The Atlantis Room

Or how to resolve the paradox of academic progress vs human needs

It was one of the worst days of my life as a new school leader.

Across from me sat several parents, smoke coming out of their ears. We were in a coffeeshop in San Francisco right after school. It was probably a month since our brand-new school had opened its doors, and most days I felt like my hair was on fire. I didn’t know how to be a school leader and had never built a school from scratch before, let alone one trying to do something so different.

In the midst of this hurricane of stress, a group of parents had urgently requested a meeting. As I sat down with them, they let me have it. Their anger and anxiety came out through pointed, dogged questions. The four-alarm fire, in their eyes, was our math curriculum.

As I sat there absorbing their concerns, I was boiling inside. I knew that our young school was trying something very different with math. Instead of the typical, rigid sequence of math skills, we wanted to use games, problems with multiple solutions, mixed-skill groups, and “number talks” to develop our mathematical thinking. It meant that math class was not at all familiar looking. And, truth be told, our quality was mixed. We were still figuring out how to do this well.

But to the parents sitting in front of me, we were derailing their children’s academic train. I tried to defend our program, but I was too green. I didn’t yet have the tools to make the case convincingly. The parents threatened to leave the school if we didn’t change it. For all my idealism, the pragmatic part of me kicked in. We were a tiny startup school with 24 families in the first year, and I decided this was not the hill to die on. You can’t win every battle. And so our math program became significantly more conventional.

Now math is maybe an extreme case — I would go so far as to say that our educational culture has a fetish around it (for anyone who wants to be broken out of that particular matrix, I highly recommend the essay A Mathematician’s Lament). But that meeting pointed to an underlying challenge with how we see academics, one that I still feel keenly as both an educator and a parent.

If we don’t push hard on academics, how can we expect our kids to make the necessary progress?

Or perhaps: How much risk can we take by leaving the traditional methods — is that just gambling with our kids’ futures?

In homes and in schools, this often comes down to a less abstract choice: do I make this kid in front of me frustrated/angry/resigned, say by forcing them to do that math worksheet, because I think it will make them happier in the future?

Of course, there’s no simple answer. But I do think we err too much on the side of being willing to cause suffering now. To protect against possible negative futures, we create a definite negative present. Just ask your average middle schooler if they like school. Do we really train them to live as vital, embodied, wise adults by creating suffering on the journey there?

I’m not saying that our focus should be making kids happy all the time, or spare them the experience of frustration. That would create at least as many unfortunate side-effects as forcing them to cram academically. But I am saying that we’ve gotten too used to them disliking how we make them learn. Out of habit, we unconsciously over-ride their curiosity and push kids into work that they find desperately boring. When they complain, it seems to just confirm our expectations — “this is what school is”, or even, that we must be doing it right because they’re having the typical experience.

So I’d like to propose something that may seem either totally obvious, or totally paradoxical:

Putting academics first tends to reduce our academic growth.

Or to state it positively:

Our full learning potential only comes when human needs are first met.

Let’s explore this with some examples.

My experiences in the last few years with the homeschool community have taught me a lot. I was once told a rule of thumb that homeschoolers move through curriculum about 3 times as fast as those in school (not necessarily meaning they’re able to leap grade levels ahead, but that they only need 1/3 the hours to learn a given skill). While obviously a generalization, with so much depending on a particular student, I think this is often true.

It’s not that homeschoolers are smarter. It’s that the majority of time in most schools is spent reacting to unmet human needs. And in reaction-mode, we’re often quite ineffective in meeting those needs.

For example, consider the unmet need of a middle schooler who feels that they don’t belong and are being excluded. This is a kid who feels almost physically unsafe, such is the depth of our need for belonging at that age. Looking for protection and solace, trying to regulate their nervous system, they are not going to be learning at their full potential. Nowhere close.

Or consider the kid who feels lesser-than, say because they’re slower to pick up reading, or their family comes from a less privileged place, and they develop a story about themselves as a bad student. Here’s a kid who may sabotage themselves, or hold back on taking positive risks in class, until their need to be seen as skillful and valuable is met.

The simple truth, I believe, is that you can either attend to the human needs first, in which case academics will flow freely and quickly when a student’s attention is on them, or you can attend to human needs while you’re attempting to teach, which leads to a slow, frustrating experience for most students (and teachers).

The challenge here — and it’s a big one — is that to make a shift like this takes an immense leap of faith, as well as skills and supports that are not yet commonly practiced in most schools.

There is a road to make schools truly places where human needs are met first. It’s not a painful road either — it’s one that will yield more connection and depth. But change is hard. It will make us adults feel like beginners again, which can be the best or worst feeling, depending on how you see it.

What exactly is on this road? A full answer to this would be book-length, and I only know the puzzle pieces I’ve seen, but I’ll share two:

For middle and high school, I believe it begins with advisory. Specifically, the kind of advisory that becomes a “safe and brave” group of peers, guided by an adult who sees themselves as facilitator rather than instructor. In a group like that, students can have their essential developmental need of belonging met, as well gaining a place to process the social or emotional needs on their minds. If we don’t make space to process those needs, we cannot expect them to be focused on academics.

