“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

“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

“As a classroom teacher, I always tended to have high standards, and to give enormous assignments and challenges, but to be generous about grading. I think, deep down, the generosity was based partly on appreciation and admiration of the work the students were doing, but also on deep concerns about the reliability and validity of evaluation. And yet—here’s the thing—we have to do it.” – Michael Clay Thompson

“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

“I am sometimes asked, ‘What are we supposed to do with this? Just read?’ It is true: my curriculum is different, particularly in its philosophy of assessment. I think we must change the terms from what students can FIND to what they can THINK after careful reading.” – 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

“The exciting thing is how far we are able to extend learning. None of the extra material included in Michael’s books is on the test. That is not why it is there. It is intended to expand our children’s horizons so that they can make themselves more knowledgeable about things that interest them and so that they can be better educated about the civilizations that produced their world.” – Dr. T.M. Kemnitz

“The primary pedagogic purpose of ‘Caesar’s English’ is to teach vocabulary—the academic vocabulary that children will need to succeed in education and in professional life. But the classical education editions have a wealth of additional content. They are everything we want textbooks to be.” – Dr. T.M. Kemnitz

“The ancient Greek and Roman civilizations provided the inspiration for the classical education editions of ‘Caesar’s English.’ There is a difference between good and great; we are determined to bring to you what is truly great, and we will use the best that humankind has created to fire the imaginations of children.” – Dr. T.M. Kemnitz

“A teacher told me, ‘I think everyone is gifted in their own way.’ It is only when giftedness is discussed that someone feels the need to make it a universal attribute; someone may not be gifted—everyone must be. But just as everyone is not tall, even in their own way, everyone is not gifted, even when we twist the idea by saying ‘in their own way.'” – Michael Clay Thompson