What's actually happening inside the Lamentum Institute

Hi everyone,

If your eagle has come home recently speaking in a strange accent, ranting about a potions recipe gone wrong, or telling you very seriously about their character — congratulations. You are witnessing an Odyssey in full swing. 😏

I want to step out from behind the curtain of the Lamentum Institute for a minute and tell you what your kids are actually building in there, because from the outside an Odyssey can look like an elaborate game. Wands, potions, dueling cards, a secret school hidden inside our school. And it is all of those things. But underneath the spectacle is some of the most serious educational work happening anywhere in the country right now. And I want you to be able to see it.

A quick heads-up: this one's a little more research-heavy than usual. Blame the PhD program — you start a doctorate and suddenly every parent email wants to grow footnotes. Bear with me! 😂

The skills education researchers now call "durable skills" or the "4Cs" — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity — are the competencies the research community has spent two decades trying to figure out how to teach. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report finds that creative thinking, analytical thinking, and resilience are among the fastest-growing skills employers will need through 2027 and beyond — and that 44% of workers' core skills will be disrupted in that window as automation handles more routine work. CASEL's longitudinal research finds that students who develop these competencies show better academic performance, stronger mental health, and measurably better life outcomes up to 18 years later. The hard part has always been how to teach them, because they don't transfer from a worksheet. They have to be practiced inside real situations with real stakes.

That is exactly what the Odyssey is engineered to do.

In Potions, your eagle is reading a recipe, troubleshooting a botched brew, and negotiating with a classmate over who measures and who pours — that's communication, planning, and applied chemistry all running at once. In Monsters, when they work through a five-step taming decision tree on a creature they've never seen before, they're doing structured reasoning under uncertainty. In Spells, the Gauntlet forces them to execute a precise sequence while distracted — essentially a working-memory and self-regulation drill in costume. And every time they interview a guide character like Professor Eudora to crack a mystery, they're practicing one of the most underrated academic skills of all: asking a better question than the one they started with.

The quieter work is happening on the social-emotional layer. The students at Lamentum are not just characters on a card. Each eagle is inhabiting someone with a history, a personality, and relationships with twenty-five other people. When they have to make a choice in-character that costs them something, or speak up to a classmate whose character disagrees with theirs, they are building empathy and perspective-taking in a way that no discussion-circle conversation can replicate. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology found that drama-based pedagogy directly enhances theory of mind — the ability to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and motivations different from your own. That capacity is foundational to everything from leadership to healthy relationships to good citizenship. Your eagles are exercising it every day.

I'll tell you what makes this approach unusually powerful. Harvard Business School, Wharton, and INSEAD pay enormous sums to put their graduate students inside high-fidelity simulations because the research is clear that experiential learning beats classroom instruction for building judgment under pressure. The Odyssey does the same thing — ethically, joyfully, and with eight-year-olds 😜. Your kids are making genuinely hard decisions about loyalty, identity, power, and sacrifice, feeling the full emotional weight of those choices, and then walking out and reflecting on what they learned. As I said in an email to parents sent during a previous year's Odyssey, being able to learn from a mistake without having to actually make the mistake — and the same for wise decisions — sounds a lot like experience. Because it is.

A few moments from this session that have stuck with me:

A young eagle who has hated reading for as long as he's been at Aim — sitting on the floor of his house room, working his way through a Monsters guide page by page, because he wanted the card badly enough to fight through the thing he's avoided his whole life. Two eagles sacrificing their own characters to save one of their teachers' characters, knowing exactly what it would cost them (such as giving up cards, sitting out of Odyssey for a day, and knowing they will have to come back as new characters without any friends). And one I will never forget — walking into the Ferryn house room and seeing a character lying on the couch, killed by a werewolf attack, the other eagles gathered around in stunned silence. I am not exaggerating when I tell you it felt like walking into a funeral. For a second I forgot it was a game. I think the eagles forgot too.

And one more, because it captures something I think most adults underestimate about kids. A girl watched Headmaster Arkanis (me) stoop down to pick up Petra (one of my daughters), who had just been killed, while he was shouting at the others. Afterward she told me what she had felt in that moment, and it went something like: "I was sad because Petra was dead, and I was mad because Arkanis was yelling, and I felt guilty because I thought it was partly my fault, but I was also kind of happy because the way he picked her up showed me he really loved her." That is a ten-year-old sorting through conflicting emotions in real time and naming each one. There are adults who cannot do that. Emotional intelligence at that level is not something you teach with a traditional school. It is something the Odyssey forges, because the stakes are real enough that the feelings are real.

Speaking of stakes... I want to be transparent about why the stakes are what they are. Characters die in the Odyssey. They get betrayed, they lose their cards, they fail, they have to live with the consequences of choices they made an hour ago and four weeks ago. We design it that way on purpose. Pretend stakes produce pretend learning. If an eagle knows that nothing can really go wrong, no real growth happens. The minute the stakes become real — even within a fiction — everything changes. The brain starts treating it as real. The decisions start mattering. The character starts forming. That is the whole game. (But as is so often said within the walls of Aim: The Odyssey is NOT just a game.)

The same goes for the darkness. Parents sometimes ask why there is real darkness in the Odyssey — werewolves, betrayal, loss, fear, characters who can be lost. The answer is simple. We do not build heroes in well-lit rooms with soft music playing. The whole reason there is darkness in the story is so our eagles can practice being the kind of light the world needs while they fight it. That is the work. And every year I watch them rise to it, and every year I am more sure we are doing the right thing.

So when your eagle comes home talking about potions and duels — the wands and the houses are not the point. They are the vehicle. The point is that your child is spending an hour a day inside a problem that matters to them, making real decisions, collaborating with peers, and discovering that their thinking has consequences. Those are the habits I want them carrying into middle school, into high school, and into whatever the world looks like when they get there.

One more story. A few weeks ago in the studio we played a song that the eagles hadn't heard in an entire year — and the second it came on, every eagle who was deep into the Space Odyssey last year, or who went to Dreamwalk for last year's final showdown, looked up. You could see it on their faces. Nearly 365 days later, that day is still living somewhere deep in them. These are remember-forever days. That is what we build toward every single year.

Ok...that's it. Novel complete.

(...to be fair, I did warn you that these emails would be coming again with me back in as head of school lol)

Thank you, as always, for trusting us with this strange and wonderful work.

Onward,

Lance