“Why is this important?”

In May, I pulled up a second chair and invited the question to sit with me. Then I pulled up a third for anyone willing to join us.

Every Monday since, the three of us have talked.

First, a plant.

A rhododendron taught me that some questions are not meant to be answered on the spot. They are meant to be carried. Through your week, through your conversations, through your ordinary moments.

Then, a law.

Price’s Law taught me that the work worth doing is usually the slow part. The part that builds capability. The part a shortcut skips.

Then, a valley.

The valley taught me that growth lives where certainty does not. Struggle is not always evidence of failure. Sometimes it is evidence that growth has finally begun.

I thought I was collecting pieces of an answer.

Looking back, they were all pointing at the same thing.

To name it, I had to borrow an older word.

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The Scrutiny Is Everywhere. The Telos Is Nowhere.

Telos (τέλος) is an Ancient Greek word. It means end, purpose, or goal.

Aristotle argued that everything has one. To know what a thing is, or to judge whether it works, you first have to know what it is for.

The telos of an acorn is to become an oak.
The telos of an eye is to see.

You can judge both because the destination is fixed. An acorn that becomes an oak has succeeded. An eye that cannot see has failed.

Finding a telos is simple.
Until it isn’t.

Ask ten people what school is for and you will get ten answers. Preparation for work. Citizenship. Character. Fulfillment. Critical thinking. The list keeps growing.

Look closer at what is happening. Each person is not just naming a purpose. They are naming their own. Each one measures the school by whether it delivered the future they wanted.

That is why the argument never ends. The sides are not aiming at the same finish line.

According to Aristotle, none of this should be possible. You cannot judge whether a thing works until you know what it is for. Yet everyone judges education, all the time, without hesitation.

The scrutiny is everywhere. The telos is nowhere.

So I spent a week looking for the thing underneath the noise. The shared purpose every side was standing on. The common thread that would finally reconcile them.

I did not find one.

I found that the absence of one was the answer.

It is human to want results. To want a fixed telos. To want a line in the sand that says, “Here is what education is for.”

But there is no line to draw. Education cannot be pinned to a single telos, because the thing it acts on cannot be pinned to one.

A child.

An acorn has one future. A child has thousands. Both arrive unfinished. Only one of them knows its ending.

School’s purpose is contested because a child’s future is open.

I had expected to find a shared destination beneath the disagreement.

Instead I found an open door.

Misunderstood Purpose

Underneath “Why is this important?” lives another question.

For weeks I thought there were three of us sitting at the table.

Me.

The Question.

And You.

I miscounted.

Every good question eventually introduces you to its friends. The rhododendron. The law. The valley. Each one was pointing toward the same guest.

The Unknown.

It had been sitting with us the whole time, waiting to be noticed.

The Unknown is not a visitor in education. It is the landscape education is built on.

Once I saw that, the telos question finally shifted.

If a child’s future is open, then delivering students to a particular destination was never the assignment. Destination was the wrong lens all along.

Maybe the purpose of education is not destination.

Maybe it is navigation.

Not delivering students to a particular future. Instead, preparing them to meet whichever future arrives.

A destination tells you where to go. Navigation teaches you what to do when you do not know where you are.

Sooner or later every student finds themselves there. The map stops matching the terrain. Plans break. Dreams change. Technology reshapes the landscape. Something unexpected appears around the bend.

The telos of school, I believe, is the one thing no one can argue with. Not a place to reach. A readiness for whatever arrives.

Our students will meet the Unknown again and again. It is where every meaningful thing begins. Every discovery. Every love. Every calling. Every act of faith.

Are we teaching them to navigate it, or only to walk with a map in hand?

I fear the latter.

How you build that readiness is the question the rest of this series will chase.

The Right Question

For most of history, knowledge was scarce and hard to reach. A student’s advantage came from holding more of it than the person beside them.

That world is ending.

A student can now ask a machine almost anything and receive an answer in seconds.

As information becomes abundant, something else becomes scarce.

Direction.

Judgment.

Discernment.

The ability to move toward discovery when the answer is not already known.

Knowledge alone is no longer enough.

