Most of our students don’t understand what school is for.

They think it’s:

• A hoop to jump through
• A step on the path to a successful life
• A trial to endure
• Pointless
• Just something we do because…we do it (question mark?)

And here’s the deal: we shouldn’t hold this against our students. I learned this from Gerald Graff over a decade ago via his ​Clueless in Academe​. Even in college, Graff argued, most students simply don’t understand the point of school. They don’t get what it’s for. And so, Graff contends, for most kids, college is something like this:

• At the start of each semester, go to each of your classes and begin figuring out what each individual professor wants.
• From then until the end of the semester, work to give that professor what they want.
• Eventually, you’ll graduate and get started with real life. Hang in there.

The thing is, of course, that this is not how human education started. The bullet points above aren’t what was at its core. These weren’t what teachers meant when the first schools began. When you and I decided to become teachers, we weren’t signing up for something that gets done just…because.

Yet nonetheless, the “cluelessness” continues, right up to the students you and I will teach today. It is a mountain we climb that’s peak has become thoroughly obscured.

The only thing for it, then, is for you and I to be cloud clearers. We’ve got to picture our students as these human beings who come to us with thick cloud systems hanging around their heads. And what we’d like to do for them, as we teach toward mastery in music or math or health or physics, is to clear those clouds away a bit.

We do this through things like:

• Making the case for school in brief, creative arguments (I call these Apologetic ​Mini-Sermons​ and treat them extensively in ​The “Why Do We Have to Do This!?” Mini-Course​ and ​The Will to Learn​, Strategy 6)
• Teaching them to think for themselves about things like the Value of school or what success in it looks like (Covered in-depth in the ​Mini-Course​ and in Strategies 6 and 8 in ​WTL​)
• Teaching them how and why to do things well in your subject area (Strategy 7 in ​The Will to Learn​)
• Helping them interpret outcomes as information rather than judgment (Strategy 9)
• Using Everest statements to repetitively explain what your subject is for (chapter 1 of ​These 6 Things​)

Clearing the clouds is critical, non-skippable work. The other option is cluelessness, which isn’t much fun at all.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. This is another oldie that I’ve pulled up from the archives and given a fresh coat of varnish. I hope it gives you some good things to think on. Back when I first published it (2023), ​The Will to Learn​ had just come out and ​The ‘Why Do We Have to Do This!?’ Mini-Course​ was just a pipe dream.

I was listening to our colleague Drew Campbell (of ​the ETW newsletter​) speak about teaching last month, and, though he dropped multiple dimes in that talk, one thought in particular made the trip back to Michigan and keeps affecting my practice.

“Sometimes,” he said, “the thing to do when you’re struggling to like a student is just to look at their face for an extended amount of time. While they’re working on a warm-up or engaged in conversation, just sit and look at them. What I often find, if I’m able to get away with doing this for twenty or thirty seconds a few times an hour, is that I’ll begin to like them more, just by looking at their face.”

When Drew said this, it sounded right — like I knew I had had experiences where just looking at a student for a moment increased my sense of warmth and appreciation for them. (It also reminded me of David Brooks’ idea of an Illuminator — someone whose gaze is respectful, warm, and admiring — in his ​How to Know a Person​.) But it got me wondering whether or not there’s any research supporting the idea.

The first thing I came across is called the mere exposure effect. The idea is that simply being exposed to a stimulus (e.g., a student’s face) repeatedly increases positive affect for that stimulus. (​Here’s​ a 1965 report by Robert Zajonc that introduces the idea, and ​here’s​ a 2017 abstract of a paper with more recent findings.)

Importantly, the mere exposure effect seems to rely on the absence of ​”aversive events”​ — which makes sense. If I’m looking at a student who is actively disrupting the learning environment, I’m unlikely to simply start liking the student more. But even when the stimulus — a student’s face — is initially one I dislike, when I am repeatedly exposed to that stimulus in a benign context — e.g., if I look at the student while they are not engaged in behavior non-conducive to learning — the research suggests I will tend to end up liking the student more. (This ​1974 study​ by Zajonc, Markus, and Wilson should let you look at it without a paywall.) This lines up well with Drew’s observation: the time to look at a student for a bit of extra time is when they are doing something harmless (or, even better, something productive like working at learning).

