There's a quote from The Office where Michael Scott says he's an early bird and a night owl, so he's wise and has worms.
That's basically how June works for teachers.
You're simultaneously wrapping up the year, grading final projects, sitting through vendor demos and trying to remember if you submitted that one form. You're wise. You definitely have worms.
These three reads from 2026 were our most-read playbooks—and each one is more useful right now, in the chaos, than it will be in August when you're sunburned and optimistic and have forgotten everything about this year's kids.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: Read these before your brain logs off.
Reading Rainbow: AI parents, teen sleep and big goodbyes.
From Our Desk: Mason City, platform updates and CTE series.
Watch of the Week: Cursed island. Coward mayor. Great TV.
Your end-of-year assigned reading.
Here's what we know: The end of the year is when teachers have the most information about their students and the least time to use it. Which is a cruel little design flaw, honestly. So we pulled our three most-read playbooks from the Spring semester. We promise we wouldn’t add these to your to-do list if there wasn’t at least one winning move you can steal before summer break officially starts for you.
A public school visual arts teacher (ages 13–19) at Foothill High has nearly half her students with 504s or IEPs. Her five-category rubric covers everything from craftsmanship to progress, and students score themselves before a one-on-one conversation. Her observation is that kids almost always lowball themselves, and it’s on teachers to help them find their true worth.
Final project season starts in days. Even just adding the self-assessment piece is worth the experiment.
Match Your Art Methods to How Students Actually Learn
Lindsey Sherrard (10+ years in K–12 visual arts, now at Subject) makes the case for matching students with materials that actually fit how their brains and hands work. Some kids hate drawing because pencils are too small for their motor skills—hand them clay and everything changes. You know which students those are right now. In August you won't.
One final project with student-chosen mediums is a low-stakes way to see the difference.
Most EdTech Companies Don't Know Their Students. Here's How to Finally Connect.
Amanda Goodson, co-founder of Edlink, has a simple rule for evaluating the EdTech vendor pitches flooding your inbox right now: Boring + Paid beats Sexy + Praised every time. The flashy product with a great demo isn’t always the one teachers actually use. She built Edlink entirely on cold outreach—no warm network or inside tracks—which means she had to earn the sale. She knows exactly which tools districts should keep and which ones will gather dust.
End-of-year budget season means vendor pitches are coming. This is your cheat sheet to shopping smarter.
You've got maybe fifteen school days left and a brain full of intel about your students that will fully evaporate by Labor Day. Thankfully, none of these playbooks require a permission slip, a budget request or a summer reading list.
Just a willingness to try one thing before the year ends with students whose names you actually know how to pronounce. That's the whole assignment.
When Your Best Teacher Peaces Out: Three principals share hard-won advice on handling a star teacher's departure—from honoring their exit on their terms to reframing a vacancy as a chance to shake things up. Basically the professional development version of "how to survive a breakup with dignity."
Rehearsing the Awkward: AI Edition: A Georgia teacher who used to negotiate insurance settlements for GEICO found parent-teacher meetings somehow more terrifying than arguing with actual lawyers. His district's solution? AI-generated parent avatars that let teachers practice tough conversations before the real thing. Yes, we've reached the point where teachers are rehearsing confrontation with robots. No, we will not be taking questions.
Let Teens Sleep, You Monsters: New research confirms what every teenager has been mumbling facedown into their desk since the invention of first period: they are biologically incapable of functioning at 7:15 AM and it is not a moral failing. Scientists are calling this "obvious." School boards are calling it "complicated." Teens are calling it "can I please just have until 8:30."
The IEP Paperwork Problem Gets a Robot Sidekick: Over half of special ed teachers are now using AI to help draft IEPs, up from 39% the year before, which tracks… because have you seen an IEP?! They're longer than most mortgage applications and twice as stressful. The dream: less paperwork, more teaching. The asterisk: privacy and legal concerns are very much still a thing, so maybe don't feed student data into the first chatbot you find.
Mason City Schools is putting Subject to work! See how they’re using it in their district.
Our Subject homepage has a new look with some major upgrades, including our new live chat feature.
We’re sending our own people to trade school! Our very own Katie Redd shadowed a plumbing crew in Cleveland to kick off our new CTE series.
Our pick of the week: Widow’s Bay
Why We’re Obsessed: Parks and Recreation meets sea hag. Widow's Bay is Apple TV's horror comedy, starring Matthew Rhys as a mayor trying to rebrand a cursed, Wi-Fi-less island into a tourist destination. The locals keep saying the place is haunted. (They’re not wrong.) It's dry, creepy, funnier than it should be, and any show about a leader spinning an existential crisis into a PR opportunity should feel immediately familiar to educators.
Recommended lesson integration:
The Mayor's Persuasive Pitch: Mayor Tom Loftis is essentially writing a tourism brochure for a place where people keep disappearing. Students write their own persuasive pitch for the worst possible vacation destination they can dream up. Extra credit for maintaining a completely straight face during the presentation. Double extra credit if a classmate almost books the trip.
Who Gets to Tell the Story?: The show's tension runs on the mayor dismissing everything the locals know to be true, which is basically the plot of every faculty meeting ever. Students analyze a scenario where an outsider's perspective clashes with community knowledge and write a response from both sides. Point of view has never been this haunted.
Budget Meeting from Hell (Literally): Widow's Bay needs funding, the town has supernatural problems, and the mayor keeps pretending they don't exist. Students role-play a town budget meeting where they allocate limited resources across competing, increasingly unhinged priorities. Line item for "sea hag mitigation" optional but encouraged. Civic engagement unit? Done and done.
Rhetoric of Denial: Mayor Loftis keeps insisting the curse isn't real while buildings crumble and creatures emerge from the ocean. Students analyze real-world examples of leaders dismissing credible evidence and write a rhetorical analysis of how denial gets constructed and maintained. Pairs beautifully with any media literacy or argument unit, and with the general experience of reading the news.
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Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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