Pathway Prep
"Everything negative — pressure, adversity, hatred — is all an opportunity for me to rise." Michael Jordan said something close to that once, and it's stuck with me for years. It's not really about basketball. It's about what you decide a setback means.
A few years back I tried a teaching experiment that flopped, badly. I won't bore you with the details, but the short version is: I was confident it would work, it didn't, and I had a room full of students who noticed. My instinct in the moment was embarrassment — the kind that makes you want to quietly retire the idea and never mention it again.
Instead I told the students exactly what happened and why I thought it hadn't worked. Not as a pep talk — as data. What actually happened when we do this? What do I do differently next time? That reframe changed the whole room. Failure stopped being a verdict and started being information.
Failure isn't the opposite of progress. It's usually a required step in it.
I think about this every fall when the Chiefs play from behind, the way they did against the Bills a while back — down late, half the stadium assuming it's over. The players who perform in that moment aren't the ones who never fail. They're the ones who've decided in advance that a bad quarter doesn't define the game. They get smacked right in the mouth, and the very next play, they respond like it's their opportunity.
What this means on test day
Every ACT student hits a hard section, or a section where the pacing falls apart, or a practice test that goes worse than the one before it. That moment is not the verdict on their score. It's one data point in a much longer process, and how a student responds to it — panic and shut down, or adjust and keep moving — matters more than the miss itself. That's a skill we build in prep, right alongside the content.