The Problem with The Anxious Generation — and What the “Ban All Screens” Movement Gets Wrong About Education

There is a real crisis in children’s mental health. I believe this because I see it daily in the schools I work in. The data supports it. The children themselves are telling us. On this point, Jonathan Haidt and I agree completely.

Where I part ways — and where I think the current panic about technology in schools is leading us somewhere counterproductive — is on the question of cause. And because cause determines response, getting this wrong has real consequences for real kids.

Let me be direct: The Anxious Generation is a compelling, well-written, emotionally resonant book built on a scientific case that is significantly weaker than Haidt presents it. The conclusions it has inspired in education policy are, in many cases, the wrong conclusions drawn from the wrong diagnosis — and I think educators and parents deserve a more honest accounting of where the evidence actually stands.

What Haidt Gets Right

Before the criticism, the credit.

Haidt is correct that something has gone badly wrong with childhood and adolescent wellbeing. He’s correct that overprotective parenting and the decline of play-based, independent childhood are serious problems. His advocacy for letting children take risks, experience failure, and develop resilience outside adult supervision — what he calls “antifragile” development — aligns closely with Peter Gray’s research and with what I see as an instructional coach working with students every day.

He’s also correct that smartphones and social media are not neutral tools for developing adolescents. The attention-capture dynamics, the social comparison mechanisms, the algorithmic amplification of outrage and anxiety — these are real design features with real effects. None of that is made up.

The problem is what he does with these legitimate observations. He builds an enormous causal argument on a foundation that the researchers who actually study this area largely reject.

The Scientific Case Against the Thesis

Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, put it plainly in a review published in Nature: “The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.” She added that the “bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.”

This isn’t one dissenting voice. The critics are numerous and credentialed. Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford, describes Haidt’s approach as “vote counting” — prioritizing quantity of studies over quality, accumulating a long list of weak evidence and presenting it as a compelling case. Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University who has studied media effects for decades, has pointed out that older adults in the US have experienced worse mental health deterioration than teenagers — which raises an obvious question: why would social media, used most heavily by the young, be causing problems worst in those who use it least?

One critical review examined the actual statistical rigor of the key studies Haidt relies on and found them wanting: “The book is over 400 pages long and waxes lyrical about the spiritual degradation we sustain as a result of social media… I would not have the nerve to write a several hundred page book calling for significant government intervention while summoning only five pages of statistical evidence. To make matters worse, the evidence is weak. The data quality is poor, the studies are flawed, and researchers are divided.”

The studies themselves have serious methodological problems. Many don’t study actual depressed teenage girls or heavy social media users — they study mostly adults, mostly average users, without serious psychological issues. You cannot establish the effect of heavy social media use on teenage depression unless you actually study heavy social media users who are depressed. Most of the studies Haidt cites don’t come close to that standard.

The Pattern I Keep Seeing

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. My generation was going to be ruined by television and video games. We were rotting our brains, becoming socially isolated, losing the capacity for deep attention and real connection. Parents panicked. Legislators proposed restrictions. Books were written explaining the neurological catastrophe underway.

Before my generation, it was comic books. Before that, rock music. Before that — and this is the one I find most useful to remember — novels. In the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were genuinely considered a moral hazard for young people, particularly young women. The idea that you would sit alone for hours, absorbed in a fictional world, engaging your imagination in ways that couldn’t be supervised or directed — this was seen as dangerous. Corrupting. The kind of thing that led to hysteria and bad decisions.

Every generation has a technological panic. The technology changes. The structure of the panic doesn’t. And the panic is always most persuasive to the people who didn’t grow up with the thing being panicked about. Ferguson draws a direct comparison to Seduction of the Innocent, the 1954 bestseller by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham that declared comic books had created a wave of juvenile delinquency — a book that caused enormous policy consequences before the evidence caught up with the panic.

I’m not saying social media is fine. I’m saying we’ve been here before, and the track record of these panics — as predictors of actual causal harm — is not good. The TV and video game generation didn’t turn out markedly worse than the generations before it. The novel-reading generation produced the Enlightenment.

What changes in each iteration is which thing we’ve decided is uniquely, irreversibly corrupting the youth. What doesn’t change is the confidence with which we assert it, the weakness of the actual evidence, and the policy consequences that follow before the evidence is properly interrogated.

What’s Actually Happening in Schools Right Now

The policy landscape has shifted fast. As of early 2026, some state legislators and witnesses have suggested banning 1:1 device programs in schools entirely, with calls for younger students to return to analog learning with pencil and paper. The Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project developed model legislation that would prohibit all screen technology in grades K-5 and ban school technology using generative AI at every grade level.

Parents across the country are forming networks teaching one another how to opt their children out of school-issued Chromebooks and iPads. One parent in California described pulling her children off school-issued devices as an “analog education” — framing it as a victory.

I understand the impulse. I genuinely do. Screen time management is a real issue. Distraction in the classroom is real. The feeling that technology has gotten away from us and we need to reclaim something is legitimate.

But the leap from “smartphones in pockets during class are a distraction” to “all screens in learning environments are harmful and we should return to pencil and paper” is enormous — and it’s a leap that the evidence doesn’t support.

Easier classroom management is not the same as better learning. And limiting students to pen and paper does little to prepare them for a world in which thinking, writing, and collaboration increasingly happen through digital tools.

There’s also an equity issue that gets papered over in these conversations. The children of affluent parents who are choosing analog education for their kids will still encounter a fully digital professional world. They’ll learn to navigate it eventually — at home, through tutors, through the social capital their families provide. The students who most need schools to close the digital literacy gap are the ones who will lose the most if we strip that from their education.

The Right Diagnosis, the Wrong Villain

Here’s what I think is actually happening, and why Gray’s framework matters more than Haidt’s for understanding it.

The mental health crisis in children is real and has been building since roughly the 1950s — decades before smartphones, social media, or the internet. Gray’s longitudinal data makes this undeniable. The primary driver, in Gray’s reading, is the progressive elimination of children’s independent, unstructured time: the reduction of recess, the increase in adult supervision, the overscheduling of childhood, the cultural shift toward treating independent children as negligent parenting.

Smartphones accelerated some of these dynamics and added new ones. But they arrived into a childhood that was already significantly impoverished of independent developmental experience. Children who have no free time, no unstructured outdoor play, no practice at self-regulation and conflict resolution — those children are developmentally primed for anxiety. Of course they reach for the nearest source of stimulation, connection, and escape. Of course the smartphone fills the vacuum.

The phone is a symptom as much as a cause. Taking the phone without restoring what the phone replaced is treating the symptom.

This is why I find the pencil-and-paper movement in education so frustrating. It’s addressing the wrong variable. A student who sits at a desk for six hours a day, goes home to an overscheduled afternoon of structured activities, and has never had two consecutive hours of genuinely unstructured time is not going to develop resilience because their school gave them a pencil instead of a Chromebook. The problem runs deeper than the device.

What Schools Should Actually Do

This is where I land, after years in the classroom and coaching teachers, watching students, and reading the research:

Cellphones during instructional time are a legitimate problem. Personal smartphones in pockets during class are a distraction issue, not a technology issue. Addressing that specifically — with clear policies, consistently enforced — is reasonable and has some evidence behind it.

1:1 device programs deserve scrutiny, but not abolition. The question isn’t whether devices belong in schools. It’s whether the learning design built around devices is pedagogically sound. The problem was never laptops. The real issue is the learning model we built around laptops. Bad technology implementation is a professional development and curriculum problem, not a technology problem.

The equity argument matters. Any policy that removes digital tools from schools disproportionately disadvantages students whose families can’t provide those tools and experiences at home.

