DEEP DIVE

The Problem with "Back to School"

Every year, the same ritual plays out. New backpacks. Fresh notebooks. That first-day photo by the front door. Parents breathe a sigh of relief (or shed a tear) as kids board the bus. September (or thereabouts) means school starts. June means it ends. This is how it's always been.

But this outdated schedule was designed for a world that no longer exists. The traditional school calendar emerged when kids needed summers free to help with farm work. The September start made sense for the harvest schedule. We're now generations removed from that agricultural society, yet we're still following a calendar created for it.

Meanwhile, your eight-year-old's fascination with ancient Egypt doesn't suddenly shut off in June. Your teenager's coding projects don't need a three-month pause. And that moment when your child finally understands fractions might not happen according to the specific syllabus pacing.

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This is an excerpt from Matt Bowman’s 2-week learning sprints framework. If you're looking for something to jumpstart learning (any time of year), read the full deep dive here.

Podcast Highlight: The Third-Floor Tutoring Tower

Mike Goldstein's charter school tried project-based learning. It wasn't working. What did work was one-on-one tutoring for foundational skills. The problem is, tutoring is expensive.

So Mike came up with a wild solution. When they bought their three-story building, the original plan was to rent out the top floor to help pay the mortgage. Instead, the school built it out as a college dorm with 14 triple rooms and bunk beds.

They recruited 42 recent college grads to live and tutor for a year, Teach for America style. The pay was minimal, but housing was free. Every day at 8:00 AM these 22-year-olds would come downstairs and spend their entire day tutoring students one-on-one.

Listen to the full episode with Mike Goldstein here.

Tools of The Week

1. Learn to Code This Year: Looking for a way to translate real-world learning into a tangible skill? Through OpenEd, you can now access Bottega University's full-stack coding bootcamp. It's a direct path for teens and young adults to acquire high-demand skills on a schedule that works for them.
2. A Field Guide to the Education Underground: For those ready to explore the growing ecosystem of learner-centered models, Kerry McDonald's new book, Joyful Learning, is a practical field guide. For a multimedia tour, you can also browse the episodes of the LiberatED podcast to hear directly from microschool founders and edupreneurs.
3. The Ultimate Field Trip Pass: For families on the road, the National Park Service's "America the Beautiful Pass" is a free, lifetime pass for U.S. citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities. It's a golden ticket to over 2,000 federal recreation sites.

Trends of the Week 

1. Roadschooling on a Roll: More families than ever are trading stationary life for an education on the road. They're discovering that a national park can be a biology lab, a historical monument can be a history lesson, and a conversation with a local fisherman can be a course in economics. Families like the Koons are showing that it's a fundamental shift from seeking knowledge in books to finding it in the real world.
2. The Nerds Have Become the Crunchy Moms: In a recent CNBC interview, the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services said the most important skill in the age of AI is critical thinking. Even OpenAI's Sam Altman admits that human insight is what drives real progress. It wasn't long ago we featured Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann explaining how he learned to embrace the Montessori method. When your AI assistant can write an essay, what matters is your ability to tell if it's any good.
3. School-Switching is a Feature, Not a Bug: As Kerry McDonald calms fears around “school-switching”, she notes that just as Goldilocks had to try different bowls of porridge, chairs, and beds before finding the one that was “just right,” sometimes parents and learners have to try a few schools or learning models before they find the best fit. For many families, education is becoming a series of tours through different models—a microschool for elementary, a self-directed learning center for middle school, maybe a hybrid program for the high school years.

Parting Thought

Kids don't need more space. They need more world.

This was the insight that led Zach Koon and his family to sell their house and move into an RV. As he explains on his podcast episode, his son's love for geology wasn't something to be confined to a textbook; it was an invitation to explore the canyons of Zion National Park firsthand.

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