to you, that’s exactly why I’m writing this.

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I Mean, Only If You Can Handle It

There’s another version of that line I use, too.

“If you call me up in ten years and say, ‘Mr. Brady, I just didn’t have it in me to be a teacher… so I became an astronaut,’ I’ll understand.”

Or a surgeon. Or an engineer. Or something equally demanding and precise—like a fireworks designer.

My students laugh because they know exactly what I’m doing.

The world treats teaching like the fallback plan—the thing you do if your other plans don’t work out.

“Those who can’t…teach.” And all that nonsense.

Yeah. That’s bullshit.

Teaching is the job you take if you’re willing to do one of the most cognitively demanding, emotionally complex jobs there is. Everything else is what you choose if you’d rather not deal with thirty kids at a time.

That’s not entirely a joke.

If you’re thinking about becoming a teacher—whether you’re still in school, halfway through an education program, or staring down a career change—you deserve something better than the recruitment-poster version of the job.

So here it is.

The job is hard. Fundamentally hard.

Not because kids are terrible. Not because the content is impossible. Or any one of the other million problems with education.

It’s hard because every class period is a live performance. You’re making decisions constantly—what to emphasize, what to skip, when to push, when to back off. You’re reading the room, adjusting on the fly, trying to keep thirty different minds moving in roughly the same direction.

It’s thinking, and feeling, and performing, all at once. It keeps your brain young, vital, and flexible.

It gives life meaning and prevents you from, as Seneca said, “dying before your time.”

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Motion Comes Before Motivation

The part most teachers won’t tell you? You have to do the job—sometimes a lot—before you start to like it. You don’t get to wait until you feel good about this job to start. You have to move first.

If you’re looking for instant gratification, this is not the job for you. If you’re expecting to love it from day one—or even from day 181—you’re probably going to walk away before you ever get good at it. A lot of promising people do, and that sucks.

There’s an idea Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about: you don’t wait for motivation. You start moving, and motivation catches up to you. Teaching works the same way.

I run. Sometimes a lot. And there hasn’t been a run in years where the first twenty minutes felt like anything I would describe as fun. I start stiff. My breathing’s off. My legs feel like lead, constantly arguing that today would be a great day for a walk instead.

And then, somewhere along the way, it shifts. Not because I waited for motivation—but because I was already moving when it showed up.

That’s teaching.

You don’t fall in love with it at the beginning. You grow into it. The meaning comes after the motion—after you’ve been in the room long enough to develop instincts, after you’ve had enough small wins to start trusting yourself, after you figure out how to make the classroom feel like yours instead of someone else’s idea of what it should be.

I tell my students this when they get stuck on a problem: just get the wheels turning. Just start. The engine will catch, and you’ll find the way.

The same rule applies here. You’re probably not going to love this job at the beginning, and that’s okay. But that early resistance doesn’t tell you much about what the job will become. Neither do occasional bad days. The goal is to keep moving.

Everyone’s timeline is different, but most teachers who stay long enough to get good at this job end up loving it.

These Glasses Aren’t Rose Colored

I need to be crystal clear about something. This job is not perfect.

There are parts of it that are frustrating, exhausting, and at times, genuinely disheartening. The pay isn’t great, especially for what the job asks of you. Student behavior, if it’s not actively shaped and supported, can drift in the wrong direction. Social media has done real damage to kids’ attention, their confidence, and their ability to sit with difficulty—and we’ve been slow, as a culture, to push back on that.

You may find yourself working under administrators who don’t trust you, who manage out of insecurity instead of competence. You will have students dealing with things that are far bigger than anything happening in your classroom—mental health struggles, instability at home, pressure from every direction—and there will be days when you feel completely unequipped to help.

There will be days when you sit in your car and cry—before school, after school. Sometimes both.

There will be days on your way to work when you wonder what would happen if you didn’t take that turn to school—if you just kept going. I still have days where I fantasize about just continuing east in my drive to work, and three hours later, midway into the second period, I could be at the beach, where I could just sit and stare out across the ocean all day. It happens.

All of that is real, and you don’t have to pretend it isn’t.

And if you go looking for it, you’ll find it—day after day—and it will start to change you. You’ll get bitter. Cynical. Your colleagues will feel it. Your students will feel it. And before long, you’ll have built a version of this job that’s harder than it has to be.

Yes, there are real negatives. But none of that is the whole job. And none of it is a reason to walk away from the work itself.

Because inside all of that—mixed in with it, sometimes buried under it—is the actual job: helping a group of young people make a little more sense of the world than they could the day before. Watching a student who didn’t think they could do something—do it. Seeing understanding click into place. Seeing someone start to take themselves seriously in a way they hadn’t before.

The difficult moments aren’t constant. Yes, they’re real, and they matter—but they’re not evenly distributed.

So yes—the job is flawed. The system is imperfect. Some days are going to test your patience and your limits in ways you didn’t expect. You can acknowledge all of that without becoming cynical about the work itself.

You don’t stay because everything about the job is good. You stay because the part that matters is.

Loving It ≠ Martyrdom

What coming to love being a teacher does not mean is that you should grind yourself into the ground to prove that you care.

There’s a version of teaching culture that treats exhaustion like a badge of honor. Late nights. Endless grading. Sacrificing your time, your health, your relationships—because that’s what “good teachers” do. Sometimes that’s even given as an implicit expectation by administrators.

Bullshit.

That version burns people out—fast. And then the system replaces them in the blink of an eye.

You don’t prove you care by destroying yourself.

You prove you care by staying.

By building systems that let you do the job well without giving up everything else that makes you a functioning human being.

By protecting your energy so you can show up again tomorrow, and the day after that, and ten years from now when you’re actually good at this.

The job doesn’t need more exhausted teachers; it needs more teachers who last.

Teaching is not a sprint. It’s not even a marathon in the heroic sense.

It’s more like a long, steady practice. You show up. You get a little better. You figure things out. You adjust. You come back the next day, over and over again. 180 weekdays in a row.

There’s nothing noble about burning out in three years.

There’s nothing heroic about sacrificing your life outside the classroom to keep up appearances inside it.

That’s not commitment.

That’s unsustainable. That’s martyrdom for an uncaring system.

If a system only works because its people have to sacrifice themselves to keep it running, that’s not a system you should want to be part of—or one that will last.

The teachers who actually make a difference—the ones students remember, the ones who get good at this—are the ones who figure out how to do the job and keep themselves intact.

They don’t fit themselves to the job; they make the job fit them.

They don’t give everything.

They give what they can sustain.

And they keep going.

Kid, Teaching Will Break Your Heart

There’s another part of this job you need to know about: It will break your heart wide open.

Not every day. Not in some dramatic, movie-scene way, but often enough that you’ll feel it.

That’s the line you walk in this job.

You care about your students. You invest in them. You show up fully, day after day, and give them something real to work with. But at the same time, you come to understand—sometimes slowly, sometimes the hard way—that you are only one part of a much larger system of influences in their lives. You matter more than you probably realize. But you are not the whole story.

They have lives outside of school. Sometimes things in those lives go badly. Sometimes horribly. That’s reality.

And once you really accept that—once you stop trying to carry everything—the way you see the job begins to shift. Students stop looking like problems to solve or outcomes to manage, and start looking more like people in motion—people on their way somewhere, even if they don’t fully know where yet.

If you stay in teaching long enough, that shift becomes permanent. The students in front of you stop feeling like “your students” in the narrow sense, and start to feel more like people from the future passing briefly through your room.

They’re heading toward a world you won’t fully see—one that’s going to ask things of them we can’t completely predict.

For a few years, though, they’re here, and you get a small window to influence what they carry forward.

So you give them what you can.

Not everything—you can’t—but what you can. You help them learn how to think, how to question, how to recognize the difference between what’s true and what only sounds true. You give them tools that will still matter when the content itself has faded: how to read carefully, how to reason through a problem, how to treat other people like they matter.

Keeping the Faith

You don’t do this because you believe you can fix everything that’s coming.

You do it because they might be able to.

And at some point, if you stay in this job long enough, that stops being a comforting idea and starts becoming something much heavier. Much more real.

Because you begin to understand, in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone outside the work, that the future is not some abstract thing waiting out there for someone else to deal with. It’s sitting in front of you, thirty desks at a time, unfinished and uneven and full of possibility, carrying more than it knows how to hold.

And for a little while, it’s yours.

There’s a story about Skylab that I’ve always liked. When NASA launched it, they did so knowing that some of the means needed to sustain it didn’t yet exist. The technology wasn’t ready. The missions hadn’t been built. They were sending something into orbit, knowing the people who came after them would have to figure out the rest.

So they launched it anyway.

Not because they had all the answers, but because they believed that someone, later, would.

Teaching is an act of that same kind of faith.

Every year, you stand in front of a group of young people who are going to inherit problems you can’t fully see, let alone solve. And you give them what you can—how to think, how to question, how to hold onto truth when it’s inconvenient, how to work with people who are different from them, how to stay human in situations that make that difficult.

You don’t get to see most of what that turns into.

You don’t get to follow them far enough to watch the moment where something you taught them becomes the thing that helps them make a better decision, or build something that works, or choose not to make the world a little worse than it already is. But if you’re lucky, you do get to see it: the spark, the flash of who they’re going to be. The potential. The nobility. The person who’s coming, but is just a few years out.

And then you have to let them go before any of that comes to pass.

And then you do it again. The next year. And the year after that.

Not because you think it’s enough, but because it’s what you have.

And because, taken together—year after year, classroom after classroom—it might be.

Which is why I keep saying that line.

“When you grow up and become a high school science teacher…”

Sometimes the students laugh.

But I’m not entirely joking.

And every now and then, I catch a student looking at me and thoughtfully nodding.

Because if you’re paying attention—if you can see what’s actually sitting in front of you, and what it represents—it becomes hard to convince yourself there is more important work to be done.

And the future, whether it knows it or not, will need a few more people willing to do it.

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Quick ask: If you’ve ever had a teacher who mattered to you—

what did they do that stuck?

The faculty meeting the week before spring break had the usual vibe: it could’ve been an email. Announcements, schedule reminders, and the usual odds and ends. Then we got to the item that changed the mood of the room: measles. Not a hypothetical. Not a public-health bulletin somewhere else. Our district believes it’s coming here.

Our school nurse (technically not our nurse—she rotates among several schools, but that’s a conversation for another day) got up and delivered the presentation the district had prepared.

The short version:

• Measles cases are rising in our part of the country, and as far as the district is concerned, arrival here isn’t an if but a when.

• My school is reasonably well-protected, though we do have a few students who aren’t vaccinated. Thankfully, in North Carolina, we still require immunizations for students to attend public school.

• Symptoms, transmission, and oh holy God does this thing spread.

Regular readers know I don’t often find myself nodding along with whatever floats down from the district office. But on this one, they were probably right. It’s coming.

Okay.

Look, I like our school nurse a lot. She’s competent, thoughtful, and trying to do an important job with very little support. So she did what she could. A few slides. A few reminders about symptoms. Some procedures if a suspected case appears.

But, as with most faculty meetings, the presentation answered some questions and raised a dozen more. You could feel it in the room. People were half-listening, half-checking email, half-trying to figure out whether this was something they actually needed to worry about. Questions ranged from the predictable—things already covered in the slides—to speculation better suited for a hyperbolic Facebook thread.

Then one detail landed: if a teacher is exposed to measles and can’t show documented immunity, the exclusion window is twenty-one days. And, depending on the situation, that time might not be paid leave.

A week later, the district followed up with an email that felt like HR and legal had written it while gently elbowing the employee health people out of the room.

To be fair, I’m not sure if we have employee health people.

The email was straightforward: measles is rising, and staff should locate their vaccination records. If we’re exposed and can’t show proof of immunity, we could be excluded from work for twenty-one days.

The instructions that followed had a distinctly archaeological feel.

Check with your doctor.
Ask your parents.
Look in your baby book.
Contact schools you attended decades ago.
Reach out to health departments in other states if you’ve lived elsewhere.

In other words: start digging. If records can’t be found, the district suggested the simpler solution—just get another dose of the vaccine. Pharmacies and health departments can administer the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine quickly.

That was the option I had already taken during the meeting itself.

Look, we don’t tend to keep teachers around that long anymore (I wrote a whole article about it), so at fifty-six, I have no realistic hope of locating my childhood immunization paperwork. Somewhere, at some point in the early 1970s, a pediatrician almost certainly wrote something down on a card that has long since disappeared into the deep sedimentary layers of family paperwork.

So while the nurse was presenting slides about measles symptoms, I scheduled an MMR booster at Walgreens. It took about two minutes.

Got the shot the next day. Two doses of the MMR vaccine provide about 97% protection against measles, so a small leap of faith that I’ve already had one (I’m sure I did), but I’m good to go.

But being the science nerd (and teacher) I am, I went down the measles rabbit hole.

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The Measles Science Stuff

Let’s start with the part the meeting didn’t really unpack very well: what measles actually is.

Measles is caused by a paramyxovirus—a nasty family of viruses that includes mumps and distemper in animals. It spreads through the air when an infected person coughs, breathes, or even just talks. The virus can linger in a room’s air for up to two hours after the infected person leaves.

In fact, about 90% of unvaccinated people exposed to measles will become infected.

Imagine a classroom with twenty-five students. If one student walks in contagious with measles and nobody is vaccinated or immune, twenty of them could end up infected. That’s not a dramatic exaggeration. That’s the math.

Epidemiologists measure contagiousness using the basic reproduction number, written as R₀. It represents the average number of people one infected person infects in a population with no immunity.

Seasonal flu usually has an R₀ around 1–2.
The original strain of COVID-19 was roughly 2–3 (though that later rose, with the Omicron variant topping out at near 10).

Measles lives in a completely different league.
Its R₀ is usually estimated at 12–18.

Before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles infected hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, hospitalizing about 48,000 and killing 400–500 children annually.

In epidemiology terms, measles is basically the Michael Jordan of contagious diseases.

Very few human diseases spread that efficiently.

That’s why measles was a routine childhood illness (albeit with occasional life-long complications and fatalities) before 1963, and why outbreaks still spread quickly when they find pockets of low vaccination coverage.

On the “plus” side, we know this virus well. Measles has been circulating in North America since the colonial era. Interesting fact — In 1988, Roald Dahl wrote a public letter about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, urging parents to vaccinate their children so they would not suffer the same loss.

Also, measles is not just a rash illness — about 1 in 5 infected people require hospitalization, and complications like pneumonia or encephalitis can occur. And that’s not even considering the amount of money spent on treatments, hospitalizations, and complications, some lasting a lifetime, such as possible immune system suppression, brain damage from encephalitis, hearing loss, tinnitus, and vision loss.

The measles virus has been studied for generations.

Signs and Symptoms

This is the part turning our “if” into a “when.” Measles doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks in. The symptoms unfold in a way that makes early recognition tricky.

The first few days look a lot like those of other respiratory illnesses. Infected kids may develop a fever, along with the “three Cs” of measles, as doctors call them: cough, coryza (runny nose), and conjunctivitis (red, watery eyes).

As our nurse told us, this is how measles gets into schools. At this stage, parents—or the kids themselves—just “Advil up” and head to school. In our district, like many others, students aren’t allowed to carry medicine—even over-the-counter pain relievers. So, as our nurse put it, these kids crash around lunchtime, when the medicine wears off, and the symptoms come roaring back.

Around this time, another sign may appear: Koplik spots, tiny bluish-white dots along the inside of the cheeks. They show up a day or two before the rash.

The measles rash usually begins near the hairline or behind the ears, then spreads downward across the face, neck, and torso before reaching the arms and legs. The spots often merge together into larger blotchy patches as the illness progresses.

Here’s the problem: people are contagious before the rash appears.

A student whose early symptoms can be Advil’d away?
They’ve likely already been contagious for a day or more.

A student can feel sick for several days—fever, cough, watery eyes—while already spreading the virus to others in the room. By the time the rash makes the diagnosis obvious, the exposure has most likely already happened.

Teachers are not trained to diagnose illnesses. That’s not our job.

But we are often the adults who see the same students for hours in the same room, day after day. Recognizing when something looks unusual—and getting the school nurse involved—can make a real difference in how quickly a situation is contained.

But the odds are stacked against us, partially by design, and partially because the measles virus is such an efficient little bastard, and we’ve got about 30 other plates to keep spinning on any given day.

Below is a quick visual guide to what measles symptoms actually look like.

The Key Point

People with measles are contagious before the rash appears.