Unstructured time is the real deficit. If we genuinely want to address the root causes of the mental health crisis Gray’s research describes, we need to give children back their unstructured time — at school and at home. More recess. Fewer scheduled activities. More space for boredom, conflict, and self-direction. That’s the intervention the data supports.

Teaching students to use technology critically is education, not capitulation. We live in a world saturated with algorithms designed to capture attention. The answer is not to pretend that world doesn’t exist or to seal children off from it until they turn 16 and then release them into it untrained. The answer is to help students develop the critical capacities to navigate it. That’s what education is for.

A Final Thought on Haidt

I’m not saying don’t read The Anxious Generation. It’s a book worth engaging with, and the parts of it that align with Gray’s research on free play and independent childhood are genuinely valuable. Haidt is a smart person thinking hard about a real problem.

But read it skeptically. Read the critics. Notice how much of the emotional weight of the book rests on anecdote and moral argument rather than the statistical case. Notice that the researchers who spend their careers studying this specific question — screen time and adolescent mental health — largely disagree with his conclusions.

And notice, most importantly, what the book makes it easy to avoid thinking about: the choices adults make about how to structure children’s time, how to design schools, how to build neighborhoods, how to value childhood independence. Those are harder conversations because they implicate us directly. Blaming the phone is easier. It usually is.

Further Reading

Free to Learn by Peter Gray — Start here. Gray’s full argument, written for a general audience, is rooted in decades of evolutionary psychology research. More compelling, better supported, and more actionable than anything else on this list.

Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World by Devorah Heitner — Published in 2023, this is the most current and most practically useful book on kids and technology that I’ve found. Heitner, a former media studies professor with a PhD from Northwestern, explicitly rejects the fear-based framing that dominates this conversation. Her core argument: the answer is mentoring, not monitoring. She draws on hundreds of interviews with kids, parents, and educators rather than extrapolating from weak correlational studies. A direct and well-earned counterweight to Haidt.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt — Read it. Engage with the parts that align with Gray’s research on play deprivation. Push back hard on the causal claims about smartphones. It’s worth reading because it’s driving policy — and understanding the argument you’re pushing back against requires having read it.

Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle — Turkle is an MIT sociologist who has spent decades doing actual long-form qualitative research with students and families about technology and attention. More careful than Haidt, more specific about the mechanisms, and more interested in nuance than in producing a villain. Published in 2016, but holds up.

How Children Learn by John Holt — First published in 1967. Holt sat in classrooms, observed children learning — or not learning — and drew conclusions that the education system has ignored ever since. Gray cites him approvingly. The arguments about how children develop intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and self-direction are as relevant now as they were sixty years ago, possibly more so.


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Yes, We Need to Get Rid of AP Courses

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And the College Board’s recent score inflation just made the argument stronger.

There, I said it. Let me make the case.

I’ve worked in public education long enough to watch AP courses go from a program for genuinely advanced students to a college admissions arms race to, now, something so thoroughly gamed by the College Board itself that universities are quietly questioning whether AP scores mean anything at all. We have spent the better part of two decades pushing AP as an equity solution — offering the best, most rigorous content to every student, regardless of background. That framing is correct. The vehicle we chose to deliver it is wrong.

Let me explain why, and what we should do instead.

The Equity Problem Has Never Been Solved

The original argument for expanding AP access was simple and appealing: if we give more students — low-income students, students of color, first-generation college students — access to rigorous coursework, we close the opportunity gap. More challenge equals better preparation equals better outcomes.

The data has never supported this at scale. A 2023 New York Times investigation found that roughly 60 percent of AP exams taken by low-income students scored too low for college credit — a 1 or 2 out of 5 — and that this number has barely moved in twenty years. Two decades of expanded access. Same failure rate. That’s not a pipeline problem. That’s a systemic problem with the model.

The barriers are layered and often invisible. Nationally, about 30 percent of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in AP courses never take the corresponding exam at all, compared to roughly 15 percent of Asian students. The reasons aren’t mysterious: scheduling conflicts, unofficial prerequisites, being steered toward “more appropriate” classes by counselors who read demographics rather than ability. Getting into the course doesn’t mean the course is actually accessible — or that success in it is equitably distributed.

This is the AP equity promise: a credential that most of the students it’s supposed to serve can’t access in any meaningful way.

The College Board’s Response: Change the Score, Not the System

Here’s where the story gets genuinely infuriating. After that NYT investigation put the failure rates for low-income and minority students into the national conversation, the College Board didn’t redesign courses, improve teacher training, or address structural barriers to preparation. They changed the scoring.

In 2022, the College Board quietly introduced what it calls “Evidence-Based Standard Setting” — a new methodology for scoring its most popular AP exams. The results were extraordinary, in the worst possible way.

AP U.S. History: students earning 4s and 5s jumped from 25 percent in 2023 to 46 percent in 2024. AP U.S. Government and Politics: top scores leapt from 24 percent to 49 percent in a single year. AP English Literature’s pass rate went from 44 percent in 2021 to 78 percent in 2022, the first year EBSS was applied.

Were students suddenly twice as prepared? Were teachers twice as effective? Did something happen in American high schools that would justify this kind of jump in a single year — while NAEP scores in 8th grade math and reading continued to decline and PISA scores showed stagnation or decline for American 15-year-olds?

No. The College Board changed the scoring system under pressure, and more students passed because passing got easier.

The financial context matters here. In 2024, over 86 percent of College Board revenue came from fees — nearly half of that from the basic AP exam fee alone. More than 1.3 million students paid $99 per exam for over 4.8 million AP exams in 2025. Total revenues exceeded $1.17 billion, and the organization held reserves of over $2 billion. The CEO received $2.3 million in total compensation in 2024 — comparable to the president of Stanford, whose institution operates on a budget roughly ten times larger.

The College Board has a direct financial incentive to keep AP attractive to students. If competitors like dual enrollment are growing, AP scores need to look competitive. The solution they chose wasn’t to improve the product. It was to make the grades better. Some elite universities are now quietly developing their own assessments to supplement AP data, having lost confidence in what AP scores actually signal.

What AP Courses Actually Do — and Don’t Do

Here’s the core problem, and it isn’t really about the College Board’s financial incentives, though those matter. It’s about what AP courses were designed to accomplish and what we’ve asked them to do instead.

AP courses were designed as an exam-prep system. The course exists to prepare students for the AP test. The test exists so students can demonstrate college-level knowledge and potentially earn college credit. That’s the whole loop. There’s nothing in that loop about authentic inquiry, personalized learning, or developing the kind of curiosity and self-direction that actually prepares people for college and life.

I’ve seen good teachers do extraordinary things inside AP courses. The structure doesn’t prevent great teaching — it just doesn’t require it, reward it, or build toward it. What it requires is covering the material on the exam. And teachers in underfunded schools, with overcrowded classrooms, serving students who haven’t had the preparation advantages their suburban peers have had, are left trying to jam college-level content into students who are already behind — while the clock ticks toward the May exam.

This is what we’ve decided counts as equity.

No one takes an AP course because it sounds exciting. Students take it because they need the credential, the weighted GPA boost, or the college credit — in roughly that order of priority. The course has become a box to check in a game nobody designed for the students who need the most from their education.

The Alternative That’s Already Working

Here’s what the advocates of the current system don’t want to talk about: dual enrollment is quietly eating AP’s lunch, and for good reason.

Dual enrollment allows high school students to take actual college courses — usually through community colleges or state universities — and earn real, transferable college credits before they graduate. Not maybe-credits that depend on a May exam score. Actual college credits that appear on an actual college transcript.

The numbers tell the story. In the 2024-25 school year, an estimated 2.8 million high school students were enrolled in dual enrollment courses — up from 2.5 million just two years earlier. Ninety percent of U.S. high schools now offer dual enrollment as of 2026. Studies consistently show that dual enrollment students are more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree, and the effect is particularly pronounced for first-generation college students.

