Fall 2026 Classes

This course aims to present US History in context, in depth, and from the perspective of the people who lived it. Classes are discussion-driven, with students regularly bringing their knowledge of history to bear. They'll take on the roles of historical figures, make evidence-based predictions, and build foundations for their own independent, reasoned views of the world today.

History ought to be just about the easiest subject in the world to fall in love with: it's the study of the most important things that ever happened and the most interesting lives ever lived. But, too often, kids say they find it boring. I don't think this tells us something about kids; it tells us something about the state of history education. The metrics by which curricula are measured are, almost exclusively, test results limited to factual knowledge and a narrow range of interpretive skills. Knowing things and being skilled matter, obviously, but think about what's not measured. Do students see value in history and want to keep learning about it once their grades are no longer at stake? Do they understand history as something of practical value that they put into practice in order to understand the world around them?

People don't dislike history. Dan Carlin's history podcast is one of the most popular in the world, and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton became one of the most popular Broadway musicals in living memory... yet no one is rushing to the bookstore to pick up the newest textbook.

My aim is to help students see what is motivating, intriguing, and inspiring about history itself, and that's one of the reasons that I don't use a textbook. I've invested a lot of late nights into crafting the readings for this class myself—at this point, hundreds of pages of them. I certainly won't claim to be a Ron Chernow, but my students have often requested additional readings and seem to enjoy what I write. Being fully in control of the readings also allows me to make them serve the class, rather than building the class around texts that someone else wrote: I can lay precise foundations for the discussions that students will get the most out of, and I can temporarily hold back the “spoilers” that would make it impossible to ask them for their evidence-informed predictions and judgments.

Not everything is mine, of course: we also read many primary sources. My groups mix students of various ages and skills, so in the first year these usually come with a “translation”: a plain-English version students can read against the original, so 1700s language doesn't present a barrier for a student who is perfectly capable of handling the ideas. (Students also practice creating their own translations as an exercise in understanding these texts.)

The first year also leans heavily on games and historical problem-solving. Students might measure the earth the way Eratosthenes did (yes, it's relevant), play a competitive game to experience the effects of British trade restrictions, run a currency-and-inflation scenario about the financing of the Revolution, and advise Washington on whether to assume the state debts.

The class runs for two years, which gives us space to explore the parts of history that get glossed over in a typical one-year course: the colonial period, for example, or the proposals at the Constitutional Convention that didn't make it to the final document. We dig deep on controversies and conflicts of ideas, and I hold to a strict principle of keeping my own views out of the classroom. My role is to encourage students to think well—often by playing devil's advocate and by pressing them to ground claims in evidence—not to lead them to any particular conclusions.

Students and families are in charge of how much time they wish to commit between sessions. I provide work options regularly, most commonly in the form of writing prompts on topics of upcoming class discussions. This means that there are opportunities to share work in class without other students being stuck in “spectator mode”; everyone can contribute, and the students who write (or even just think) about the prompts in advance can enjoy the satisfaction of being extra prepared. There are no grades and no tests. I do ask that students do their best to keep up with readings between classes, but everything beyond that is optional.

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The goal of The Art of Figuring Things Out is to help students make the best use of their own minds: to think more effectively and independently. There are many classes out there with similar goals, of course, and many of them are valuable, but few capture the breadth of what it means to think. Some lean toward formal logic and argumentative structure, offering tools for winning debates and honing academic essays. Others focus on hot-button topics: social media literacy, the issues in the headlines, and so on—even though these “of the moment” issues may not be the priorities of the future. All of this can be worthwhile, but take a moment to think about how much these approaches leave out.

