Teacher EcoSystems Matter

This time of year, we put our 16-year-olds through a coming-of-age ritual. We make them sit in rows and write down things they have spent the last two years trying to memorise. We pit them against the clock, and prevent them from talking to each other. We tell them that this is the most important thing that they will ever do and their future life depends on it. We don’t just do this once. For most of them, we make them sit in rows and write things down between twenty and thirty separate times in the space of about six weeks. Maths, English, History, French, Biology….Again and again, they have to keep at it. Each time, we tell them how important it is and they better not have an off-day or be ill. Then we take their papers and we rank them. For some, the result will be accolades and glory. For others, failure and retakes. We know for sure that this will always be true, because these rituals that we call exams are designed to rank them. A third will always fail. There would be no top grades if we didn’t also have the bottom. It isn’t possible for them all to pass. And yet, every year, we talk as if this was not true. We pretend that it would be possible for them all to succeed, if only they and their teachers worked harder. Politicians talk about raising standards and accountability. We pretend that the problem is them not working hard enough, not an exam system designed so that hundreds of thousands fail. We blame them, not the exams. For the truth is that we have a coming-of-age ritual for our teenagers which involves a third of them being told they haven’t met the grade, that they are not good enough. We launch them into adult life telling them that they will carry the stigma of not understanding quadratic equations for ever. We put them all through intense stress, and then when some of them cave in we say they have anxiety and send them to see a therapist. And then we’re surprised when many of them say they just can’t carry on, that they don’t see the point. They don’t see potential in the future for themselves. We need to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do this to our teenagers. For the problem isn’t our young people. It’s not their fault that a third of them fail and many are chronically stressed. The problem is what we make them do. We’ve designed a coming-of-age system with a very high cost in human misery. Every year a new crop of teens will come of age, and despite their distress we just push them harder. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really the best we can do for our teenagers. We urgently need to think again.

Homeschooling is fun and cute when your kids are little, however as my kids get older I’m more and more thankful that we’ve chosen to homeschool. At first you just want all that extra time with them and it’s easy and fun and they just get to play a lot. But as my kids get older I see how high of an impact homeschooling has. In every area. How they interact socially with friends, how they integrate into our family, how they process events in life and in media, how they view themselves, and how they take in what they are actually learning in school. The side conversations we have when I’m folding laundry and they wander in with a seemingly random question that actually reveals a much deeper thought. What if they asked their teacher instead of me and she gave a weak or wrong answer? How would that settle into their soul in a way I would never know about? The longer I raise these kids and the more time we spend homeschooling the more I can’t imagine letting them go out into the storm of public school.

When black Americans ponder why they are failing in easiest country in the world to be successful - put this video on repeat. Culture. It’s always culture.

AI just killed higher education’s old teaching model. We need smaller classes and oral defenses for every paper—implying more faculty time, hence more professors. Since banning AI is unenforceable, written work alone can no longer be trusted.

❓ Should black students dance at graduation? So, black students like to dance at their graduation. Why does that bother you, the so-called white conservative? How exactly does this affect your life? Do you hate to see black people joyful? Or do you hate the way black people dance? Where does it say that dance is not a part of celebration? Do you think your rigid stiffness and dull ceremonies make you better than the next human? The better question is, why aren't YOU dancing at your graduation? The cold truth is historical. You were neutered by the Puritans. In the 16th - 17th centuries, the Church of England shunned dancing. They saw theatre and plays as wasting time and promoting sin. They even showed disdain for excessive merriment. The sumptuary laws regulated what people could wear based on social class and wealth. This is the same agenda that led to the Salem Witch Trials. Are you not the same people who cry about freedom of speech and the Constitution? Do you not see how your reactions are anti-liberty? Once upon a time, you whites were taught to suppress your emotions. You were taught NOT to be human. You were homogenized and ushered into groupthink. This is in line with the communist agenda to suppress freedom of expression. You have learned nothing from George Orwell's 1984. So, I must assume that you are communists. At the very least, you are hypocrites and should remove conservative from your designation. You should praise Karl Marx and raise the flag of hammer and sickle. Because that's what your knee-jerk reactions favor. I say all of this to avoid calling you racist. Because I know you are not. There is no such thing as racism. When we call white people racist, what we are really exposing is racial insecurity. You are insecure people threatened by the people of dark skin out of the continent of Africa who enjoy freedom. You hate to see us express ourselves because you were taught not to. What we are witnessing is not hate but jealousy. With that said, I encourage you to break out of the puritan shackles of communism. I invite you to become human again. It is okay to dance in celebration of your accomplishments. No church of England will reprimand you. I promise you, it is okay to be free.