The Classroom Students Crave

Something is wrong with our schools. You already know this. You knew it before you picked up this book. You have felt it as a parent watching your child leave the house in the morning with the weight of the world on their shoulders. You have felt it as a teacher standing at the front of a room full of exhausted, anxious young people and wondering how it came to this. You have felt it as an administrator caught between a system that demands compliance and children who are quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) breaking under the pressure of it.

You have felt it every time a school shooting makes the news and the conversation that follows changes nothing.

This book is for all three of you. The teacher. The parent. The administrator. Because what is happening in our schools is not any one person’s fault, and it will not be fixed by any one person’s effort. It will take all of us, everyone who touches the life of a child, deciding together that we have had enough of what we have built and that we are willing to imagine something better.

How We Got Here

I came to teaching through an unusual door. I was a youth minister before I was a theatre teacher and director, and that sequence shaped everything about how I understood young people and what they needed. In youth ministry, the work was relational before it was instructional. You did not stand at the front of a room and deliver content to passive recipients. You sat in a circle. You asked real questions. You played games that revealed who people actually were. You created the conditions for genuine community and then you watched what grew inside it.

When I moved into the classroom, I brought all of that with me. And what I discovered, confirmed again and again over years of teaching students from sixth grade through twelfth, was that the things that made young people thrive in a youth group were the same things that made them thrive in a classroom. Safety. Play. Real relationships with trusted adults. The freedom to be imperfect while they figured out who they were. The experience of being genuinely seen.

What I also discovered was how rarely our schools provided any of that. And how high the cost of that absence had become.

What This Book Is Not

This is not an academic text. I am not a researcher or a policy expert or a credentialed educational theorist. I am a teacher who loved her students, made mistakes, learned from them, and spent years paying close attention to what actually worked and what did not.

This is not a partisan book. The crisis in our schools does not belong to one political party or one ideological camp. Children are suffering across every zip code, every school district, every demographic. The solutions I propose will not fit neatly into anyone’s existing talking points, because children do not fit neatly into talking points, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not really talking about children.

This is not a book that is easy on the current system. I will say things in these pages that will make some administrators uncomfortable, that will challenge some teachers, that will ask some parents to look honestly at their own role in the pressure their children are under. I say all of it with love: for the profession, for the families, and above all for the young people who are living the consequences of our collective choices right now, today, in real time.

What This Book Is

This is a book about joy. About what happens in a classroom when a teacher decides that the five minutes at the beginning of class belong to the students: to play, to reset, to be genuinely human together before the lesson begins.

This is a book about systems: about the homework that was invented as a punishment and became policy, about the standardized tests that measure compliance and call it intelligence, about the school buildings that look and feel like prisons because in every meaningful sense they function like prisons.

This is a book about safety. Real safety. Not metal detectors and active shooter drills, but the kind of safety that comes from a young person walking into a building and knowing, in their bones, that they are wanted there.

This is also a book about the creativity we are destroying. In a study commissioned by NASA, researchers tested 1,600 children between the ages of three and five and found that 98% of them scored at genius level in creative thinking. By age ten that number had fallen to 30%. By adulthood, less than 2% remained. Twelve years of schooling, and we reduce our children’s creative genius by 96%. We are doing this. We can stop doing this.

A Word About My Classroom

The theatre department really was an island of misfits, as a colleague once observed. She meant it as a gentle joke. I took it as the highest compliment of my career.

Those students taught me everything I know about what young people need. They came into my classroom carrying things I could not always see and sometimes could not fix. But they came back. Voluntarily. Day after day, they came back, because the room was safe and the games were real and they knew, without my having to say it, that I was genuinely glad they were there.

That is the classroom this book is trying to build. Not just in theatre departments, but everywhere. In every subject, every grade level, every school in this country.

Every child deserves a room they want to come back to.

How to Read This Book

The book moves in four directions. We begin with the foundation: the why and the who of teaching, the deeper purpose that gets buried under the daily pressure of the machine. We move into practice: how to actually teach, how to debrief, why play matters, and a full collection of games tested in real classrooms with real students. We turn then to diagnosis: what is broken in our system and why, from ADHD mismanagement to the violation of developmental innocence to the school shooting crisis that is a symptom of everything else. And we close with transformation: a concrete, hopeful, actionable vision for what school could actually look like if we were willing to build it around children rather than around control.

However you read it, read it as someone who still believes things can be different. Because they can.

But it requires us to remember what we are actually here for.

We are here for the children. Let us act like it.