Dual enrollment has real limitations. Quality varies by institution. Credit transfer isn’t guaranteed everywhere, particularly at highly selective universities. Some rural districts struggle with access to college partners. These are real problems worth solving.

But the structural difference matters enormously: in dual enrollment, the credit is earned by doing the work, not by performing on a single high-stakes exam in May. For students who’ve struggled all year and finally understood the material in April, AP rewards the exam. Dual enrollment rewards the semester.

What I Actually Want

I’m not just interested in replacing one credential with another. The deeper argument isn’t that dual enrollment is perfect — it’s that the entire framing of AP as an equity solution has distracted us from the real work.

The real work is redesigning Tier 1 instruction in every classroom for every student.

Not advanced placement for some. Not rigor for those who can access it through the right course label. Authentic, engaging, challenging learning environments for all students — where the goal isn’t coverage for an exam, but genuine intellectual development. Where teachers are supported and trained to create learning experiences that develop curiosity, critical thinking, and the capacity to learn independently. Where students who need more support get more support rather than being filtered into different tracks based on teacher recommendations and parental advocacy.

AP courses didn’t create tracking. But they reinforce it, give it a credential, and let us feel like we’ve addressed equity when the data says we haven’t.

As an instructional coach, I’ve watched schools celebrate expanding AP enrollment while the students enrolled in those courses received content coverage without the preparation, context, or support that would make it meaningful. The number of AP course offerings became a proxy for school quality. The number of students enrolled became a proxy for equity. The pass rates told a different story that nobody wanted to hear.

The College Board’s recent decision to fix that story by softening the scoring didn’t solve the problem. It made it harder to see.

The Hard Conversation

I know this argument is unpopular in certain circles. Parents who have watched their children use AP courses to build transcripts and earn college credit have real, concrete reasons to value the system. Teachers who’ve designed genuinely excellent AP courses have real, legitimate grievances with the suggestion that the whole structure should go.

I’m not saying those courses aren’t valuable. I’m saying the architecture around them — the College Board’s monopoly, the single high-stakes exam as the sole measure of learning, the financial incentives that led to score inflation, the equity promise that was never delivered — is worth being honest about.

We can do better. We should demand better. And the first step is being willing to say that a system that has failed its stated purpose for twenty years doesn’t deserve another twenty years of the benefit of the doubt.

Related on this site: The problem with The Anxious Generation and the “ban all screens” movement — a related argument about how education policy gets driven by compelling narratives rather than honest data.


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Free Play Is Not a Luxury: What Peter Gray’s Research Means for Every School and Every Parent

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I want to tell you something I’ve noticed in my years as an instructional coach that I’ve never quite figured out how to say in a faculty meeting without sounding like I’m blaming everyone in the room.

The kids are struggling. Not academically — though that too — but in the more fundamental sense of not knowing how to handle conflict, setbacks, boredom, or problems that don’t have an adult available to solve them. I watch students freeze at the first sign of ambiguity. I watch them escalate minor peer disputes immediately to adults rather than working them out themselves. I watch them sit in unstructured moments — the rare ones — with visible discomfort, as if the absence of instructions were a failure of the environment rather than an invitation.

I don’t think this is a character problem. I think it’s a development problem. Specifically, I think we have systematically removed the conditions under which children develop the capacity to manage themselves — and we’ve done it with the best possible intentions.

This is, in short, exactly what research psychologist Peter Gray has been saying for over a decade. And the evidence behind it is more substantial than most people realize.

The Research Nobody Wants to Sit With

Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College and one of the foremost scholars on childhood play. His work takes an evolutionary approach: what do children’s play behaviors look like across cultures, across species, and across history — and what does that tell us about what play is actually for?

His central finding, documented across decades of research, is this: rates of anxiety, depression, and psychopathology in children and adolescents have been rising continuously since roughly 1955. Not spiking — continuously rising, decade after decade. And over that same period, children’s opportunities for free, independent, self-directed play have been continuously declining.

In 2023, Gray published a paper in the Journal of Pediatrics with co-authors David Lancy and David Bjorklund, laying out multiple lines of evidence for a causal relationship between these two trends. The paper summarizes decades of data on what independent activity does for children’s psychological development — and what its absence does to it.

The suicide rate among school-age children is now roughly six times what it was in the 1950s. The rate of mental health hospital admissions for children is double during the school year compared to summer, when school is not in session. These are not subtle correlations.

Gray also published a piece in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health in July 2025, continuing this line of argument, cementing a body of work that is difficult to dismiss as ideological and increasingly hard to ignore.

What “Play” Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)

The word gets muddied, so it’s worth being precise about what the research actually refers to.

Play, in Gray’s definition, is “an activity that is self-chosen and self-directed — something you do because you want to do it.” By this definition, organized sports are not play. Adult-supervised classroom activities are not play. Structured recess with rules enforced by a teacher is not play. Even a child following a parent’s suggested activity is not, in any meaningful developmental sense, playing.

This is a harder truth than it sounds. Many of the things we offer children as “play” aren’t. A soccer league is exercise, social development, and competition — all valuable — but the child isn’t deciding the rules, resolving disputes without a referee, or navigating the social dynamics of a group without adult mediation. Those are different skills, and they require genuinely unstructured time to develop.

As Gray explained in an NPR interview: “That’s how children develop the kinds of character traits that allow them to ultimately become independent adults. They learn how to deal with peers without an adult intervening. They learn how to deal with minor bullying… But if you’re always protected from bullies by some adult, you’re not learning how to deal with that yourself.”

This will make some readers uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable the first time I really sat with it. Because it means that a significant amount of what we consider protective parenting and good schooling is actually developmental interference — removing children from the exact experiences through which they learn resilience, problem-solving, and self-regulation.

How We Got Here

Gray argues that the shift happened in overlapping waves.

Television first — it brought children indoors and somewhat isolated them. Then came the gradual cultural shift toward the belief that children develop best when guided and controlled by adults, which led to increased schooling, organized activities, and adult-directed time outside school. And then, beginning especially in the 1980s, a fear of allowing children outdoors unguarded.

That last shift is worth pausing on. What was considered ordinary parenting in 1970 — sending your kids outside in the morning and expecting them back for dinner — began to be coded as negligence by the 1990s. Not because the world became dramatically more dangerous (by most measures, it became safer), but because the perception of danger increased and because cultural expectations of parental supervision tightened.

The result: a childhood increasingly spent inside, in structured activities, under adult oversight, with every problem either solved by an adult or at least supervised by one.

As an educator, I see the downstream consequences of this every day. Students who’ve never had to navigate a disagreement without a teacher moderating it. Students who don’t know how to occupy themselves when there’s no assigned task. Students who experience normal adolescent difficulties — which is to say, all of them — as catastrophic rather than manageable, because they’ve never had low-stakes practice at managing things.

A Note on Smartphones — and Why I’m Skeptical of the Simple Story

There’s a more popular explanation for the youth mental health crisis right now, and I want to address it directly because I think it’s incomplete in ways that matter.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has gotten enormous traction with its argument that smartphones and social media are the primary drivers of rising anxiety and depression in young people. I understand why it lands — the timing seems to correlate, the mechanism makes intuitive sense, and it offers a satisfying villain and a concrete solution (take away the phones).

But I find myself skeptical. Not because Haidt is wrong that screens can be harmful — they can be, particularly for young adolescents. But because the “phones did this” narrative has serious holes, and because I’ve watched every generation get this treatment.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. For my generation, it was television and video games. We were told we were rotting our brains, becoming isolated, losing the capacity for real connection. For the generation before mine, it was rock music and comic books. Before that, novels — yes, actually, novels were once considered a moral hazard for young people. Every generation has its technological panic, and the panic is always most credible to the generation that didn’t grow up with the thing in question.

