Any kid can get an answer in six seconds. This course teaches them to question it.
FlexTIM is a project-based critical thinking course built by a lifelong educator for students heading to college. His son restored it for the generation that grew up with ChatGPT.
Studies show that artificial intelligence will transform education for the better, giving every student a personal tutor. Experts agree the change is inevitable, and those who resist will simply be left behind.
The first lessons are free when they open. This is a family project; you'll get one email.
Unit 0.1 — The problem
Thinking is a practice. AI makes it optional.
The research so far says something more precise than "AI makes you dumber": people who hand their thinking to the machine and accept whatever comes back show less of it, while people who interrogate what comes back don't. Your kid is going to use AI. The real question is whether anyone has trained them to check its work.
That training barely exists. Schools are still writing their AI policies, "AI literacy" courses mostly teach prompt-writing, and the classic thinking curricula were written before any of this existed.
Unit 0.2 — The method
Eight questions, drilled until they're reflex.
FlexTIM builds on the Elements of Thought, the framework at the heart of the Paul-Elder critical thinking model. Every text a student meets gets the same eight questions:
- PurposeWhat is the author trying to accomplish?
- QuestionWhat question is actually being addressed?
- InformationWhat facts and data support this, and are they accurate?
- InferencesWhat conclusions is the author drawing?
- ConceptsWhat ideas do you have to understand to follow the reasoning?
- AssumptionsWhat is taken for granted that might be questioned?
- ImplicationsIf this is right, or wrong, what follows?
- Point of viewWhose perspective is this, and whose is missing?
The drills are only half of it. FlexTIM is project-based: students debate live issues, argue moot court cases, produce investigative news reports, and defend their reasoning in front of the room. Robert built the course around questions with no clean answer. He liked to quote Jimmy Carter: "It's easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. The difficulty is predicting which wrong is more right."
Watch real students from the original course: a Kean University class debates marijuana legalization →
Exercise 1 — Try it yourself
Four of these sentences cheat. Find them.
This paragraph was written to sound reasonable. Tap every sentence you suspect of a named fallacy.
Found 0 of 4.
That reflex is the whole course. The full fallacies unit — eight fallacies, three passages, answer key — is free. Get it when lessons open.
Unit 0.3 — Where this comes from
A teacher built this. His son brought it back.
Robert H. Robinson (1955–2023) taught students how to think for most of his life, in classrooms and teacher workshops around Newark, New Jersey. His Halsey Street consortium published curricula from 1996 on. FlexTIM was the work he cared about most: a critical thinking course built through years with pre-freshman programs at Rutgers and Kean University, and taught in seminars for Kean's Exceptional Educational Opportunity program, where students make the jump from high school to college-level work.
He believed the students least likely to be handed intellectual confidence deserved the most rigorous training in it. He died in 2023. His son recovered the course from old email attachments and web archives: the textbook chapters, the lab workbook, the lesson decks, the debate assignments. He is restoring it because the problem his father worked on has gotten bigger. Students now carry a machine that will happily do their thinking for them, and almost nobody is teaching them how to check it.
"Education is the continuous process whereby one goes from uninformed arrogance to thoughtful uncertainty."
Robert Robinson, from the FlexTIM learning theory
Unit 0.4 — What's coming
The first lessons are free. The full course follows if enough families want it.
Joining the list gets you the first restored lessons when they open. The opening unit is the one every family should run at the dinner table: logical fallacies, and how to catch them in the wild. If enough people want more, the full course follows, modernized for homeschool and self-study use and priced like a workbook.
Built for homeschooling families and college-prep parents. Adults taking it for themselves are welcome too.
Enrollment interest — Section A