So since Drew’s comment, I’ve been giving it a shot. During a warm-up, I’ll look out at the class and notice Brady’s concentration while he’s writing, or Ava’s earnest effort to get what’s on her mind onto the computer screen. And I do tend to find that it brings just a bit more warmth into my heart for my students, even during the tired months of the fall in a classroom.

Sharing in case it helps.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

PS It’s small things moves like this that I try to emphasize in my work on student motivation. Small, earnest efforts, wisely applied — that’s what I’m always after. You can learn more about my approach in things like my book, ​The Will to Learn​, or this explainer on the ​Five Key Beliefs​.

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.

The line above is the “Quarry Worker’s Creed,” as seen in Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 89). Newport explains that he first saw this line as an epigraph to The Pragmatic Programmer, a book that also has strong connections to our work as educators and has new relevance for me this year as I trod through the new terrain of teaching AP Computer Science Principles.

From the introduction of The Pragmatic Programmer:

What distinguishes Pragmatic Programmers? We feel it’s an attitude, a style, a philosophy of approaching problems and their solutions. They think beyond the immediate problem, always trying to place it in its larger context, always trying to be aware of the bigger picture. After all, without this larger context, how can you be pragmatic? How can you make intelligent compromises and informed decisions?

Could there be words more directly targeting the hearts and minds of teachers who aspire toward wisdom, like you and I do? The wise teacher, too, can only adopt this big picture approach to their work. Though I hope and pray that our profession will improve its ability to measure the impact of a teacher’s work, I have no delusions that we are anywhere close to measuring all of it right now. Measures like end-of-year testing are a start, though even those vary wildly in capturing the learning we facilitate in our classrooms. After all, we really don’t know just how big of an impact we’re having when we engage in simple, robust, excellent teaching. We must continue to seek to see the impacts we’re having, but we must not be deluded into thinking we know the full extent.

Ours is work that constantly demands intelligent compromise. Otherwise, there are simply too many things to do in the time we have. We have to decide where to excel, where to merely pass muster, and where to disappear.

And why? Because we’re building cathedrals, you and me. One brick at a time. And just as the quarry worker is humble enough to expect no credit, so too must we work. We must let go of the expectation for credit; as Wendell Berry says via Hannah in Hannah Coulter, expectations amount to “a bucket of smoke.”

Having contributed to cathedrals is well reward enough.

Laying bricks right beside you,

DSJR

This is a revised version of an article I published in December of 2018. I am thankful to our colleague Marc Byrn for reminding me of its existence. (It’s a funny thing that I’ve now forgotten more of the articles I’ve written than I remember.)

Lately I’ve been rereading Ann Hollingsworth’s The Simple Faith of Mr. Rogers: Spiritual Insights from the World’s Most Beloved Neighbor.* In its first chapter, Hollingsworth described the moment she realized that “underlying the apparent simplicity of the [Mister Rogers] program — the kind that was fodder for mockery — I suddenly saw a depth I had never noticed before. Mister Rogers was more philosopher than babysitter” (p. xx). She later goes on to describe Fred’s background in the rigorous study of both theology and child development.

The man was no stupe.

This got me back to thinking of a theme that came out during a visit I had at Parker Core Knowledge school in Colorado a month or two ago. As I was sitting in my hotel getting ready that morning, I was reading a Peps Mccrae article (his newsletter is lovely, btw) in which Mccrae argued that, paradoxically, the better someone’s teaching is, the simpler it looks to an outsider.

During my time at Parker Core Knowledge later that morning, I found myself amazed at the depth of understanding of the teachers, the earnestness of their passion, and the elegance of their school’s systems of intervention and student onboarding. It looked like a very normal school in a very normal place. Yet though it appeared normal, it was filled with experts (who as it happened were a lovely and earnest group to think with during that morning’s session on The Will to Learn).**

But I’ll admit that there is something sort of annoying about that idea that expert teaching is easy to miss. This idea that the more expert your teaching becomes, the easier it is to miss it or take it for granted. It’s sort of grating, given how hard it is to get one’s practice built up into something one could call expert teaching. But just beneath that fleeting annoyed feeling, what I find is an intoxicating reality — this idea of being so excellent in your work, so very good at what you do, that a layperson can hardly notice it.

