Just published: "Incoming -The Lourens Breytenbach Learning Letter - 30 October 2026". Check it out and subscribe to get everything I'm making. https://pages.lourensbreytenbach.com/posts/incoming-the-lourens-breytenbach-learning-letter-30-october-2026

I am a school teacher with 30 years experience and it has now become a pandemic: Moody and grumpy teenage boys who cannot and will not be reformed. Here is my (growing) gripe list: * Young men being real assholes these days * Having no manners, no gratitude, no punctuality * Not being able to admit that they don’t know everything * Being moody ALL THE TIME * Not showing respect when they’re talking to older men * Inherent stupidity that they are not even hiding, they are flaunting * Being upset about acting stupidly; not asking for advice * Having a problem with being called ignorant even while they are actually being ignorant * Not doing anything about anything Firstly, what is it with young men today? You cannot blame your laziness, or your lack of action, or your anxiety, or your declining mental health, or your failure to move further than 10 meters at a time, on your childhood and abuse. I’m really sorry. These are serious matters and I know, I really know, what it is like to have personal issues that you’re dealing with. That is par for the course for most people – having really difficult issues to deal with from childhood … but it is not an excuse for having bad manners. These days, if a young man has a set of good manners, I’ll sommer promote him. And if that young man has a smile on his face and moves with energy and good posture, he might even become the head boy of the school without having the ability to be one. That is how sensitive I am to these things. That is how rare it is. It is as if our young men today are always in a bad mood. They are slouching, their pants are still hanging on their asses, and they are dragging their feet. Their shoelaces are untied. The pant length is either too long or too short. They refuse to cut their hair, they do not eat anything healthy, they drink no water at all and they want to sleep all day. They don’t speak properly, they don’t make eye contact, and they are really not interested in learning anything. They’ll probably talk over you while you’re busy giving them advice or they might lose interest completely and fall asleep in the middle of a lesson.

Here Is the Prompt I Wrote So It Never Happens Again. By Lourens Breytenbach. It was a Saturday, early, and I had the kind of weekend in front of me that you get perhaps six times a year: two clear days, a list of work that actually matters to me, and enough energy to do it. I made coffee, opened ChatGPT, pasted in a long piece of thinking and asked it, in plain words, to read it and tell me what it thought. I did not want a document. I wanted a conversation. I wanted to be heard before anything got built. It built something. Of course it did. Within seconds there was a tidy, formatted deliverable on my screen, complete with headings, and my morning was gone. Not the whole morning, but the part of it that matters: the calm part, the part where the creative person is in the room and not the other one. Anybody who writes for a living knows the other one. He arrives the moment you feel unheard, and he swears like a sailor, and once he has the keyboard the good work is over for at least an hour. So this is an article about that hour, and about how to stop losing it. It applies to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and whatever arrives next month. I am not writing it to complain about the machines. I am writing it because I finally understand what the fight is actually about, and once you see it, the fix is short enough to paste at the top of a chat. Please read the rest of this article on my Medium and Substack blogs and follow me there. I don't just ask to get the numbers up, but to actually see some comments and reaction. Thanks everyone! Join the Lourens Learning Letter

https://lourensbreytenbach.substack.com/ Most students do not have a learning problem. They have a highlighter problem. They reread. They paint the page yellow. And Pink. Light-avo (i don't know!) They walk away feeling busy. Then the exam paper is blank. That is not laziness. That is the fluency illusion. Recognising a sentence on an open page is not the same job as retrieving it when the book is closed. Memory is not a photocopier. It is a path. It only stays flat if you walk it. Three small moves. Close the book. Write the heading. Produce the idea from memory. Fifteen minutes is enough. The discomfort is the work. Come back later. Not one heroic Thursday. Short visits as the idea starts to fade. Tomorrow. Then next week. Teach it in your own words. Pick one idea. Explain it as if the listener is ten. No borrowed phrases. The sentence you cannot finish is the exact gap. Open the book only for that gap. Then say it again, shorter. That last one is the Feynman technique. It looks like play. It is the most honest test in the room. If you cannot make it simple, you do not own it yet. Keep the marker. Use it as a prompt, not as the main event. A yellow rectangle with no words left is a souvenir of time spent, not a memory. Keen is a gift. Keen without a method just paints the furniture. Close the book. Say it simply. Leave. Come back. That is the whole craft. https://lourensbreytenbach.com/sharelink

Hi Everybody! We are talking about HOMEWORK today - NOT a favourite topic! But worth talking about. I wrote a longish article (2 pages) about the topic for you. Download it here. Here's what's inside: - 🍽️The Dishwashing Analogy: Why Delaying Homework is a Cognitive Disaster - 6 Lifelong Benefits of Doing Homework Properly and Quickly - What do you think is your biggest obstacle to starting your homework immediately after class—is it the distraction of your phone, or simply feeling too tired to begin? If you're a teacher - have this chat with your kids. - I also have a new video on youtube video about it.