How to Use Substack for Ongoing Self-Education When You’re a Busy Parent or Teacher
It was 9:18 p.m. last Tuesday when I sank into the couch cushion, one kid’s sparkly unicorn sock peeking out from under the frame and congealed buttered pasta still sitting on the stove. I’d spent the day walking 22 third graders through long division with remainders, broken up two recess arguments over who got the only blue hula hoop, and packed three different lunches that morning, and I still had that quiet itch: the persistent feeling that I wasn’t learning anything new outside of scripted lesson plans and repeated readings of The Gruffalo.
I’d tried all the usual fixes for adult learning when you have almost no free time. I checked out professional development books on the science of reading from the public library and returned them three weeks later with the audiobook still 92% unplayed. I signed up for a MasterClass subscription during a 2020 sale and never made it past the first 10 minutes of the first lecture. A fellow teacher slipped me a link to a Substack written by a retired reading specialist over staff donuts a few months later, and I clicked it mostly to be polite. I expected another long essay I’d never finish, something else to add to my guilt list of uncompleted self-improvement tasks.
That first post was 400 words long, about a quick phonics game you can play with kids while waiting in the grocery store line. I read it standing in my kitchen while my pasta water boiled, tested it with my own 4-year-old that weekend, and pulled it out for my struggling readers the next week. I was hooked, and immediately made the same mistake everyone makes when they first find the platform: I subscribed to 47 different newsletters in one rainy Saturday.
There were newsletters on gentle parenting and macroeconomics, backyard vegetable gardening and 19th century women’s poetry, classroom management and neurodivergent kid advocacy. Within two weeks, my inbox was flooded with 10+ new posts a day, and I started archiving all of them unread, same as the library books. I felt that familiar twist of guilt: here were all these smart people giving away useful information, and I couldn’t even be bothered to read it.
I culled the list while my oldest did soccer practice a few Sundays later, and worked out a loose set of rules that’s stuck for the last 10 months, rules I’ve since passed along to half the other teachers on my team and a handful of mom friends who complain they never get to learn anything for fun anymore.
I cap my active subscriptions at 12, total. That works out to roughly one new post every other day, since most writers publish 2-3 times a week at most, and it never feels overwhelming. Any new newsletter I want to try gets a three-post test: if I open and finish three issues in a row, it gets a spot. If I skip two in a row, I unsubscribe immediately, no hard feelings, no “I’ll get to it later” guilt. I thought I wanted to learn formal macroeconomics, for example, so I subscribed to a big, popular national newsletter on the topic, but every post was 20 minutes long and full of jargon I had to look up. I swapped it for a Substack written by a former high school econ teacher who ties every concept to ordinary household costs. Last month she wrote a short post breaking down why egg prices jump around so much, and I turned her data into a graphing exercise for my third graders. Half my kids help their parents shop for groceries, and they talked about that assignment for a week.
I also turned off all email notifications for Substack, and deleted the shortcut from my phone’s home screen. I don’t let posts pop up in my main inbox, where they’d mix in with parent emails and district reminders and feel like another chore. I open the Substack app intentionally, only when I already have a 10-minute pocket of dead time: while I wait for after-school pickup, while my oatmeal cooks in the morning, while one kid is at piano lessons and the other flips through picture books in the waiting room. I never save posts to a “read later” folder, either. I used to have a folder of 120 saved pieces I swore I’d get to on a free weekend, and that free weekend never came. If a post is too long to finish in that 10-minute window, I close it and move on. If that happens twice with the same writer, they go.
I only pay for two subscriptions right now, $11 total a month, less than I spend on one fancy iced coffee a week. Everything else I read is free, and I never feel pressured to upgrade or buy a paid course from any writer. The best unexpected benefit is that I can ask specific questions and get answers without signing up for a formal workshop. A few months ago, I had a second grader who could decode words fine but froze up when it was time to read aloud, and hated all the standard confidence-building worksheets the district recommended. I left a two-sentence comment on that retired reading specialist’s next post explaining the situation, and she wrote back the same day with a simple trick: let him read aloud to the class goldfish first, then work up to one partner, then the whole group. I tried it the next week. Within a month, he was volunteering to read pages during our story circle.
My teammate Lila and I complained in the staff lounge a few weeks back, between bites of sad vending machine granola bars, that our district’s annual neurodiversity training was the same three-hour recorded Zoom we’d watched three years running. She pulled out her phone and showed me her own curated Substack list, put together after I showed her my system last winter. She reads one post a week while her 13-year-old is at taekwondo, and she brought a new two-minute sensory break routine she found on a special education teacher’s Substack to our last grade-level meeting. We’re rolling it out in all our classrooms next month.
It’s not perfect, of course. Some weeks, like when my youngest had strep throat two months back, I don’t open the app at all. I spend my evenings folding laundry and rewatching old seasons of Great British Bake Off, and I don’t give myself a hard time about it. Sometimes I see a viral list of “10 Substacks every smart parent must read” and add a couple new ones on impulse, then cull them a week later when I realize I don’t care that much about foraging for wild mushrooms. I still have that unread reading science book on my nightstand, and I probably won’t finish it this year, either.
Last night I sank into that same couch cushion at 9:22 p.m., the same sparkly sock still under the frame, leftover taco meat congealing on the stove this time. I opened the app, and the new post from the econ teacher was about back-to-school supply price gouging. I read it in seven minutes, left a quick comment saying I was going to adapt it for our upcoming addition and subtraction unit, then closed the app and stood up to scrape the dishes.
I don’t have a new degree or a stack of completed courses to show for 10 months of this. What I have is a running collection of small, useful ideas that fit into the cracks of days already packed full of other people’s needs. Next month I might swap out the poetry newsletter for one on beginner birding, since I’ve skipped the last four issues. I might go a whole month without reading anything at all when the school year ramps up. It doesn’t have to be a permanent, structured habit to count as learning. It just has to fit.
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