Teaching Keating with Weston and Molly Kieschnick

Teaching Keating with Weston and Molly Kieschnick is a conversation show built around a marriage. Weston and Molly talk about schools, children and manners with the interruptions, teasing and quick yeses of two people who share a house. Education sits at the center. They come at it from the parent's side and the teacher's side, with parenting and everyday etiquette crowding in around it; by their own account, summer topics lean toward parenting because that is what they are living through. A run of recent titles shows the spread: 'E205: The Most and Least Important School Subjects: Our Bold Rankings', 'E203: How to Talk to Teachers: A Guide for Parents, Students, and Strangers', 'E202: Rediscovering Social Etiquette: What's Lost and What We Want Back' and 'E200: Parenting Plot Twists'. The rankings conversation gets billed on air as the most controversial they have done, a label that draws pushback within seconds. Music, arts and physical education land at the top of one list, argued for as the reason some kids come to school at all. That sets off a detour about who was the school nerd, and a fond memory of a dance unit in PE. On talking to teachers, the tone sharpens. One of them says plainly that teachers, like anyone, will not like every kid, and that some will not go the extra mile for the ones they dislike. The same conversation weighs chain of command and clear boundaries, along with the benefit and the weight that come with a highly invested parent population. Back-to-school talk argues that school is about growth rather than trading behavior for points in a grade book. It also turns to educators who check work email while making dinner, with one spouse claiming to be far better at boundaries than the other. Family structure gets an episode too: grandparents who were strict disciplinarians in their day and now have no rules, and cousins the same age who text each other. The etiquette episode collects small public annoyances, including a man dancing to a loud wireless speaker on an escalator and a phone call carried on through a coffee-shop checkout, and also makes room for modern things the pair are glad to have. 'E200: Parenting Plot Twists' includes the disbelief of being allowed to walk out of the hospital with a newborn, and a candid exchange about keeping a marriage healthy once a baby arrives. None of it stays abstract; a son's school, a daughter's Nutcracker practice and a child's new driver's license all turn up as evidence. Recent episodes close on the same question of where to find each of them. Weston answers from the road, in South Carolina, Ohio or West Virginia; Molly answers from the garden, the carpool or the football field. It suits a listener who wants school talk grounded in one real household and delivered with very little hedging.