Second, I believe it takes the courage to reduce curriculum, much as Finland famously cut their curriculum back by in some cases 50%, in order to make space for deeper, more memorable learning through projects. The truth is, we spend vast amounts of effort teaching knowledge that is forgotten by nearly all students, even being willing to sacrifice their human needs in the process. It’s a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.

There are so many other steps on this road, more than I can fit into one post, though what I wrote about in Finding the Magic in Middle School has much of it. But let me close with a story of a school that does this. Many years ago I visited the fascinating Integrale Tagesschule Winterthur in Switzerland, where visionary educators had created many ways to put human needs first, and one stuck out so much that (with their blessing) we copied it and brought it to Millennium School. It’s called the Atlantis Room.

Fortunately, the Atlantis Room at Millennium is easier to find than any lost mythical cities of the same name.

The idea, as we implemented it, was this: all day long, there is a room available in the building called the Atlantis Room, staffed by a rotation of faculty and staff such that one adult is always present. It’s designed to be a relaxing place — comfy chairs, soft lighting, a guitar, board games, books to look at. If at any point in the day, a student cannot be in a classroom (by their own determination — they can’t be forced to go), perhaps because they’re having a social conflict, or trying to process stress coming from outside of school, they can go to the Atlantis Room. There, they’ll be greeted without judgment or demand. The adult present will check-in with them and see if they can support. They’ll make space for them to have quiet time for a little while if needed, or maybe chat, or maybe play music. When they’re ready, with some encouragement perhaps from the adult, they head back to class.

I know the concerns forming in many peoples’ minds here, about misuse of this system. There are ways to address that, too. Students check in on a tablet when they enter the room, and their advisors are notified. If they go repeatedly, we have a clear signal that more support is needed, and the advisor will check in, or potentially get parents involved. If a pattern emerges, like going to the Atlantis Room during a certain class period, that’s extremely useful information to support a student better. And students are still responsible for catching up on any work missed.

What does the Atlantis Room offer? A clear signal that human needs are valid and can be addressed whenever needed. By accepting those needs, they become visible, available to be worked with, rather than hidden away and appearing later only as “disciplinary issues” or academic under-performance. It’s no cure-all, but the Atlantis Room shows that human needs come first. When we have those met, the academics move faster than we expect.

Going all the way back to that harrowing coffee with the angry parents, I wish that I had the confidence and clarity back then to explain all of this. Or better yet, I could have started with our needs as parents — like managing the profound fear and anxiety we often hold, the message we receive that society is hyper-competitive and that there are limited ways to be successful. Those parents had unmet needs. I hadn’t done a good job explaining why we chose to teach Math differently, and with many other parts of the school I had expected them to take a leap of faith without enough accompaniment. These days, perhaps because I’m now parenting a middle schooler myself, I’m more aware of how much support we need to feel centered and skillful through a time of such rapid change.

I know I’m naive. I know this oversimplifies. But as a compass heading, I’d bet everything on it. Academic achievement matters, but we can’t sacrifice our humanity to it, and sadly I think most schools do. It’s a paradox: we improve academics by demoting them to second place.

On some level, I think we’ve all seen evidence of this. Just think of any time when your child or a student had profound motivation to learn something. They persevere. They eat up curriculum. They can make weeks of academic growth in days. They come to unexpected solutions. This is how kids naturally are.

---

In Other News…

• Advisory trainings this summer: Advisory is the heart of great middle and high schools — a space where students experience belonging, validation, and greater connection to school. I’ve seen it transform school cultures, and yet I know that leading great advisories is not a commonly taught set of skills. So, 8 years ago I began doing summer trainings to help educators become excellent advisory facilitators, and this work continues to be one of my favorite parts of every year. We’ve just announced our advisory training institutes for this coming summer: July 27-29 in San Francisco and August 3-5 in New York City. Details and registration here. For the first time, we’re also offering a one-day advanced training for folks who have completed that introductory course and want to go deeper. That will be in New York City on August 6, 2026 (details here). If this speaks to you, come join us this summer!
  

• Homeschool adventures: Many of you have asked how my own homeschool experiment has been going, with my 7 year old daughter. What an adventure it’s been! I wrote about some of it in The Wild & Unruly Weather of Learning. I’ll say this: it feels purposeful, she’s far happier and more engaged than she had been in school, and I’m gradually trusting her more and more to guide her own time. And: it’s hard! When she’s in the doldrums, or I’m grappling with time pressure from work while trying to be present for her, it can feel like I’ve taken on so much. Most of the time, I rest on the fact that I can create reasonably good conditions around her: fascinating people to learn from (both fellow homeschoolers and interesting adults), access to the world (lots of time in nature, and out and about in the city), good materials (from books to podcasts to craft supplies), and someone (me) with whom she can reflect, make choices, and guide the adventure.
  
  I guess the truth is that when I dropped her off at school each day in past years, I felt distant from her, while also able to believe that her learning was steadily chugging along. Now I feel much closer to her, and I have the privilege and challenge of riding the waves with her. I struggle through the days that feel like zero has happened, but revel in the ones where she finds her flow, like spending hours and hours writing. Homeschool has fewer illusions, and more human rhythms, and for that among many other aspects, I’m grateful.