New Oklahoma Superintendent Rescinds Bible Mandate: Oklahoma’s new superintendent, Lindel Fields, will not enforce the previous mandate to place Bibles in public school classrooms. This change marks a shift away from the former superintendent’s focus on culture war issues. Fields aims to improve the quality of education and student outcomes in the state.
Life: The First Few Levels – Traditional education resembles old computer games in its reliance on manuals and tests. Modern games teach players through simple, fun challenges that build skills and allow failure without harsh consequences. Education should be more like these games, using real-life examples to prepare students for the future.
“A life of dangerous adventures might seem worth it now… but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.” — M. L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen
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I’ve been on a zine kick for a while now, and recently had the chance to walk teachers through making their first zine.
We worked on creating their own zines, which was fun and made many of them uncomfortable, which is perfectly OK. I compiled some quick links and information, and we discussed potential ideas they might consider and run with when working with students.
Oh, and here’s the zine I made during one of the sessions. Feel free to use it to introduce the idea of zines to your peers and admin.
A zine (short for “magazine” or “fanzine”) is a small-circulation, self-published work, often made by hand, that can take many forms—comics, essays, art, collages, instructions, etc.
Because zines are informal, tactile, and often DIY, they offer a low-stakes way for students to share voice, experiment with layout or narrative, and synthesize content in creative formats.
Zines are used in classrooms to teach skills such as media literacy, personal narrative, research synthesis, visual thinking, and more.
A friend made this prayer into a short video and, while the focus is on the work of Christians (real Christians, not the power-mad Christian Nationalists currently trying to ruin literally everything in the world), I can’t help but see our work as educators reflected here, as well.
This prayer was first presented by Cardinal Dearden in 1979 and quoted by Pope Francis in 2015. This reflection is an excerpt from a homily written for Cardinal Dearden by then-Fr. Ken Untener on the occasion of the Mass for Deceased Priests, October 25, 1979. Pope Francis quoted Cardinal Dearden in his remarks to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2015. Fr. Untener was named bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, in 1980.
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
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We’ll likely never know the reason why the show was pulled, even if it does return. However, I can’t think of a time when media that makes people think is more important than the current time we’re living in.
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More students (and teachers) should grasp this concept. School is a great thing, to be sure, but so is learning on your own. If we can bring that type of learning into our schools… oh, what a time we could have.
But it’s like Jim Henson said: “Your kids… don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
One of the things we’ve tried hard to do in our house is to make it a place of learning while also making it as unlike school as possible. What this shakes out to, essentially, is thinking about the house as a library.
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We’re two weeks into the school year, and I’ve already seen some incredible examples of authentic learning in action. It’s a good reminder of Steve Wozniak’s advice: keep the main thing the main thing—and don’t sell out for something that only looks better.
This week’s newsletter rounds up 10 links worth your time, from AI and education to remote learning, punk archives, and why cell phone bans never work.
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Math is supposed to be the most “objective” subject in school. Two plus two equals four, no matter who you are, right? But research shows the way we teach early math is full of bias—and those inequities start shaping kids’ identities before they even reach third grade.
That’s the focus of the Racial Justice in Early Math project, a collaboration between the Erikson Institute and the University of Illinois Chicago. The team is developing resources—books, classroom activities, teacher trainings—to help educators confront racial bias in how young children experience math.
As project director Priscila Pereira points out, bias isn’t just an individual teacher problem; it’s baked into structures like scripted curricula, under-resourced schools, and practices like ability grouping. Danny Bernard Martin, a professor at UIC, highlights how stereotypes like “Asians are good at math” and deficit narratives about Black children filter into classrooms, shaping expectations in damaging ways. Even the smallest teacher choices—who gets called on, whose creative solutions are validated—can reinforce or disrupt those narratives.
The initiative is working to equip educators with not just strategies but reflective spaces: webinars, fellowships, and immersive experiences where teachers and researchers can rethink what it means to create racial justice in early math classrooms. As Pereira puts it, “We just have to keep doing the work, because we know what’s right.”
It’s a reminder that math isn’t just about numbers—it’s about identity, power, and whose ideas we choose to value.