By the time the rash makes the diagnosis obvious, exposure may already have happened. If a student has a fever, cough, red eyes, and looks unusually sick, it’s worth looping in the school nurse.

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What Measles Means in a School

If measles enters a school, the biggest problem isn’t just the illness. It’s what happens next.

The measles component of the MMR vaccine is extremely effective—about 97% protection after two doses. In a well-vaccinated school community, most students and staff will never become seriously ill. But we can no longer guarantee a well-vaccinated school community, even in public schools, and even in states with legal requirements for vaccinations before enrollment. Exemptions—medical, religious, or otherwise—have consequences. As a result, to quote my own district, planning for “not if, but when” is a reasonable approach.

Once a case appears, public health responses move quickly. If someone in a school is diagnosed with measles, the local health department begins contact tracing. They determine who may have been exposed and whether those individuals have documented immunity. Hence, the HR/legal-sounding email staff in my district received last week.

Anyone who cannot show proof of immunity—either vaccination records or confirmed prior infection—may be excluded from school for up to 21 days after the last exposure. That window comes from the virus’s incubation period, which can last up to three weeks. Public-health officials are essentially waiting to see whether symptoms appear.

Personally—and we already lost two weeks to snow in February—I can’t imagine prepping lessons and remote work for students who miss three weeks of class. Yes, some of it can be done remotely. But despite school districts crowing otherwise, pandemic remote learning was largely a systematic and structural failure. It. Doesn’t. Work.

Students’ anxiety rises, parents start calling, class progress derails, administrators scramble—and teachers will be expected to make it work. Even if very few people actually get sick, the disruption spreads quickly.

But I Thought Vaccines…

And you’re right. Vaccines are incredibly effective. Two doses of MMR provide about 97% protection, and vaccinated students and staff are remarkably well protected. But occasionally, breakthrough cases occur, and vaccinated individuals still become infected. It’s rare, but it can happen.

When that happens, the illness is usually much milder, and the immune system clears the virus faster. That reduces both the severity of the disease and the likelihood of spreading it to others.

If a vaccinated person develops measles, isolation typically lasts four days after the rash appears, when they are most infectious. After that period, and once symptoms are improving, they are usually cleared to return.

Vaccinated and exposed? Documented vaccination usually prevents the 21-day exclusion. Individuals simply monitor for symptoms.

Not vaccinated—or unable to show immunity—and exposed? That’s where the possible 21-day exclusion comes in.

Public health officials have known for nearly a century: the more people vaccinated, the better the protection for the entire community, including those who cannot be vaccinated for health- or immune-system-related reasons. This is the principle of herd immunity. When vaccination rates stay very high (around 95% or more for measles), the virus struggles to gain a foothold and outbreaks burn out quickly.

Which brings us to the quiet system that kept this from happening very often for the last half-century.

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Why Is This Even Happening Now?

The virus circulating today is not a new super-variant chewing through immunity. It’s the same virus we’ve known for a long time. Unlike COVID in 2020, measles isn’t novel. We understand how it spreads—and, until recently, we had largely stopped it in its tracks.

For most of the last half-century, measles was something American schools simply didn’t see very often. That wasn’t luck. It was the result of very high vaccination coverage, sustained for decades after the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963 and later incorporated into the MMR vaccine.

For many years, the United States maintained a vaccination rate of around 95%. In 2000, measles was declared eliminated in the United States, meaning the virus was no longer spreading continuously inside the country. Cases still appeared occasionally, usually brought in by international travelers, but they were quickly contained.

For a long time, the system worked.

So why are we talking about measles in schools again?

The short answer is declining vaccination coverage in some communities.

National vaccination rates remain fairly high overall, but in recent years they have slipped slightly. Kindergarten vaccination coverage for MMR has dropped from around 95% before the pandemic to closer to 92–93% today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For measles, epidemiologists estimate that about 95% community immunity is needed to reliably prevent outbreaks.

That might not sound dramatic. But for a virus as contagious as measles, a few percentage points matter. Just as important, the decline hasn’t happened evenly. Immunity has become patchy.

Some communities still have extremely high vaccination rates. Others have clusters of exemptions or lower coverage. When measles finds one of those gaps, it can spread quickly.

Historically, measles outbreaks in the United States tend to occur in under-vaccinated communities, including:

• areas with high rates of vaccine exemptions

• close-knit communities where vaccine skepticism spreads socially

• populations with limited access to routine health care

Measles doesn’t spread randomly. It spreads where immunity has thinned.

International travel also plays a role. Measles continues to circulate widely in many parts of the world, and travelers occasionally bring the virus back to the United States. When vaccination coverage is high, those imported cases usually go nowhere. When coverage dips, they can ignite outbreaks.

None of this means vaccines have stopped working. In fact, the opposite is true. The measles vaccine remains one of the most effective vaccines ever developed. Two doses provide about 97% protection, and communities that maintain high vaccination rates rarely see significant spread.

What has changed is not the virus, but rather the system around it.

Vaccination rates have slipped in some places. Exemptions have grown in others. Routine childhood care was disrupted during the pandemic, and some families never quite caught back up. None of these changes seems dramatic on their own. But when they accumulate, they reopen doors that had been closed for decades.

Which is how we end up having faculty meetings about measles again.

And it’s worth saying this plainly: it doesn’t have to be this way.

The tools that nearly eliminated measles from American schools still exist. The question is whether we continue using them.

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So What Do Teachers Do With This?

Most teachers are not epidemiologists. We’re not writing vaccination policy, and we’re not setting exemption rules.

But we are adults who see the same kids, in the same rooms, for hours every day. When something unusual shows up—fever, cough, red eyes, a student suddenly looking far sicker than the usual late-winter crud—we’re often the first to notice.

That doesn’t make us diagnosticians. It just makes us observers.

And right now it’s spring break season.

Which means that over the past couple of weeks, millions of students have been doing what students do during spring break: traveling. Beaches, theme parks, airports, concerts, and hotels—places where people from all over the country and the world mix together.

Some of my own students are returning from trips to places like Florida, Texas, and South Carolina—states where vaccination coverage has dipped in some communities and where recent measles activity or vulnerability to outbreaks has raised concerns. None of that means they’re bringing measles back with them. But it does mean they just spent a week mixing in a dense soup of humanity.

On top of the usual teacher worries—missing assignments, half-finished projects, kids returning with the academic equivalent of jet lag—a quiet public-health worry is now humming in the background.

If measles does show up in a school, the playbook is straightforward: loop in the nurse, follow the health department’s guidance, and keep teaching while the system around us does what it’s supposed to do.

But it’s worth remembering something bigger: for decades, American schools barely had to think about measles at all. A quiet, boring system of immunization records and routine pediatric visits kept the virus from gaining a foothold in schools.

That system didn’t disappear overnight. It’s just grown thinner in places—eroded by skepticism, misinformation, and flat-out denial of the science.

Which means the meeting I sat through before spring break—the one where the district told us measles was not an if but a when—isn’t really about a virus. It’s about whether we want to keep doing the simple things that kept it out of schools for fifty years.

The science hasn’t changed.

The virus hasn’t changed.

The only question now is what happens next.

Because spring break ends, busloads of kids start showing up at schools again, and a whole lot of students who just spent a week in the wider world will walk back into classrooms.

Let’s see where this goes.

On Saturday evening, I did something that was pretty unusual for me. I spent a couple of hours scrolling through social media. Instagram, specifically.

If you know what I write about phones, teen anxiety, and socials… yeah. Pretty unusual.

Two things stuck out.

I remember seeing an (obviously AI-generated) Reel of a professor getting hit with what looked like a water balloon while they were lecturing in a hall. It knocked them down — ragdoll physics — and they popped back up and kept teaching. Obviously fake, but the “teacher” looked shaken.

That pause loaded up more Reels about teachers being attacked in classrooms. I didn’t stop to watch any of them fully, but they rolled past, and I caught flashes of them.

At the same time, I was also seeing a lot of things that produced a completely different reaction — FOMO, or flat-out jealousy:

• Chemistry teachers doing slick demonstrations in front of their classes.

• Small chemistry demos.

• Chemistry teachers in other countries doing things with their kids (clearly younger than my 10th- and 11th-graders) that would be wildly unsafe to do in a classroom here.

• And Steve Spangler, fresh from a preview screening of Project Hail Mary, talking about how amazing it was and how it’s a terrific teacher movie.

As I thought about those two flavors of Reels later, the pairing was pretty obvious.

The seed and the fertilizer.

Fear and comparison.

That night, I had an agita dream. Not a full nightmare, but one of those uneasy dreams that sits on your chest after you wake up.

In it, I was attending a talk given by a friend of my parents who was a teacher. Both my parents were teachers, and this friend — someone I knew as a kid — hadn’t aged a day. Because… dreams.

The talk was about (you probably saw this coming) the rise of violence toward teachers in classrooms. They described an incident that had happened to them, and the talk ended with a VR-style simulation in which police in tactical gear entered a classroom behind a rolling robot weapons platform. Not triggering for a teacher at all.

Again — dreams.

The robots were kind of cool, though.

The dream ended with me crawling on a hill outside the conference hall, picking up pencils that people had tossed there so I could use them in my classroom.

I can only say it so many times — dreams.

I woke up anxious and full of agita, and my Apple Watch confirmed what I already knew: my sleep score was somewhere between lousy and utter shit.

I felt draggy and full of unfocused anxiety. My heart rate was a giveaway that my nervous system was still running hot, and my brain was doing what brains do when that happens — trying to grab something to attach the anxiety to.

Luckily, we’re on spring break this week, so it couldn’t turn into full-blown Sunday Scaries. But the anxiety was still there, floating around looking for a target. Knowing myself, I knew I had to dump it before it found one.

IYKYK — you wake up in a mood, and the next thing you know, you’re leaving the breakfast table because someone is chewing too loudly. Just to pick a completely random example that has certainly never happened to me.

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Breaking It Down a Little

This dream happened the night between March 7th and 8th — the night we turn the clocks ahead an hour — “The sucky time change.”

We lose an hour of sleep and wake up tired whether we want to or not.

The day before had been great. It was my wife’s birthday. We visited our son, toured a distillery (and sampled their bourbon), and ate probably a bit too much.

I developed a vasoreactive headache somewhere along the way — possibly the bourbon, possibly the burnt Basque cheesecake — and by the time it finally passed, I was exhausted and felt like I wanted to carry my head around in a cotton-lined box so it wouldn’t have to move, see anything, or hear anything.

So by the end of the day there had been:

• Emotion.

• Travel.

• Alcohol.

• Heavy food.

• Fatigue.

• Two hours of algorithm-driven social media.

Taken together, nothing about the dream or the morning anxiety should have been surprising. And once I thought about it Sunday morning, it wasn’t.

I wrote about it in my journal, which helped a little. Then I went for a run, which helped a lot, flushing most of it out of my brain, and replacing it with my brain sending messages like: “Dude. Why did you do that to us and our legs?”

Later in the day, I talked to my wife — a former teacher — which was the final processing step I needed. After that, the anxiety was gone.

But it had been real. It starved to death because I refused to feed it what it wanted.

This isn’t a post about my bad decisions and my weird-ass dream.

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Let’s Talk About Teen Anxiety

Given what I’ve written about phones before, this is where my mind went.

Everything that happened to me Saturday night — someone who rarely uses social media, who understands exactly how the algorithm works — happened in the span of about two hours. I could literally watch the algorithm shifting while I scrolled. The longer I stayed on certain things, the more they fed me.

More conflict, more comparison, more emotional hooks. I didn’t see a single post from a friend the entire time.

For two hours.

And I couldn’t stop. I knew what it was doing, I knew why it was doing it, and I kept scrolling anyway. I felt gross while I was doing it.

Then the realization hit:

I had spent the evening living like a teenager.

I had spent the evening (just the evening, not a day) letting a machine deliberately push my nervous system around.

And this is what it did to me, someone who knows how this works, someone who rarely engages with it, someone who can usually spot the manipulation in real time.

Everything I described above — exhaustion, emotional loading, lousy sleep, endless scrolling, algorithmically optimized content designed to provoke engagement — that’s just daily life for a teenager with a phone.

What chance do our kids have?

Our kids are reporting record levels of anxiety (the CDC has been reporting about this for many years now), and all you have to do is spend one day inside a school to see it. It shows up everywhere: checking out, avoidance, missing school, physical symptoms, and stress reactions that used to belong to the Don Drapers of the world — not kids.

The pipeline looks something like this:

Plant the seeds of anxiety throughout the day via social media:

• this is how you should look

• this is what you should own

• this is the life you should be living

• this is how other people your age are succeeding

• this is what you need to buy, take, apply, or inject to improve yourself

• this is how kids in China prepare for exams

And layered on top of that:

• bullying

• trash-talk

• social ranking

• anonymous cruelty

all turned up to 15 because it’s happening online, constantly, and often in front of an audience.

Then feed the body like a teenager, based on the four teenage food groups:

• caffeine

• sugar

• carbs

• more caffeine

Then destroy sleep.

• Drink a 300-mg caffeine Monster at 4:00 p.m., and half of it is still in your system at 10:00 (a shot of espresso is about 64 mg).

• Stay up late finishing schoolwork.

• Stay up later talking to friends.

• Stay up even later scrolling.

• Screens until sleep.

That’s the teenager version of what I did.

Now, wake up the next morning with anxiety and a higher heart rate. That’s physiological arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. Your body knows something is wrong, but your brain doesn’t know why. Your brain’s response is to start auditioning explanations:

• Maybe it’s that assignment.

• Maybe it’s that conversation (with a parent/friend/teacher) from yesterday.

• Maybe it’s the death in the family from last year

• Maybe that teacher thinks you’re stupid.

• Maybe that upcoming game.

The body rings the alarm bell, the brain writes the story explaining why the bell is ringing.

The story feels true because the alarm is real. And if the brain “feels” that something is true, it is true.

Those stories? Very hard to disbelieve. Ever try to argue with your own brain when it decides something is wrong? Yeah. Mine doesn’t listen to me very often either.

For me, this lasted about a morning. I reflected, wrote, ran, talked to someone I trust, and processed it out of my system. I got out.

What about our kids? How many nights like that does it take before it becomes the default state? Wake up with anxiety, feel your heart racing, brain searches for a cause. Find one.

Repeat.

Day after day after day.

Eventually, anxiousness stops being an episode; it becomes the default.

And that can grow into real anxiety, then panic and all of anxiety’s other lousy friends.

What I’m Not Saying, What I Am Saying

I’m not saying this explains every case of anxiety.

I’m not saying phones are the only cause.

I’m certainly not saying I have a cure.

Anxiety is complicated, and can grow into an all-encompassing thing when it gets comfortable.

What I am saying is simpler: I had a day where my environment nudged my nervous system into a bad place. I could recognize it, reflect on it. And take steps to correct it.

Our kids are living inside those conditions every single day. We are building daily conditions of physiological dysregulation and then acting surprised when children become emotionally unstable.

And when their behavior reflects that stress, we often treat it as a character flaw instead of an environmental signal. If that short exposure was enough to tilt my brain off balance for a morning, then maybe we should think harder about what it means to grow up inside it. Not once in a while, but constantly.

Kids are kids. Like any living thing, they respond to the environment they’re living in. We can get angry, we can act surprised, but that’s how life works. Organisms respond to their environment.

We owe them a better one.

If you're a teacher or parent seeing this too, I’d be curious what you're noticing.

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So the last piece traveled a little farther than I expected.

That’s always a strange moment as a writer. You toss something out into the void, thinking a few colleagues might nod along, or look at you and shake their heads disapprovingly at a meeting, and suddenly thousands of people are reading it.

Which brings us to the natural next move: train’s moving, shovel coal.

So let’s talk about AI.
(Polite wave toward the SEO gods.)

I’ve written about this before. A while back, I published a piece called “What AI Means for the 99%” and “The Kids Have AI, the Teachers Have Icebreakers.” The point of those articles wasn’t panic or prophecy. They were observations. Students were already experimenting with powerful tools, while the adult response often felt procedural and surface-level. Something big was happening, and we were responding with small strategies.

That imbalance hasn’t gone away.

If anything, it’s scaled up.

Editor’s Note: I’m writing from the perspective of my own district — an under-funded, below-average district in a state that is itself well below average in public education funding. Your mileage may vary, obviously. For example, it took my district roughly two years to release formal guidance on AI use in classrooms, and students were granted access to AI tools on the district network before those guidelines appeared. And we were using it on the down-low in classes before that, while district officials were publicly saying there was no way students could use AI in the schools. So…yeah.

