Pete Stone is a 10th grade English/Language Arts, journalism, and public speaking educator at Lewisville High School in Chester County, SC. He is also one of the five educators receiving the 2026 Horace Mann Awards for Teaching Excellence.
“Each of you is a miracle beyond my comprehension, and my hope is that by the end of this course you will better see yourself for the wonder that you already are, and know that, in this adventure of life, your best teacher always has been and always will be — you.”
These are the first words I speak to my 10th-grade English II students at the start of each semester to remind them of who they are and the larger purpose of education: exploration, growth, and awareness of the life they have found themselves to be living.
As our society pushes blindly to move faster, demanding everyone be ever busier and more competitive, I find that students have lost touch with the wonder of learning, largely because school has lost connection with allowing time and space for the wonder of living.
The emphasis placed on ranking and comparing ourselves based on the numerical results of multiple-choice tests has reduced learning and, therefore, living down to an easily misinterpreted, empty number of mere external importance. How can we pretend to value diversity, preach equity, and embrace inclusion if we keep overprioritizing measuring success through one “standardized” method? What if the illusion that students “aren’t doing well in school” is both because of the narrow lens our system uses to identify excellence and the feeling of exclusion this limiting view creates in distorting students’ perception of their own wonder and the inherent value of education?
The old mantra of working “bell to bell” reveals one of the largest underlying problems: our education system is perhaps set up more like a manufacturing business producing products than it is uniquely structured for inspiring and educating human beings. The presumption is that simply spending more time doing more things will equal more product.
True learning is more like watering a potted plant. After the soil is saturated, continuing to actively water it for hours longer only creates wasted runoff and, if anything, risks damaging the roots. The plant needs time to process the water into something useful. Humans today are not starving for information; we’re drowning in it. We don’t need more apps, software, programs, or benchmark testing. Students are not made of rock, wood, or metal; they are miracles and need free time and space to apply what it means to be a human being rather than a “human doing.”
There is an ancient text that speaks to what our schools are perhaps lacking most; the 11th verse of the Tao Te Ching states:
“Shape clay into a bowl;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the openness which makes it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.”
Likewise, when I reflect on what I do that leads to student success, I can perhaps more truly say that it’s what I don’t do that allows my students — many who historically have not done well in school — to discover confidence again in who they are and joyfully apply that natural energy to the curious process of learning.
I don’t race through prescribed pacing guides designed by individuals far away from the classroom. I don’t bombard them with facts to memorize. I don’t assign benchmark tests. I don’t even grade students based on what they do — the product — but instead grade them based on their engagement in how they’re doing it — the process. This allows me to mostly give supportive feedback rather than a number.
Our class time involves as much free time for “chilling,” taking walks around the school, and even playing pick-up sporting games as we spend on assignments. However, this ensures that whatever we do, it is done with purpose and students are not just in attendance but truly present in guiding their own learning. I emphasize that education is not about having answers at all but rather daring to ask questions.
It’s amazing to watch how much kinder, less distracted, and more engaged students are with this approach when it doesn’t matter “how much we do,” but instead we shift the focus to how much value we gain when truly involved in developmentally appropriate activities. In short, I design the curriculum to serve the human being rather than trying to force humans to serve the curriculum. After all, do we really want our students to merely grow into another adult who compliantly rushes through each day only to rush through the next day until they realize they raced past enjoying the one life they have to live?
There was a student I had who barely spoke, barely wrote, and rarely read. Words felt foreign to him, as the student had been taught through bad grades that his understanding didn’t matter because it didn’t match the “standard.” Why bother? Then came the poetry assignment. I shared with students “Moment of Truth” by my friend Vivian Ayers, an acclaimed poet honored by NASA for her visionary expression of space exploration. Vivian, in the same hometown as us, went outside and simply looked up at the sky to help her ascend beyond external limitations.