The harder question is knowing what to ask next. What to trust. Which path to pursue. How to keep moving when certainty runs out.

If that is true, navigation is not merely a useful skill.

It may be the most important one.

If it is, a more important question emerges.

What makes navigation possible?

What allows some people to move through uncertainty while others become stuck?

What are the essential components of human navigation?

That is the project.

Over the coming months, I am going to explore the navigators who have gone before us. Explorers, scientists, teachers, philosophers, writers, and religious figures.

People who ventured into some form of the Unknown and returned with insight.

They are navigators not because they all reached some destination, but because they learned something about how human beings move when the destination is unclear.

My suspicion is that navigation is not a single skill.

It is a collection of capacities.

Doubt.

Trust.

Discernment.

Orientation.

Capability.

Reflection.

Perhaps others I have not discovered yet.

Each may be a component of something larger.

A framework.

One that could help explain how people navigate uncertainty and, more importantly, how a school might help students develop that capacity for themselves.

This summer, I am going to look for those pieces.

One essay at a time.

In September, I will begin testing what I find in a real classroom with real students.

Not because I think I have the answers.

Because I think I have finally been introduced to the right question.

The seat is still open.

See you Monday.

— Chase

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Next Week

This past Sunday, a pastor at my church led a sermon about doubt. I'm convinced doubt is essential to human navigation. Next Monday I'll share what I learn as I sit with that claim throughout the week.

Not because I lacked ambition.

Because I had too much of it.

Every new passion felt like a mountain worth climbing.

A new career path.

A new skill.

A new idea.

The beginning was always exhilarating.

The view was clear.

The summit seemed close.

Then the terrain changed.

Progress slowed.

Confidence faded.

The climb became steeper than I expected.

And eventually I would leave.

For years I called this curiosity.

I told myself I was simply a person with many interests.

Looking back, I see something different.

I was not chasing knowledge.

I was chasing beginnings.

The moment a mountain stopped giving me excitement and started demanding something from me, I looked for another one.

Another peak.

Another burst of confidence.

Another fresh start.

Maybe you’ve done it too.

Maybe you’ve mistaken difficulty for a sign you chose the wrong path.

Maybe you’ve stood in the middle of a climb and wondered whether turning back would be easier than continuing.

I have.

What I eventually discovered is that every worthwhile mountain contains a valley.

Not at the bottom.

In the middle.

The valley is where confidence disappears before competence arrives.

Where the summit vanishes behind clouds.

Where progress becomes difficult to measure.

Most people interpret the valley as a warning.

A sign they should find a different mountain.

I spent years believing that.

Now I think the opposite is true.

The valley is not evidence that you chose the wrong mountain.

It may be the first evidence that you chose the right one.

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Chasing Mountains

Mountain chasing was explained to me in two ways by the world.

The first explanation I found came from psychology.

In graduate school, I encountered the Dunning-Kruger effect. Put simply, confidence rises faster than competence. When we begin something new, we know so little that we cannot yet see the size of the mountain in front of us.

Then reality arrives.

We learn enough to recognize how much we do not know. Confidence falls. We enter the valley.

Capability finally begins to grow there.

When I read that, I realized I had been confusing discovery with mastery. The dopamine rush of finding a mountain often felt the same as conquering one.

Once that feeling disappeared, I assumed the mountain was no longer worth climbing.

So I left.

The second explanation came from faith.

One Sunday my pastor preached on Proverbs 12:11 ESV:

“Those who work their land will have abundant food, but whoever follows worthless pursuits lacks sense.”

The message resonated more than I expected.

For years I had treated discomfort as a signal to move on.

The valley meant I should find a different mountain.

The verse suggested the opposite.

Work the ground beneath your feet. Stay where growth is possible.

What struck me was that psychology and theology were saying the same thing in two different languages.

One said capability grows in the valley.

The other said to stop chasing worthless pursuits and work the land you’ve been given.

The message underneath both was the same.

The mountain I was looking for was never the next one.

It was the one I was already climbing.

Beauty in the Valley

The valley is not failure.

It is the first honest measurement of the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

That is why so many people avoid it.

The valley strips away illusion. It reveals the gap between confidence and competence. It forces us to confront our limitations without giving us a shortcut around them.