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Students are using AI. Teachers are experimenting with it. Or actively fighting it. Or somewhere in between. District leaders are drafting policy language about integration. Federal conversations increasingly frame AI literacy as essential preparation for the future economy. Adoption is accelerating, while the narratives surrounding it are, to put it politely, contradictory.

What remains less clear is whether we intend to prepare the people expected to make that integration meaningful.

Seeds…and Studies

This piece was sparked by a study that had been sitting on my computer for a while: “AI Use in Schools Is Quickly Increasing but Guidance Lags Behind,” published by RAND using their national survey panels. The report came out last September and is reinforced by similar studies.

At its simplest, the RAND study says this: Schools are already saturated with AI—used by over half of students and teachers—but most districts still haven’t provided clear rules, training, or guidance. Students are largely figuring it out themselves while adults argue about cheating. And the divide between AI skeptics and AI proponents inside school systems breaks down almost exactly as you’d expect.

That finding isn’t especially surprising to anyone working in schools, but RAND’s survey panels give it something classroom anecdotes don’t: scale.

One section heading in the report reads:

And another observation follows:

I haven’t run my own survey, but I’d wager not much has changed in the five months since that report came out. Taken together, there isn’t a veteran teacher in this country who hasn’t heard this song before.

What I want to look at here is AI in education at the system level—as part of the larger design.

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The Cleanest Signal Yet?

If you want to understand the systemic problem in American public education in one clear moment, look at how we’re handling AI.

At every level, from federal to local, schools are being told that AI must be integrated into classrooms. Teachers must prepare students for an AI-shaped future. Schools must innovate. It’s the moon shot that will rocket us into the future.

That part is clear.

What accompanies the mandate is harder to identify. There is no coherent national framework outlining what effective AI integration should look like across disciplines. There is no sustained professional structure built into the school calendar that allows teachers to redesign curriculum thoughtfully. There is no meaningful credentialing pathway recognizing AI literacy as a professional specialization for teachers. And there is no dedicated funding stream that matches the scale of the expectation.

In other words, the expectation is systemic, but the preparation is improvised.

Decades of research on educational technology adoption show that implementation depends less on the tools themselves and more on “facilitating conditions” such as institutional support, training, and organizational readiness.

Every reform eventually lands in the same place: a classroom, where a teacher has to translate policy language into something a room full of students can actually learn from. That translation requires time, expertise, and thoughtful design.

It’s also worth saying that many administrators are navigating the same contradictions teachers are. State directives arrive. Federal initiatives appear. Technology companies make promises. School leaders are asked to demonstrate innovation and accountability at the same time, often without additional resources. The pressure flows downward through the system, and eventually it reaches a classroom where someone has to make it real.

Right now, the system seems to assume that design and implementation will simply “happen.”

This pattern is not new. Education historian Larry Cuban has long documented how schools repeatedly overestimate the instructional impact of new technologies while underinvesting in the professional learning required to use them well.

What the Research Actually Says

This isn’t speculation. Technology integration research has been consistent for decades: tools alone do not change instruction. Teacher learning does.

Educational technology research has long reflected this reality. The widely cited TPACK framework, developed by Mishra and Koehler, argues that effective technology integration occurs only when teachers combine technological knowledge with deep pedagogical and subject expertise.

Research on technology-enhanced learning repeatedly emphasizes that digital tools alone do not transform instruction; their impact depends on how thoughtfully they are integrated into pedagogy.

Studies of technology adoption repeatedly show that meaningful classroom integration is tied to sustained, pedagogically grounded professional development.

A recent systematic review of teacher professional development and digital instruction similarly found that sustained training, collaboration, and institutional support are the strongest predictors of meaningful technology integration.

When teachers receive ongoing training tied to real classroom practice, instructional change deepens. When preparation is minimal or fragmented, adoption tends to remain surface-level, frustrating teachers and students alike.

Recent reviews of artificial intelligence in education suggest a similar pattern. Research attention has exploded around AI applications themselves, but far less attention has been paid to preparing teachers to use those tools in pedagogically grounded ways. In practice, that means the technology is advancing faster than the professional structures needed to support it.

A recent systematic review of nearly one hundred studies on AI in education similarly concluded that research attention has largely focused on applications of the technology itself, while comparatively little attention has been paid to preparing teachers to use those tools pedagogically.

Teachers are not resisting AI.

Research on teacher technology adoption consistently shows that teachers’ beliefs, professional knowledge, and institutional support structures—not the tools themselves—determine whether digital technologies meaningfully reshape instruction.

Research also consistently shows that teachers generally hold positive attitudes toward classroom technology, but report barriers such as insufficient training, time, and institutional support as the main obstacles to meaningful implementation.

Our skepticism comes from a simple recognition: meaningful integration requires thoughtful design. Thoughtful design requires expertise. And expertise takes time.

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The Funding Paradox

This is where the contradiction becomes hard to ignore.

In many states, public education funding is tightening or being gutted by design. Professional development funds are among the first areas trimmed. Planning time is compressed. Staffing gaps widen.

At the same time, schools are being told to prepare students for an AI-driven economy—and, sooner rather than later, to demonstrate that AI is being integrated into classrooms.

There’s no anger in saying this, just the usual confusion.

I’m a sixteen-year veteran. I’ve watched standards shifts, assessment reforms, device rollouts, and LMS transitions come and go. In every wave of change, meaningful transformation depended less on the sophistication of the technology and more on the seriousness of the investment in teacher learning.

When training was sustained and embedded, practice evolved. When training was perfunctory, practice complied.

I’m still not really good at Infinite Campus, even after using it all year. Our “training” was essentially telling us we’re using it in the coming year, at the end of last year, and suggesting that we watch some videos on it over the summer.

AI represents a larger shift than any of those earlier waves.

But structurally, we’re treating it like a plugin. Like switching from Blackboard to Canvas.

When a system mandates transformation but withholds investment, the problem isn’t teacher resistance; it’s structural incoherence.

And then there’s the critique that lands squarely.

AI and the Relational Work of Teaching

Some of the most revealing research compares AI-generated lesson plans with those designed by teachers. Generative systems often perform well in structural alignment. They can quickly produce clear objectives, organized sequences, and standards-aligned frameworks.

Where they tend to fall short is contextual nuance—the parts of teaching that depend on human judgment. Depth of inquiry, cultural responsiveness, and authentic intellectual challenge tend to emerge most strongly when teachers adapt and reshape what the tool produces.

Teaching requires noticing who didn’t sleep. Who didn’t eat. Who’s bored because the lesson is too easy, and who is quietly drowning because it’s too hard. Who’s faltering because a grandparent passed away last month.

It requires adjusting mid-lesson when the energy shifts or confusion surfaces. Responding when the temperature of the room changes—for any of a dozen reasons.

AI can scaffold, but it cannot read a room. It can’t tell a joke to lighten the mood, or push a student a little further with a quiet signal that you believe in them.

Teaching has always required more than structural coherence. International education research has similarly shown that the mere presence of digital technology alone rarely improves learning outcomes unless teachers redesign instruction around it.

And The Accountability Wave Is Coming…

This is not just a classroom pattern—it’s an institutional one. If you’ve been in education long enough, you know what follows any new initiative.

Measurement.

Soon enough, administrators and upper management will want evidence of AI integration. Walkthroughs will look for it. Lesson plans will reference it. Data dashboards will attempt to measure its effects. There will probably be school-, district-, and state-level “AI report cards.”

That instinct is understandable. If we introduce powerful tools and initiatives into classrooms, we should care about whether they improve learning. But accountability without preparation yields a predictable outcome: documentation rather than transformation. The box-checkers will have another box to check. And they’ll check it.

AI will appear in lesson plans. Screenshots will pollute slide decks. The language of innovation will be visible. But the underlying instructional design will not have shifted in the ways leaders hope—or have been ordered to produce.

How can I be sure? I’ve done this myself.

Teachers are not afraid of accountability. We live inside it. We’re accountability sinks—it all flows downward and eventually lands on us. That’s part of the job.

What we are wary of is being held accountable for outcomes tied to tools we were never given the time or training to master.

If We’re Serious, Then Be Serious

If AI integration is important enough to mandate, it is important enough to structure and fund. As a former VP (at the time) once said, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

Serious integration requires serious conditions. At minimum, that would include:

Bring real expertise into the room.

Professional learning should be led by people who understand AI’s pedagogical implications, limitations, bias structures, and ethical dimensions—not just its surface functionality. Expertise matters, and the field deserves professionals whose depth goes beyond a handful of workshops and an online certification. Ideally, experts who can respond to the skepticism of veteran teachers with practical solutions and clear paths forward. You’re challenging our perceived usefulness, validity, and the core of what we do. Some of us are going to push back.

We don’t need to be shamed or called Luddites. We’ve seen this before. Heck, there are probably a few of us who remember when VCRs were the tool that was going to revolutionize education. Help us understand how this is actually the real thing.

Provide sustained, in-contract learning time.

One-off workshops or optional after-hours modules cannot support tools that reshape assessment, feedback, and curriculum design. Teachers need embedded time during the contract day to experiment, reflect, and collaborate.

Research on technology integration consistently finds that sustained support systems—combining leadership backing, expert guidance, and peer collaboration—allow instructional practices to evolve over time rather than remain superficial.

If it’s important enough to revolutionize education at the classroom level, it should be important enough to fund. If it’s not important enough to fund, don’t expect teachers to jump on board.

Recognize AI mastery as professional expertise.

If AI literacy is important enough to mandate, it should connect to licensure credit, credentials, or compensation pathways. Professional growth should be treated as advancement, not just another plate teachers are expected to keep spinning. If the plan is to have local, school-based “AI-gurus” to lead, give them the time, money, and room to help other teachers adopt and develop best practices.

Clarify acceptable use of AI.

Students and teachers need consistent frameworks around authorship, academic integrity, and ethical boundaries. These expectations should be codified and enforced clearly rather than improvised classroom by classroom, and largely unknown to leadership.

Include teachers in the design process.

I understand that in many places, this horse has already left the barn.
Research on co-design models consistently shows deeper integration when teachers help shape how tools are implemented, rather than receiving directives after decisions have already been made.

And because it doesn’t get said enough: when it comes to education, teachers are the experts. Not consultants. Not upper management. The education experts are teachers. If you want us to do something well, involve us from the beginning. Want to know how new technology will work with kids? Ask the teachers.

None of this is radical. It’s simply designing the reform with the teacher in mind for once.

If this isn’t happening, we all need to push this conversation up the chain.

Teachers should point out the gap between expectations and support to administrators. Administrators should raise it with district leadership. District leadership should raise it with school boards, and school boards should raise it with state legislatures. And there should be accountability at every level. Too many people in education shrug and point to the status quo in the face of change, and, unsurprisingly, nothing changes.

If AI truly is the future we claim it is—if it matters for our students, the future workforce, and national competitiveness—then we should be able to find ears willing to listen at every level.

“This is the best we can manage for where we are now” isn’t good enough.

Otherwise, what are we doing any of this for?

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Automation or Amplification

AI will be present in classrooms. That much is already clear. The battle is effectively over—if there was ever going to be one. But the real question is whether it arrives as automation or amplification.

Automation reduces professional judgment to a process, while amplification strengthens it with tools. The difference between those futures is not the software. It is whether we are willing to invest in the teachers expected to make it work.

If AI integration is important enough to reshape instruction, then it is important enough to reshape professional learning. Otherwise, we are placing ambitious expectations on schools while constraining the very resources required to meet them — or, as teachers call it, business as usual.

The AI moment feels less like a technology debate and more like a structural stress test. It reveals how education systems translate ambitious ideas into classroom reality. It exposes a familiar pattern: mandates flow downward, resources hesitate, and teachers absorb the implementation burden.

Take all of this not as an argument against AI, but rather a plea for coherence.

If we invest in teachers as experts, AI can amplify human judgment and deepen learning. If we attempt to bypass that investment in pursuit of efficiency, we risk thinning the professionalism that gives education its power.

Give teachers the time, training, and respect that match the mandate, and we will build classrooms that are intentional rather than reactive.

That’s not resistance.

It is simply a request that the math of a mandate finally make sense.

Thanks for reading, and hey - quick favor?

We’re not going to get any change made if we all just read this, nod, agree, and click “Like.” Can you do me a solid and share this with others, and hopefully up the chain to some decision makers? I’m not thinking things will change overnight, but I think that educational leadership and decision-makers need to know we see them, we see the decisions, and we know what’s best for our kids. Thanks.

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Last spring, a student looked at his grade, did the math in his head, and said — just loud enough for me to hear — “There’s no point.”

He wasn’t being dramatic. He was being accurate.

That was the moment I stopped treating grading as a moral issue and started treating it like an engineering problem.

In most American schools, grades run from 0 to 100. A rough day might earn a 23%, a 35%, maybe a 58%. If nothing is turned in, the gradebook records a 0.

I use a 50% minimum. No recorded score falls below 50%, whether a student earned 12% or turned in nothing.

That sentence alone is enough to change the temperature in a room.

But once I ran the numbers, the reaction didn’t match the math.

The Structural Distortion We Don’t Talk About

On a 100-point scale, the passing range (60–100) spans 40 points. The failing range (0–59) spans 59.

I tell my students: there are ten points that earn each letter grade above a 60, and fifty-nine that earn an F.

Grades below 50% behave differently from every other grade on the scale. A 95 and an 85 are ten points apart. An 85 and a 75 are ten points apart. But a 60 and a zero are sixty points apart.

The bottom half of the scale isn’t symmetrical with the top.

When we enter a 12% or a 0%, we aren’t just communicating weak mastery. We’re introducing a numerical weight that requires multiple strong performances to offset. The lower half carries disproportionate weight.

A 50% floor doesn’t eliminate failure. It compresses the lower half so it behaves proportionally to the upper half. It makes the scale symmetrical.

That’s a design adjustment — not a lowering of standards.

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What a Real Turnaround Looks Like on Paper

Let’s look at a student who starts poorly and then genuinely improves.

Grade Weights
Tests — 50%
Labs — 15%
Project — 20%
Classwork — 15%

Scores
Tests: 35, 42, 92, 96
Labs: 0, 0, 90, 95
Project: 80
Classwork: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 85, 85, 85, 85, 85

This is a rough start, followed by real academic improvement.

First, calculate it on a traditional 0–100 scale.

Traditional Grading (0–100 Scale)

Despite earning 92 and 96 on the final two tests, the overall grade remains in the low 60s. The early zeros dominate the semester average.

Now apply a 50% floor to every score below 50.

Scores
Tests: 35, 42, 92, 96
Labs: 50, 50, 90, 95
Project: 80
Classwork: 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 85, 85, 85, 85, 85

Minimum Grading (50% Absolute Floor)

Same student. Same learning at the end. Same mastery demonstrated.

Under the zero scale: 62%.
Under a 50% floor: 72.8%.

The student did not magically earn an A. Standards did not collapse. Early performance still mattered. What changed is that later learning was allowed to move the number.

So I treated grading like a lab.

Hypothesis: If I compress the lower half of the scale, late mastery will move the overall grade proportionally.
Intervention: 50% floor.
Observation: The grade distribution did not inflate. Students who improved saw movement. Students who didn’t, didn’t.
Conclusion: The scale behaved more like a measurement tool than a penalty amplifier.

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The Psychological Cost We Pretend Not to See

At some point, this stops being about percentages and becomes about people.

Teenagers are not irrational. They are pragmatic. When they see a grade sink into the 40s because of early zeros, they calculate how many perfect scores it would take to recover. They decide whether the climb is possible.

When the climb looks impossible, many of them stop climbing.

We often say zeros teach responsibility. In practice, I’ve seen them teach futility. When a student believes the semester is mathematically unwinnable, the system has communicated something powerful: your early failure defines you.

A 50% floor does not erase failure. It tells the student something different: you are behind, but you are not buried.

That distinction changes behavior.

The students most harmed by the zero scale are not hypothetical masterminds gaming the system. They start poorly because their lives are unstable. They miss assignments because they are overwhelmed, working, anxious, or distracted by chaos we never see. Sometimes, something shifts. A relationship forms. A tutor helps. They decide to try.

Under a zero scale, that late effort cannot move the grade enough to matter.

Under a 50% floor, it can.

Adolescence is built on second chances — on missteps followed by growth. When a grading system prevents growth from changing the outcome, it quietly tells students that effort is cosmetic.

Hope is not sentimental. It is cognitive fuel. Students work when they believe improvement will count. They disengage when they believe it won’t.

The zero scale can flatten the recovery slope.

A 50% floor restores proportional movement.