Rather than give a quiz on poetry or drill them with mere vocabulary terms, I want the students to experience poetry and life directly, so that they can in the words of Lord Byron, “mingle with the Universe, and feel, what I can ne’re express yet cannot all conceal.” For, as the teaching goes, there is a difference between having a complex technical understanding about the chemistry of honey versus actually knowing the taste of honey. One is analytical knowledge, and all the facts in the world still cannot replace or fully understand the intuitive wisdom of truly knowing from direct awareness of the experience.
I therefore reserve an entire day or two to take my classes into the woods so they can have time and space to look up and experience the poetry of the sky in nature as Vivian did. They can sit on the earth long enough to feel the roots drawing nutrients from the ground beneath them — feel light on their face that originated over 90 million miles away, now being converted into warmth and energy on the leaves above their heads. As the breeze moves past the limbs, they can appreciate the transpiration of water rising and branching upward and outward to literally create the air we breathe on the only planet in the known universe adorned with life’s deep greens and blues. And then I encourage them not to analytically think, as that often involves trying to imitate what they “think” a poem is and judging it.
Rather, I encourage each student to be aware of their own wonder and, in their own unique language — with any grammar or spelling they please — dare to simply record with what this moment feels like in all its unedited poetic truth.
The student who rarely talked found a place far away to sit and stare for almost an entire class period before taking pen to paper. The next day, he raised his hand and then let flow the most mesmerizing poetic prose I have heard. Not only that, but during a special community gathering honoring Vivian Ayers, he walked to the front of the auditorium and again shared his experience with over two hundred guests, including Vivian, along with her daughters, Tony- and Oscar-award-winning actresses. What inspired him? He simply had the time and space to hear and trust his own voice, so education was not something happening to him or for him; it was, as it should be, happening by him.
I suspect it’s because of my seeming disregard for testing data that my students ironically have among the best state End-of-Course test scores in our district and region. This again emphasizes my belief that if you want students to do well, you must first help them let go of their concern for the product and instead fully engage with childlike joy and wonder in the process. This can be challenging, though, with the system’s fixation on test scores as the prescribed symbol for success creates enormous fear surrounding one of humans’ most valuable tools for learning — failure. Because unless we are already competent in something, the only way to get better is trying, failing, adjusting, and repeating that process to keep making progress.
I really look at my career in teaching as the “practice of teaching,” an ongoing exploration, since I have certainly learned my best lessons from my biggest failures. Yet one of the worst things you can ever get in school is what? An “F” for failure.
Some students would rather take a zero than risk trying and “failing.” It isn’t laziness. It’s protection. If you never try, no one can say you came up short. Others can’t hold their higher scores over you because you “don’t care.”
Take one student of mine who struggled with literacy due to probably undiagnosed dyslexia. He knew he worked 10 times harder than most, and still his test scores were always lower than his peers or what school said they should be. This tragically caused him to see himself the way he felt school saw him — “a problem.”
However, he said when he heard me preach every day that a score does not define our ability, he started to feel a little air in the room. I talked to that class about Daymond John, the founder of FUBU, and others who struggled through school but are now thriving entrepreneurs.
In fact, 40% of self-made millionaires identify as dyslexic. Why is that? Turns out having a different perspective than everyone else can help you find solutions where others just see obstacles. You see windows and doors where others only see walls. Embracing your unique perspective can provide the courage to dare to embrace failures as simply part of the process toward growth. The student reframed how he saw himself, because what school labels as a weakness can be transformed into a kind of superpower in the real world for creating success.
Slowly, this quiet young man stopped chasing comparison. He stopped worrying about the scoreboard. Instead, he leaned into the process, trusting his own voice, and discovered that words vividly lived inside his head. Gaining so much confidence, one day he stood up and just started singing original songs and reciting his poetry to the class. No accompanying music tracks. No covers of existing songs. No cool lyrics prepared. Just courage to share his words of wonder with others the way he heard them.
Instead of laughter, he found respect. It was so moving, other students were inspired to join in. Before long, our third block class had these spontaneous, joyful a cappella moments each day. He was learning something no test can measure: personal freedom.