But it is also where transformation happens.

The valley is a liminal space. A place you are not meant to stay in forever, but a place you must pass through.

Every meaningful thing I have learned has required a valley.

Teaching.

Leadership.

Faith.

Relationships.

None of them rewarded me for feeling capable. They rewarded me for staying when I did not want to.

The valley taught me something I spent years trying to avoid.

Being stuck does not mean you are failing.

Sometimes it means you are finally growing.

The only condition is that you stay long enough to find out.

True Peaks

Until recently, I thought the purpose of a mountain was to reach the top.

Now I think the purpose of a mountain is to become the kind of person who can climb it.

The summit is simply where that transformation becomes visible.

That is what makes the valley so important.

The valley teaches lessons the peak never can.

Patience.

Humility.

Discipline.

The ability to continue when progress is no longer exciting.

Anyone can begin a climb.

Most people do.

Few remain when the novelty disappears.

Fewer still stay long enough to discover what exists on the other side of difficulty.

The strange thing is that the reward is rarely what you expected.

The mountain changes you more than it impresses you.

The summit lasts for a moment.

But the climber remains.

That is why I no longer see success as reaching a peak.

Success is staying with a climb long enough for it to shape you.

The peak is not the achievement.

The peak is the evidence.

What This Has to Do With School

I was a mountain chaser.

Students feel pressure by the world to be mountain chasers.

It took me most of my adult life to find out the valley was more important.

If it took me this long, how is a teenager supposed to find it alone?

That question troubles me as a teacher.

Because I am not convinced our schools are helping.

In my classroom, a student who fails a test on Monday can retake it on Tuesday for a better grade. To clarify, there is no prerequisite to a retake other than not liking the grade you got the first time. There is no other requirement. They do not even need to look at, or review their first attempt.

The first question after a failed test is rarely:

“What did I get wrong?”

The first question is:

“When is the retake?”

I have asked students:

“Would you do the retake if it didn’t change your grade?”

The answer is always no.

That answer reveals something important.

We have become obsessed with the summit.

The score.

The grade.

The outcome.

We assess students at the peak instead of in the valley. And because we do not put emphasis on the valley, our students assume we do not care how they get to the peak.

I made this case at length last week, but I am here today to make a different claim.

The problem is that a student who has never been allowed to struggle has never been taught to climb.

The valley does not disappear because we avoid it.

It waits.

Eventually life removes the retake button.

A young person who has never learned to navigate uncertainty will either spend their life chasing new peaks or become stranded in the first valley they cannot escape.

That is why I believe our responsibility has changed.

We must become sherpas.

People who know the valley well enough to walk beside them through it.

The danger is larger than a single student who never learns to climb.

The valley compounds.

A student who never learns to navigate uncertainty becomes an adult who cannot guide others through it. A child who grows up believing struggle is evidence of failure becomes a parent who removes every obstacle from their own children’s path. An educator who sees the valley as a hindrance teaches students to avoid rather than cross it.

Eventually an entire generation forgets what the valley is for.

That is the risk.

Not that our students will fail.

That they will never learn what failure is trying to teach them.

In our attempt to create equitable environments through modification and accommodation, we should be willing to ask an uncomfortable question:

Are we still leading?

Or are we clearing the trail so completely that students never experience the terrain?

Equity is not the removal of adversity.

It is making sure every student has the opportunity, support, and resources to climb.

The terrain matters.

The terrain is where resilience is built.

The terrain is where judgment develops.

The terrain is where a young person discovers what they are capable of.

If we smooth every path, shorten every climb, and remove every valley, we may produce students who arrive at the summit without ever learning how they got there.

The goal cannot be to eliminate the valley.

The goal must be to teach students how to navigate it.

Just as importantly, we must give them enough time to remain there.

Growth is slow.

Competence is slow.

Character development is slow.

The valley does not reveal its lessons to people rushing through it.

And that may be our greatest challenge.

We live in a culture that worships speed.

Productivity.

Immediacy.

Instant gratification.

Frictionless experiences.

More output.

More efficiency.

More packed into the same eight hours.

Everything around us is designed to shorten the journey.

