Homeschooling Dadx4. Building something new.
Baltimore, MD
Joined March 2010
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I've changed how I teach history this year. Inspiration on the new method from Herman Ebbinghaus, @DTWillingham, and general cogsci readings.
I call the new method "Catalytic Stories"... admittedly an average name.
If any educators want to give feedback, it'd be much appreciated!
justinshell.substack.com/p/c…
Justin Shell retweeted
I'm hiring for someone's dream role @theacademysf: student recruitment.
Here's what the person I'm looking for will do and looks like:
This person will oversee our student recruitment funnels. You'll travel the world to give talks in schools and meet applicants, spend your days on the phone building trust with families, and work with our industry partners to reach their communities.
Here's the archetype I see for this person: junior, extraordinarily talented, high energy, golden retriever vibes. Embodies the ethos of the school. Tech savvy enough to keep up with the extremely technical projects our applicants work on.
Young people need to like you, and you need to genuinely like them. Take them seriously, treat them like peers, and be curious about what they're building. You should get excited talking to these people, not because you're trying to recruit them, but because you find them fascinating.
You need to LOVE talking to people, that's 90% of the job. You also need to be comfortable traveling a lot.
This is a role for a junior person (open to mid-level or senior if you're willing to be in the trenches with us!) who is extremely ambitious and capable of owning an extraordinary amount of responsibility. You'll be one of the main intermediaries between the world and our school, and for many people, their first impression of The Academy.
I'm actively interviewing candidates for this. If you're interested, apply through our career page and ping me once you've submitted. If someone I know can vouch for you, you'll get on my radar even faster.
If you know anyone who fits the bill, I would be extremely thankful to hear from you as well!
This mimics a useful framework that I apply increasingly often comparing a person’s CONFIDENCE vs COMPETENCE.
In some places like sports, business and politics, it seems to be beneficial for confidence to significantly exceed competence (often significantly).
However in other places like medicine or engineering (when risk is real and significant) it behooves you to have competence align with or slightly exceed confidence.
Makes sense.
Using the η=A×M×Q heuristic, a learner might go from A=.7, M=.8 with phones to A=.9, M=.9 without: 45% higher modeled learning efficiency at fixed Q.
(Illustrative assumptions not values measured or inferred from this study.)
learning-episode-demo.myscho…
Restricting student access to phones is associated with significantly higher academic performance.
science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Really good article. Critical point.
Somewhat relatedly, implementation is in part about creating conditions where students can attend to learning, hold those ideas in mind, and generate initial memory formation.
I explore those relationships in my preliminary model, η = AMQ.
learning-episode-demo.myscho…
📣 The first official post on my Substack, 📘The Blue Book📘, is up.
I hope you'll read it, share it, and—if you like it—subscribe.
I argue there is a bigger insight from the New York Times article ranking education reforms.
matthewakraft.substack.com/p…
Somewhat true.
We know small group and 1:1 tutoring are more effective, so the method of teaching that can be used in very small classes vs large classes is a primary differentiator.
The teacher also needs to be able to control the class, and class size CAN matter for this too.
Lastly, it matters whether you’re talking about very young kids, middle schoolers, college, etc.
#bringbacknuance
#dontbringbackhashtagsnotsurewhyimdoingthisrightnowmustbelackofsleep
"SMALLER CLASSES, SMALLER CLASSES, SMALLER CLASSES", I've been hearing for my whole life.
But it turns out smaller classes don't help much. We should be spending that money on hiring BETTER teachers, not MORE teachers.
noahpinion.blog/p/stop-spend…
My 4yo has 3 older siblings and if I told her she couldn’t practice her letter sounds and try to read like her older siblings, she would see it as an injustice worthy of calling CPS over!
Thanks to the recent NTY piece from @nhannahjones and a litany of discussions about the need to maintain the option to EXIT, I dug up a piece I wrote years ago about socialization and the centrality of the EXIT option. (Warning: it’s a bit long)
justinshell.medium.com/so-wh…
Justin Shell retweeted
NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.
The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1.
We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better.
Underfunding and racism aren't causing schools to fail. @DanielDiMartino explains what is:
Justin Shell retweeted
The Tragedy of Nikole Hannah-Jones 🔥🔥🔥marginalrevolution.com/margi…
Agree with everything except…
I was moved by the piece. I think NHJ was sincere in her beliefs, and sent her child to schools based on those sincere beliefs. She’s now deeply troubled that she may have done the wrong thing.
But she still does’t seem to have reconsidered the accuracy of those beliefs.
Some kids are smarter than others and should go to more challenging schools. Sending smart kids to bad schools in the belief that those schools will then become great is based on zero evidence. It’s ideological faith healing.
Not every kid is going to be able to learn calculus. Most of them are not going to brain surgeons or megalomaniacal AI researchers. Which is fine, we already have too many of those.
“Ironically, she pulls on the heroic history of blacks integrating schools to justify segregating her child.”
In the past, the parents were rightfully trying to get their kids into good schools, exercising parental stewardship at personal peril, knowing they could make a difference at the individual level, and that the aggregate of individual action could bring about systemwide change, but unfortunately a single individual outside the system can rarely ever change a large institution regardless of resources and strength of their desire.
Ooof. Hard reading. Brave to write. True personally, false impersonally.
Everything she documents is a management and accountability failure rather than a resource failure. NYC spends $36k per pupil, the highest of any large district in the country. There haven't been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades.
Ironically, she pulls on the heroic history of blacks integrating schools to justify segregating her child.
A great piece on why voice fails, even a powerful voice, in the absence of the threat of exit. See The tragedy of Jonathan Kozol below
nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magaz…
marginalrevolution.com/margi…
First off, @nhannahjones is brave to even ask this question, but it’s the inevitable result when the rights of the child as an individual are subordinated to a collective goal.
Parents hold temporary decision-making authority as stewards of the child, not owners of that authority in their own right.
In this case, her daughter’s interests were treated as a means to an end, rather than solely as the ends themselves.
Justin Shell retweeted
This is really silly. If we have learned anything from the learning styles myth, it's that the content determines the form. We make instructional decisions based on the effectiveness of the learning not on some vague notion that "screens are bad m'kay."
There are some excellent short video explainers of scientific concepts like Newton's law that are just way better than trying to recreate it with toy cars.
the74million.org/article/how…
Possibly my most controversial opinion is there should be more shame (and consequences) for people who opt out of serving in the military. I get that the military still gets your taxes, but enrollment matters so much.
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