Why your best ideas never come at a desk 🤔

Welcome back to the weekly edition of OpenEd Daily!

Whether you’re forest schooling, world schooling, kitchen-table learning, or mixing-and-matching your way through education—you’re in the right place. Pull up a chair (or don’t… you’ll see why).

And now, let’s take a look back at the week that was.

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And now, let’s take a look back at the week that was.

💡 THE BIG IDEA

This Week in Open Education

Quick question: When’s the last time you had a really good idea while sitting perfectly still at a desk?

If you’re like most people, your best thinking happens on walks. In the shower. While pacing. Basically, anywhere except where we make kids spend most of their learning hours.

We’ve created an education system that ignores how brains actually work, and then we wonder why kids struggle to focus. It’s like building a fish tank in the desert and wondering why the fish aren’t thriving.

New research shows that movement doesn’t just make learning more fun—it makes it work better. A single session of physical activity improves memory for a full week.

And it’s not just about movement. Our entire approach to learning seems stuck in ‘factory settings’ that actively work against our biology. We ask kids to multitask—taking notes while processing lectures—when the brain can only truly focus on one complex task at a time.

We force everyone to learn at the same pace as if our brains came off some cosmic assembly line with identical processing speeds. Then we label kids as “ahead” or “behind,” when really they’re just running their own operating systems.

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📊 TRENDS WE’RE WATCHING

Speaking of labels…

• Back in 2019, tracking homeschoolers was straightforward—just count the kids learning at home. 📚 Then 2020 hit, and something strange happened: millions of students entered a new category that our old labels couldn’t capture. What do you call a student who takes biology at the local high school, math through an online program, belongs to a homeschool co-op, and interns at a local business? The old categories—public school, private school, homeschool—feel about as relevant as asking if your phone is for business or pleasure.
• The Great Rewiring of 2012 📱 Something changed when smartphones became ubiquitous, according to Jonathan Haidt.
• The Math Hack That Went Viral ➕ A video comparing multiplication methods between China and South Korea sparked millions of shares.
• Forest Schools Go Global 🌲 Not just a Nordic novelty anymore. The UK reports 5,000+ forest school leaders, South Korea is creating hundreds of forest kindergarten spaces, and Singapore is weaving outdoor learning into its national curriculum.

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⚒️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK

• GoNoodle – GoNoodle turns movement breaks them into mini-adventures. Dance parties between math problems, anyone?
• Math Academy-One parent watched their kid go from “I hate math” to mastering calculus in 8 months by using this curriculum that lets students move at their own pace.
• The Smart Way to Use Rewards 🎯 Most reward systems backfire by making the activity feel like “the bad thing I need to get paid to do.” Education innovator Niels Hoven shares a brilliant framework for when (and how) to use rewards without killing natural motivation.
• The Sleep Solution Hidden in Plain Sight 🌙 When Matt Beaudreau’s family cracked the code on their kids’ sleep issues, it wasn’t with fancy apps or elaborate bedtime routines. Their “old school protocol” is surprisingly simple—and it starts hours before bedtime.

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(FACT) OF THE DAY

By graduation, the average American student will spend 13,000 hours sitting in traditional classrooms. That’s about the same time it takes to watch every episode of The Simpsons 37 times, walk to the moon, or learn 13 languages to fluency.

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That’s all for this week, folks! Have a great weekend.

– Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)