What It Did to My Room

I know what this sounds like. After arguing about scale design and weighted averages, I’m about to talk about how my classroom feels.

But classrooms are human systems. If the numbers change behavior, the behavior changes the room.

When I moved to a 50% floor, something shifted. It’s hard to quantify, but unmistakable. The room feels lighter. Not easier. Not softer. Just freer.

The biggest shift wasn’t in the spreadsheet. It was in posture.

Students stopped slumping when they saw an early failure. They started asking, “Okay, what do I need on the next one?”

Recovery became a rational decision instead of a heroic one.

Students still panic about low grades. They still come in upset when they see a 62 or a 58. They understand that stacking multiple 50s and low 60s creates real gravity in their average, and that climbing out takes sustained effort. They still cry sometimes when a test comes back lower than they expected.

Nothing about the academic expectations has changed.

What has disappeared is the sense that one bad stretch permanently defines the semester. I no longer have students who simply decide they’re “that” student, and nothing can change it.

Students work. They revise. They retake. They calculate. They come for help. They know recovery is possible, which makes the effort rational.

My grade distribution has not transformed into a utopia of effortless As. There has been no explosion of top scores. The curve looks remarkably normal. The difference isn’t inflation.

The difference is that students know I care about whether they ultimately learn the material — not about whether I can mathematically punish them for stumbling early.

I have to explain that not all of their classes operate this way, and that some teachers still use the traditional zero scale. The conversation is awkward. It’s also revealing. Students immediately understand the distinction. They feel it.

What they sense — and what I sense — is that the grading system is aligned with growth instead of finality.

The room is not more permissive.

It is more hopeful.

Hope, in a classroom, changes behavior more reliably than fear ever has.

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The Myth of the Strategic Slacker

At this point, someone insists students will exploit this — that they’ll collect 50s and do just enough to pass.

I understand the concern about the “strategic slacker.” In my experience, that student is theoretical — someone who does minimal work, but is a math genius at the same time.

Students disengaged enough to do nothing for weeks are not secretly calculating weighted averages or engineering semester-long strategies. If they had that level of foresight and discipline, they wouldn’t be disengaged.

Even under a 50% floor, passing requires real work. A student earning nothing but 50s still fails. Mastery of major assessments is required to climb.

What minimum grading removes is not accountability. It removes mathematical annihilation.

“But What About the Kid Who Earned a 56?”

One objection deserves a serious answer: how is it fair that a student who tries and earns a 56% sits in the same numerical neighborhood as a student who does nothing and receives a 50%?

First, they are not the same. A 56% is still higher than a 50%, and in a weighted system those differences accumulate.

But the deeper question is this: what is a grade supposed to represent?

A grade is meant to communicate mastery of content. A 56% indicates limited mastery. A 50% floor indicates that mastery has not yet been demonstrated. Both fall below proficiency. The distinction is real, but not enormous.

Under a traditional scale, the gap between 56% and 0 is 56 points. The gap between 86% and 100% is 14. That imbalance reveals the problem: the lower half carries disproportionate weight.

Minimum grading does not erase the difference between weak work and missing work. It removes the structural overreaction built into the lower half. It prevents one form of failure from becoming permanent mathematical debt.

If fairness is the concern, we should also ask whether it is fair for one early collapse to outweigh weeks of later improvement. The 50% floor keeps distinctions intact while restoring proportionality.

Grades should measure learning — not amplify punishment.

What This Debate Is Actually About

A zero does not measure what a student knows. It measures how severely we respond to what they didn’t do.

If a student earns a 35 because they did not understand the material, that reflects mastery. If they submit weak work and earn a 42, that also reflects mastery.

When we assign a zero, we are not increasing precision. We are increasing severity.

If the numerical impact of zeros is often modest in weighted systems, the debate may not be about precision at all. It may be about what we believe grades are for.

Punishment feels powerful.
Power is not the same thing as rigor.

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The Question We Have to Answer

Not doing the work should cost you that assignment. It should lower your average. It should prompt intervention.

What it should not do is mathematically erase the impact of later mastery.

If grades are meant to communicate what a student ultimately knows and can do, the scale must allow growth to change the outcome.

That’s all this is for me — not a revolution, not a manifesto. A design adjustment so that growth counts.

Once I saw the math — and the students behind the math — I couldn’t unsee the distortion. So I adjusted the system in my room.

Minimum grading does not excuse failure. It recalibrates the scale so that failure is proportional and recovery is possible.

The numbers show the distortion. The psychology shows the cost.

The rest is a choice.

Do we want a grading system that measures learning?
Or one that amplifies collapse?

Once you see the math — and the kids behind it — it becomes difficult to pretend those are the same thing.

It took me ten years to stop bracing for impact every day at my job.

In his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000-hour rule” — the idea that mastery in complex fields tends to require around 10,000 hours of practice. I’ve always been skeptical of how clean that number sounds. Gladwell is a masterful storyteller — very good at selecting the narratives that make a thesis land.

The specific number has since been challenged, refined, and caveated — as it should be. But the exact number isn’t really the point.

The larger truth is harder to dismiss: practice matters. Accumulated exposure to complexity changes you. You don’t become fluent in something difficult without time in it.

And teaching is one of the most cognitively complex jobs we ask adults to do.

Ten years sounds long until you realize it’s the standard apprenticeship in many professions we consider serious. We don’t expect surgeons, engineers, or attorneys to reach fluency in three years. We assume formation takes time.

So I ran the numbers.

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The Math of Mastery

If a teacher averages six hours a day of direct instruction over 180 instructional days, that’s about 1,080 hours a year in front of students. I’m talking about instructional hours here — actual time in front of students — not the planning, grading, meetings, emails, and everything else that fills the rest of the day.

At that pace, you don’t reach 10,000 instructional hours until sometime in year ten.

Not year three. Not year five. Year ten.

Whether the real threshold is 8,000 or 12,000 is beside the point. Mastery does not arrive in year three.

By the end of year three, a teacher has logged roughly 3,200 instructional hours. By year five, about 5,400. That’s still apprenticeship. It may not feel that way — year three feels ancient — but in terms of accumulated practice, you’re not yet halfway to what we call mastery in other professions.

For me, that ten-year mark wasn’t abstract.

What Year Ten Feels Like

It was about five or six years ago when I realized something had shifted.

Up until then, I was competent. I worked hard. Students learned. But there was still a low-grade uncertainty humming underneath everything. I was constantly calculating — reacting more than anticipating.

Around year ten, instinct replaced uncertainty.

There was muscle memory where I used to be learning along the way. Fewer surprises. When a problem surfaced — behavior, confusion, pacing, parent conflict — I could see solutions quickly because I had seen similar problems before.

I wasn’t angry all the time anymore.

We don’t talk about that enough. Early in your career, the job can feel like a constant affront to your time, energy, and ideals. You’re tired. You’re defensive. You’re proving yourself.

By ten years, you’ve seen just about every type of student the job will throw at you — at least twice. The disengaged genius. The charming saboteur. The anxious perfectionist. The student carrying more than any teenager should have to carry. You’ve watched initiatives rise and fade. You’ve made enough mistakes to know which ones actually matter.

You stop mistaking turbulence for crisis.

I finally felt like a teacher. Teaching felt less like a job and more like a craft.

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Difficult is the Point

The first year of teaching is brutal. The second year can be worse. The novelty hasn’t worn off yet, but the adrenaline has. You’re no longer the shiny new hire, and you’re still not fluent. You’re tired in ways you didn’t know were possible.

There is no serious teaching model in which the first few years are easy.

And that’s not entirely a flaw. Apprenticeship in any serious profession is demanding. You have to dig in. You have to decide why you’re there. You have to find the internal reason the job works for you, because no external structure can supply that alone.

We need strong teachers. But we also need people entering the profession with their eyes open. This is complex, emotionally intense work. It’s not getting easier. I’ve seen talented new teachers walk away because the job was harder than they were led to believe. Not because they lacked commitment — but because no one prepared them for the cognitive and emotional weight of it.

Difficulty is not the same thing as instability.
The job can be hard and still be sustainable.

Exceptions Don’t Define Systems

There are exceptions.

Some teachers find powerful strategies early. Some hit their stride in year two. Some innovate quickly and share what works.

That’s not the claim.

The existence of early excellence doesn’t erase the reality of formation.

A breakthrough lesson is not the same thing as professional fluency. One strategy working is not the same as having seen enough cycles to recognize patterns across years, cohorts, crises, and reforms.

Outliers exist in every profession. But we don’t design systems around outliers. We design them around typical developmental timelines.

If most teachers leave before year five, a handful of extraordinary second-year teachers does not change the structural problem.

Designing for Churn

The average teacher leaves before year five.

A few years ago, a legislator suggested that teaching isn’t really a lifelong profession — that it’s the beginning of a larger working life. The implication was clear: three or four years in the classroom, then move on.

That framing is seductive. It makes churn sound noble. It reframes attrition as career mobility. But if we take that idea seriously, we should be honest about what it means.

Three years is roughly 3,200 instructional hours.

Five years is about 5,400.

If we design a system that expects teachers to cycle out at that point, then we are intentionally building schools staffed primarily by apprentices.

We are normalizing perpetual infancy in a profession that requires maturity.

No one would suggest that surgeons practice for three years and then pivot to “something larger.” No one would argue that airline pilots should log a few thousand hours and then rotate out as part of a healthy workforce design. Why would we treat the people educating our kids any differently?

When we talk about teaching as a short-term civic experience rather than a long-term craft, we quietly lower our expectations for what expertise looks like in classrooms.

We say we want mastery in the profession. We design for turnover.

In districts across the country, when deficits surface and budgets must be corrected quickly, the corrective measures often fall on the least senior teachers — the 3,000-hour and 4,000-hour teachers just beginning to see patterns and understand the work.

There are realities to consider. Veteran teachers cost more. In some states, significantly more. They also bring experience — and opinions — that can challenge new leadership or shifting initiatives. Budget pressures and reform cycles can make less-experienced teachers seem easier to slot in, and veterans easier to replace.

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What Interruption Looks Like

A friend told me a story that won’t leave me.

Years ago, he inspired a student to major in history and become a teacher. When that former student was hired into his district, he was overjoyed. The student he once taught was now his colleague. It was a near-mythical full-circle moment that we live for.

Two months into the school year, reductions in force came.

The former student — now colleague — was RIF’d. Two months into his career. He was pushed out of the classroom. Left the school. He’s back now — but as a substitute, not a teacher. Paid less, with no guarantee of returning next year as either a sub or a teacher. Oh, and a twist to the knife? He’s a substitute in the class that he was teaching before he was RIF’d.

Yeah.

That’s what interruption looks like.

Not a statistic.

Leadership cycles on. Board members step down or get voted out. Headlines fade. The institutional scar remains.

And new teachers are watching.

If you were starting your career and saw a district cut early-career teachers to correct a financial crisis, would you plant your roots there?

Instability sends a message. It tells the newest teachers that the ground beneath them may not hold. We can redesign websites. We can attend job fairs. But recruitment is not the core issue. It’s teacher turnover.

Teacher Retention Is the Real Reform

Policymakers sometimes wring their hands about declining birth rates and wonder how to persuade people to have more children. But birth rates don’t rise because governments plead. They rise when people feel economically secure, socially supported, and confident about the future. If you want people to have children, make the world feel secure enough to raise them.

Teaching works the same way.

Teachers rarely leave because of a bad day or a difficult class. They leave because of the broader system and the environment in which they’re asked to work. Increased expectations without any reduction in other responsibilities. Inconsistent enforcement of student expectations. Reductions in instructional time with no benefit for the cost. Loss or lack of autonomy in classrooms. Micromanagement by leadership.

If you want teachers to stay, make the job worth staying in. Stability and respect aren’t built through slogans. They’re built through design choices. If the job feels stable, respected, and sustainable, people will stay. If it feels precarious, underpaid, and subject to chronic instability, they won’t.

The long-term solution isn’t mysterious: improve pay. Improve working conditions. Reduce unnecessary administrative noise. Restore trust between classrooms and leadership. You can’t plead people into trust. You build conditions that make trust rational and inevitable.

But in some places, those changes are treated as aspirational rather than actionable. That doesn’t mean patches cannot be applied in the short term.

So what would it look like to design differently?

What Can Be Done Now

1. Prepare New Teachers for Reality
   Be honest with new teachers about the cognitive and emotional weight of the job. Not to discourage them — but to prepare them. Let experienced teachers speak plainly about what year one feels like, especially in high-need schools. Help them to understand the ideas I’m talking about here. Preparation is not protection from difficulty; it is preparation for it. When new teachers understand the reality of the work, they are more likely to endure it. Not doing it plants the seeds for teacher burnout.
   

2. Protect the Formation Years

   There are signals that reductions in force may be unavoidable in the coming years. That may just be reality, but RIFs need to be designed with the long term in mind. Avoid disproportionately cutting teachers in years one through five. Mastery requires time, and the pipeline to year ten must be intentionally protected rather than resetting the clock every couple of years.
   

3. Shift Early Years From Compliance to Coaching

   Reduce performative evaluation cycles for early-career teachers and replace them with sustained mentorship. Provide real release time for mentors and compensate them accordingly. Prioritize feedback and modeling over paperwork and scoring.
   

4. Stabilize Teaching Assignments

   Avoid reshuffling course preps annually for teachers under year five. Mastery accelerates with repetition. Resetting content every year slows formation and increases burnout.
   

5. Address Salary Compression Strategically

   Where local supplements allow, create targeted bumps in years four through eight. Signal clearly that staying in the classroom is viable and valued.
   

6. Reduce Cognitive Overload Immediately

   Conduct an audit of non-instructional requirements. Remove at least one committee, one redundant data cycle, or one recurring meeting block for early-career teachers. Limit additional extracurricular assignments for early-career teachers. Hard work builds mastery; unnecessary noise interrupts it.

None of these suggestions is radical. They are structural.

Architecture, Not Attitude

Imagine a school filled with teachers in year ten and beyond. What would that feel like for teachers, parents, and students?

None of this requires heroics. It requires architecture.

Hard work builds mastery.
Instability interrupts it.

You can close a fiscal gap in a year. You cannot grow a master teacher in less than ten.

If we want experienced teachers in any classroom — teachers with steadiness, fluency, and perspective — we have to design systems that allow them to become experienced.

It takes ten years to grow a teacher.

If we keep interrupting that process, we should stop pretending we want mastery.

#local

Hundreds of people lost jobs.

My district dug itself into a $46 million hole.

The board couldn’t even elect its own leadership during a crisis.

And now it’s primary season, and everyone suddenly wants to “serve.”

Let’s reset the baseline.

Somewhere along the line, school boards stopped being boring governing bodies and started becoming audition spaces — high-stakes positions filled by people who too often don’t understand the job they’re supposed to do.

The result is as predictable as it is preventable: the people paying the price are the ones inside the buildings.

And now, the yard signs are blooming. The mailers are coming. Everyone has a slogan.

Before we hand over the gavel again, let’s define the job.

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What a School Board Actually Is

A school board has a small number of jobs:

Hire and evaluate a superintendent.
Approve and monitor a budget.
Set policy.
Oversee internal controls, contracts, and facilities.
Protect the district’s long-term stability.

That’s it.

It’s not glamorous work. It’s not loud work. It’s disciplined, procedural, and detail-heavy work.

A functional board spends more time in spreadsheets than in speeches. More time asking follow-up questions than delivering monologues. More time building majorities than building personal brands.

If that sounds dull, good. Governance is supposed to be dull.

What It Has Become

I’ve seen it in my own district. We’ve watched a board struggle to elect its own leadership during a financial crisis, multiple rounds of voting. No resolution. Public stalemate.

At the same time, the district was facing the fallout from a state audit that detailed years of financial mismanagement, including a roughly $46 million deficit, repeated budget overrides, weak internal controls, and failure to align staffing with enrollment declines.

That is not a blip, an oops, or a “how did this happen?”
That is a governance failure.

To the district’s credit, WS/FCS has publicly acknowledged the crisis and outlined steps toward financial correction and increased transparency. and that matters.

But acknowledgment after the fact does not erase years of oversight failure. A corrective plan is necessary — it is not exculpatory. Recovery is not the same thing as competence. To date, no one at the governance level (board or upper district management) has been held accountable for failing to govern. Meanwhile, we’re all being asked what the district can do to regain the trust of the community and staff.

Now let’s widen the lens.

A school board is not a minor league for aspiring politicians. It is not a launchpad. It is not a place to rehearse culture-war talking points until someone hands you a bigger microphone.