When the End-of-Course exam arrived, he didn’t fear it either. He saw it as another opportunity to practice presence, discipline, and courage. He even gave a speech beforehand to encourage his peers as they went into the media center: “Focus on the process, not the product.” For the first time in his life, he exceeded the necessary grade on a state test. His success didn’t come from chasing someone else’s benchmark for perfection. It came from refusing to be defined by the system’s labels, embracing failure as a teacher, and discovering — unapologetically — his own voice.
When you actively place learning back in the students’ hands, you discover something most folks miss: young people are far more responsible than we’ve been led to believe.
Responsibility — the ability to respond — begins when a person can use their power to respond and impact their life rather than just react. But when we constantly tell students exactly what to do, what to think, and, explicitly or implicitly, that how well they do on a standardized test is what matters most, we quietly teach them that their only job is compliance. And compliance, no matter how neat and orderly it looks, denies students any real power or opportunity to be able to respond or have responsibility.
Students don’t really want to be entertained — they want to be useful. We often hear, “I’m bored,” and assume school needs to be more “amusing.” But no classroom can compete with the endless entertainment machine of our age, nor should it try.
What school can do is help students develop the skills to grow in any area they discover brings themselves and those around them more joy, freedom, and opportunity.
In a rural community, the needs of others are visible and real. Dilapidated buildings need repairing. Food banks need funding. Yards need upkeep. Kids need tutoring. Families need support. The lonely and forgotten simply need someone to listen. And here’s one of the quiet truths about human beings: we come alive when we use our skills to help someone else with their needs. Students come alive when they are allowed to shift their focus from merely reacting to how the world is happening to them and instead shift their focus to how they are happening to the world.
I invite students to look honestly at our world and our town — not with pity, but with purpose. The moment they see that they can make a difference, boredom disappears. Usefulness becomes joy as they can explore how to apply their gifts to life. Learning stops being abstract preparation for a future life and becomes support for their own lives and for others — right here, right now.
I’ve watched students organize food drives, build fundraisers, create events, and generate real change. One student, far from a straight-A honoree, organized a community basketball tournament to feed families. Another, who spent years in foster care, kept returning to help with projects long after finishing my class. He later reached out to say thank you — not for a grade, but for believing in him. Today, he runs a multimillion-dollar business built on service and generosity. No one asks about his test scores. They see his work, his tenacity, and his responsibility to give back. Of course, it’s not what these students did that mattered most; it’s how they poured themselves into a process they chose that breathed life into them and others.
Mr. Rogers famously noted that “Our society is much more interested in information than wonder.” We are the only planet we know of in the universe with conscious life, and yet we condense learning about that miracle down to A-B-C-or-D. Is it any surprise students and teachers feel disengaged, half-asleep, or simply miserable?
James Clear reminds us in Atomic Habits: “We optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.” If all we do is standardize children, we shut out and fail to optimize the richest energy source on Earth — the living imagination each child carries.
Every teacher I know who, despite the system, still finds a way to use their imagination in the classroom could also share countless anecdotal stories about their students’ amazing performance when given time and space.
So why don’t we make this approach easier to achieve by building a system to serve human beings, instead of forcing human beings to serve a broken system? After all, buying all the software programs in the world, adding even more hours to the school day, or cramming the curriculum pacing guide with infinite more content, still won’t address the underlying problem.
The poet Rumi advised us centuries ago to “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” The good news is we don’t even need to purchase wonder. If simply given the time and space, then human beings — students and teachers — naturally provide that bountiful, radiant, and colorful resource to power schools and the curriculum to new levels that transcend all the limitations of our bland, standardized status quo.
Each human life is already a miracle beyond comprehension, so for our schools to be transformed into places of wonder and joy rather than conformity and compliance, perhaps all the system needs to do is trustfully allow students and teachers to — in the words of poet Vivian Ayers — “Be True, Be Beautiful, Be Free.”
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