I had been doing my progress reports for, I don’t know, 100 hours, when my 19 year old son walked by. He looked over my shoulder and nodded.

“We’re learning about direct instruction,” he said.

I looked up. I love when he starts talking about his EdPsych class. Watching him go through K-12 school was… let’s say, an adventure. Hearing his reflection on that time as he learns about education? That is amazing. He’s given me advice for behavior management, he’s helped me figure out how to explain things, he’s been pretend taught as I prepared for learning labs… And sometimes his reflections just make me reflect on my own practices.

“And what do you think about it?” I asked him, wondering what he was going to say about direct instruction.

“Good direct instruction is discovery learning.” He said this with confidence. “We’ve been learning about them as separate things, but really they go together.”

I tried to get him to tell me more, because, what? I love this train of thought. But, he insisted that he is just starting to learn about it, not ready to give me a thesis yet.

“I had to write a second-grade lesson plan the other day,” he told me.

I asked him why he didn’t get my help for that. I mean, come on!

“We had to do it in the middle of class,” he explained, “I just did a math lesson plan on converting tiles to inches, feet and yards.”

I was excited to tell him that I’ve done that lesson plan, and he nodded.

“I know. You told me about it. That’s why I knew to use it.”

“Ahhhh, so you DID get my help,” I smiled proudly.

I don’t know if he’ll ever be a teacher, but I know he’d make a good one. In the meantime, I continue to grab the nuggets of wisdom he randomly spouts out. He is like my own instructional coach that I get to see whenever he comes home from college. (And I’ll take all the coaching I can get.)