More importantly, the data on declining children’s mental health predates smartphones by decades. Gray’s 2011 paper in the American Journal of Play documented the trend using research from before the iPhone existed. The continuous rise in anxiety and depression among young people stretches back to the 1950s — long before social media, long before mobile devices, long before any technology Haidt is pointing at. If smartphones caused this crisis, what caused the preceding sixty years of the same trend?

Gray’s answer — which I find more compelling — is that the roots are structural, not technological. Children turned to screens partly because the alternative, outdoor independent play with peers, had already been progressively eliminated. The screen fills a vacuum. Restricting devices without restoring unstructured time is treating a symptom while leaving the underlying condition untouched.

I’m not saying screens are irrelevant. I’m saying the conversation we need to have is harder than “take away the phones,” and I worry that Haidt’s framing lets adults off the hook for decisions about schooling, scheduling, and supervision that are much more directly within our control — and much more directly implicated in the data.

What This Means in Schools

I work with teachers and students in a district that, like most, has systematically reduced recess time, eliminated free periods, increased structured supervision, and added academic programming into spaces that used to be unscheduled. We’ve done this in the name of academic achievement and safety. These are not bad intentions.

But Gray’s research suggests we are making a significant developmental trade-off that we rarely acknowledge. Every minute of structured, adult-supervised activity that replaces unstructured, child-directed time is a minute of developmental practice that doesn’t happen.

Some concrete implications for schools:

Recess should be genuine and protected. Not a supervised activity period. Not an extension of PE. Unstructured time outside where children decide what they’re doing and work out their own problems.

Conflict is developmental, not just a management problem. When children argue on the playground, our instinct is to intervene immediately. Sometimes that’s necessary. Often it’s counterproductive — we’re preventing them from learning that they can resolve conflict themselves.

The impulse to fill every moment is worth examining. Not every unstructured moment is lost instructional time. Some of it is essential developmental time that looks unproductive from the outside.

The school year vs. summer mental health data is important. The rate of mental health admissions being double during the school year compared to summer suggests that something about how we structure the school day contributes to the problem, not just external factors. This should prompt uncomfortable conversations.

What Parents Can Do

If you’re a parent reading this, the research points in a fairly clear direction — and it’s one that runs counter to most dominant cultural pressures around parenting.

Let them be bored. Boredom is not a problem to solve. It’s the precondition for self-directed activity. A child who says “I’m bored” and hears “go figure something out” is getting something valuable.

Let them go outside without you. Age-appropriate independence varies, and you know your child and neighborhood. But the research is clear that children need time in the world without adult oversight, and the age at which we tend to grant this has been steadily rising in ways that don’t match the developmental data.

Let them work it out. When your child has a conflict with a friend, resist the impulse to mediate immediately. Ask what they’ve tried. Ask what they think they could do. Be available but not the first resort.

Reduce the schedule. Organized activities have real value. But the balance most children currently have — heavily scheduled with structured activities from after school through evening — leaves almost no time for the self-directed play that Gray identifies as essential.

The Books Worth Reading

Free to Learn by Peter Gray — The essential text. Gray’s full argument was written for a general audience. Accessible, well-researched, and genuinely challenging to conventional assumptions about schooling and child development. If you read one book off this list, make it this one.

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv — An earlier and influential book on what Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder” — the developmental consequences of children spending less time in unstructured outdoor environments. Published in 2005, it was ahead of its time and holds up well.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt — I’d recommend reading this one critically rather than taking it as a settled truth. Haidt’s data on smartphones and social media is real and worth engaging with, but his causal claims are contested, and the deeper structural issues that Gray identifies predate the technology Haidt focuses on. Read it, but read it alongside Gray, not instead of him.

How Children Learn by John Holt — A classic, first published in 1967, that still challenges almost everything about how we structure formal education. Holt observed children learning and drew conclusions that the education system has largely ignored ever since. Gray cites him approvingly, and for good reason.

The Honest Reckoning

I’m writing this as someone who works in a system — public K-12 education — that is structurally oriented toward exactly the kind of adult-oversight-heavy, risk-managed, achievement-focused environment that Gray’s research implicates. I’m not exempt from this critique. Nobody in education is.

The honest reckoning is that we’ve built schools that optimize for the things adults can measure and control, and in doing so we’ve progressively eliminated the developmental experiences that children need most and that are hardest to schedule, supervise, or assess.

The children are trying to tell us something. The data is trying to tell us something. The question is whether we’re willing to hear it.

Related on this site: Why aren’t people reading books anymore? — a parallel argument about what we lose when children’s time becomes entirely structured and output-focused.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

Teacher Side Hustles That Actually Fit Your Life (From Someone Who Gets It)

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The national average teacher salary is $74,200. That sounds okay until you account for the fact that most teachers spend hundreds of dollars out of pocket on classroom supplies each year, work 50+ hour weeks, and bring a graduate degree to a job that still can’t cover the rent in most major cities.

I’ve been in education long enough to know: the pay conversation isn’t changing fast enough. So this post isn’t about waiting for the system to fix itself. It’s about what you can actually do right now, in the margins of the life you already have, to build some financial breathing room.

A few things this post will do that most side hustle lists don’t:

  • Be honest about what these hustles actually pay (not just the best-case ceiling)
  • Help you figure out which one fits your schedule, energy level, and personality
  • Address the stuff nobody mentions — union rules, burnout, and the fact that you’re already exhausted
  • Point you toward the tools and gear you’ll actually need

Let’s get into it.

First: The Most Important Concept Nobody Explains

Before diving into the list, understand the difference between active income and passive income. It matters more here than anywhere else, because teachers are already time-poor.

Active income means trading your hours for dollars. Tutoring is the clearest example — you work an hour, you get paid for that hour, and when you stop working, the income stops too. It can pay well and start quickly, but it doesn’t scale.

Passive income means building something once that keeps earning. A resource you upload to your own store in August can sell every September for years. A blog post with affiliate links can earn while you’re sleeping, grading papers, or staring blankly at a faculty meeting. It takes longer to build but compounds over time.

The best strategy is to start with active income (faster money, lower barrier to entry) while building passive income in parallel (summer is perfect for this). Most of the hustles below are labeled so you know which type you’re looking at.

The “Start Here” Guide: Which Hustle Fits You?

Before scrolling the full list, answer these honestly:

You have 2–5 hours a week during the school year → Tutoring, freelance writing, building a resource store slowly

You’re an introvert who doesn’t want to talk to anyone → Selling your own resources online, selling printables on Etsy, blogging, curriculum writing

You want money fast → Tutoring, substitute at another district on days off, test administration

You have summers mostly free → This is your superpower. Launch a resource store, build a course, start a blog, do curriculum consulting — dedicate June to building something that earns through the school year

You want something totally unrelated to education → Freelance writing (non-education topics), voiceover work, reselling

Your district has a moonlighting policy → Read it carefully before tutoring students from your own school or district. Some contracts restrict this. The hustles that are always safe: anything online, anything not connected to your school community.

The Hustles

1. Sell Your Own Resources — On Your Own Terms

Type: Passive income (eventually) | Startup time: Medium–High | Earning potential: $100–$5,000+/month

Here’s something the “sell your lessons!” corner of the internet doesn’t like to say out loud: the big teacher resource marketplaces have real problems. Quality control issues, intellectual property concerns that have put some districts on alert, and commission structures that take a significant cut of every sale you make.

There’s a better approach, and it starts with owning your own storefront.

Payhip is what I’d recommend to any teacher who wants to sell their original resources. You set up your own store, upload your materials, and keep 95% of every sale — Payhip only takes a 5% transaction fee. There’s no monthly cost to get started, digital delivery is fully automated, and you can sell everything from worksheets and unit plans to full online courses and memberships from the same place.

