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A WSJ writer thought getting kids back to school would be like ending a fire drill. Newton's laws finally get the visual proof they deserved. And a 4-year-old ranks math workbooks above train sets, how??

Let's dive in.

THOUGHT: Newton Was Right
TREND: The Fire Drill Fallacy
TOOL: Workbooks That Work

Newton Was Right

Let’s be honest: you never really believed it.

In 7th-grade physics, a teacher told you that a bowling ball and a feather WOULD fall at the same rate in a vacuum. You nodded, memorized it for the test, and filed it away under "weird facts that don't apply to real life," right next to the platypus. Your intuition, trained by a lifetime of watching leaves and rocks fall, knew better.

But now, there’s proof. Researchers in the world's largest vacuum chamber drop a bowling ball and a feather (spoiler alert: they really do fall at the same speed).

One good demonstration is worth a thousand textbooks. It's the difference between knowing a fact and understanding a truth.

The Fire Drill Fallacy

After the New York Times’ predictable take on homeschooling, you'd hope the Wall Street Journal might offer a deeper analysis. Yet, in a recent piece on the declining school enrollment, William A. Galston admits to a stunningly naive assumption: he thought getting kids back to school would be like a fire drill ending. The bell rings, and everyone obediently files back inside.

The establishment sees empty desks and blames lazy parents or broken habits. The real story is that the "weakened bond of trust" Galston mentions isn't a footnote—it's the headline. For two years, parents got a front-row seat into their kids’ classroom, and many didn’t like what the saw. The social contract broke.

Now, families are unbundling education. They're sourcing academics from one place, socialization from another, and childcare from a third.

It wasn't a fire drill; it was an evacuation.

Workbooks That Work

After her four-year-old blew through two Singapore Math workbooks in two days, a mom on Twitter reports doing a “180 on the power of worksheets.”

What made the difference? Design details that seem trivial but aren't. Each page includes graphic representations in the top right corner that her son "deftly decodes" even though he can't yet read the plain text directions. They're beautiful enough that her kid ranks them "above trains, above screens, above everything."

Singapore Math's "Dimensions" workbooks are built on the concrete-to-pictorial-to-abstract method. Kids understand why math works before they memorize formulas. The toolkits run about $150 per grade level (PK through 8), and come with teacher’s guides. You can find them here.