Newton Prep

Congratulations, Jackson! It's wonderful to see you achieve your long-held baseball goal. Well done, sir.

Love the explosiveness, B. Great work.

Great work, Garren. You continue making big strides in your game. Consistency and relentless dedication are paying off.

Not just a team player. A player committed to continual improvement and being a great teammate. And the results show.

Glad you got up there, Jackson. You look good. Loving the movement and changes in pace and location on these pitches. Thank you for sharing.

Jackson, this is a great example of identifying facets of your mechanics you want to improve and then focusing your efforts on them. You're looking good. Well done.

Absolutely. That speed work is paying off, too.

So glad you went up there, Carson. Your high character, consistency, and work effort show in your performance, every day.

Newton Prep launches Robeson for equal interscholastic opportunity insights.newtonprep.org/newt…

Loving the consistency, Kaleb. Well done.

100%. This level of effort and consistency is what it's all about, Kaleb. You're setting a great example.

Why wait until after birth? Play @BrianCainPeak podcasts while the baby is still in utero!

It's genuinely interesting that any parent would fall for the @alphaschool marketing gimmick "crush academics in 2 hours" per day. Meanwhile, in China, consumers now have access to flying taxis, none of which were engineered by people educated in a two-hour school day. We have now reached peak AI gullibility, where the label can be slapped on something as important as the education of our children and parents fall for it.

Loving it, Kaleb!

Congratulations, @Oz_Z_2k26. We have some questions for @Alphaschool. Oz says he will fail an assignment if he does not attract 100 followers by October 9th. Why is that not an abusive teaching practice whose real purpose is promoting @Alphaschool? Is Alpha School grading the content of these posts — accuracy, substance — or only the follower count? Has Alpha School provided a template or coaching to shape these posts from Oz and his schoolmates? How broad is the cohort of students receiving this assignment? Why is Alpha School so obsessed with time-bounded learning? First the two-hour school day. Now the five-day AP course. What comes next — a thirty-day doctorate? What were the actual scores students received? Will Alpha verify these with screenshots of the score reports? Please state how many students accepted the challenge, show proof of results for each, and disclose the score distribution. Which AP subject and which specific unit did Oz study? Were students allowed to choose? Was this the students' first exposure to the unit, or a review of material already covered? How many student-hours per day went into the exercise, on average? Were guides or teachers available for questions? What role did AI play beyond "breaking down concepts?" Were students allowed to choose their own models? Is "Learning to Learn" a named, recurring program at Alpha? Did students complete this exercise individually, or alongside other students working the same challenge? Are students at @TXSportsAcademy given this same assignment?

Teaching is a noble profession. Much of it takes place, however, in a coercive, anti-competitive system — one incapable of compensating teachers sensibly because it lacks the pricing signals a market economy produces. From 2000 to 2019, public schools added district administrators at more than ten times the rate they added teachers and students: forwardozaukee.com/important… Many districts now have more administrators than teachers. Many of these administrators justify their existence by imposing bureaucratic constraints that do nothing to help teachers teach. Some spend their time building monuments to themselves — diverting resources from the classroom. Football stadiums costing $40 million or more are one example. "Burnout" is a symptom of lost control. Lost control produces helplessness. Helplessness produces hopelessness. The path back from dysfunction begins with understanding the root cause: compulsory schooling funded by confiscation of private property was always doomed to failure. Teaching and force make bad partners. When teaching returns fully to the realm of peaceful, voluntary transactions, teachers will have more control over how they practice their profession — and an opportunity to receive compensation aligned with the value they provide.

We applaud coaches for seeking and implementing new ways to help athletes improve. What's missing, too often, is use of the scientific method and publication of data for independent evaluation. For example, what is the actual resistance hypothesis underlying "The Anchor?" Are we saying that resistance training is the best way to correct the fine motor movements the athlete must execute over distances measured in inches and at high speed? If so, how do we prove that hypothesis? What kind of experimental set-up do we need? What is the proper "dosage" level for the training? How many sets? How many repetitions? What magnitude of resistance? Does countering an ingrained mitt path with resistance bands cause the athlete to use different muscle groups in different ways? Given that the resistance will of necessity slow his mitt along any given path, will resistance training cause his brain to re-compute when he should react to the stimulus of the pitch in a deleterious way? Does it change his accelerators and decelerators in a helpful, harmful, or neutral way? Highly-credentialed coaches should especially be careful in making poorly-tested claims about the efficacy of new training techniques. Their advice may be followed to the detriment of the people they are trying to help. Anecdotal may be better than no evidence at all, but is no replacement for solid experimental design.

Donald Trump's ranking of U.S. presidents, including his proclamation of himself as the "greatest," is a good starting point for conversations about knowledge, learning, education, and logic that can take place in classrooms and at family dinners across the United States, beginning today. How do we know what we know? What are the different states of knowledge? What is the difference between assertion and fact? What does it mean to be the "greatest?" What does it mean to be a failure? What is the difference between ordinal and cardinal? What is the standard of performance for elected officials in the United States? Should appraisals of performance for such officials be evaluated against this standard, or any standard at all? How are averages computed? Assume a standard, such as fidelity to the law. What does it mean to be "average" in relation to that standard? Would Jefferson have approved of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies? Would Andrew Jackson have approved of Wilson's Federal Reserve Act? If presidents at a given rank would have disrespected or even loathed one another's policies, what does that say about the basis or sensibility of the rankings? If presidents of the same rank in Trump's system would have disagreed violently with one another, what are the implications for his rankings? How much do Americans really know about the policies of Polk, Cleveland, and dozens of other presidents in this list? Do they truly know enough to agree or disagree with the list? Would it be a good use of time for every American to read at least one biography of each president, and then to form their own judgements?