There’s a powerful theme emerging, at least in my mind, and your piece reiterates this theme. We seem to struggle with embracing the many paradoxes within education. We can set high expectations for kids in a humane and warm manner; we can teach kids how to ask their own questions and learn with independence, meanwhile leveraging explicit instruction in the right places; we can acknowledge the fact that we all basically learn the same, but that variation in students needs to be addressed through sustainable and sane differentiation techniques.

We just tend to become so polarized that we think we need to choose a side. But we don’t.