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I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.
For centuries, scientists, artists, and philosophers have tried to pin down a “perfect” way to map color. But here’s the problem: color isn’t just physics, and it isn’t just perception—it’s both. Try to squeeze it into a neat geometric model, and you’ll quickly realize it refuses to stay put.
That’s what makes French video essayist Alessandro Roussel’s latest ScienceClic piece so fascinating for educators. He takes us from Isaac Newton’s prism experiments all the way to modern models of hue, brightness, and saturation. Along the way, he shows why there isn’t just one map of color, but many. Each communicates something different about how humans experience this slippery phenomenon.
So what’s the classroom connection?
In art: Students can compare different models of color—Newton’s circle, Munsell’s tree, the modern RGB cube—and reflect on how each changes the way we think about mixing, matching, or designing with color.
In science: Teachers can use these models to illustrate how physics collides with perception. Why do two people see the “same” red differently? How does light wavelength interact with the human eye and brain?
In interdisciplinary projects: Color mapping opens doors to conversations about how humans create systems to explain the unexplainable. It’s a perfect bridge between STEM and the humanities.
And then comes the kicker for students who think we’ve “solved” everything already: scientists recently managed to engineer a new, so-called impossible color called ‘olo’—a shade outside the traditional visible spectrum.
It’s a reminder that color isn’t just a solved equation or a finished wheel. It’s a living, shifting puzzle that still invites curiosity, wonder, and experimentation.
Imagine giving your students that as a challenge: If color can’t be mapped perfectly, what’s your best attempt?
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I want to be honest about my relationship with Daring Greatly before I say anything else, because I think it matters.
When Brené Brown’s TED talk went viral, I was skeptical. The vocabulary — vulnerability, wholehearted, shame resilience — sounded like the kind of therapeutic language that gets plastered on motivational posters and stripped of the difficult specificity that actually makes it useful. I’d seen the ideas travel from a research context to a corporate keynote to a school district “culture” initiative, losing precision at every step.
So I put off reading the book for longer than I should have.
I was wrong to. Daring Greatly is not what I expected. It’s a more rigorous, more honest, and more specifically useful book than the way it tends to be discussed. And for anyone who works in education — particularly anyone who coaches teachers, which requires asking adults to be vulnerable about their practice in ways that most professional norms actively discourage — it’s genuinely important.
What the Book Actually Is
Brown is a qualitative researcher who spent years studying connection, shame, and what she calls “wholeheartedness” — the capacity to engage fully in life despite uncertainty and imperfection. Daring Greatly is built on that research: real data, patterns from thousands of interviews, and a framework she developed to understand what gets in the way of genuine engagement.
The central claim is that vulnerability — defined as risk, emotional exposure, and uncertainty without guaranteed outcome — is not weakness. It is the precondition for courage, creativity, connection, and meaningful work. The armor we build to avoid vulnerability (perfectionism, cynicism, numbing, controlling) protects us in the short term and costs us everything in the long term.
The book is titled after a Theodore Roosevelt quote: the famous “man in the arena” passage, the one about the critic who sits in the cheap seats versus the person who is actually in the fight, who “dares greatly” even knowing they will fail sometimes. Brown uses it as a frame for what she’s asking: not to eliminate vulnerability, but to choose it deliberately, in service of what matters.
Why It Matters in Schools, Specifically
Teaching is one of the most vulnerable jobs there is, and we have almost no professional language for that.
Every day, teachers stand in front of 25 or 30 people and attempt to make something happen — understanding, curiosity, skill, connection — without any guarantee that it will work. The lesson they planned might fall flat. The explanation they thought was clear turned out to be confusing. A student they’ve been trying to reach for weeks shuts down at the one moment they feel like they’re finally getting through. This happens constantly, and mostly in silence, because the professional culture of teaching tends to reward certainty and penalize visible struggle.
As an instructional coach, a significant part of my work involves watching teachers teach — sitting in classrooms, observing, taking notes, then having conversations about what I saw. This is, if you think about it, a structured invitation to vulnerability. I’m asking a professional to let someone into the most imperfect part of their work, the part they haven’t figured out yet, and to talk about it honestly.
