“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

Textbooks lay the groundwork. But standing on the ground impacts a child like nothing else.

In this episode, Katy McKinney, Founder and Head of School at Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), makes the case for the field trip — not as a break from learning, but as the moment learning becomes real. Drawing on years of travel with her own family as a homeschool mom and now with LCA students and their parents, Katy explains why history studied for weeks and then seen with your own eyes stays with a child for life, and why a well-prepared field trip does more than teach facts: it forms the affections and cultivates gratitude for those who came before.

Mrs. McKinney takes listeners along to the places that have shaped her students — Gettysburg, Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, Fort Necessity, Independence Hall, and Washington's Crossing — and shares the moments that stayed with her: reciting the Gettysburg Address at sunset in the very spot Lincoln delivered it, with taps playing and not a dry eye in the group; a fourth grader recognizing Lafayette's portrait at Mount Vernon because of the book she had read the night before; two young children whose jaws dropped in front of the Liberty Bell because they understood what it had cost to preserve it; and a summer afternoon on the banks of the Delaware, where Katy asked her kids to close their eyes and imagine Christmas night, 1776.

She closes with the words that were circulating among Washington's men that winter — Thomas Paine's The Crisis — and a reminder that the freedoms we enjoy were won at a particular spot, on a particular night, by people who did not know they were doing it for us.

Whether you homeschool, send your children to a classical school, or simply want them to love what is good and true, this episode offers a practical picture of how to bring history to life.

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

An eighth grader came into class holding a handwritten letter from his grandparents, and told his teacher, happily, that his mom had typed it out so he could read it.

"That broke my heart," Katy McKinney says. She was the teacher. She's also the Founder and Head of School of Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA). It was at that moment that she stopped her eighth grade English class, got a fourth-grade handwriting book, and taught thirteen-year-olds cursive for five minutes a day for the rest of the year. By spring, students whose print was rough to read were writing script that was, in her word, gorgeous!

In this episode, Katy gives seven reasons LCA teaches cursive while most schools have dropped it. It connects children to the past, to their grandparents' letters, and to the journals and documents of our founding, read without a translator. It's personal expression: handwriting is like a fingerprint. It builds the brain in ways typing doesn't. It teaches patience, and craftsmanship, and it's simply beautiful. And in a world of instant messages and AI-generated text, a handwritten note still says something no machine can: I took the time to do this for you.

There are no iPads and no Chromebooks in LCA classrooms. There's no shortcut.

So why does Lafayette Classical Academy teach cursive? Katy says the better question is the other one: What are we losing, in the name of efficiency, if we don't?

If this episode encouraged you or gives you hope, share it with a friend – because great nations are not renewed in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in the hearts of our children. That’s how we help preserve the promise of America.

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

"Virtue is not theoretical. It is extremely real, practical, and usable."

That is the claim Katy McKinney makes in this episode, and then she proves it out of the life of her school.

When people first hear "classical education," she says, they think of Latin, the great books, history, and all of that matters deeply. But a classical education has never been only the filling of the mind. It is the formation of the whole person. So at Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), two questions get asked instead of one: what does this student know, and who is this child becoming?

Katy, LCA's Founder and Head of School, shares three stories from the school's own families. A seventh grader who came in behind and disengaged, and graduated having found that she loved the subject she liked least. A boy who used to dread getting out of bed for school, and now points to his recitations as the reason he can walk into an interview and speak. And a second grader who ended up in open water with the boat blown away from her, where the word that broke through her panic — fortitude — was one of the four cardinal virtues her class had been practicing all year. Her mother wrote to Katy afterward: if it had not been for Lafayette, neither my daughter nor I could be writing this.

None of it happens accidentally. It is focused, disciplined work, daily habits, high expectations, the curriculum, coaching and correction. It is loving students enough, she says, to call them to go higher.

She also names the temptation she sees in education today: to assume that when we love our children, we lower the bar. "That is not loving the child. That is a cop-out." Children are more capable than they know, and the job of the adults around them is to hold the bar high and walk beside them until they meet it.

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

"They don't even know what they're saying — so what's the point?" It's the objection every classical school hears about recitation. In this episode, Katy McKinney, founder and Head of School at Lafayette Classical Academy, makes the case that this isn't a flaw in classical education — it's the process itself.

Katy explores what recitation actually trains beyond memory, which passages Lafayette students carry with them for life, and two stories — one from her own kitchen table, one from a middle school classroom — that reveal just how much is happening beneath the surface when a child memorizes words before fully grasping them.

Recorded as the country marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's a timely reminder of why some words are worth giving to children early — long before they understand them.

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

At Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), we don't celebrate an eighth-grade graduation; we celebrate something even more important.

In this episode, Katy McKinney shares the meaning behind LCA’s Eighth Grade Recognition Ceremony, one of the most memorable traditions at the school. More than an academic milestone, this evening reflects years of growth in virtue, courage, gratitude, humility, and character.

Katy also tells the remarkable story of one eighth-grade student whose journey from fear and self-doubt to courage and confidence reminded everyone in the room why classical education is about far more than grades and test scores.

If you've ever wondered what the long-term fruit of a classical education looks like, this episode offers a powerful answer.

Whether you're a parent exploring private schools, considering classical education, or simply interested in raising children of strong character, this conversation will encourage and inspire you.

Lafayette Classical Academy, a Hillsdale Curriculum school, is a K-12 classical school in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri, serving families throughout St. Charles County who desire an education that forms both the mind and the character.

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