To remove resistance.

To get us to the summit faster.

But mountains do not work that way.

No one becomes a climber by taking a gondola to the top.

No one learns the terrain by riding the chairlift over it.

The terrain itself is the lesson.

The loose footing.

The exhaustion.

The uncertainty.

The valley.

Yet we increasingly design systems that bypass the very conditions that produce growth. We look for shortcuts around the mountain because the climb takes time. We search for ways to move students over the terrain rather than through it.

A screen with AI is the fastest gondola ever built. It will carry a student to the summit in seconds and teach them nothing about the climb. It can look like a mountain. Only a human can walk through the valley.

So the question is no longer should we allow the valley to exist in schools.

The question is whether we still have the patience to let students walk through it.

And that responsibility belongs to all of us.

Teachers.

Parents.

Policy makers.

Coaches.

Mentors.

Sherpas.

We need to reevaluate the value of the valley.

Stop treating it as failure.

Stop glorifying the peak while avoiding the climb.

Stop measuring success solely by who reached the summit first or unscathed.

The summit is only visible because of the valley beneath it.

Our job is not to carry young people around the difficult terrain.

Our job is to know the terrain well enough to walk beside them through it.

Because one day they will become the guides.

And if they never learn to cross a valley themselves, who will be there to lead the next generation through theirs?

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Next Week

I am still carrying the question,

“Why is this important?”

Out loud, watching what the world gives back. I have carried it through a plant, a law, and a valley. Next week I stop adding pieces and lay the whole answer on the table. The one I have been chasing all year, arriving the same week the school year ends. The thing I will finally be able to say to a student who asks me why any of this is important.

See you Monday.

— Chase

I found an article called “The Mathematical Reason Most People Never Make It.” It was about creators. About the algorithm, about why a few posts carry an entire account while the rest go quiet. I clicked it for myself, eager to know how to make this thing grow.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped reading about Substack and started reading about my classroom.

That is the project here, if you are new. I am hunting for an honest answer to the oldest question a student ever asks, which is why is this important. I am doing it out loud, one essay at a time. This is the third stop on that hunt.

Price’s Law and the algorithm

The article was about a principle called Price’s Law. It comes from Derek de Solla Price, a historian of science. The TLDR is that in any group of people doing work, most of the work gets done by a very small slice of them. Not half the people. The square root of the people. For example, in a company of one hundred people, ten of them produce half of what gets produced. Fifty, and about seven carry it. The crowd fills in the rest.

You see the shape of Price’s Law cleanly on social media, which is where the article found it. A creator posts a hundred times. Around ten of those posts drive almost all of the growth. The other ninety go quiet. Every creator knows the feeling of the ninety. A post goes out, and the world does not answer.

Those ninety posts are not failure. They are how a creator learns, and how the algorithm learns the creator. The ninety are where a creator finds their voice, their real audience, what lands and what does not. Nobody hits their ten without first posting their ninety. The ninety is the training. The ten is just where the training finally shows.

Creators chase the ten. Once they find what works, they want to live there, they want every post to be a hit. That is the dream of the algorithm. Find the square root and never leave it.

The same shape, inside school

Reading this, I could not stop thinking about my school, because a classroom runs on the exact same split. Every course a student takes has a ninety percent and a ten percent. The ninety is the work that builds the student. The ten — the square root — is the result that shows.

The school, like the creator chasing the post that hits, fell in love with the ten and slowly stopped tending the ninety that produced it.

The school’s ninety percent

The ninety percent is the training. It is the quiet, undervalued work that builds a person, the same work a creator does in every post that lands on no one. The breakthrough, the day a whole room finally gets it, is the ten. That ten only arrives because of every hour that built toward it. A creator who decided the silent posts did not count would never write the one that breaks through.

A classroom changes the metaphor in one way. Most of the ninety percent does not belong to the student. It belongs to the teacher.

I facilitate the ninety percent of a student’s year in my specific subject. The teaching, the setup, the scaffolding, the thousand small moves no one grades, the way a hard idea gets broken apart and built back up. The student does his share, the practice, the struggle, the reps. I am responsible for the conditions that make his share possible.