…until you look at the impacts.

The way to spot an expert is less by how their work looks than by what it’s impact is. This is essentially where Mccrae starts in his paper “Expert Teaching: What is it, and how might we develop it?”:

There are several ways we might begin to think about expertise in teaching. The first is to consider teacher impact: the influence that teachers have on what their students think, do, and achieve.

And this brings me back to what I find so worthwhile in the study of Fred Rogers via things like Hollingsworth’s book. His program appeared laughably simplistic. And honestly, so did he! But beneath the apparent simplicity, there was an enormous hidden depth.

There’s a wonderful little clip I can use to demonstrate this to you. In 1969, a young Fred Rogers was called to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee, which was chaired by a feisty and abrasive senator named John Pastore. Rogers gets about six minutes with the guy. And in that six minutes, through slow and deliberate speech, you can watch as Pastore transforms from annoyed to awed.

I believe that the power of Rogers’ testimony flowed from the deep degree to which Rogers understood children, understood himself, and understood the obstacles to healthy child development. From this hidden depth, Rogers spoke; from this hidden depth, Rogers developed 895 episodes over 31 seasons. And lest we feel that Rogers’ world was a different one than ours, notice in the hearing clip above how Rogers is concerned with what he calls the “animated bombardment” of children. We simply live and teach in a time when bombarding young people with engagement has been perfected into things like the TikTok algorithm. But just as Rogers’ hidden depth produced an impact that ripples still today, so too can ours.

To make this article practical, I will summarize my point like this: seek expertise and understanding. Seek to see your students, their world, and the impact good teaching has. Find like-minded folks*** and do this work with them. There are many of us in education, even today, who continue to work toward this hidden depth.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

*I can’t recommend this book enough, or for that matter any work that aims at better understanding the life and mind of Fred Rogers.

** If you’ve got a group of rock stars I could come and think with, learn more about my speaking services here and be in touch here. Please note that I’ve got new capacity for Zoom-based mini-sessions (1-2 hours) in the afternoons. Let me know if you’d like to talk more about that.

*** I’d be remiss not to invite you to San Diego this January, where I hope and pray many like-minded people will convene to think about student motivation. Tickets are only $89 if you order by the end of November. You can learn more and order your ticket here.

There are lots of factors that go into the degree to which I flame out each year, but the most powerful factor is rarely the latest policy from on high, the newest cumbersome teacher eval rubric, the fact that “this year’s group is a really rough one,” or even the reality of teaching three preps to 150+ students. Now of course, these things create challenging circumstances (and many times the challenge lies not in the things but in the ignoring of them), but they don’t necessarily have to burn me out. Really, what tends to get me are my unrealistic expectations.

In June, I decompress. In July, I start to dream. And so in August, I tend to bring larger-than-life expectations to the classroom as I prepare for the year.

Some of those expectations are mission-critical, and woe to me if I forget to cling to them:

• Even the smallest lesson can have a trajectory-shifting impact in the life of a student.
• We’ll keep our work oriented toward Everest, and our job is ultimately to invest in the long-term flourishing of our students.
• We’ll improve this year.

IDEALS: that’s a better word for these kinds of worthy, big-picture expectations. I’m 20 years into my career, and I can’t conceptualize doing this work without the above ideals. “Essential” isn’t a strong enough word. This kind of idealism doesn’t lead to burnout; rather, it acts as a charm for keeping burnout at bay.

