“I have no doubt that every child would benefit from what you have to offer. For our particular child, though, this connection to the world of ideas…I do not mean to overstate it, but this has been a lifeline for her.” – parents of a child taking one of Michael’s courses at Royal Fireworks Online Learning

“Why do students have to keep doing four-level analyses in every level of the MCT curriculum once they know how to do it? This is a good question. But four-level analysis is different because it is an expansive inquiry into language; it is investigating something that is not concrete or simple but that is essentially bottomless.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“My central concept for ‘The Word Within the Word’ is that it is a profoundly interdisciplinary vocabulary curriculum, interweaving the vocabulary of science, mathematics, history, literature, art, and more into a great vocabulary fabric that will make students better in every subject and prepare them for the future like no other curriculum ever has.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“From time to time, it is healthy for us, as educators devoted to optimizing differentiated education for gifted children, to reexamine our most fundamental assumptions. The assumption I would like to discuss can be expressed in a question: Is gifted education a dream or a goal?” – Michael Clay Thompson

“Whenever I give a presentation on my Mathematical Nights books, there’s one name that I always mention: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. You may know him better by his pen name: Lewis Carroll. As a writer, he often blended his mathematical skills with his whimsical style—sometimes in obvious ways and other times in ways that are harder to find.” – Robert Black

“We must advocate for real reading. There is nothing else in education—nothing—that is as educational as reading. By reading serious literature, both fiction and nonfiction, students experience the full range of intellectual experience. They grow in their reading power and can read better and deeper, with more comprehension and enthusiasm for important stories and ideas.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“In my life, no teacher had ever told me that I could write—not in elementary or middle or high school, not in college or university. It took Julie Long—with her immovable, fierce brain—to push me in a direction that would make me happy. She believed in me years before I did.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“For many people, learning math mostly involved working a seemingly endless set of exercise problems. Such drills have their place, but if that’s all students do, they’re missing a big part of what math is about. In fact, they’re missing the most important part: the opportunity to see math as a creative, collaborative experience, full of possibilities for exploration and discovery.” – Robert Black

“A teacher of high school honors English, I had always enjoyed the lively discussions related to my students’ reading of Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Walden.’ Everything about Thoreau’s life intrigued them. But there was one big downside: Thoreau’s layered, dense, nineteenth-century language, with all its subtleties, was hard for them to penetrate. They ‘got’ him, but his writing was quite another matter.” – Anne Faigen

“Between 2% and 20% of schoolchildren have some type of reading problem. Educators are starting to recognize the importance of the visual system and eye-tracking skills for reading, but these skills must be trained before a child with reading problems can be successful..” – Dr. Kenneth A. Lane

“In my language arts classrooms, I did not teach reading; I taught literature. I assumed that students knew how to read the literature we tackled, and for some students, that assumption was true. But for others, it was not. Teaching sound literacy skills not only will create successful language arts students, but it will create successful science, social studies, and math students, and it will create successful employees in all industries.” – Steve Loe

“The Common Core standards have been adopted in the majority of states, to our relief or disappointment, depending upon our understanding of the standards. My impression is that some of the negative reactions to Common Core have not so much to do with the standards themselves as with how they are interpreted or implemented.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“We must include the formal study of poetics as one of the core components of language arts. Using the sentences of great novelists as their models, students can begin to experiment with poetic devices, not only in their own poems but in their own prose sentences.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“For gifted children, the development of verbal talent is among the deepest joys and most critical preparations of life, but the talent will not develop on its own. If we provide access to books, enlightenment about grammar, and enthusiasm for words, then children will move forward into exciting experiences in language that will be catalysts for the development of verbal talent.” – Michael Clay Thompson