Consider the following situations:

• Orren is a month into middle school, and he just got his second math test back. It's another F. He remembers when his fifth grade teacher would tell him, trying to be reassuring, that “not everyone's a math person.” He had wondered at the time if it was a polite way of saying he was bad at math. Now he's sure that it was—and that it was true.
• Priya has become convinced that her lucky socks help her win at soccer. Her brother laughed at her and called it a “dumb superstition,” so she made a spreadsheet comparing wins to socks worn. The numbers lined up: her team has won almost 30% more games when she's been wearing the lucky socks. Now she's planning to wear them to every game... and she's considering whether she should stop washing them, too.
• The end-of-year trip got canceled because someone stole money from the fundraiser envelope, and Sarah heard that it was Daniel. They were best friends in elementary school, and even though they've grown apart a bit since then, Sarah would have ignored the rumor if she'd only heard it from one person. But she heard it from three different people, none of whom even hang out with each other. What are the odds? When Daniel calls her in the afternoon, Sarah doesn't bother to pick up.

There's something wrong with the thinking in all these cases—but what habits and skills would these kids need in order to have a better chance of getting it right?

Orren's problem is that he settled on the first explanation that came to mind. There might be all kinds of reasons why that particular explanation came to mind first, but the point remains: he didn't keep looking. What if the tests were unfairly hard? (Did other students in the class do poorly, too?) What if his fifth grade teacher had actually been talking about himself not being a “math person,” and Orren just needed a teacher who could explain it better? There might be all kinds of other explanations—and if Orren was in the habit of not stopping at the first that came to mind, he might have discovered them.

Priya took one good step: she collected data. But when she saw that wins lined up with wearing her lucky socks, she didn't stop to think: does that mean the socks caused the wins? If she knew to dig deeper than correlation, she might realize that the games she usually wears those socks to are home games; for away games, her dad packs her bag and grabs socks at random. This realization wouldn't prove anything by itself, but she would, at least, have something else to test before giving up on hygiene.

Sarah gave credence to the rumor because she heard it from three people who don't hang out with each other. She didn't consider whether they might have anything else in common, though, and when she brushed off Daniel's phone call, it was based more on an emotional reaction than on a conscious thought process. If she thought it through more, she might have realized that even though the three people don't hang out, they do eat lunch around the same corner of the cafeteria, making it entirely possible they'd all overheard one person blaming Daniel. How confident should she be in the rumor? She might think it through and decide 15%, maybe 20% at most—not enough to end a longtime friendship over. It's still a bit of a gut sense, but it's a thoughtful one.

Most critical thinking classes make one big assumption: there's already an argument. Students read the provided passage and find the fallacy, or they compare the strengths of two essays. Those are useful skills, but a lot of the real challenges in life are ones where you're starting from scratch. How do you come up with hypotheses of your own? For that matter, how do you make the sorts of observations that would lead you to notice that something needs explanation in the first place?

Here's an oversimplification of the process that students will practice in this course:

• Notice that something needs explaining
• Describe it precisely: what do I actually know, and what am I assuming?
• Generate possible explanations without settling for the first/most obvious
• Analyze them: do they hold up?
• Consider how they could be tested to determine which is right.

Running throughout this will be the theme of calibrating confidence. Many classes encourage students, as a point of rhetoric, to make bold, confident claims. In this class, students will be encouraged to earn that sort of confidence—and, when they haven't, to use terms like “likely,” “possible,” and “probable” with precision.

The two semesters

Each semester of this class can stand alone: they complement each other, but the first isn't a prerequisite for the second. During the first semester, we'll focus on thinking about the world: situations, systems, and events. The second semester will shift the focus to other reasoning with and against other people's minds: for example, how to “step inside” views you don't hold to understand them better, how to catch yourself when your own mind starts coming up with reasons to believe what you want to believe, and how to test claims that are made by others.

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Sentence diagramming is a way of analyzing a sentence and drawing out how it actually works—the role of each word and clause, and how they all relate to one another. It turns grammar into something like an analytical puzzle, rather than a set of rules to memorize. The small group of students I did this with last year enjoyed it so much that they asked to continue through the summer!

No formal grammar background is needed for this class. I teach the grammatical concepts as they come up, and for students who want extra review on the foundations, I'm working on an app customized for this course that they can use between sessions. (My current students are testing it now.) For making the diagrams themselves, we use letsdiagram.com, which makes it easy for students to share and discuss their work during class; they will also use this website to work through practice diagrams between sessions.

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