But then there’s this other set of expectations that just has to be allowed to whither if I’m going to avoid burnout. These are the unrealistic expectations:

• Everything is going to go as planned (when, in fact, Marlena will attack).
• I have to grade everything, and all of that grading has to be done the same way (when, in fact, some of the best teachers grade very pragmatically).
• I have to read everything that my students write (when really, there are types of writing we should rarely read — use the Pyramid of Writing Priorities for that).
• I have to give individualized feedback after Pop-Up Debates (when the guy who made up PUD practically never does that, opting instead for brief, whole-class feedback and reflection).
• I have to do everything on my list (when instead, we ought to be brutally clear-sighted in handling the most pointless things we’re asked to do).

What I’ve briefly painted here is what many of the best career teachers possess: REALISTIC IDEALISM.

• That first set of bullet points is about as high-minded as it comes. It is hugely idealistic. To hold to that list, we need to ignore the pessimistic voices that surround us.
• But that bottom list is interesting because, to hold to it, we need to ignore the overly optimistic voices that surround us — those who believe we can somehow do All The Things.

You can’t climb up Mount Everest with your kitchen sink. You can bring only what is required.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

This article first appeared in August of 2017. I wanted to resurface it this year because I had forgotten some of its lessons and, having found a use inside myself for the reminder, I figured someone else out there might benefit as well.

Last week, the sponsor of a small student club at our school reached out to ask if I’d come and talk to the group after school on a Tuesday. Though I had no fatherly duties to attend to at that time, I did have a backlog of writing on my mind and several million (or so) emails sitting overdue in my inbox. But I decided last minute that the meeting would be good to “get off my plate,” and so I went and I spoke with the group.

It was only an hour, but man… I left feeling GREAT. And that great feeling ended up creating a momentum within me that fueled some of that writing that had become overdue.

It reminded me of the study where researchers found that people tend to avoid asking for help because they underestimate the degree to which people tend to enjoy performing acts of kindness. In the survey group (n= 2,000+), researchers found that people have a tendency to:

• Underestimate the willingness other people have to help;
• Underestimate how positively helpers tend to feel upon helping; and
• Overestimate how inconvenienced helpers feel when asked to help.

It mapped directly onto my experience with the club visit:

• I was willing to help, even though I hesitated at first.
• I felt a remarkable increase in positive feelings from having helped and was, in fact, helped myself.
• As I left school that day, I found that I had suffered no inconvenience at all.

For me, 2026 has been a year of asking for a LOT more help than I have before. Again and again, I find that what the researchers found in their study is true: folks are willing, they express positive emotion in helping, and they don’t seem to regret the help they give.

All of which is to say, if you need help right now, but you’re bottling up that need and not asking for fear of inconveniencing someone…maybe just ask anyways.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. Want to do me a favor ? San Diego, this January. Come meet some of the amazing people who read this blog and attempt to think better –> feel better –> teach better. Details and tickets here.

P.P.S. You can also help me by sharing my blog newsletter with others or purchasing a Pay What You Want product on my Gumroad store. Those acts of kindness are what make this blog work!

One of the reasons we tend towards burnout this time of year is that there’s a work beneath our work. Here’s what I mean.

The work that we’re in the midst of right now is lesson plans and unit designs and classroom clean-up and photocopier snafus and tech hiccups and building mental models and teaching annotation and managing difficult behaviors and so on. And doing this for three preps and 153 students across six class periods is…a lot.

And look: all of the things I’ve listed don’t necessitate burnout. They can be a lot of things to manage sometimes, especially given all the other demands on our time, but I think with some constraint-based measures like fixed-schedule productivity and saying no more often, they can border on doable for both you and me. Theoretically, at least, these things can be done without burning to a crisp. After all, people have done it for decades and do it all around the world, all the time.

But there’s a work beneath our work that can make these real-world teaching demands truly disastrous. I’m talking about the work beneath that work above, which is:

• To do our jobs as a means to prove ourselves
• To make sure we matter
• To demonstrate that teaching is hard
• To make sure people respect us, or to fashion ourselves as some kind of irreplaceable hero

Early on in my career, I think beneath the weekly mentoring trips and the stand-on-my-desk speeches and the let’s-make-swords-during-our-Romeo–and–Juliet-unit activities and the first-car-in-the-parking-lot-and-last-car-out habits, beneath all of that work was this insatiable drive to:

• Prove that teaching was a worthy career choice for me
• Be the teacher from Freedom Writers or The Ron Clark Story
• Win awards and recognition
• Be the hero of all of my students

And frankly, all of that work — the work beneath the work — is soul-twisting slavery. All of it is 100% about me, just like your work beneath the work is ultimately just about you. Want to burn yourself out? Submit yourself to the ceaseless striving that such work beneath the work tyrannically calls us to.