I am sick of watching people treat the management of public education like a branding opportunity or a hobby.

This job is supposed to be about budgets, policies, oversight, and the unglamorous work of making sure the lights stay on and the teachers and staff get paid. Instead, we get mismanagement. We get theater. We get rehearsed indignation. We get vague conspiracies whispered just loudly enough by self-proclaimed “heroes.” We get shock that district staff and the public would dare question the board’s actions and inactions —or ask for accountability.

And here’s the part that should make everyone uncomfortable: Every minute spent posturing is a minute not spent governing. Every viral clip is a reminder that the person speaking into the mic might be thinking about their next campaign instead of this district’s current crisis.

If your goal is to build a personal brand, go start a podcast. Go run for Congress. Go get a ring light and argue with strangers online.

Do not use 50,000 students and thousands of employees as your political internship.

Meanwhile, teachers are trying to teach. Students are trying to learn. Families are trying to trust that someone in the room is an adult.

Instead, we get spectacle — and leadership that hasn’t earned the name.

And the quiet damage — the erosion of trust, the normalization of dysfunction, the steady drain on morale — spreads far beyond one meeting, one vote, one viral moment.

Something has gone very wrong.

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So Who Should School Board?

A primary is coming — March 3, 2026 — and the field is crowded. At least 37 candidates have filed to compete for nine seats on our board. Incumbents. Challengers. Fresh faces. Familiar names. All are asking voters for the authority to run this district.

Like modern politics everywhere, an election appears, and suddenly everyone wants to “serve.”

Good.

Democracy requires choices.

That’s one victory for the current school board - they did mobilize a large field of candidates who all want to take their jobs.

But let’s talk about how people tend to vote in these races — and why that’s part of the problem.

Too often, we vote for:

The person with our party label.
The person from our church.
The incumbent recasting themselves as the isolated truth-teller — long on retrospective explanations, short on contemporaneous receipts.
The person we recognize from a yard sign five years ago.
The long-serving incumbent who believes that “experience matters.”
The loudest candidate, because at least they “fight.”

That’s not school boarding.

That’s brand shopping.

To school board — yes, I’m using it as a verb — means something different.

It means walking into the room already understanding the job.

Not “excited to learn.”
Not “bringing fresh energy.”
Not “figuring it out as we go.”

We have already lived through what happens when people learn on the fly while sitting on the board. A significant part of how we got here is that too many people on this board did not understand their responsibility. As a result, state-level bodies moved to require external reviews and additional audit work due to the crisis.

Governance is not vibes.
It’s not instinct or being led by your gut.
It’s not “asking good questions” while the numbers burn.

It is oversight. It is fiduciary responsibility. It is systems-level thinking.

And when you don’t understand that — when you treat a multimillion-dollar public institution like a discussion forum instead of a governed entity — you get years of budget overrides, weak internal controls, and crises that “suddenly” appear even though the warning signs were documented.

That is not bad luck.

That is a failure of understanding.

To school board means you can:

Read a 200-page budget and grasp its meanings and implications — and spot problems.
Understand enrollment trends and staffing ratios, both now and in the future.
Ask what internal controls exist — and what happens when they fail.
Know the difference between governance and administration.
Vote in a way that protects long-term stability instead of short-term applause.

This is not an entry-level position. It is not student government, a church board of deacons, an internship, or a leadership workshop that’s a step towards something bigger in the future.

It is fiduciary oversight of a multimillion-dollar public institution that employs thousands of people and educates tens of thousands of children.

You do not show up “ready to learn,” you show up ready to govern.

And let’s be honest: there are candidates in this race for whom this job may simply be too much.

Too much complexity.
Too much financial responsibility.
Too much need for restraint.
Too much consequence.

That’s reality. Despite the good vibes on social media and well-wishers at election meetings, not everyone is built to govern at this scale.

And especially now — after documented oversight failures and public dysfunction — this district cannot afford another round of well-meaning amateurs.

Not another long-building “surprise.”
Not another round of layoffs followed by platitudes.
Not another “how could this happen?”

Institutions don’t collapse in a single dramatic moment. They erode.

And we are eroding. The budget and staff cuts didn’t cut the fat in the district. There’s no fat left. They cut muscle. Ask teachers and administrators, and you’ll hear one phrase: “not sustainable.”

We cannot survive another round of this. Not another ‘how did we miss it?’ Not another mass cut. Not another year of ‘trust us’ after the fact. If we keep electing people who don’t understand the job, this district will hollow out and be done.

Competence is not elitism; it’s the minimum requirement.

Here’s another uncomfortable lens through which to view the contenders: the stake.

Who actually has a stake in the outcome?

Do they have children in the system?
Have they worked inside public schools?
Have they demonstrated long-term investment in this district beyond election cycles?
Will they personally feel the consequences of instability?

Because we’ve just lived through hundreds of jobs cut, careers disrupted, families uprooted. And for too many decision-makers, it cost nothing.

No classroom lost.
No careers upended as they were starting.
No paycheck vanished or decreased by months’ worth of money.
No daily disruption at home.
No emotional stress.

Just carefully measured “sympathy” that cost nothing.

When you have no skin in the game, governance becomes abstract. Numbers on a slide. Positions on a spreadsheet. But for the rest of us, those numbers are colleagues. Friends. Mentors. People who built lives here.

So as this primary approaches, ask better questions.

Don’t ask who sounds strong.
Ask who can govern.

Don’t ask who fights hardest.
Ask who can collaborate.

Don’t ask who shares your party.
Ask who understands fiduciary responsibility.

Don’t ask who shares your beliefs.
Ask who understands the job.

Don’t ask who goes to your church.
Ask who has skin in the game.

That’s how you school board.

This is not revenge politics.

This is performance review.

If you are currently serving, your record is the résumé. Not your intentions. Not your explanations after the fact. Your record.

If you were in the room while oversight failed, while leadership collapsed into stalemate, while dysfunction became normalized — you don’t get to run again as if you were a bystander or an outsider. Governance is collective. So is accountability. Own it.

Continuity is only valuable if it is continuity of competence.

And if you are running — new face, fresh slogan, polished mailer — understand something clearly:

This seat is not a stepping stone.

It is not a personality platform.
It is not a culture-war trench.
It is not a place to grow a following.

If you are more excited about being quoted than being effective, don’t run.

If you are more fluent in outrage than in oversight, this may not be the seat for you.

If you think “strong leadership” means dominating a microphone and scoring “points” instead of building a majority, leave it to someone else.

If you cannot sit at a table with people you dislike and still govern responsibly, absolutely do not run.

We need adults.

Adults who read the audit.
Adults who understand fiduciary responsibility.
Adults who know the difference between attention and achievement.
Adults who care more about institutional stability than personal advancement.

No one is owed this seat.

Not because you’ve been there before.
Not because you “care deeply.”
Not because you have the loudest supporters.

You earn it — or you don’t.

The rest of us have been doing our jobs under the weight of decisions we didn’t make. We’ve absorbed the chaos. We’ve explained it to students. We’ve reassured families about district and staff stability, often when we didn’t believe our own words. We’ve kept the classrooms steady while governance wobbled.

We’ve watched staffing shuffles that seemed to be made with incantations and dice. We’ve given long hugs, said goodbyes, tipped back beers, and wiped away tears as old colleagues and kids new to the job were told that, through no fault of their own, they no longer had positions.

That grace period is over.

If you want to lead, prove you can govern.

If you can’t, step aside.

Public education is not your audition.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here are my own as a classroom teacher. All factual references are based on publicly available reporting and official audit documents linked in this article.

We were out for snow days.
Nine+ school days, a blend of sleet, snow, single-digits, and roads just…disappearing.

No bells. No interruptions. Just me, pots of coffee, and stacks of student work. Tests. Quizzes. Explainers. Free-response answers. Enough time sitting with work that the patterns that can hide during the “rush-to-a-meeting, teach for four and a half hours straight, inhale my lunch, recover and plan for the next day” days stopped being subtle.

After a while, it started to feel a little like The Shining. Snowed in. The same mistakes. The same habits. The same beliefs. All written over and over again, just in different handwriting.

And my dog started talking about those nice twin girls he saw upstairs in the hall.

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Regardless of my house being haunted, things crystallized for me: student work doesn’t just show me what students know. It sends me a clear message of what they believe - about learning, about effort, and most importantly, about responsibility.

If you allow me to paraphrase my students’ messaging, a lot of that work said this:

• I sat in class. Words were spoken. We did a problem together. Therefore, I’ve learned.

• If I finish fast, I must be smart.

• I can skip reading or following instructions — my unparalleled genius will be recognized.

• If I write enough words, the answer should count.

• If I’ve always been bad at this, nothing can change - including my handwriting.

• If it’s confusing to me, it’s unfair.

• If I don’t help myself, it’s still not my fault.

• If I paste the question into a chatbot, learning has magically occurred.

Under every one of those beliefs is the same quiet assumption: someone else is responsible for the thinking.

Look, I’m not saying everyone was cheating or bombing quizzes and other assignments. Overall, the grades were decent. But what I’m seeing in the work is an absence, a lack. It’s a pattern of behaviors, habits, and beliefs that will derail these kids hard in the years to come if they’re not corrected.

And that’s where this one comes from.

The earlier essays in this impromptu series were about limits—what I can control, what I can’t, what I refuse to apologize for. They were pieces quietly aimed at me, my colleagues in the job, leadership, the system, and parents. This one is simpler, and harder, and aimed directly at my students, and I figure, a lot of other students as well. The TL;DR version goes something like this:

I can’t learn it for you.

Allow me to roll up my sleeves, skip the inspirational bullshit, and get practical.

Here’s what success actually looks like in my classroom.

Buckle up.

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The Non-Negotiables:

Put the phone in the holder.
Every time. Every day. If you’re in my room, your phone is in the holder.

Phones are very good at what they do. They interrupt. They fragment attention. They train your brain to expect a hit of novelty every few seconds. When the phone is on you, part of your mind is listening for it, whether you admit it or not. You’re addicted to your phone, again, whether you admit it or not.

Learning doesn’t survive that shit.

I keep thinking about a quote from Jared Horvath’s The Digital Delusion. It’s a line from the prologue, and it stopped me cold and prevented me from going on for about a week. The line is:

“Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.”

That makes me ill. I hope it does the same for you. But ask your folks if it’s true. Parents are parents. They love you and never want to say things that upset you. But I guarantee that if they say, “No, no…it’s not like that,” their eyes will be darting around a little like people’s do…

…when they’re lying.

When the phone is in the holder, your brain is a little more available. When it isn’t, it’s not. That’s the whole rule.

Show up as a person, not as a body warming a chair.
Eyes open. Mind engaged. At least a genuine attempt to follow what’s happening. I promise you this stuff is interesting if you just follow along and try.

Ask questions early and often.
Confusion isn’t a failure state. Confusion is the sweat of learning. A rite of passage to get to a new place. Your ticket to cross the river. But quiet confusion is how people drown.

If you say nothing, I assume you’re fine. That’s how everyone ends up surprised later.
Yeah - whoops. I agree - I guess you didn’t understand it after all.

Do the work in class.
Not performatively. Not “pretending to start.” Actually do it. Pencil moving. Brain engaged. Trying things that might not work until you find what does.

Do the work outside of class.
You can’t learn chemistry, physics, or anything else in just ninety minutes a day. You learn it by coming back to it, fixing mistakes, and putting in reps even when you’d rather be doing literally anything else.

Use failure correctly.
When something goes badly, the useful question is “What do I fix?” which manifests as “Can I have some more problems to work out?” or “Can you show me how to solve this one?”

The useless one is “How do I get out of this?” which manifests as “Are there gonna be test corrections?”

And then there’s AI.
If your entire strategy is to take my questions and paste them into a chatbot, you’re not learning. You’re acting as a human USB cable between me and a machine.

I don’t need that.

I can type the damn question into the machine myself. Protip - so can your other teachers, college admission boards, and future employers. At some point, you may ask yourself a question like, “Wait - what’s my value here?” If you land at that spot, it’s 100% everyone above you has already wondered the same thing about you, and may already be taking action on their answer.

School isn’t asking whether you can produce words. It’s asking whether you can think. Thinking is the work. The answers are just proof that the work happened.

That’s why AI-generated responses get marked wrong with no explanation. There’s no thinking there for me to respond to. If you didn’t think, I don’t respond. What exactly are you asking me to evaluate, to judge? You’re my student, the AI is not.

AI isn’t banned here. But it doesn’t get to replace you.

Thinking first, tools second. That’s the “measure twice, cut once” of learning.

With AI in my classroom:
If you try first and then ask for clarification, fine.
If you write something yourself and check whether your reasoning holds up, fine.
If you use it to quiz yourself after you’ve studied, fine.

If you hand in something you can’t explain, it’s not yours. And I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to spare your feelings.

That rule existed long before chatbots. We just stopped enforcing it for a while, and I agree with you — in some places, it’s not enforced. But in here, it is.

One more thing, because it matters more than most of you realize:

Take care of yourself.
Get enough sleep, stay hydrated, eat the best food you can manage, and move your body occasionally.

None of that is extra credit. It’s basic maintenance for a brain you’re asking to do hard things.

Pay attention to the people you spend your time with. If you hang out with four knuckleheads, you’re not the lone “nice” exception—you’re just the fifth knucklehead. That’s not an insult. That’s how social groups have worked since before we came out of the trees and walked upright on the savannah.

Build a circle that actually supports you. And work at getting along with your parents. Even an imperfect peace at home is a massive advantage when you’re trying to do difficult work elsewhere. A tired, distracted, socially-dragged student doesn’t need better tools—they need fewer things working against them.

All of this adds up to something students tend to underestimate: a supported, rested, fed, and grounded student has an enormous edge.

Call it discipline, call it maturity, call it whatever you want.

Functionally, it’s a superpower that will put you so far ahead of your peers that it won’t seem fair.

For parents reading this: I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for participation. Consistency beats talent every single damn time. Difficulty usually means learning is actually happening, even if it’s uncomfortable. Giving up is not an option. Resist the urge to swoop in and rescue them from the discomfort in their learning.

Phones matter. Attention matters. Thinking matters.

I’ll show up prepared. I’ll teach clearly. I’ll reteach when needed. I’ll show up early and stay late for tutoring. I’ll be patient. I won’t judge a student for not knowing something.

But I can’t learn it for them.

They have to show up.
Put the phone away.
Ask questions.
Try.
Do the work.

If they do that, they’ll be fine.

If they don’t, no amount of grace, technology, or good intentions can replace the missing thinking.

And that’s the part no one else can do for them.

Thanks for reading.

I’m genuinely curious what landed for you here.

If you had to pick one non-negotiable that actually changes outcomes, which would it be—and why?

Add a comment. Let’s keep this going - parents, teachers, and students.

Wondering how I got to this? Check out the past three Teacher, Teacher essays:

• What I Can Change (And What I Refuse to Pretend I Can)

• I Can’t Change Your Kid

• A Stoic and a Bodhisattva Walk into a Classroom

For most of my career, I apologized constantly.

Sometimes out loud. Sometimes, just in my posture.

I apologized for grades that reflected performance. Apologized for deadlines that mattered. For consequences that arrived exactly when they were promised. I apologized when a parent’s email came in hot, and I could already feel myself writing a reply to smooth things over rather than tell the truth. I apologized when an administrator stood in my doorway, using a tone that said, “You’re not wrong, but you’re being inconvenient.”

None of those apologies were about harm. They were about discomfort.

Over time, I noticed how automatic they’d become. The apology arrived before I’d even decided whether I’d done anything wrong. That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t my teaching. It was the role I was being asked to play.

This isn’t a defense of toughness or tradition. It’s a refusal.

I’m done apologizing for doing the job correctly inside a system that prefers comfort to honesty.

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The Apology Economy in Schools

Schools run on apologies that are never named as such.

They appear in conferences where everyone knows the student didn’t do the work, but the conversation bends away from accountability and toward “what else we could have done?” They surface in meetings where expectations are quietly lowered—not because they were wrong, but because holding them would create friction. They show up in emails where teachers absorb responsibility for outcomes they don’t control.

I’ve written those emails. I’ve sat in those meetings.

These apologies don’t repair anything. They keep the system emotionally solvent. Tension that should be addressed structurally is redistributed to individual teachers, who are expected to carry it privately and then apologize for causing it.

I, not so politely, decline.

Professional Judgment Is Not a Moral Failure

There’s a fiction in education that good teaching requires constant self-doubt. That confidence is arrogance, ego, or the lack of a “growth mindset.” That firmness signals a lack of care.