What Brown’s research makes clear is why this is so hard and why so many coaching relationships fail to produce genuine reflection: shame. Not dramatic shame, but the quiet, ambient kind — the professional fear that if you let someone see what’s not working, they’ll conclude that you are not working. That the struggle is evidence of inadequacy rather than evidence of honest effort in a genuinely difficult job.
Brown’s framework for navigating this — what she calls shame resilience, the capacity to recognize shame, reality-check the story you’re telling yourself, reach out, and speak it rather than let it drive behavior — is a practical map for conversations that coaching depends on. It’s not therapeutic language. It’s a professional development infrastructure.
The Research Versus the Brand
Here’s my honest caveat, because this book has a complicated position in the culture.
The research underlying Daring Greatly is real and legitimate. Brown’s qualitative work is careful, and her framework is grounded in patterns observed among real people. The book respects the reader’s intelligence.
But Brown has also become a brand, and the brand version of these ideas is considerably more diluted than the book version. The corporate keynote version of “vulnerability” often means “share something personal at the start of a meeting to build rapport,” which is not what Brown is describing. The school culture version tends to mean “hang growth mindset posters and say ‘we value failure,'” which is also not what Brown is describing.
The book itself is more demanding than that. It’s asking for something that is genuinely uncomfortable: not performed openness but actual risk. Not vulnerability as a tactic, but vulnerability as a condition of meaningful work. There’s a significant difference, and if you’ve been exposed to the brand version without the book version, the book may surprise you with how much harder it asks you to be on yourself.
What Resonates as an Educator
A few things from this reread that I keep thinking about:
The distinction between perfectionism and high standards. Brown is not arguing against excellence. She’s arguing against the specific cognitive trap of using perfectionism as a protective strategy — the belief that if you do everything perfectly, you can avoid criticism, judgment, and failure. That trap is everywhere in teaching and education leadership, and it produces exactly the opposite of what it promises.
The concept of “foreboding joy.” The tendency to preemptively imagine disaster when things are going well — to hold back from full engagement because full engagement feels dangerous. Teachers who’ve been through painful years sometimes develop this reflex: don’t get attached to a good moment because it will end. It’s a real pattern, and Brown names it precisely.
The arena metaphor is applied to professional learning. The person in the arena is the teacher who tries something new, has it fall apart in front of their students, and then learns from it. The person in the cheap seats is anyone who critiques without attempting. School cultures that penalize visible struggle and reward only polished performance push people out of the arena and into the cheap seats — and then wonder why professional learning doesn’t stick.
Who Should Read This
If you coach teachers or lead professional development, this book will give you a framework for understanding why the work is harder than it looks and what the emotional conditions for genuine growth actually require. Read it before you design your next coaching cycle.
If you’re a teacher who’s been in the profession long enough to have developed professional armor — the particular efficiency and distance that protects you from full engagement — this book will name what’s happening with more precision than most things you’ll find in education-specific reading.
If you’re skeptical of self-help books in general (I was), give the first three chapters a try before deciding. It earns its keep.
Rating: 4 out of 5. The research is real, the framework is useful, and the writing is clear without being condescending. The half-star off is because some sections drift toward the brand territory — the motivational phrasing that feels more like it was designed for an audience than worked out for a reader. The core is worth it.
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown — Brown’s follow-up focuses on leadership and organizations rather than on individuals. More directly applicable to school leaders and coaches.
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown — The book that preceded Daring Greatly, covering many of the same ideas with more focus on personal life than professional. A good companion.
Mindset by Carol Dweck — The growth mindset research that maps directly onto what Brown is describing about perfectionism and failure. Read together, they’re more useful than either is alone. (Affiliate link)
The Shift to Student-Led by Tucker and Novak — Connects Brown’s ideas about vulnerability and risk to the classroom specifically: what it actually means to create conditions where students (and teachers) can fail productively. (Affiliate link)
Related on this site: the Mastery post covers the long arc of skill development in teaching. Brown and Greene are in conversation, whether they know it or not — Brown asks what makes it possible to keep showing up to hard work, Greene asks what happens when you do.
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