Teaching — the real work — is wholly other-centered, totally focused on creating something new in someone else. Teaching’s real work turns the teacher into a tool for one of humanity’s oldest magics — the passing on of knowledge, skills, and wisdom from one generation to the next.

The teachers who flourish for the duration — who reach the true mark of teaching greatness, which is longevity — continually bring themselves back to what the real work is.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

This article first appeared on my blog on August 5, 2017. I came across it the other day and wanted to update and recirculate it. Thank you to New York Times columnist Judith Shulevitz and author/thinker Tim Keller, both of whom treat these ideas in their work. It was from Tim Keller that I heard the phrase “the work beneath the work.”

Last week I gave a talk with two of our ilk, the illustrious Messrs. Chris Slaten, of Son of Laughter fame, and Drew Campbell, who founded and writes English Teacher Weekly. Our topic was “The Classroom as Cosmos,” and in it we riffed on the wonder-laden layers present in every normal-seeming classroom in the world. (And spoiler: there is nothing normal about a “normal” classroom, as those who develop eyes to see can see.)

As it happened, Drew closed out our session with these words from the late Annie Dillard.

The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open the safe and find ashes.

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I love the polemical nature of Dillard’s statement. To her, to not share what one has learned isn’t merely selfish or embarrassing. It is worse than that: it inflicts loss not just on those who could benefit from the sharing, but also on the sharer. If we choose not to share what we’ve learned, we’ll eventually find that there’s nothing left to share. The goodness, if kept locked away, reduces down to dust.

So here’s the deal: it’s October. I’ve been so incredibly, in-my-bones tired these past few days of work that it’s made me laugh. The fatigue is so extreme at times that it borders on hilarious. If you and I were truckers, working at this level of exhaustion would be criminally negligent; but since we’re teachers, it’s just another day in the fall.

Which means that the last thing I feel like doing sometimes is sharing on this blog: sharing what I’ve learned, what I’m relearning, what I’m seeing. And to be honest, it’s not just the tiredness of teaching that holds me back; it’s the tiredness of an entire 2026 that has felt like one very, very, very long teaching-in-October.

But the way through the Wall isn’t isolation; it’s connection, it’s giving what one has, it’s sharing, and it’s seeing. And sometimes, the doing of those things takes mustering up just the energy for the very minute you’re inside of, just that one tiny minute.

So look: if you’re tired, you’re not alone. And if you’re a teacher, you’ve got stuff to share — stuff that, if you don’t share it, is going to turn into dust. So today in your class, just share it. Share who you are; teach from that person. Look into your students’ eyes as that person that you are. And I promise that it’ll do a lot more than it will seem like it’s doing.

One More Thing

Speaking of sharing, this January I’m doing my first-ever Student Motivation Summit in San Diego. Let’s get together where it’s warm and sunny and think on good things. I’d love for you to consider coming, as it will be a time for me to share with you what I don’t want devolving into ash in a safe. Details and ticket sales are here.

Hope to see you there.

Teaching right beside you, minute by minute,

DSJR

My classroom practice is simple by design, and part of that simplicity is because of the few but important things I keep track of. In my career, I’ve noticed two unhelpful tendencies in the realm of tracking:

1. I track too many things, and as a result, I can’t maintain the tracking system as the year progresses and the data piles up.
2. I track too few things, and as a result, I place too much burden on my mind to remember stuff that could be better remembered through externalizing my memory onto a tracking device.

Here are the things I keep track of; all of them are analog, as is my preference.

