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Although he might not admit it publicly, my husband takes a scunner to Keurig coffee.
Highly processed and manufactured, it is made to seem artisanal. And while a Keurig will never produce a bad cup of coffee, it will also never make one great.
Here is where the entire enterprise just grabs him as wrong.
No guessing is involved, which also means no human brilliance or error can affect the quality of your serving. No slight of the roaster’s hand might influence the taste, no risk exists that might make the foam in your mug the best cup of your year.
Like a deal with the devil, he is guaranteed a consistently average cup of coffee only if he is willing to forgo ever experiencing a sublime one — and this arrangement feels too close to other trade-offs these days that ask us to relinquish expertise, creativity and nuance; results of hard work and frustration for low-risk convenience, predictability and speed.
Think of all the convenient aids we have available to us: Amazon (anytime we can’t find that exact thing), DoorDash (anytime we want to consume that exact thing), TV show seasons dropped in one day (when waiting becomes too hard), e-bikes (when peddling becomes too hard), videos so we can see everything even when we are not present (our house, our yard, our dogs, our car), apps that let us turn on or off anything when we are not there. The list goes on, and I haven’t even touched AI or agentic AI.
Some involve obvious compromise, but many don’t and instead develop hidden habits that we may regret later. And so the question is (at least for my husband and his daily cup) when does the shortcut for ease seem more like a ceding of value, real quality and worth?
When I think about school — and the actual daily schedule of each of our students — no aid or shortcut will help them through the inevitable hardships of sometimes feeling lonely at lunch, confused by math or stuck on a project that others seem to accomplish easily. This is why we talk about school as a “messy” enterprise.
“Resilience doesn’t feel good when you are actually practicing it,” says Dr. Becky Kennedy using data supported by the American Psychological Association. While resilience has such positive connotations these days, it is a hard thing to live through. Dr. Kennedy goes on to talk about the learning space between knowing and not knowing something (and figuring it out) as filled with frustration, anxiety and stress. Those traits actually can represent the moments of growth.
Curiously, the quick fix for not experiencing this kind of anxiety is avoidance coping which, like my husband’s Keurig trade-off dilemma, is a bad compromise as it leads to more anxiety, less functionality and greater issues with resilience in the long run.
Why bring up the Keurig dilemma now? Because every year school appears more and more countercultural, and while that is one of our most important traits, it is also hard to absorb and get used to when returning from the summers or starting here anew.
School requires a level of attention and effort that no app can free our children from. It asks for mental discipline in the liminal psychological space between knowing and not knowing, so students — with support of their teachers — push through frustration and anxiousness to master tasks like delivering their wax museum character or finishing their junior speech.
And finally, Columbus Academy only works when we are all present, in person and in full-throated participation in the life of school. Being in assembly and recess and lunch and art and music and PE and science and after-school activities adds up to a complete experience, a cornerstone to raising the whole child.
So when it feels like the learning, and our school, could just be a little less laborious or a bit more convenient — a process with a little more ease — know that we understand. Trapped in the complexities of our schedule, our expectations around cell phones and dress code and reading and writing and missing school days for vacations is a genuine and devoted commitment to an education of real worth and value.
We are cathedral thinkers in modern times — labor-intensive at a human pace as we work with children. Most of us will never get to experience the wonderful work our students produce, the impact they will make, the change they will affect at the height of their careers. Still, we know Academy will have influenced them along the way.
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