More importantly, you’re building your brand, not feeding someone else’s marketplace. Buyers follow you, not the platform.

What to sell: Unit plans, assessment packs, rubrics, sub plans, behavior charts, parent communication templates, writing prompts — anything you’ve already made that solves a recurring problem. The materials likely already exist. You just need somewhere to put them.

One important note before you sell anything: Check your district’s contract. In many cases, materials you create specifically for your classroom during your contracted hours are considered works for hire, meaning the district holds the copyright. Materials you create on your own time, independently, are generally yours to sell. When in doubt, ask your union rep — not your principal.

Summer strategy: Use June to build 10–15 strong resources around your subject area. Get your Payhip store set up, write clear product descriptions, and have inventory ready before back-to-school season in August.

Tools you’ll need:

  • Canva Pro — the standard for making professional-looking resources
  • Microsoft Office — for layout-heavy materials
  • Canon PIXMA printer — for testing your own resources before selling (also has really great ink cost thanks to Megatank)

2. Online Tutoring

Type: Active income | Startup time: Low | Earning potential: $25–$80/hour

You’re already good at this. Tutoring is the fastest way to turn your credentials into cash, and certified teachers can command higher rates than uncertified tutors on most platforms.

Platforms worth looking at:

  • Wyzant — you set your own rate, keep 75% after their cut. Good marketplace for finding clients.
  • Varsity Tutors — pays per session, handles scheduling and matching.
  • BookNook — specifically hires K-8 reading and math tutors, pays $15–22/hour, fully remote.
  • Outschool — you create and run your own live online classes for kids. More setup, but you keep a higher percentage and build an audience over time.

The contract question: Before tutoring students from your own school, check your contract. Many districts restrict teachers from privately tutoring their own current students — not as a punishment, just as a conflict-of-interest policy. Tutoring students from other schools or districts is almost always fine.

What you need to tutor online professionally:

  • Blue Yeti USB Microphone — your audio quality is your first impression (Amazon affiliate link)
  • Ring light — makes you look like you know what you’re doing (Amazon affiliate link)
  • Wacom Intuos drawing tablet — a game-changer for math tutoring online; write out problems naturally instead of typing (Amazon affiliate link)
  • Portable second monitor — one screen for your student, one for your notes (Amazon affiliate link)

3. Selling Printables on Etsy

Type: Passive income | Startup time: Medium | Earning potential: $50–$2,000+/month

Etsy gives you access to a much broader audience than education-only platforms — buyers include parents, homeschoolers, and general consumers, not just other teachers. You can sell habit trackers, budget planners, classroom decor, parent communication templates, and anything else a creative educator might make.

The tradeoff: Etsy buyers aren’t always searching for education-specific content, so discoverability takes more work. It pairs well with a Payhip store — use Etsy for discoverability and traffic, Payhip for your full catalog and higher-margin direct sales.

Canva makes the design side very approachable. Design once, sell infinitely. Digital delivery is automated on both platforms.

4. Freelance Writing

Type: Active income (transitioning to passive over time) | Startup time: Low–Medium | Earning potential: $50–$500+ per piece

Teachers are strong writers. That’s actually a differentiator in the freelance market, where much of the content is thin and generic.

Education-specific opportunities:

  • We Are Teachers pays roughly $150/article and actively recruits teacher contributors
  • Curriculum companies (Amplify, Curriculum Associates, Khan Academy) hire freelance writers and curriculum developers — search LinkedIn for “freelance curriculum writer”
  • Education trade publications like EdSurge, Education Week, and Edutopia accept pitches

General freelance writing:

  • Fiverr — set up a profile, start with competitive rates to build reviews, then raise them
  • Upwork — better for longer-term client relationships, more competitive to break in
  • PaidWritingJobs – search for current, open writing jobs, updated frequently with new offers

The honest timeline: Freelance writing takes a few months to build momentum. Your first pieces will likely pay less than you want. Stick with it.

5. Online Courses

Type: Passive income | Startup time: High | Earning potential: $200–$5,000+/month

This is the highest-ceiling option on this list, and also the most work upfront. The idea: you know something deeply — your subject matter, classroom management, a specific teaching method, a skill you have outside school — and you package it into a course that people pay to take.

Platforms:

  • Payhip — yes, the same platform for selling resources also handles full online courses with videos, quizzes, and completion certificates. If you’re already building a store there, it’s the simplest starting point.
  • Teachable — well-designed, easy to use, good for beginners. Their affiliate program pays 30% recurring commission if you want to recommend it on your own blog.
  • Udemy — larger built-in audience, lower prices, but more discoverability for new creators
  • Outschool — specifically for live classes aimed at K-12 students. Less upfront work than a full recorded course.

Summer strategy: Build the course in the summer. The school year is when it sells. A well-made course on a specific topic — teaching fractions to struggling learners, running a high school debate team, ESL strategies — can sell to other educators for years.

6. Curriculum Consulting and Writing

Type: Active income | Startup time: Medium | Earning potential: $30–$100+/hour

If you have deep subject-matter expertise or experience in curriculum design, there’s a real market for your skills outside the classroom. Nonprofits, edtech companies, and publishers regularly hire teachers as consultants and freelance writers.

Start by updating your LinkedIn with specific curriculum accomplishments. Search for “curriculum developer freelance” or “instructional designer remote.” Platforms like Upwork and Contra are good places to build an early client base.

The pay range is wide — entry-level curriculum writing can pay $20–30/hour, while experienced instructional designers with a track record can command $75–100/hour or more.

7. Blogging with Affiliate Marketing

Type: Passive income (slow build) | Startup time: Medium | Earning potential: $0–$8,000+/month

This is the longest game on the list. It also has the highest ceiling for truly passive income, because a well-ranked blog post earns money indefinitely without additional work.

The basics: you write about things teachers care about — classroom tools, side hustles, books, professional development — and you embed affiliate links. When readers click and buy, you earn a commission. Amazon Associates is the easiest starting point. Programs like Teachable’s affiliate program, Canva’s affiliate program, Payhip’s partner program (50% lifetime recurring commission), and Grammarly (which pays $20 per premium signup) can meaningfully add to that.

Realistic timeline: most blogs take 12–18 months to generate meaningful income. A handful see results faster if they hit a good niche. Either way, you’re building an asset that compounds.

If you’re going to start a blog: Use WordPress with a reliable host. Install the Thirsty Affiliates plugin to manage all your affiliate links in one place — it makes updating links across your whole site simple when programs change.

The Tools: Your Home Office Side Hustle Setup

Whatever hustle you choose, these are worth having:

ToolWhy You Need ItApprox. Cost
Blue Yeti USB MicTutoring, recording courses, podcasting$100–$130
Ring LightAny video calls or recordings$25–$50
Wacom Intuos TabletOnline tutoring, annotating PDFs$80–$100
Portable MonitorSecond screen for multitasking$120–$180
Sony WH-1000XM5 HeadphonesFocus, grading, recording$280–$350
Canva ProResource design, printables, course graphics$15/month
Grammarly PremiumFreelance writing, course content$12–$30/month

All Amazon links are affiliate links. Purchasing through them supports this blog at no extra cost to you.

What Nobody Tells You

Burnout is real. You are already working one of the most emotionally and cognitively demanding jobs that exists. Adding a side hustle on top of that without intentional boundaries is a fast track to resentment and exhaustion. The hustles that work best for teachers are the ones with flexible schedules and work you actually enjoy — not just the ones that pay the most.

Start with one thing. The biggest mistake is trying three side hustles at once. Pick one, give it 90 days, and evaluate honestly before adding anything else.