There is a quiet cruelty in that. We are responsible for producing the ninety percent, and the ninety percent is the part the school values least. So the work looks trivial. The people holding the most important part of a student’s year are treated as though they hold the least important job in the building.

You will see later why this is no suprise.

The school’s ten percent

The student controls the ten percent. The score, the reflection, the thing that shows up on paper. The student embodies the result.

The ten percent is what gets measured. The test, the grade, the observed lesson, the number that goes in a column and travels up to the district. It is what a student produces and what the school records.

It is real. It is also a highlight. The smallest, shiniest slice of a year, the part that holds still long enough to be counted. A test score tells you what a student could show on one morning. It does not tell you the year. It does not tell you the ninety percent that made the morning possible. It is never the whole story.

The institution idolizes the ten percent

The school did what the creator does. It found the ten percent and idolized it. It measures the ten, funds the ten, builds its decisions on the ten. The grant follows the test score. The administrator’s review follows the graduation rate. The whole building is tuned to produce the ten and celebrate it the moment it arrives.

The gradebook says it plainly. The ninety percent of a student’s day, the practice, the classwork, every struggled-through problem, the part that actually builds him, carries almost no weight in the grade. The weight is carried mostly by tests and assessments. The square root, showing its face once again.

That is not a quiet accounting choice. It is a signal — one that has a compounding reach. A student reads the gradebook and learns where his effort is worth spending. A parent reads it and learns what to push their child toward. It is the clearest message a school sends a family about what matters, and it says the part building the child barely counts.

No one ever voted that the ninety did not matter. The institution forgot it the way institutions forget anything they stop measuring. It kept the ninety on the page and let the value drain out of it.

The trap

There is a reason none of this is easy to walk away from. A reason why we can not just “flip the switch” to prioritize focus on the ninety.

The ten percent is not just a grade. It is the currency of a student’s future.

Colleges read it as readiness. Scholarships are awarded on it. Financial aid formulas turn it into real dollars. A grade point is not a mark in a gradebook anymore.

It is the price of admission and the size of the check.

So a parent is not foolish for caring about the ten. A parent is forced to. A student is not shallow for chasing it. His future is wired to it.

The school is just as trapped. Its grants, its rankings, its administrators’ jobs all ride on the ten percent. No one in the building is free to simply choose the ninety.

So the ninety becomes a luxury. The slow work, and the time it demands, begins to feel optional, something a family indulges only once the result is secured. Asked to choose just one, almost everyone takes the ten, every time. If they cannot have both, they will take the result that opens the door and let the learning be a byproduct, if it shows up at all.

So ask yourself honestly. Imagine two schools. The first hands your child real challenge, builds real skill, and reports it truthfully as an eighty. The second guarantees a perfect hundred and a seat at a good college, and you are never quite sure what was learned underneath it. Which do you pick?

Most people pick the hundred. Not because they do not value the work, but because the world has told them, in money and in admissions letters, that the grade is the thing that counts. That is the trap. Everyone says they want the learning, and everyone is steered to buy the grade instead. It is the trap every student is born into.

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AI automated the ten percent

For a long time forgetting the ninety was survivable, because the ninety did not need anyone to value it. It survived in the one place the institution could not reach: the student himself. The work of the ninety still had to pass through a real person. The struggle still had to happen in someone. Now the ninety can be skipped by something.

That is what is changing. Artificial intelligence reaches that last place. It offers every student the same bargain the institution already made: keep the ten, skip the ninety, one screen at a time. Get to the finished ten percent, for free. The answer, the essay, the lab conclusion, handed over clean and complete.

Every step of the ninety skipped.

The irony is that the ten percent still gates college, signals readiness, and unlocks the scholarship. Yet it is now the one thing a machine produces instantly, better than any adult alive. Better than the student. Better than me. The whole system runs on a currency a machine can counterfeit for free, and schools still grade students on whether they can mint it by hand.

The shortcut is not the real damage. The lesson underneath it is. Every time a student takes the finished answer, the tool teaches him something. That the struggle was never necessary. That the hours of underlying work were a tax he no longer has to pay. That perseverance is obsolete. He is not just skipping the ninety percent. He is learning to believe it never mattered. It is the same lesson the gradebook, the school, and the colleges have been teaching him all along.

