What I’m reading

• Your Review: Alpha School gave some deep insights into a fascinating new school.
  • Spoiler alert: The secret sauce is not AI, not student/teacher ratios (though both important) but… incentives! Give students rewards for doing good work and they do more work better. Almost like… the work they’ll do for most of their adult life!
  • A fun tidbit from the “extracurriculars”:

    • The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)

  • We’ve got a few years before Rory starts true schooling in earnest, but this has me thinking about more creative (and expensive!) options like this. How important is this sort of differentiation in the long run? I went to public school and have done ok (more than ok!), but there has to have been some randomness in that outcome right? I don’t think we’d move to Austin like the author of the article, but what could we do in our area? Petition for a school, try to replicate the effects outside of it? I don’t know yet, but I think the first step is finding a community of like-minded parents in the area.

What Rory is doing

• We spent the 4th up at Tahoe and Rory got to experience a sand beach for the first time. Big fan of sand - digging, dumping, eating.