I believed that for a long time. I wore uncertainty like proof of virtue.

Experience changes that. Not because you harden, but because patterns repeat. You see what works, what fails quietly, and what fails loudly. You learn that some discomfort produces growth, and some exists only to reassure adults.

At some point, teaching stopped feeling like performance and started feeling like practice. Not louder. Not harsher. Just clearer. Teaching wasn’t my job. I was a teacher.

That clarity didn’t make me less human in the classroom. It made me harder to emotionally coerce.

I Won’t Apologize for Expectations

Expectations aren’t punishments. They’re promises.

They tell students what matters and where effort belongs. I’ve watched students rise to standards I was told were unreasonable. I’ve also seen what happens when expectations are removed “for their sake”: confusion increases, motivation erodes, and the students who are trying feel foolish for doing so.

I won’t apologize for asking students to stretch. Growth without tension isn’t growth. It’s just activity. Movement.

I Won’t Apologize for Consequences

A consequence isn’t a judgment of character. It’s information.

When deadlines don’t matter, time dissolves. When effort is optional, learning becomes cosmetic. I tried softening consequences for years. All it produced was drift.

I won’t apologize for letting outcomes reflect decisions. For being the FO to students’ FA. That isn’t cruelty. It’s honesty.

I Won’t Apologize for Not Performing Enthusiasm

I care deeply about my students. I just don’t perform that care theatrically anymore.

Calm competence is not disengagement. It’s steadiness. There was a time when I thought good teaching required constant animation—energy on demand, warmth on display. What I learned is that performance replaces something more durable: presence.

I understand why teachers adopt that posture. I lived there.

This is not that.

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I Won’t Apologize for Protecting Time and Attention

Time is the scarcest resource in a classroom. Attention is the most fragile. We’re often told this by the people who take it from us regularly, sometimes as they’re taking the time from us.

Every interruption has a cost. Every distraction trades depth for ease. Protecting the conditions that make thinking possible isn’t the same as rigidity. It’s respect for the work and for the students who are trying to do it well.

I won’t apologize for that.

I Won’t Apologize for Saying No

“No” is a complete sentence. And it’s sometimes the most honest answer available.

I used to soften it endlessly—explaining, justifying, reframing. What I learned is that clarity is kinder than perpetual negotiation.

I won’t apologize for refusing requests that undermine fairness or learning. Boundaries aren’t hostility. They’re what make trust possible over time.

I Won’t Apologize for Refusing to Confuse Kindness with Permissiveness

Kindness is taking students seriously. Permissiveness is avoiding conflict.

They are not the same.

Real kindness tells the truth about effort, preparation, and responsibility. It doesn’t shield students from feedback to preserve comfort. It doesn’t apologize for asking them to meet the moment they’re in.

I won’t apologize for choosing the harder form of care.

When the Apologies Stop

When teachers stop apologizing for reality, certain things come into focus.

Burnout stops looking like a personal failure and starts reading like a structural one. Boundaries stabilize because they’re no longer negotiated emotionally. Policies hold because they’re rooted in judgment rather than guilt.

Teaching regains its center. It becomes less about managing feelings and more about guiding learning.

This posture isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t seek permission.

It simply declines to perform remorse for doing the job well.

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A Different Way of Standing in the Room

This is not how most of us start teaching.

It’s where many of us arrive if we stay long enough, pay attention, and decide that honesty is kinder than performance. The shift is subtle, but students feel it immediately. Parents sense it. Administrators may not have a term for it, but they recognize it nonetheless — and they may bristle at the curtain being pulled back. After all, “You’re not wrong, but you’re being inconvenient.”

But this isn’t rebellion. It isn’t burnout. It isn’t disengagement.

It’s a teacher who has stopped apologizing for reality—and has discovered that, without the apology, the room finally settles.

If you recognize that stance, you already know what kind of teacher I’m describing.

You may already be standing there yourself. I hope you are.

If this resonated, you’re not alone.
And if it unsettled you, that may be worth sitting with.
Thanks for reading.

Next time: One for the Students…

After I published “I Can’t Change Your Kid,” a few people reached out. Some were supportive. Some were uneasy. A few were clearly hoping I’d soften it—maybe buff it a little, round off the corners, maybe add a little reassurance, maybe imply that with enough patience and cleverness, I actually could do the thing I’d just said I couldn’t.

Most of the suggestions asked the same question: “Okay, but what can you change?”

It’s a fair question, and a necessary one. Because naming limits without naming responsibility sounds like surrender, and that’s not what this is. This isn’t a shrug. It’s a boundary.

I can’t change your kid. But I can change a lot of other things—and I refuse to pretend my reach extends past them.

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The Stuff I Can Change

I can change the environment I create.

I decide whether my classroom is a place where thinking has room to breathe or just another loud, reactive space where attention is constantly under assault. I can make it predictable without being sterile, serious without being joyless. I can protect focus, slow the pace, and design a room where curiosity has a fighting chance instead of being drowned out by phones, noise, and the constant demand to perform engagement on command. I can push back against any outside attempt to take that away and make my displeasure known. If I’m the asshole, or labeled “not a team player” because I defend instructional time, I’m the asshole. I can live with that.

I can change the expectations, and I can do it without hedging.

I can be explicit—sometimes uncomfortably so—about what effort looks like, what preparation looks like, and what accountability actually means. I can say, plainly and repeatedly, that learning isn’t something I deliver to students like a package; it’s something they have to participate in. I can insist that thinking is part of the job, not an optional upgrade to their OS.

Learning isn’t something I deliver; it’s something students have to do.

I can change what I’m willing to hold the line on.

Deadlines. Precision. Coherent explanations. Whether “almost” counts. Whether confusion is something we patiently work through or something we excuse away because struggle makes adults nervous. I decide whether standards are real or decorative, whether they shape behavior or just decorate syllabi.

I can change how the content shows up in the room.

I can teach with story, with models, with experiments that leave a mark. I can design lessons that reward thinking instead of compliance, that make science feel alive—unfinished, challenging to beliefs, occasionally dangerous, and absolutely worth wrestling with—rather than a checklist students complete and forget.

I can change how I respond to resistance.

I don’t have to escalate every moment into a power struggle. I don’t have to moralize about disengagement or treat it as a personal failure. I can name the choice being made, hold the boundary, and let consequences do their quiet, boring, deeply educational work.

And I can change my own behavior.

I can be prepared. I can be consistent. I can take my craft seriously and let students see that seriousness modeled. I can let them see me make mistakes. I can let them see me ask them for help. I can be patient without being permissive, human without being indulgent. That matters more than most people want to admit.

That’s real power. It’s not unlimited, but it’s substantial.

Which is exactly why I refuse to lie about where it ends.

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What I Refuse to Pretend

I will not pretend that schools are where children learn how to be people.

Listening, respect, self-control, responsibility, empathy—these aren’t academic interventions. They’re foundational habits, and they start long before a student ever walks into my room. Teachers can reinforce them, model them, and expect them. We cannot manufacture them on demand. When classrooms are forced to compensate for their absence, instructional time gets eaten alive, learning suffers, and everyone acts surprised—as if this is some baffling mystery instead of a basic mismatch of roles.

That is scope, not blame.

I will not pretend to be able to override a student’s will.

If a student decides not to engage, not to try, not to care, no amount of relationship-building, differentiation, or motivational TikTok teacher-influencer wizardry will change that for them. At best, it creates conditions in which they might choose differently—and that choice is theirs, not mine.

And sometimes, when a student is having a bad day, they’re just having a bad day and not giving a referendum on my approach, the entirety of the education system, or their willingness to prepare for their future. Lord knows I’ve had my share of bad days as well.

I will not pretend I can teach flexibility to someone who has decided that being wrong is intolerable.

I see students with mental postures that are fixed, brittle, and heavily defended. Evidence bounces off. Questions irritate. Revision feels like a loss rather than progress. I press on that. I always have. But I cannot open a closed system from the outside, and I refuse to be held responsible for doors that never crack. Openness to new ideas begins at home, and if they’re coming to my room without that piece of the puzzle, my options are limited at best.

I will not pretend I can outwork neglect.

I can’t undo years of learned helplessness, inconsistent boundaries, or systems that quietly taught students that effort is optional and deadlines are suggestions. I can push against those forces, model something better, and insist on a different standard in my room. I cannot erase them—no matter how much people want me to pretend otherwise.

I will not pretend I can save students from the consequences of their own patterns.

Shielding students from failure doesn’t build resilience; it just delays the reckoning. Sometimes, the most educational thing that happens in my class is a low grade that can’t be negotiated away, because reality doesn’t negotiate.

I will not pretend that a parent’s wishes for a student are always aligned with the student’s own wishes or ability.

College isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t in everyone’s future. Not every student will land at a dream school. Not every child raised in a profession will inherit it. No amount of parental pressure, enforced discipline, or strategic insistence can turn a student whose habits and academic record point one direction into a student destined for another.

My role is to teach and to guide, not to act as an instrument of someone else’s ambition. Sometimes a parent’s hopes align cleanly with a student’s own goals. Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, I won’t pretend otherwise—or ask a student to carry an adult’s expectations as their own.

I will not pretend compliance is the same thing as growth.

A quiet room isn’t the same as a thinking one. A completed worksheet doesn’t mean understanding. A polite student isn’t automatically a learning student. Confusing optics with outcomes has been educational malpractice for a long time now, and I’m done participating in it.

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I will not pretend that phones don’t play a role in any of this.

Student attention. Student self-worth. Student social skills. The ability to sit with confusion, boredom, or effort without reaching for dopamine. We have watched those things erode in real time, and pretending otherwise hasn’t made us compassionate—it’s made us complicit.

I will not pretend the evidence about the harms of phones and social media doesn’t exist just to comply with a do-nothing policy that keeps adults comfortable. I refuse to act as if a student who is functionally addicted to a device has the same cognitive footing as a student who isn’t. That isn’t judgment; it’s physics.

And I flatly reject a worldview that shrugs at the damage phones and social media are doing to kids—damage that is obvious, measurable, and in many cases entirely preventable—and calls that shrug empathy. That’s not empathy. That’s bullshit with a wellness sticker slapped on it and it is actively hurting kids, whether it’s from teachers, parents, leadership, or upper management.

I’ve written a lot about phones. I’m biased.

And I will not pretend that self-sacrifice and caring harder fix everything.

That lie is everywhere in education: If you just care enough, if you just work harder, it’ll work.

No.

Caring matters. It’s necessary. It is not sufficient—and saying otherwise lets systems off the hook.

My job isn’t to change students; it’s to make change possible while opting out of nonsense, honestly.

Here’s the line I actually walk.

My job is not to change your kid. My job is to build a space where change is possible, visible, and rewarded—and where opting out comes with clear, honest consequences. I teach the students who show up. I hold the door open, keep the lights on, and refuse to drag anyone across the threshold.

That isn’t cruelty. It’s respect for students, for learning, and for reality.

And if that makes me less comforting but more honest, I can live with that. Because pretending I have more power than I do doesn’t help kids. It just helps adults feel better about a system that keeps asking teachers to perform miracles instead of telling the truth.

Which brings me to the next line, people want softened even more than this one.

Next time: what I won’t apologize for.

At some point in a semester, every teacher has a variation of this thought. They want to write a letter to a parent that starts like this:

“Dear Dr. Frankenstein,

Your creation is behaving exactly as designed. Please advise.”

You obviously don’t send it. You document. You differentiate. You take a breath and remind yourself that you chose this job. But the thought is there—unspoken, unpublishable, and instantly recognizable to anyone who’s spent real time in a classroom.

Because here’s the quiet thing that often gets lost in the shuffle of grades, GPA, discipline, and all the day-to-day minutiae of education, a simple truth teachers aren’t supposed to say out loud:

I can’t change your student.

That sentence lands wrong in public. It sounds like giving up. It sounds like lowered expectations. It sounds like the kind of thing that gets clipped out of context and forwarded to an administrator with a subject line that says “Concerning.”

So let’s be clear about what it does not mean.

It does not mean I don’t care, I won’t try, or that I don’t believe students can grow.

It means something much simpler—and much harder to accept: I am not the author of your child’s identity.

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My Classroom is Romano Tours

Adam Sandler once did a sketch on Saturday Night Live about a travel company called Romano Tours.

He promises adventure, sights, and culture in Italy. But his pitch is tempered with one inconvenient detail: Romano Tours knows how to take you to Italy, but you’re still going to be you when you get there.

Classrooms work the same way.

We can change classrooms, teachers, courses, curriculum, schedules, initiatives, bell times, furniture, platforms, and policies.

But the student who walks into the room brings themselves with them—habits, coping mechanisms, defenses, beliefs, sleep deprivation, phones buzzing at midnight, and a story about who they already think they are.

New destination. Same passenger.

The Teacher Myth We Keep Retelling

This is where much of the educational mythology creeps in.

We’re told—explicitly or implicitly—that if we just build the right relationship, say the right thing, scaffold just enough, meet students where they are just enough, then change will happen. Motivation will appear. Engagement will follow. Transformation will occur on schedule.

But when it does, we’re often telling the story wrong. Yes, change happens—but not on command, and not on our schedule.

Because teachers don’t change students. Teachers are present when students decide to change. That’s a crucial distinction.

Relationships don’t force growth. They make growth survivable when a student is ready. Structure doesn’t create motivation. It gives motivation somewhere to land when it shows up. Clarity doesn’t cause effort. It keeps effort from being wasted.

Readiness is not something we install.
Agency is not something we assign.

What Letting Go Actually Gives Back

Here’s the part that rarely gets said.

Once I accept that I can’t change your student, I get something back that most teachers have been quietly robbed of: precision.

I stop trying to manufacture motivation and start designing environments where motivation—when it appears—can actually work. I stop auditioning for saviorhood and return to craft.

Because if I’m not responsible for a student’s identity, I am responsible for the architecture around it.

That changes everything.

It means I can:

• Build classrooms that are predictable instead of performative

• Set boundaries that are firm instead of theatrical

• Design work that is clear instead of coercive

• Offer feedback that is honest instead of padded

• Hold expectations steady without mistaking compliance for growth

It means I stop chasing engagement like a mood and start treating learning like a practice.

And here’s the paradox:

Students often feel more respected, not less, when adults stop trying to rewire them.

Because nothing is more exhausting than being constantly “worked on.”

And here’s the part I didn’t understand early in my career: letting go of the wrong responsibility doesn’t leave a void. It sharpens the right ones.

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What Responsibility Actually Looks Like

So let’s get concrete.

If I’m doing this job well, I am responsible for:

• A room where attention is protected

• Instructions that don’t require mind-reading

• Work that is engaging and challenging, pushing them intellectually

• Feedback that tells the truth without humiliating

• A standard that doesn’t move just because today is hard

What I offer students is not transformation.

It’s an invitation that doesn’t disappear when they say no.

That’s the work.

The Objections That Always Follow

Once you draw this boundary, the same objections always show up. Let’s deal with them quickly.

“But relationships matter. I’ve seen them change kids.”

Yes. Me too.

But look closely at those moments.

What changed wasn’t the student; it was the relationship. The relationship created safety, and the student stepped forward.

Teachers are catalysts, not engineers. We don’t build people. We witness decisions. And when we take credit for change that wasn’t ours to cause, we quietly take responsibility for failure that wasn’t ours either.

And pretending otherwise doesn’t help students—it just exhausts teachers.

“This sounds like giving up on kids.”

It isn’t.

Giving up would be disengaging. Shrugging. Lowering the bar and calling it realism.

This is the opposite.

This is about refusing to confuse care with control.

High expectations without agency aren’t hope—they’re pressure. And pressure applied to the wrong place doesn’t produce growth. It produces resistance, avoidance, or collapse.

I can believe in a student’s capacity to change without pretending I can make that choice for them.

“This ignores trauma, inequity, and systemic failure.”

It doesn’t.

It refuses to pretend I can personally undo them in 90-minute blocks.

Students do not arrive as blank slates. They arrive shaped by systems, histories, and harms that predate me and outlast my class period. Acknowledging that reality while also acknowledging my limits isn’t indifference—it’s honesty.

Expecting individual teachers to compensate for systemic injustice isn’t compassion. It’s moral laundering disguised as praise.

“Admin will use this as an excuse.”

Maybe.

But silence already has.

Naming reality inside a classroom is not the same thing as writing policy. Truth doesn’t become false because it can be misused. And teachers already live with the consequences of pretending otherwise.

“If we all thought this way, nothing would ever change.”