Now the machine teaches it too.

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Why we must not forget about the ninety

The ninety percent is not a product to generate. It is the work it takes to get there. No one can generate the hours that turn a student into someone who can do the work. The value flipped while the gradebook was not looking. The part the school priced at almost nothing is the only part still worth a human’s time.

Two things are true at once, and they pull in opposite directions.

One. A student cannot see why the ninety percent matters, because his entire education has taught him to chase the ten. The test was the goal. The grade was the goal. He was trained to skip to the result.

Two. The world he is walking into will not need a body to produce the ten. It will need people who can endure the ninety. People who can sit in the unfinished middle of something hard, find value in it, and grow through it. That is the exact capacity the trap is training out of him.

That leaves me the strangest job in the building, and for a long time I thought of it as impossible. Convince a fifteen-year-old to pour himself into the part the gradebook values at almost nothing, while colleges, scholarships, and a machine all tell him it does not matter.

How could I talk a student out of the most rational thing he could do?

I had it backwards. I am not standing outside the ninety percent trying to sell it. I am responsible for it. The student produces the ten. We facilitate almost all of the rest. The job is not to win an argument about a gradebook. It is to stop grading our own work by the student’s ten percent — the highlight that was never the whole story. And to teach a student to navigate the trap, the one that has parents, colleges, and the whole system convinced the grade is the prize. To value the part that builds over the part that shows, even when the world keeps paying for the show.

“Why is this important?”

I started this hunt looking for the trick to grow a newsletter. What I have instead is a question I still can not finish and a stack of essays the world has not answered yet. This newsletter is my ninety percent too. The slow part. The part that builds the person who could one day do the rest.

I told you at the start that I am hunting for an honest answer to one question:

“Why is this important?”

I still do not have the whole thing, but I am slowly collecting it in pieces.

The last piece was that the answer is not something I can hand a student. It is something he has to carry himself until the world hands it back.

This is the next: The thing worth carrying is the ninety percent. Not the answer, which anyone can get for free now, but the slow work of becoming the kind of person who could have produced it. “Why is this important?” Because the doing was always the point. It is the one part of a person a machine cannot generate, and it is the part the world is now teaching students to skip.

The ninety percent is building my students this week, in the work they cannot yet see the point of. It is building me, in the question I cannot put down.

It is building you, in whatever you keep wanting to skip.

So I am still carrying the question, out loud, watching what the world gives back. This week it gave me something I cannot stop looking at. The students skipping the ninety do not feel like they are losing anything. They feel capable. A finished answer looks exactly like understanding, right up until someone asks them to do it without the screen.

Eighteen years of I can. Then, the first time it truly counts, I cannot, and the time to have become the person who could is already gone.

There is a name for the distance between feeling capable and being capable. I will be back next week with it.

— Chase

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This spring the bald patches still hadn’t come back, so my wife Becca and I went looking for a replacement. At a garden center here in South Jersey we found a Rhododendron. It worked for me, Becca liked it, and we still didn’t buy it. We wanted to see one in full bloom first.

That decision to wait is the reason for everything that happened next.

We take the same route home from church every Sunday. Same roads for three years. The Sunday after the garden center, at a stop light we looked over at a house we’d passed maybe a hundred and fifty times. There they were. Rhododendrons. Blooming out front. They had been passed by for the last three years. We were just seeing them now. We noticed them out front of the diner we went to later that week. And then again, and then again.

Once we were looking for Rhododendrons, the world was full of them. Once we were carrying the question, the world became full of answers.

Psychologists call this the frequency illusion. You notice something once, and suddenly it is everywhere, and the science says nothing actually changed out in the world, your brain just started flagging what was always there. I do not want the word illusion, because illusion makes it sound like a harmless trick of attention. What happened to us was bigger than noticing. We were carrying a real question, and the world did not just show us Rhododendrons. It answered our question.

For a while now I have been carrying a different question. It is the one every teacher gets, usually from the back of the room, usually in a tone that is half boredom and half challenge.

Why is this important?

