“Showing your work has to become a part of writing now. We don’t have a different choice.”

That is Julian Peterson’s case in this conversation with Katy McKinney, and he has spent seven years building the tool to make it possible.

Mr. Peterson studied philosophy before becoming a software engineer, and grew up in a home where books and arguments were dinner conversation. His father, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, wrote an essay writing guide for his university students. When Mr. Peterson noticed how many people were downloading it, he set out to turn the method into software. The result is Essay (essay.app), a writing platform designed “not to write for you, but to help improve you as a writer.” Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA) has been beta testing it with its senior thesis students, and one of last year’s seniors put it plainly: “I am a better writer now because of this tool.”

Mrs. McKinney, LCA’s Founder and Head of School, opens with a story Dr. Jacob Imam of the College of St. Joseph the Worker told at Cincinnati Classical Academy. It is about America’s master woodworkers around 1910, who welcomed new machines into their shops because they already had the craft, and the generation after them, who inherited the tools without it. From there the two take up writing in the age of AI, which Mr. Peterson calls “a disaster.” They also cover why great writing now gets flagged as machine-made, and a feature his team is building that lets a teacher see how an essay actually came together.

Neither of them is arguing against tools. The order is the point: master the craft, then pick up the machine. “Beginners should never use AI when they’re writing at all,” Mr. Peterson says. Mrs. McKinney goes further. The effort, she says, is “really a reflection of care,” and at bottom, care is love.

Both push back on educators who have decided there is nothing to be done. It is “way, way too easy right now to let the craft slip away,” Mr. Peterson warns. Mrs. McKinney’s answer is that our judgment “should preside over the tool.” And when she asks what parents can do at home, his answer is older than any app.

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children’s hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

For Referenced Resources from the LadyK Podcast Click Here for Download

"There is a point at which we really can't appreciate beauty unless we truly understand it."

That is how Mrs. Katy McKinney sums up the art program at Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), and she brings in the teacher behind it to show what she means. Amy Coffelt found LCA after driving past a yard sign for a week straight. She came as a parent, stepped in as a kindergarten teacher, and now teaches art across the school.

When people hear "classical education," Mrs. McKinney says, they tend to think of literature and the humanities. Art rarely makes the list. But with the Hillsdale K–12 Program Guide which Lafayette follows, students are asked to study great works before they are asked to create their own. Mrs. Coffelt shows how that plays out across the trivium, from the elements of art in the early grades to original work in high school.

Then come the projects: this year's Veterans Day art, built grade by grade on Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"; scratchboard animals that made middle schoolers reverse everything they knew about shading; first graders pressing marks into clay slabs like scribes in Mesopotamia. And a fourth grader whose Greek columns looked like he had ignored the directions entirely, until Mrs. McKinney found out why. "I ate humble pie that day," she says.

None of it is easy, and that is the point. These students are held to a high standard, and they keep at it because they have studied the masters and know what good work looks like. As Mrs. McKinney puts it, "Education, I think, finds its purpose in the loving of the beautiful."

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children's hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

For Referenced Resources from the LadyK Podcast Click Here for Download

"I don't want you to hide behind the screw."

That is what science teacher Mr. Kevin Miller tells his high school students, and it is the thread running through this conversation with Katy McKinney.

Mr. Miller came to Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA) from the field. He spent years as a wildlife biologist and aquatic entomologist, studying mayflies, before a phone call in the middle of an Illinois wildlife reserve brought him into the classroom. Now, as Mrs. McKinney puts it, he has lit "scientific fires all over the campus."

Mrs. McKinney, LCA's Founder and Head of School, asks Mr. Miller to walk through two programs: their middle school Rocket Program and their highschool Common Arts. In middle school physics, students learn Newton's laws by building rockets, and nothing launches until each student has wired a controller that can fire it safely. A retired Boeing engineer once watched the process and said it was exactly how his lab tested ejection seats. In the new high school Common Arts class, students build chairs with no screws at all, from honeysuckle they cut and hauled out of the woods themselves. And on a school camping trip, a bluff scattered with chert became a lesson nobody planned.

Mr. Miller makes the point that none of these lessons happen quickly, and that is the point. Students stay with a breadboard until the circuit works, log every launch, and keep bracing a chair until it stops rocking. The goal, Mr. Miller says, is to challenge the students enough “to where they're invested in it."

Both Mrs. McKinney and Mr. Miller push back on a world of instant answers, where, as Mr. Miller puts it, "it's really easy to just give up." Mrs. McKinney names the payoff: "incredible triumph and satisfaction," which no one reaches without "incredible determination, perseverance and dedication." Mr. Miller points out the same valuable lesson from an engineer when he and his family stood under a Saturn V in Huntsville, AL.

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children's hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

For Referenced Resources from the LadyK Podcast Click Here for Download