Belief alone has never fixed a system.

Change happens when responsibility is accurately assigned—when we stop mistaking martyrdom for impact and burnout for virtue. Pretending teachers have unlimited influence doesn’t create progress. It creates silence, guilt, and attrition.

So let’s say the quiet part cleanly:

I am responsible for the room.
I am responsible for the conditions.
I am responsible for clarity, consistency, boundaries, and invitation.

I am not responsible for who someone chooses to be inside it.

That’s not a retreat.
That’s a boundary.

And boundaries are what make this work sustainable—for teachers and for students.

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What Parents Rarely Hear

When a student eventually decides to change—and some do, spectacularly—what they usually remember isn’t the teacher who fixed them.

They remember the one who didn’t flinch.

The one who didn’t chase.
The one who didn’t quit.
The one who kept the door open without dragging them through it.

That’s not less powerful than the myth.

It’s more sustainable.
And it’s real.

The Reframe

So no—I can’t change your kid.

But I can build a room where change is possible, visible, and safe without coercion, when they choose it.

That turns out to be harder than the myth—and more useful.

It’s also more honest, more durable, and far more effective.

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Return of the Monster

Maybe that imaginary letter to Dr. Frankenstein was never about blame.

It was a reminder that creators are responsible for their creations — and teachers are responsible for the rooms they build around them.

Confusing the two turns teachers into scapegoats and students into projects.

Thanks for reading.

Not the pretentious kind of philosophy, either. No incense. No Sanskrit on a poster. Just the practical, teacher-trying-not-to-lose-it kind. When you’re trapped in a system designed by twelve committees and a malfunctioning Roomba, you grab whatever keeps you from screaming during third-period chaos.

For me, that’s when a Stoic and a Bodhisattva wandered into the room — not as mascots for enlightenment, but as survival strategies. One mutters, “Control what you can.” The other whispers, “Choose compassion anyway.”

Look, I’m not here to preach either path. I’m still figuring out why they help and when they don’t. This is just what happened when I borrowed a little ancient wisdom to keep myself upright.

Let’s talk philosophies.

The Stoic in the Room

Stoicism showed up in my life the way a spare tire does — not because I planned a road trip, but because something went flat and I needed to keep moving.

If I understand Epictetus correctly, the mark of an educated person isn’t eloquence or optimism. It’s knowing — really knowing — the difference between what’s in your control and what isn’t. That knowledge isn’t abstract. It’s practical. It keeps you from burning yourself to ash over things you were never meant to carry.

Teaching is an almost perfect laboratory for this distinction.

There’s a particular modern teacher fantasy that Stoicism looks at with raised eyebrows: the Hollywood version. The one who transforms lives through force of will, drags the unwilling into enlightenment, stands glowing at the center of the story while swelling music plays. I don’t think Epictetus would be impressed. I think he’d be politely skeptical.

Because that fantasy depends on wanting things to be different from the way they are.

That idea gets mentioned a lot in Buddhism — craving as the insistence that reality rearrange itself to suit your hopes — but it’s also deeply Stoic. And it’s poison in a classroom.

You will meet selfishness. Laziness. Performative confidence. Weaponized helplessness. You will meet students who exploit kindness and students who collapse under the weight of their own fear. You’ll meet colleagues doing their best and colleagues doing the bare minimum. You’ll meet administrators trapped between politics and reality.

Believe this will change if you want. It won’t.

Right now, most high school students I meet fall into two loose camps: the narcissists and the neurotics. One group believes the world owes them recognition; the other thinks the world is about to crush them at any moment. They dress differently. They speak differently. The posture is the tell.

The reflexive response is predictable. Anger toward the first. Exasperation toward the second.

Stoicism doesn’t ask you to suppress those reflexes. It asks what you do after them.

Marcus Aurelius believed people behave badly because they don’t know any better. Modern psychology complicates that. But in the classroom, you behave as if it were true anyway — not for their sake, but for your own dignity.

Because very little penetrates a shield of calm, principled behavior. And because losing your equanimity costs you more than it costs them.

The Stoic teacher doesn’t imagine they can fix either kind of student. They know better. What they can do is model courage in the face of entitlement, and patience in the face of fear — fully aware that this example may matter to no one at all.

Stoicism isn’t about winning. It’s about choosing how you stand, even if you look foolish doing it. Even if nothing changes, that may be the price of right living.

And then there are the groups.

Marcus wrote about the people he expected to meet each day. Teachers meet them in groups of 30 at a time, three to five times a day, all wired together by screens and incentives that reward distraction. Education is framed as an entitlement. Emotions are treated as mandates. Gratitude is optional. Self-control is suspect.

In this environment, the teacher is simultaneously babysitter and entertainer — overpaid for one role, underpaid for the other. Lessons must sparkle. Slides must dance. Every hard thing must be sweetened or softened or skipped. And when novelty wears off, liability takes over: keep them safe, keep them occupied, keep the complaints away.

Many of us entered with high ideals. Many leave bitter.

It doesn’t have to go that way.

A Stoic lens reframes the job. You rake leaves in a high wind. If they scatter, that’s not a moral failure. That’s the weather. Your frustration doesn’t make the wind stop.

Some teachers carry that frustration upstairs. I understand why. But administration is suspended between reality and politics, instructed to execute whichever educational theory is fashionable this semester, with fewer resources than last year. Schools aren’t neutral institutions. They’re political ones. Expecting philosophical consistency from them is like expecting stability from the tide.

Complaining that a student “doesn’t belong here” is often just grief in disguise. Sometimes it’s exhaustion. Sometimes it’s laziness. Either way, railing against it makes as much sense as yelling at the rain.

The student is here. The system is what it is. Make the best use of what’s in your power. Take the rest as it comes.

That’s realism.

And realism is what keeps you upright long enough to keep teaching.

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The Bodhisattva’s Path to the Classroom

Stoicism kept me from combusting. It did not, by itself, give me a reason to stay.

That’s where the Bodhisattva enters — not as an ideal, but as a refusal.

The Bodhisattva is a figure from Mahayana Buddhism. I won’t pretend expertise here. I came to it the way I came to Stoicism: sideways, out of need. What stayed with me wasn’t doctrine so much as orientation — a way of facing suffering without immediately trying to escape it.

Jack Kornfield describes a Bodhisattva as someone devoted to awakening, but unwilling to reach it alone—someone who stays. Someone who acts for the welfare of others, even when they have done more than enough for their own enlightenment, and selflessly helping others costs them well-earned comfort.

That landed uncomfortably close to teaching.

Because classrooms are full of suffering that doesn’t announce itself politely. It shows up as apathy, cruelty, noise, silence, defiance, and withdrawal. It shows up in students who are hard to like on their best days, and harder to teach on their worst. And it shows up whether you’re ready or not.

The Bodhisattva doesn’t look away from that. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t reduce it to “data” or “behavior management.” It recognizes that most harm is downstream from pain — and that the person in front of you is carrying more than you can see.

That posture changes how you read a room.

You stop treating behavior as a personal affront.
You stop assuming resistance is laziness.
You stop deciding, quietly, who is worth your effort.

You feel things more sharply, which is a problem.

Because staying emotionally open in a classroom hurts. There’s no way around that. If you actually let students register as human beings — not projects, not metrics, not disruptions — the work gets heavier. The Bodhisattva path isn’t soothing. It’s abrasive. It rubs against your nerves.

This is where many good teachers break.

They keep absorbing, they keep staying late. They keep taking the suffering home with them.

It’s easy to confuse compassion with availability, care with compliance. And slowly, the work eats them alive.

That’s not a failure of character. It’s a misunderstanding of the vow.

The Bodhisattva vows are often recited poetically. The Dalai Lama’s version, drawn from Shantideva, is the one that sticks with me — the image of being a lamp in the darkness, a bridge across the flood, a resting place for the weary. It’s beautiful. It’s also dangerous if read as a job description.

Nothing in that vow says you are required to destroy yourself in the process.

The Bodhisattva doesn’t promise to fix everyone. They promise to remain oriented toward care, even when outcomes are uncertain. Even when gratitude never comes. Even when the effort itself seems to vanish into the air.

In a classroom, that means something quieter than heroics.

It means you keep treating students as people even after they’ve given you reasons not to. It means you don’t write anyone off, even when you stop expecting change. It means you show up again tomorrow with your dignity intact.

And it means you learn where to stop.

This is where Stoicism and the Bodhisattva finally stop fighting each other.

Stoicism draws the boundary; the Bodhisattva decides what happens inside it.

Care without attachment.
Presence without self-erasure.
Compassion that doesn’t require applause.

That’s the only version of this work I’ve seen survive.

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The Balancing Act

At some point, it became clear that neither posture could carry the room on its own.

Stoicism, on its own, kept me upright. It preserved my sanity. It gave me distance. Over time, that distance started to feel like an absence. I was present, but buffered. Calm, but sealed off. Nothing pierced far enough to matter.

The Bodhisattva posture pulled me back toward the work. It reintroduced weight. Faces. Names. Stakes. It also came with a familiar risk: staying too long, carrying too much, letting the job follow me home, and set up residence.

I didn’t arrive at a balance. I arrived at a rule.

I show up fully.
I do not chase outcomes.

That distinction changed everything.

I prepare. I teach. I explain. I correct. I offer help. I set boundaries. I do it with care and attention. What happens after that belongs to forces larger than me — students’ choices, families, timing, luck, the weather.

It’s not detachment. It’s consent.

I consent to do the work in front of me. I do not consent to be consumed by it.

Once that line is drawn, many small decisions become easier.

I can address behavior without carrying resentment, and I can offer support without monitoring gratitude. I can hold a standard without turning it into a referendum on my worth.

The classroom stops being a stage for moral drama and becomes what it always was: a place where people practice being human under constraints.

Some days the work lands, some days it evaporates. But both are survivable.

What nearly destroyed me was the belief that caring required collapse. That if I didn’t exhaust myself, I was failing. That restraint from giving my absolute last bit of energy was a form of betrayal.

It isn’t.

It’s how the work continues.

But this all comes with a warning. This posture doesn’t make you popular. It doesn’t read as inspirational. You’re not going to be hollering “Amen!” at a staff meeting. It can look suspiciously like indifference to people who benefit from your overextension.

That’s fine.

I will teach you.
I will treat you with respect.
I will not destroy myself trying to pull you across a finish line you haven’t chosen.

That’s not abandonment, it’s staying in the room long enough to matter.

But for all the work of merging these two approaches, things can go wrong…

When Compassion = Policy

Once you start holding both postures — care without attachment, boundaries without withdrawal — you begin to notice a pattern.

Leadership tends to be very comfortable with one half of that equation.

The language of compassion travels well upward. It sounds good in meetings. It fits on slides. It photographs nicely. “Do it for the kids” is difficult to argue with and easy to repeat. It feels moral. It feels urgent. It feels like leadership.

The trouble starts when compassion is treated as a resource rather than a stance.

In that framing, care becomes something to be extracted. Extra time. Extra patience. Extra flexibility. Extra forgiveness. Always extra. And because it’s framed as moral rather than contractual, it’s difficult to refuse without sounding small.

Stoic boundaries, on the other hand, don’t translate as easily. Calm refusal. Clear limits. A teacher who does the work in front of them and then stops. That posture doesn’t read as inspirational. It doesn’t perform empathy. It can feel, from a distance, like resistance.

Sometimes it’s interpreted that way directly, with something like, “Well, I guess you just don’t care about the kids.”

That sentence gets inside your head like a parasite.

It calls out your boundaries as indifference; reframes sustainability as selfishness; and turns restraint into a character flaw.

Most of the time, it isn’t even said out loud. It hangs in the room. It shows up in tone, in evaluations, in who gets praised and who gets quietly sidelined.

And it makes you ask yourself the ultimate self-recrimination question: “Wait — am I the asshole?”

No. It’s not you. It’s it.

When systems are under pressure — political, budgetary, or optics — they reach for the tools that scale. Guilt scales beautifully. Compassion language scales beautifully. Personal sacrifice is infinitely renewable — until it isn’t.

What doesn’t scale is restraint.

A teacher who says, “This is where my responsibility ends,” forces a system to confront its own limits. That’s uncomfortable. It’s much easier to celebrate those who absorb more and more until they burn out and disappear.

The irony is that the teachers most likely to be accused of not caring are often the ones trying hardest to make the work and the institution last.

They’ve learned that compassion without structure burns people out, presence requires limits, and that saying yes to everything eventually means being useful to no one.

When leadership leans too hard on the Bodhisattva posture and treats Stoicism as suspect, the system selects for martyrdom. The calm, steady teachers don’t rise. They endure. Or they leave.

None of this requires bad intentions—just unexamined incentives.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. If you’re a teacher, watch for it in your next faculty meeting. It’ll be there.

Notice which forms of care get praised, and which ones make people uncomfortable.
The teachers who remain calm, boundaried, and unpanicked rarely read as inspirational — but they are often the ones who still return the next day, able to teach.

Systems that mistake endurance for indifference tend to learn the difference only after the rooms are empty, and “no one wants to teach anymore.”

On the Way Out: An Oath

The most challenging moments in teaching aren’t the loud ones. They’re the calm conversations where a reasonable request asks you to erode yourself just a little more — to be flexible, to stretch, to absorb one more thing in the name of compassion.

Stoicism helps you see the boundary. The Bodhisattva keeps you from walking away from the work. What’s missing is something that speaks at the moment you’re told to do harm for a good reason.

I’ve long thought we need something to fall back on, well, something like this:

A Hippocratic Oath for Educators

First, do no harm —
to our students, in mind, body, or spirit,
and to ourselves, through neglect or martyrdom.

I will teach with care and clarity,
remembering that I can guide, not compel.

I will act with compassion,
but I will not confuse compassion with self-erasure.

I will hold students accountable
without contempt,
and myself accountable
without cruelty.

I will respect the limits of my influence,
the dignity of my profession,
and the humanity of all involved — including my own.

I will do this work honestly,
steadily,
and without surrendering my soul.

That’s the job.

Not sainthood.
Not saviorhood.
Just teaching.

Thanks for reading.

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Note:

I wrote this in the days after a student in my district was killed at school. It isn’t an investigation, a policy proposal, or an attempt to assign blame. It’s one classroom teacher trying to describe what institutional response looks like from inside the building — what changes, what doesn’t, and what gets quietly absorbed in the process. Nothing here is meant to reduce the gravity of the loss or the complexity of the moment. It’s written with care, and with the belief that clarity still matters, especially now.

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A student in my district was stabbed to death with a knife at school last week — an act of violence in a place meant to be safe.

As a teacher, even writing that sentence feels unreal. Nothing I’m about to say makes it smaller, softer, or less horrifying. It happened during the school day, in full view of other students, and it was filmed on their phones. The fight that led to the death was over a vape. No charges were filed against the student who fatally stabbed the victim.

This was a tragedy. Full stop.

In the days since, conversations about school safety, metal detectors, and accountability have moved quickly. The loss itself has not had time to breathe.

What I want to talk about is what happened next.

Because before the facts could fully settle, the wagons started circling. Statements went out. “Thoughts and prayers” and other carefully worded expressions filled the air. Narratives began to harden. The machinery of institutional response spun up quickly and efficiently.

Naturally, without a word from teachers, even though educators on the front lines have shared powerful firsthand accounts of how safety protocols shape their daily reality.

Almost immediately, the familiar questions arrived. Why did the students have phones? Why were students out of class? Were metal detectors running that day? How did no one see or hear it? Why didn’t anyone in the bathroom get an adult instead of pulling out a phone and filming?

Those questions always land in the same place: what safeguard failed?

Metal detectors. Cameras. Locked doors. Hall passes. Phone bans. Zero-tolerance policies with fresh coats of paint.

This isn’t new. After every school tragedy, we reach for the same levers and pull harder. We add another layer of screening, another checkpoint, another protocol meant to catch the next thing before it happens. Schools weren’t designed as hardened targets. We became that slowly, one incident at a time.

And once you start down that road, it only ever goes in one direction.

The History of Safety Screening

When they started a couple of years ago, we were told that safety screenings with metal detectors and wands were “just where we are now.”

I don’t even remember which tragedy prompted the shift. That’s part of the problem. There’s always a reason, and it’s always framed the same way: a reaction, not a plan.

“Training” consisted of a short video — district staff LARPing procedures — a few minutes for questions, and a schedule adjustment that told teachers to absorb the disruption into the instructional day.

That detail matters, so I don’t want it to slide by.

The screenings and metal detectors are run by teachers.