For most of my life I could not have answered them genuinely, and now I know why. I thought school was just true. It was the air I breathed. It is simply there, you move through it, and you never once stop to see it.

I had never carried the question for myself.

Here is what I am beginning to understand about that question from the back of the room.

When a student asks why is this important, the lesson is just the costume. Underneath it, they are reaching for something much bigger. They want to know why any of this matters. How is a person supposed to tell what is worth their time. That is one of the deepest questions a human being can ask, and they are asking it about a worksheet, because the worksheet is what happens to be in front of them.

That is the trap.

Teachers falling for the surface question.

When we answer the question about the worksheet, we teach them the question was small — something you settle once and move past. We never tell them it is worth carrying for themselves.

Which means why is this important may not be a question I can answer for them at all. Becca and I never bought the Rhododendrons. But we got our answer — and not because anyone handed it to us. We got it by carrying the question ourselves until the world answered it. Nobody could have done that carrying for us.

So my job was never to be the person with that answer. My job is to hand a student the question, to make them believe it is worth caring about, and then to get out of the way while they carry it.

The next time a student asks why is this important, do not answer it.

Not right away. Hear it for what it actually is, and treat it like the real question it is trying to be. Then hand it back to them. Make them want to carry it out the door, into their week, into their life, because that is the only place the answer was ever going to be found. Not in what I tell them. In what they notice once they are finally looking.

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I told you at the start of all this that I am hunting for an honest answer to one question. Why is this important? I do not have the whole answer, but this is the second piece of it:

The answer is not something I can hand a student. It is something they have to carry themselves until the world hands it to them.

The Rhododendron Effect. Carry a question, refuse to put it down, and the world begins answering it everywhere you go. Not noticing it. Answering it. In places you were not searching, in conversations that were not about it. The answer was always there. Carrying the question is what lets you hear it.

That is true for me too. I am still carrying the question. That is what this whole project is. Me, carrying it out loud, and watching what the world gives back.

The answers are always there. We just have to become the kind of people who can see them.

So could your students. So could you.

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Next Week:

Recently, carrying this question led me to an answer I did not expect. A principle called Price’s Law, and what it may have to do with our schools. Once you see that, you will not be able to unsee it.

See you Monday.

— Chase

I arrived by accident, but I am here now with purpose.

That revelation took time, and growth in my faith. For nearly a decade, purpose stood beside me like a stranger. I kept passing without a word. It took me years to finally turn and recognize it — back at the very place I started. When I did, I saw what it had been all along: the oldest question a student ever asks a teacher.

Why is this important?

As teachers, we all have our drawer full of answers to that question. I have received that question every year of my career — from the very first time I stepped foot in a classroom as a long-term substitute, through my years going through alternate-route accreditation, up to where I stand now as a seasoned teacher. The most recent time was a few months ago, from a student in my biology class, who wasn’t trying to be difficult. He just wanted to know.

As I have grown wiser in this career, the answer has started to elude me. Not in the sense that I do not know an answer. Rather, my answer has lost its conviction. My career continues and the answer keeps unraveling, while simultaneously becoming more complex. I wonder if that is due to wisdom, or due to the world. I wonder if it is both.

I teach at a public school in New Jersey. I am married to an educator who also teaches at a public school in New Jersey. I teach biology, physics, and forensic science. By every measure I should be an expert at answering the question.

I am an expert — so much as anyone who tells the truth with their fingers crossed.

This is the year my own answers stopped convincing me. I went looking for new ones. I have found nothing. Exhausted, I stopped looking for an answer. I turned and looked at the question instead. I have carried the question for so long that the two of us have become close. I cannot shake it. But I have grown fond of its company. I have come to believe the question was given to me – and that it was never meant to be carried alone.

I cannot be the only one. I cannot be the only educator who feels the answer running away from them. The only one who wonders whether school still has a good answer to give at all.

For months it has just been me and this question. Every Monday, I am going to start pulling up a third chair.

Why is this important?

I have stopped pretending I can answer that for my students. But I have not stopped believing it deserves an answer. So I am going to sit with it, out where you can see — and if you have been carrying it too, the seat is yours.

— Chase

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