I got my education out of a dumpster.

I was about ten when I found the tape player. Somebody had thrown it out because the sound was so quiet it barely worked, and there was still an opera cassette inside it. Every morning I laid it flat on the pleather seat of the school bus, put my head down on it like a pillow with my ear against the casing, and listened for an hour. Then an hour again coming home.

That is how I met music. Through something a person threw away.

My grandmother taught me to dive. We pulled out furniture, cleaned it up and sold it. Devices too, anything not broken enough to be worthless. Later it was computers. I taught myself to fix those, gave some to nonprofits and sold the rest. I have never once thought of any of it as hardship. It was one of the great educations of my life.

Around eight or nine I was obsessed with books about countries and read every one I could reach. Years later I hitchhiked the whole way around the world. Thirteen months, all the way round. I did not do it because I could. I did it because I decided to, and the doing followed the deciding. That order matters more than almost anything else I know.

I have taught refugees. I have taught in classrooms. In 2020 I founded Empathy School in Bali, and for six years I have tested everything on this site with real children, daily, in real heat and real rain, in the ordinary chaos of a school day. Nothing here was written in a seminar room.

I am also a father, and that changed what I think this work is for.

I have come to believe something fairly simple. If we want a different world, we do not get there by teaching children more facts. We get there by teaching them about themselves, and how to say it.

Almost every serious thing that goes wrong between people starts the same way. Someone could not name what they were feeling, so it came out as something else. Or they could not hear what the other person was feeling, so they answered the wrong thing. Scale that up and you have most of what is broken.

A child who can say I am frustrated, not angry, becomes a different adult. A child who asks someone what they feel instead of assuming becomes a different colleague, a different partner, a different parent. That is not soft. That is the whole thing.

The nature work here is part of the same idea. A child who knows the plants around them, what they do, what they heal, is a child who pays attention. Attention to the world and attention to people are the same muscle.

So everything on this site is free. No sign up, no email, no account, no catch. Hundreds of worksheets, lessons and guides, ages two to fifteen, all of it mine to give.

I am not going to put a gate in front of the thing I got out of a skip.

Take it. Print it. Change it. Use it with your class or with your own children. If it helps one teacher on a bad Monday, it has done its job.