Summers are your leverage point. If you have relatively free summers, that is a genuine competitive advantage most non-teachers don’t have. Use that time to build something — a resource store, a course, a blog, a consulting client base — so that when school starts again, you have income flowing without much active effort required.

Tax note: Side income is self-employment income. Set aside 25–30% of whatever you earn for taxes, especially if you’re pushing past $600/year on any platform. You’ll thank yourself in April.

The Bottom Line

There is no perfect side hustle. The best one is the one that fits your schedule, plays to your strengths, and doesn’t require you to give up the few hours of rest you actually need.

If I had to pick a starting point for most K-12 teachers: tutoring to build immediate cash flow, your own Payhip resource store to build passive income, and a real summer project — a course, a blog, or a consulting push — to build something with a longer ceiling.

You’ve already got the skills. The question is just where to point them.

What’s your side hustle? I’d love to hear what’s working — or what hasn’t — in the comments.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

Book Review – The Lies of Locke Lamora

There is a moment early in The Lies of Locke Lamora where Father Chains — the blind priest who is not actually blind, and not actually a priest — explains to a young Locke Lamora exactly what kind of criminal he’s going to become. Not a common thief. Not a hired blade. Something more specific and considerably more dangerous: a con artist who targets the nobility of Camorr, the one category of victim that the city’s organized crime syndicate has quietly agreed to leave alone.

The Gentleman Bastards Secret. That’s what Lynch calls it. And the audacity of it — stealing from the most powerful people in a city run by criminals, hiding that fact from the criminals themselves — tells you everything you need to know about whether this book is for you. If that premise makes you grin, buckle in. If it makes you anxious about what happens when it inevitably unravels, also buckle in.

What It Is

The Lies of Locke Lamora is Scott Lynch’s 2006 debut novel, the first in the Gentleman Bastards series. It is set in Camorr, a fictional city that is essentially Renaissance Venice run by the mob — canals, ancient towers of alien glass left by a vanished civilization, a rigid criminal hierarchy, and enough filth and beauty coexisting in the same frame to make you feel like you’re actually there.

Locke Lamora is an orphan who becomes the most gifted con artist in Camorr. His crew, the Gentleman Bastards, pulls elaborate long cons against the city’s wealthy nobility — a category of victim so off-limits in the criminal underworld that nobody would think to look for thieves there. The book follows two timelines: the present day, where Locke is running his most ambitious scheme yet, and a series of interludes tracing his childhood and how he became who he is.

The comparison that keeps appearing in reviews is Ocean’s Eleven meets The Godfather. That’s accurate as far as it goes. I’d add: with the warmth of a found-family story underneath all the deception, and the gut-punch of grimdark fantasy when the plot decides to stop playing nice.

Why It Works

The thing everyone who loves this book mentions first is the voice. Lynch writes dialogue the way someone who genuinely enjoys language writes dialogue — it’s witty and foul-mouthed and character-specific in a way that feels earned rather than performed. The Gentleman Bastards bicker and insult each other constantly, and you understand their loyalty to each other precisely through the texture of how they argue. Nobody’s monologuing their feelings. Nobody needs to.

The dual-timeline structure is handled well. The interludes into Locke’s childhood do what flashbacks are supposed to do — they recontextualize what you’re reading in the present without dragging the plot sideways. By the time certain things happen in the present-day story, you’ve been prepared to feel them much more deeply than you would have if Lynch had told the story straight through.

Jean Tannen deserves particular mention. He is Locke’s best friend and the beating heart of the crew — a big, quiet, book-loving man who happens to be extraordinarily violent when the situation calls for it. The relationship between Locke and Jean is what gives the novel its emotional stakes. You root for the heists because they’re clever. You root for these characters because you genuinely care whether they survive.

The world-building is immersive without being oppressive. Lynch doesn’t stop the story to explain his world to you — he trusts the details to accumulate naturally, and they do. Camorr feels lived-in. The Elderglass towers feel genuinely strange. The criminal hierarchy feels as if it has a history that extends well before chapter one.

The Honest Part

The beginning is slow. This isn’t a controversial opinion — almost every review of this book, including the glowing ones, mentions it. The first fifty or so pages are dense with world-building and character setup, and the plot hasn’t found its footing yet. Lynch is laying track, not racing on it. If you trust the process, it pays off enormously. If you need momentum from page one, you might not get there.

The violence, when it comes, is not cartoonish. This is grimdark fantasy. People die suddenly and badly. Some of the deaths are genuinely brutal in a way that’s meant to be felt, not just processed as plot information. This is not a book that treats its violence as consequence-free, which I consider a feature. But it’s worth knowing going in.

There’s also the series situation, which I’d be dishonest not to mention: Lynch published The Lies of Locke Lamora in 2006, Red Seas Under Red Skies in 2007, and The Republic of Thieves in 2013. Book four has been in progress for over a decade with no confirmed publication date. If starting an unfinished series is a dealbreaker for you, that’s worth knowing. If, like me, you’ve long since made peace with the reality that some authors write slowly and the books that do exist are worth having, the first three are genuinely excellent.

The Verdict

This is one of the best fantasy debuts I’ve read. Lynch wrote a book that is simultaneously a heist thriller, a crime novel, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on what friendship and loyalty actually mean when you’ve chosen a life built on deception. The pieces shouldn’t fit together as well as they do. They fit together perfectly.

The quote image I’ve kept from the original review captures the book’s energy better than most descriptions:

“When you don’t know everything you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.” (Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora)

“When you don’t know everything you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.”

— Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

That’s the book. Clever, profane, self-aware, and ultimately warmer than it has any right to be.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars. (I bumped it up from my original 4 on reflection. The slow opening earned the half-star deduction; everything that follows earned it back.)

Get The Lies of Locke Lamora →

If You Liked This, Read Next

Red Seas Under Red Skies — The immediate sequel. Locke and Jean, new city, new con, new catastrophe. Different in tone (nautical heist rather than urban), equally entertaining.

The Republic of Thieves — Book three, and the one that finally explains the backstory of someone the first book only hints at. The most emotionally complex of the three published novels.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo — The most common recommendation for readers who loved Locke Lamora. Morally grey crew, elaborate heist, excellent found-family dynamics. Younger in tone — less grimdark — but equally compelling.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss — Lynch and Rothfuss debuted within a year of each other and were constantly compared in the mid-2000s fantasy scene. Rothfuss is lyrical where Lynch is propulsive, but both center on a protagonist who is the most gifted person in the room and knows it. Also an unfinished series, alas.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie — If the grimdark edge of Locke Lamora is what hooked you — the sense that consequences are real and survival is not guaranteed — Abercrombie is the natural next stop. Darker, bleaker, absolutely brilliant.

Filed under: the pile of books recommended to me by multiple people who know my taste, and whose recommendations were entirely correct.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

How to Read and Take Notes Like a PhD Student (From Someone Near the Finish Line)

study hall
Photo by Lina Kivaka on Pexels.com

I wrote an earlier version of this post in 2023, partway through my doctoral program. Looking back at it, I can see the problem immediately: it reads like a summary of advice I’d read somewhere, not advice I’d actually lived.

Four years into my dissertation, near the finish line, I want to rewrite it properly. Not a listicle of tips. Not a summary of what PhD students are supposed to do. An honest account of what actually works — for reading comprehensively, retaining what matters, and building the kind of knowledge base that holds up under the pressure of original research.

Some of this applies only to doctoral work. Most of it applies to anyone who reads seriously and wants to remember what they read.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s the dirty secret of academic reading: nobody reads everything. Not the students, not the professors assigning the reading, not the scholars whose bibliographies look like small libraries.

The volume is genuinely impossible. A serious doctoral seminar can assign 300–500 pages a week. A comprehensive exam reading list might run to 150 books and several hundred articles. No one reads all of that cover to cover and retains it. The people who try to are usually the ones who burn out.