Not security professionals. Not trained staff hired for this purpose. Teachers.

The more cynical among us joke that “TSA agent” has been added to the long list of non-teaching duties, alongside hall monitor, phone police, dress-code enforcement, therapist, referee, parental stand-in, child advocate, and whatever else the day requires.

But the comparison isn’t really fair.

To TSA agents.

TSA agents receive at least 120 hours of training and are provided with equipment designed for the job. Teachers were handed wands, metal detectors, and an expectation that we would figure it out on the fly — while also doing the jobs we were actually hired to do.

Ask the student to open the bag. Look inside. Move things around. Keep the line moving. Instructional minutes are ticking away. Hopefully, the weather cooperates because the line stretches out the door.

Questions about gaps in the plan were met with variations of the same answer: this is what we were told to do.

Teachers assigned to morning entry points were expected to arrive well before their contracted report time. Those assigned during the day had to give up planning periods. The schedule rotated. The responsibility stuck.

Not long after, “random” safe-entry screenings began.

Over time, the training evaporated. Staffing thinned. Fewer people were asked to cover the same ground.

For anyone who works in public education, the variation of the phrase is already familiar:

Do more with less.

Again.

Budget cuts leave schools with fewer resources — from paper to people — while expectations remain unchanged. The work still has to be done, so it slides downhill until it lands where it always does: with the people already in the building.

Work in public education long enough, and you’ll hear several versions of this story. This happens to be my fourth.

When “Fatal Flaws” Are Built In

Security screenings are theater.

The first time our “safe entry” plan was explained to students, it took my physics class about five minutes to identify its structural and geographic vulnerabilities. Not hypotheticals. Not edge cases. Just obvious weaknesses baked into the building’s layout and the flow of people.

I won’t describe them here. Anyone who works in a school already knows where they are.

Teachers know the blind spots. Students find them instinctively.

That’s not a failure of individual vigilance. It’s a consequence of retrofitting security protocols onto buildings that were never designed to function as secure facilities. You can add layers, checkpoints, and procedures, but you can’t redesign the underlying system without real investment.

Budget cuts leave schools with fewer adults in the building, fewer minutes to work with students, and fewer resources across the board.

That assumption shows up everywhere.

Teachers are expected to enforce safety protocols, preserve instructional time, support students emotionally, maintain academic outcomes, and now, visibly reassure the public — all at once.

After the stabbing, we were told detectors would be running “every day.” That phrase sounds reassuring to people outside the building. Inside, it translates differently.

“Every day” means staffing has to come from somewhere.
“Every day” means time is taken from instruction or planning.
“Every day” means the same finite number of adults are stretched thinner.

And still, there is no corresponding shift in expectations elsewhere. Test scores are still expected to hold. Class sizes don’t shrink. Accountability metrics remain unchanged.

When a system absorbs tragedy without examining its own limits, responsibility doesn’t disappear. It moves — slowly, predictably, and almost always downhill — until it lands on the people with the least authority to change the conditions that produced the risk in the first place.

That’s what makes it dangerous.

Not because no one cares.

But because the response feels decisive while leaving the underlying structure untouched.

Security theater doesn’t fail loudly. It reassures quietly — right up until the moment it doesn’t.

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The Detectors

We currently use open-frame metal detectors and a few newer systems — OpenGate among them. OpenGate detectors are often described as the next step: faster throughput, less disruption, more consistency.

That sounds reassuring, especially in the days following a student’s death.

Wanting to better understand the system, I read the publicly available materials describing how OpenGate works and what it’s designed to detect. What stood out was not what the system promises — but what it does not claim to do.

OpenGate is not designed to catch every metal object. That’s not a flaw; it’s a design choice. The system prioritizes speed and reduced false positives, meaning it is calibrated to identify specific thresholds rather than everything made of metal.

A day or so ago, I watched a teacher test one of these detectors with a stapler, held openly in front of them.

It didn’t trigger an alert.

The folks around gave a nervous chuckle. In complete honesty, it was more nervous than chuckle.

I don’t know exactly what that result means, and that uncertainty is the point.

There are a few possibilities. The particular detector may not (or can’t) be calibrated to flag smaller metal objects. It may be calibrated only for items with a mass or configuration above a certain threshold. Or it may be functioning exactly as designed — but without clarity communicated to the people running it.

In any of those cases, the outcome is the same: teachers are asked to operate a system without a shared understanding of what it will and won’t catch.

And this wasn’t a drill or a test run. This was part of the daily screening process implemented in response to a student’s death. Students were being passed through the detector under the assumption — or at least the appearance — of increased safety.

If a visible metal object can pass through without triggering an alert, then what we’re offering isn’t comprehensive prevention. It’s selective detection. And that distinction matters.

When the system’s limitations aren’t clearly defined for the people operating it, what’s being enforced isn’t safety. It’s confidence. Confidence reassures adults. Safety protects students.

In moments like this, visible action carries weight. It signals that something has changed. But without clarity, training, and staffing aligned to the reality of the tools being used, that action risks becoming ritual — a way to say we did something without addressing what the system can actually accomplish.

And once the response is framed in those terms, the next step becomes predictable.

More detectors. Wider coverage. Every middle school. Every high school.

Each step looks like progress. Each step costs money. Each step requires staffing. And none of it alters the underlying equation unless the people running the system are given the time, training, and authority to make it more than appearance.

A student was killed with a knife. The response relies on a screening system that is not designed to identify knives reliably. That mismatch alone should end the conversation. What has followed is not safety work; it is compliance work.

The system is performing reaction, not prevention — executing a visible process that satisfies the need to be seen responding while leaving the core problem untouched, the core risk unchanged.

Note: As reported in multiple outlets, North Forsyth does have metal detectors, but they were not even being used the day of the stabbing.

So Where Does the Money Come From?

Metal detectors cost money. Installing more of them costs more. Staffing them costs even more.

At the same time, districts across the state — including mine — are facing budget shortfalls. Not the abstract kind. The practical kind. Fewer positions. Fewer substitutes. Fewer adults in the building.

Those two realities now coexist: an expanded security response and a shrinking pool of resources.

So the question becomes unavoidable. If additional detectors are deemed necessary, where does the funding come from?

In situations like this, districts often turn outward. Grants. Partnerships. Donations. Community support. Sometimes all of the above. On the surface, that can look like civic strength — a community stepping in to help its schools in a moment of need.

And in many cases, that support is well-intentioned.

But it also introduces complications that are rarely discussed.

Large donations don’t arrive in a vacuum. They come with expectations — not always explicit, but real nonetheless. Expectations about visibility. About access. About results. About reassurance.

And when security measures are funded this way, the pressure to demonstrate effectiveness increases, even if the system’s underlying limitations haven’t changed.

The danger isn’t corruption. It’s distortion.

When funding is tied to visible action, the incentive shifts toward things that can be seen, counted, photographed, and announced. Metal detectors fit that model well. They signal response. They create the appearance of control.

What’s harder to fund — and harder to explain in a press release — are the less visible investments: staffing levels that allow adults to be present in hallways, smaller class sizes that reduce conflict, time for training that goes beyond procedural compliance, and planning periods that don’t disappear when something else needs to be covered.

Those things don’t photograph well. But they matter.

If we aren’t careful, we end up reinforcing the same pattern that follows every tragedy: visible reassurance paired with invisible strain. The system looks stronger from the outside, while the load on the people inside quietly increases.

And once again, the cost isn’t borne evenly.

The expectation to make it work — to absorb the gap between what’s promised and what’s possible — settles on the people already in the building. The ones without budget authority. Without staffing control. Without the authority to redesign the system, they’re being asked to hold together.

That’s not a moral failure. It’s a structural one.

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What’s the Solution?

I don’t have a clean solution for violence in schools. Anyone who claims they do is selling something — hardware, software, or false certainty.

What I do have is a clear view from the floor.

I see systems responding to tragedy with urgency but not investment. I see visible measures standing in for structural change. I see confidence being enforced where safety should be engineered. And I see responsibility moving steadily downhill — not because anyone intends harm, but because that’s how the system is built to function under strain.

I can’t fix it by arriving earlier, giving up planning time, or absorbing one more responsibility that wasn’t part of the original job. I can’t fix it by pretending that selective detection is comprehensive protection, or that visible action automatically translates into reduced risk.

What I can do is tell the truth about what this feels like from inside the building.

Doing more with less is not a safety strategy. It’s a coping mechanism — one that relies on elasticity it never replenishes. Over time, it shifts the cost of systemic limits onto individuals who don’t have the authority to redesign the system they’re holding together.

That works for a while. Until it doesn’t.

I don’t want to be doom-and-gloom here and say that schools are going to become increasingly dangerous if we stay on this performative action-reaction course, but I don’t see how they can get safer.

If there’s anything to learn from this moment, it isn’t that we need to pull harder on the same levers. It’s that reassurance and safety are not interchangeable — and treating them as if they are comes with consequences.

For students.
For teachers.
For schools asked to function as something they were never designed to be.

Thanks for reading.

See you in January.

The thing is, a couple of times a year, I go insane at work. My close friends and my wife know this, and a few months back, I was able to put a name to it. A specific name: Frank Grimes.

Who is Frank Grimes?

The Simpsons, season 8, episode 23 - “Homer’s Enemy.”

If that doesn’t ring bells, Frank Grimes2 (“Grimey”) was the guy who dedicated his entire life to hard work, grit, and excellence…only to be devoured by a system that rewards mediocrity, vibes, and whoever “seems nice.”

He cares too much in a universe that cares too little. He’s the person who expects logic in a system explicitly built without it.

He is, in short, a teacher in 2025.

Frank Grimes is the patron saint of educator burnout3.

The quick version of the episode, if it’s been a minute - Frank Grimes is the hardest-working man in Springfield — a self-made striver who survived every hardship imaginable.

Grimes tries to fix the system, follow the rules, and hold people accountable. And then he meets Homer. The system responds by punishing him, rewarding Homer, and giving the Executive Vice-President job to a dog4. No, seriously.

Grimes ends up electrocuting himself while angrily imitating Homer’s behavior.

At his funeral, Homer falls asleep, sleep-talks to Marge, everyone laughs, aaaaand scene.

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No, Seriously, Who is Frank Grimes?

Okay - I’m turning on my institutional organization and behavior fanboy for this. I probably read and listen to too much Adam Grant, but…

Sometimes it’s the veteran who’s held the building together with grit and binder clips since 1998. Sometimes it’s the rookie who still thinks the PD slides contain some secret, universal truth. Sometimes — and this is the uncomfortable part — Frank Grimes is you.

Or me.

Grimes named it. He said what we all know and see out loud.

Why Frank Grimes Still Snaps

Frank Grimes isn’t just a character; he’s a diagnostic tool. He’s what happens when a high-integrity person walks into an ecosystem built around something entirely different.

Grimes assumed the workplace was a meritocracy — that competence earns influence, that effort earns respect, that consistency counts for something.

Institutions reward the people who smooth the waters, not the ones who clarify them.
They admire competence right up until it asks inconvenient questions.
They love integrity until it creates friction.

Once that misalignment clicks into place — your integrity versus the institution’s appetite for convenience — the slide into Grimes Mode begins.

Not with anger.
Not with ego.
With expectation.

The Problem Isn’t Integrity — It’s What Institutions Do With It

Before anyone warms up their vocal cords to say, “Oh, so you think you have integrity? Maybe you’re just an asshole5,” let’s establish something:

I’m not nominating myself for sainthood here. I’m not the Patron Saint of Principled Behavior. Most days, I’m just trying to keep my standards, my patience, and my coffee at reasonable levels.

This isn’t about me being morally superior. It’s about what happens when anyone tries to bring integrity into a system that prioritizes convenience.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Institutions don’t bless integrity. They tolerate it until it becomes an inconvenience.

Integrity is admirable until it requires someone else to change.

And this is exactly what Frank Grimes discovers, painfully and in real time.

He believes the system should care.

But institutions — schools very much included — run on a different fuel entirely:

Compatibility over competence.

Compliance over clarity.

Truth bent toward comfort.

The people who succeed long-term are not the best at the job; they’re the best at not threatening anyone else’s sense of stability.

Grimes violated the unspoken rule: he expected meritocracy in a system designed for equilibrium.

He assumed institutions reward excellence. They don’t.

They reward people who don’t rock the boat. They reward the easy colleague, the pleasant presence, the person who nods at PD slides with a very audible, “Mmm-hmmm,” even when the math is wrong.

And this is where the descent into Grimes-hood begins — with misaligned expectations.

Because once you think your competence should matter, and once you realize the system isn’t interested in that…the spiral starts:

You notice things.
You point them out.
You assume someone will appreciate that you noticed.
The institution grows uneasy.
You double down, because this is supposed to matter.
The system quietly closes ranks.
You become the problem, not the issue you raised.

This is not personal failure. This is systemic inertia.

Grimes didn’t break down because he was wrong. He broke because he expected the system to recognize that he was right.

And institutions don’t do that. Not until doing so becomes easier than ignoring you.

Grimes expected his integrity to be an asset. But in institutional environments — schools especially — it becomes a liability the moment it disrupts comfort.

That’s the lesson. That’s the warning. And that’s why we start with Frank Grimes.

The Natural Habitat of Frank Grimes

Chaos is not the exception in schools — it’s the operating system.

Today’s rule is tomorrow’s suggestion.
Enforcement is geographical.
Initiatives arrive with fireworks and die on contact with reality.
“Expectations” are often just vibes stamped with a label.

Into this steps Frank Grimes, whispering:

“I can fix this.”

And the system, thoroughly unbothered, replies:

“Aww, that’s adorable.”

The Frank Grimes Early-Warning System

There are signs you’re sliding into Grimes Mode:

You read the emails.
You ask clarifying questions.
You start connecting dots no one else is connecting.
Your eye twitches, and you call it “being thorough.”

The most dangerous sign?

You begin assuming everyone else is seeing what you’re seeing.

They aren’t. They won’t. And you cannot make them.

That’s when resentment metastasizes. That’s when competence curdles. That’s when your integrity starts to feel like a set of handcuffs.

The Grimes Laws of School Reality

Four truths every educator eventually accepts:

Competence is suspicious. It implies expectations.
Excellence is rewarded with extra duties. Never with money.
Decisions are made by people who are unaffected by the outcomes. This is cosmic law.
The PD slides are lying. No one uses those strategies. Not even the consultants, if they were ever in the classroom in the first place6.

Grimes fought these laws. You’re going to work within them.

How Not to Become Frank Grimes

The solution isn’t apathy. It’s precision. Grimes treated every problem like it was his to solve. That’s how you go nuclear.

Healthy teachers care strategically.

Care about:
• your students
• your craft
• your sanity
• your boundaries
• the work that actually matters

Do not care about:
• fixing the entire system
• district fads
• reply-all diplomacy
• hallway politics
• why the printer has declared cyan optional

You survive not by lowering your standards, but by refusing to let absurdity steal your peace.

The Frank Grimes Reset Protocol

When you feel yourself slipping:

Pause. Your anger is data.
Reframe. Name it: this isn’t personal. It’s structural.
Shrink the sphere. Influence the classroom — the only logically consistent space you control.
Set a boundary. Excellence without boundaries becomes self-harm.
Act with intention, not reactivity. Your integrity is a compass, not a weapon.

Grimes gave the institution power over his identity. You will not.

The Real Reason You’re Not Frank Grimes

Frank Grimes mistook the institution for a meritocracy. You know better.

You already know effort guarantees nothing except more requests for effort. You’ve seen enough to release that illusion.

Frank Grimes broke because he expected the system to care back. You anchor your care in the only places that deserve it.

Your kids.
Your craft.
Your character.
Your steady flame.

Grimes was destroyed by the absurdity. You metabolize it.

You don’t burn down. You burn steady.

The Part Frank Grimes Never Learned

Frank Grimes tried to impose logic on a nonsense universe.

It killed him.

Don’t be Frank Grimes.

Teach your kids. Protect your joy. Walk around the flaming dumpster and keep going. And when you inevitably whisper, “Why is no one else seeing this?!”

You already know the punchline.

They don’t.
They won’t.
And that’s why you have to stay whole.

Next time, I want to look at what staying whole actually requires — and why the only thing that’s kept me from going full Frank Grimes is a strange alliance between a Stoic and a Bodhisattva. It’s not as mystical as it sounds. It might even be practical.

Thanks for reading.

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Yeah, the title gives it away - I’m a teacher, and this Substack largely applies to teaching, but I think many of us work within systems where every single piece is broken, and so many people revert to:

So maybe there’s something here for you, too.