• Mini-sermon attempts: The thing with mini-sermons is that we all give them — every teacher in the world. We all have those moments where we’re “feeling it” and we wax poetic on the beauty or wonder or grandeur of what we teach. The trouble is not that we never do these; it’s that we don’t do them nearly enough. Mini-sermons — especially when given by Credible teachers — are, therefore, a largely disused lever for improving the Value belief in our schools. This simple little tracker helps me ensure I’m attempting at least 100 mini-sermons per school year, which I believe places me in the top 1% of teachers in the world in terms of quantity of attempted mini-sermons. Additionally, the more mini-sermons I give, the better I get at their effective delivery. And, oh yeah — the better I tend to feel, too, as the mini-sermons have their most reliable impact on the inner world of the sermonizer.
• Classroom management (CM) builds: When I notice something isn’t working right in my classroom management, I’ll sometimes make an index card like the coffee-infused one in the picture. In this case, I was trying to keep track of the consecutive days in which I Woodenized or reinforced things like the bell is our boss, giving your personal best on provisional writing warm-ups, or the RESPECT callback thing my students and I do.
• 2x10s: Because the effectiveness of this intervention depends on having 10 consecutive non-academic conversations with the target student, I keep track of these in a separate spot from my MGC clipboard. I simply jot down the target student’s initials and create 10 checkboxes. (I conduct only two or three 2×10 interventions per year and have yet to be disappointed by the noticeable improvements.)
• MGC attempts (not pictured): This clipboard sheet has one job: tracking my attempted moments of genuine connection. As I wrote about earlier this week, the power of this list comes from the oft-neglected middle group of students. (Read that article here.)
• Pop-Up Debate participation (not pictured): I started keeping a separate clipboard sheet for these when my principal lovingly dinged me on an eval for not tracking formative data in a distinguished manner. The tracker is nonetheless very simple and allows me to keep notes on how individual students are developing.

Those, to me, are the most important little trackers I use. What kinds of things do you keep track of?

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

A couple weeks ago I made a second PD visit to Traverse City, MI. My work in this district has been focused on developing a single strategy with the middle school teachers there: tracking attempted Moments of Genuine Connection (MGCs). I taught the same session to three consecutive groups of teachers. And as I was going through those reps, I found myself getting clearer on who MGC tracking is really for.

MGC tracking is NOT for the two groups of students you and I will tend to check-in with regularly just on default teacher mode. These two groups are:

1. The students we naturally like and enjoy
2. The students we are most worried about (e.g., I’m picturing a young man in one of my classes this year who has a reputation for behaviors that are not conducive to learning)

If these were the only kinds of students we needed regular connections with, we wouldn’t need to keep track.

MGC tracking is PRIMARILY for the middle group of students who don’t fall into the two categories above: the quiet ones, the standoffish ones, the shy ones, the ones who are just there doing what they’re meant to do but not drawing attention to themselves. In my classroom this year, I’m talking about students like Adam, a freshman in my upperclassman AP Computer Science Principles course who acts like he wants to crawl under his desk when I look at him.

When I had my first MGC with Adam last week, it was very simple, just like the vast majority of my MGC attempts:

• Adam, what got you interested in computer science? [Listen.] What do you like to do outside of school? [Listen.] Very cool. Well listen, Adam — I’m glad I get to be your teacher this year.

(Interestingly, it was on the afternoon of this initial MGC attempt that Adam popped his head into my classroom on the way to his bus and said, “Oh hey, Mr. Stuart! Have a good night!”)

It’s this middle group of students that you keep track of your MGCs for because these are the ones who really notice when you have a brief, genuine conversation with them. By simply attempting these moments with that middle group on a regular basis, a teacher will begin to develop a robust and comprehensive Credibility across the whole student body — not just the kids who tend to be popular (Group 1 in my earlier list) or the at-risk ones (Group 2).

Anyways, I found that insight to be clarifying for me during these early, weary weeks of the school year.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. The person who most benefits from the MGC strategy is, in my view, the teacher. There is something about attempting to connect with 150+ diverse human beings each year that inevitably deepens and widens my soul. I remain so grateful to work a job that requires me to love each of my students in this way.