The skill isn’t reading everything. The skill is reading strategically — knowing what you need from a text before you open it, finding it efficiently, and processing it in a way that makes it retrievable and useful later.

That’s the entire game. Everything below is in service of it.

Three Modes of Reading (And Why They’re Different)

Not all reading has the same purpose, and trying to use one approach for everything is where most people go wrong. I work in three distinct modes, and switching between them deliberately has been one of the most important adjustments I’ve made.

Reading for Understanding

This is your slowest, most deliberate mode. You use it on texts that are foundational to your work — the sources you need to actually understand, not just reference. Dissertations are built on a handful of these. Everything else is commentary.

For this mode:

  • Read the introduction and conclusion first. For a book, this tells you the argument before you encounter the evidence for it, which makes the chapters comprehensible in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be.
  • Read chapter by chapter, pausing at the end of each to write a single paragraph — not a summary, but what I now think because of this chapter. That’s the difference between reading and learning.
  • Read footnotes selectively. They’re where scholars conduct their real conversations with each other — where they agree, dispute, complicate, and qualify. Some of the best sources I’ve found were in footnotes.
  • Write in the margins. I use Blackwing pencils for this — erasable, smooth, and they force me to be deliberate because space is limited. I use sticky flag tabs to mark pages I know I’ll return to.

Reading for Retention

This is reading you do with the explicit goal of remembering it months or years from now — for comprehensive exams, for situating your research within a field, for the kind of conversational fluency about a body of literature that you need to have by the time you defend.

Retention is not a passive process. Passive reading produces passive forgetting. What actually builds long-term memory:

Active recall over re-reading. After reading a section, close the book and write from memory what you just read. Not copying — reconstructing. The effort of reconstruction is what encodes the information. This is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point.

Note to your future self, not to the text. Most students write notes that are essentially paraphrases of the source. These notes are almost useless for retention because they still require the source to be meaningful. Write instead what you think the argument is, why it matters, and how it connects to things you already know. This takes longer and produces fewer words — and those words are worth ten times as much.

Spaced return. Come back to your notes on a source a week after you wrote them, then a month after. Add anything that wasn’t there before. The gaps reveal what you didn’t actually understand.

Reading for Research

This is your fastest, most surgical mode. You have a specific question. You need to know if this text addresses it. You don’t have time to read everything.

The tools here are underused by most students:

The index is your first stop, not the text itself. Establish your key terms before you open the book, then go directly to those entries. A 400-page book might have four pages that are genuinely relevant to your specific question. Find them in five minutes instead of reading everything, hoping to stumble across them.

Ctrl+F/Command+F for PDFs. Academic articles as PDFs are searchable. Use it relentlessly. The phrase you need is in there somewhere.

Introduction and conclusion first, always. Most academic books make their central argument in the first and last chapters. Read those before anything else. If the argument isn’t relevant to your project, you’ve saved yourself hours. If it is, you now know what you’re looking for in the middle.

Citation backward. When you find a source that’s directly relevant to your project, look at its bibliography. Follow the citations backward. This is how you map a field efficiently — one key text leads to the three texts it’s in conversation with, which each lead to three more, until you’ve traced the lineage of an idea.

The Note-Taking System That Actually Works

I’ve tried most things. The Cornell method, plain Word documents, elaborate Evernote hierarchies, and more. What I’ve landed on is a hybrid system that I’ve described in more detail in my Zettelkasten post, but the core principle is this:

Notes should capture what you think, not what the source said.

When I read something worth keeping, I write a note that answers three questions:

  1. What is the argument?
  2. Why does it matter — to the field, to my project, to how I think about this topic?
  3. What does this connect to that I already know?

That last question is the one most people skip. It’s also the one that determines whether the note is useful six months from now or just another thing you vaguely remember reading.

The Physical Layer

I use 4×6 ruled index cards for permanent notes — one idea per card, written by hand. The physical act of writing slows me down enough to think about what I’m actually trying to say. A date stamp goes on every card when it enters the system. Cards live in a card box organized by loose topic clusters.

For quick capture — ideas mid-reading, thoughts in a seminar, connections that occur to me in the car — I use a Field Notes notebook in my pocket. These are temporary. Their job is to get the idea out of my head. I process them into permanent notes later.

The Digital Layer

Notion is where my system lives at scale. Every permanent note that survives the physical card stage gets entered into Notion with tags, source references, and links to related notes. The search capability is what makes this invaluable — finding a note about a source I read two years ago takes seconds. (Affiliate link)

I’m currently experimenting with Obsidian as a complement, specifically using it with Claude Code to surface connections across my note vault that I haven’t made manually. If you want to go deep on this, Andrej Karpathy recently published a pattern for this — the LLM Wiki — that’s one of the most interesting developments in personal knowledge management I’ve seen. More on that in the Zettelkasten post.

What to Do With Academic Articles (The Specific Workflow)

Articles are different from books, and they get short-changed in most reading advice. Here’s my workflow for a journal article that matters to my project:

  1. Read the abstract, then the introduction, then the conclusion. In that order. This tells me the argument, its context, and its implications before I’ve read a word of the actual analysis.
  2. Skim the section headers. Most academic articles are structured to be easy to navigate. The headers tell me where the argument lives and where I can move faster.
  3. Read the parts that matter. For most articles, this is 40–60% of the text. The literature review often rehashes things I already know. The methods section may or may not be relevant. The analysis and discussion sections are almost always.
  4. Write the note immediately. Not after I’ve read three more articles. Right now, while it’s fresh. The note I write in the twenty minutes after reading an article is worth more than the note I write a week later from memory.
  5. Record the full citation before I close the tab. This sounds obvious. It is obvious. I’ve spent more time tracking down sources I didn’t fully cite than I care to admit.

The Tools

Physical:

Digital:

  • Notion — for the searchable permanent note archive
  • Obsidian — for graph visualization and the LLM Wiki experiment (free)
  • Zotero — free reference manager; essential for tracking citations across a large project

Books:

The Honest Part

Here’s what nobody who writes these posts usually says: the reading load of doctoral work is genuinely brutal, and no system makes it easy. There are weeks when I’ve read 400 pages and felt like I retained almost none of it. There are other weeks when a single 30-page article reshapes how I think about my entire project.

The difference isn’t usually reading speed or technique. It’s engagement. When I’m reading something I’m genuinely curious about, my retention is dramatically better. When I’m reading something I’ve convinced myself I “should” read, it evaporates.

This isn’t an argument for only reading what you want. It’s an argument for finding what’s genuinely interesting in even the readings that feel like an obligation — the question that hasn’t been answered, the argument you disagree with, the footnote that opens a door you didn’t know was there. Active curiosity is better than passive discipline every time.

Four years in, near the finish, what I’ve learned is that the reading never stops being hard. You just get better at finding the parts that matter, connecting them to what you already know, and making something out of them.

That’s the whole skill. Everything else is tools.

The physical tools I use for reading and note-taking — notecards, Field Notes, Blackwings, date stamp, highlighters — live on my Favorite Gear page. The deeper dive into the Zettelkasten system I use for organizing all of this is here.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

The Best Books for Understanding AI — A Reading List for Educators and Curious Humans

elderly man thinking while looking at a chessboard
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

A quick note before the list: I’ve been living in this space for a while now — as an instructional coach, a Google Certified Innovator, a doctoral student, and someone who uses AI tools daily in my actual work. The books I’m recommending here are ones I’d press into the hands of a thoughtful educator or a curious non-technical reader. This is not a developer’s reading list. If you want to build LLMs from scratch, you’re reading the wrong blog.

What I care about: understanding what these systems actually are, what they can and can’t do, what they mean for teaching and learning, and how to think clearly about the cultural and ethical questions they raise. The AI book market has exploded with hype, doom, and everything in between. Most of it isn’t worth your time. Here’s what is.

Where to Start

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI — Ethan Mollick (2024)

This is the book I recommend first to every educator asking me where to begin, and it’s not particularly close. Mollick is a Wharton professor who has been using AI in his classroom since the day ChatGPT launched and writing about it — honestly and with genuine curiosity — at his Substack ever since. Unlike most AI books, this one was written by someone with actual daily practice rather than theoretical distance.

The central argument is in the title: AI as co-intelligence, not replacement intelligence. Mollick’s four rules for working with AI are practical enough to start using today and deep enough to keep thinking about. His concept of the “jagged frontier” — that AI is weirdly capable at things we’d consider hard and oddly bad at things we’d consider easy — is the single most useful mental model I’ve found for calibrating what to expect.

For educators specifically, Chapter 7 on AI in schools is worth the price of the book alone. Mollick is genuinely thoughtful about the implications for assessment, expertise development, and what we’re actually asking students to do when we assign traditional work in an era of capable AI tools. He doesn’t hand you easy answers. He asks better questions.

Worth noting: some readers already deep in this space find it a bit surface-level, and it was written in 2023, so some specifics are already dated. Read it for the framework, not the technical details.

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Understanding What AI Actually Is

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Melanie Mitchell (2019)

Still the best accessible introduction to what AI fundamentally is and isn’t. Mitchell is a computational complexity researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, and she brings real intellectual rigor to a topic that attracts an unusual amount of noise. This book predates the LLM explosion, which is actually part of what makes it valuable — it gives you the conceptual foundation to understand why systems like GPT surprised even the researchers who built them.

Mitchell is especially good on the gap between narrow AI capability and what we loosely call “understanding.” If you want to have an informed opinion about whether AI is “really” thinking, read this first.

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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman (2023)

This is the big-picture book. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI before becoming CEO of Microsoft AI — he is, in other words, someone who has spent his career at the center of this thing. The Coming Wave is his argument that we are facing a genuine civilizational inflection point with AI (and synthetic biology), and that the window to build appropriate containment structures around these technologies is narrowing rapidly.

What distinguishes it from most AI doom-or-boom books is specificity. Suleyman doesn’t deal in vague anxieties — he makes concrete arguments about the concentration of power, economic disruption, and the structural problems of trying to regulate technology that spreads faster than governance can follow. Readable, serious, and useful for understanding why AI isn’t just a productivity story.

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The Ethics and Alignment Problem

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values — Brian Christian (2020)

If you want to understand why making AI systems that reliably do what we want them to do is genuinely hard — technically, philosophically, and ethically — this is the book. Christian spent years interviewing researchers at the leading AI labs and built a rigorous, human-readable account of the problem at the center of AI safety.

The alignment problem isn’t abstract. It shows up in recommendation systems that optimize for engagement and produce radicalization. It shows up in hiring algorithms that encode historical discrimination. It shows up every time a system is optimized for a measurable proxy of what we actually want, rather than the thing itself. Christian is excellent on how this happens, why it’s hard to fix, and what the researchers working on it are actually doing.

This book complements Mollick’s more optimistic framing well. Read both.

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Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence — Kate Crawford (2021)

The critical perspective this list needs. Crawford, a researcher at USC and co-founder of the AI Now Institute, makes a compelling argument that AI systems are not software abstractions — they are material, political, and economic objects with real costs and embedded power dynamics. The rare earths in the hardware, the data center energy consumption, the contract workers’ labeling training data in difficult conditions, and the labor displacement — Crawford maps all of it.

I don’t agree with everything in this book, and Crawford’s perspective is explicitly critical rather than balanced. But the questions she raises are important and underrepresented in the mainstream AI conversation. If you’ve read Mollick and want a counterweight, this is it.

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The History and the People

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World — Cade Metz (2021)

The best narrative history of the deep learning revolution. Metz is a New York Times technology reporter who covers this beat obsessively, and he had remarkable access to the key figures: Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis, and the others who turned decades of dormant theory into the technology now reshaping every industry.

This is the book if you want to understand why everything changed so fast after 2012, what the competitive dynamics between labs looked like, and how the researchers themselves thought about what they were building. Reads like a thriller — the science is real, the rivalries are real, and the ethical stakes land harder when you know the people involved.

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For Educators Specifically

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) — Salman Khan (2024)

Sal Khan founded Khan Academy. He’s also an optimist, which comes through clearly in this book. Brave New Words makes the case for AI as tutor, mentor, and educational equalizer — arguing that tools like Khanmigo can bring the one-on-one tutoring advantage (Bloom’s famous “two sigma” finding, that individual tutoring improves outcomes dramatically over classroom instruction) to every student who needs it.

I read this more critically than I read Mollick, because the institutional interests are more directly aligned with the argument. But the core vision — that AI could close genuine equity gaps in access to high-quality educational support — is worth taking seriously, and the specific examples from Khan Academy’s work are compelling. Read it alongside the Crawford book for balance.

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The Short Version

If you read only one: Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. It’s the most practical and most directly relevant to anyone working in education or doing knowledge work of any kind.

If you want the big picture: Suleyman’s The Coming Wave. The most serious argument about what’s actually at stake.

If you want the history: Metz’s Genius Makers. The best story of how we got here.

If you want the ethics: Christian’s The Alignment Problem for the technical/philosophical dimension, Crawford’s Atlas of AI for the political/material dimension.

These books sit alongside my broader reading on technology and education — if you’re interested in that context, the Zettelkasten post covers the note-taking system I use to actually hold onto what I read across all of this.


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You Can Just Print An Air Purifier

I don’t have the time right now, but when the ol’ dissertation is done, I can easily see a 3D printer getting heavy usage around these parts…

3D printers are one of the few pieces of technology in the last 30 years that are as revolutionary as they were pitched. It is easy to miss that fact, in part because 3D printing itself is a dorky little habit that produces a lot of embarrassing trinkets with visible layer lines, a technology that launched a thousand Iron Man cosplay masks. But the quality and speed of these machines improves yearly, and you can get a fantastic printer that handles multiple colors for less than $600 dollars and even cheaper if you go with eBay or know someone who is moving at just the right time. Access to a 3D printer can be a great way to repair an existing device, replace something you would otherwise buy commercially, or create something that the commercial market would never provide you.

Want to try this yourself? The printer the article is describing is real, and the current best-in-class for an enclosed home machine is the Bambu Lab P2S ($549 direct from Bambu). It’s the evolution of their best-selling P1S — fully enclosed, quieter, faster, AI-powered print monitoring, and built-in filament drying with the AMS 2. It handles engineering-grade filaments that open-frame printers can’t touch, and it sets up in about 15 minutes. Pair it with some HEPA filter material and you’ve got a DIY Corsi-Rosenthal box that actually works. The barrier to entry on serious 3D printing has never been lower.

Source: You Can Just Print An Air Purifier

3d printers

Artemis II Astronauts Witnessed 6 Meteorites Colliding With the Moon

The shock and awe on the face of the folks at Mission Control as they chatted with the astronauts as this happened…

  • During their flyby of the far side of the moon, the Artemis II astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft saw as many as six flashes emerging from the lunar surface. Surprisingly, they were witnessing small meteorites impacting the ground and producing brief flashes of light.
  • NASA’s control room recorded the team’s surprise during the mission livestream, although the cameras did not pick up the flashes. According to the astronauts, the flashes were white or blue-white and lasted less than a second. The cameras they were using to document the moon weren’t fast enough to record them.

Source: Artemis II Astronauts Witnessed 6 Meteorites Colliding With the Moon | WIRED

moon and earth