The Shakespeare Exam

An exam you could not cram for, and what it taught me about building something that lasts. An article from the Build series

There was an exam at Episcopal High School (Alexandria, Virginia) that you could not shortcut.

It was the Shakespeare exam, and it came senior year. My teacher, and later my colleague, Whit Morgan, ran it. There were several sections to it, and twenty-five years later I will not pretend to remember all of them. What I remember is the part that mattered. A long run of quotes, and for each one you had to name the speaker, name the play, say where the line fell, and explain what it meant in that moment.

Everybody crammed. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to tell this story as though some of us walked in relaxed. Nobody did. We all sat up late trying to hold it together.

But here is what Whit understood, and it was masterful. He built an exam that was Cliff Notes proof. You could not buy the summary and pass it. Knowing the plot of Macbeth got you nothing. He wanted the line, the mouth it came out of, the moment it landed in, and what it was doing there. The only way through was to have actually read the plays and then work hard on top of that.

Which meant the cramming was not the same for everybody.

If you had been at Episcopal since freshman year, you had read those plays across four years. Romeo and Juliet. Julius Caesar. Macbeth. Hamlet. The lines had time to settle. Your night of studying was consolidation. You were pulling into focus something you had already lived inside.

If you arrived junior year, your night of studying was construction. Same hours, same exhaustion, entirely different job. You were trying to assemble four years of accumulated reading from nothing, in a few weeks, and hold it steady long enough to place the lines.

Some students pulled it off. Most felt the gap the whole way through.

What the Exam Was Actually Testing

I have thought about that exam for years, and I have come to believe it was not really testing Shakespeare.

It was testing whether the foundation was there.

The senior who could name the speaker was not smarter than the junior who could not, and was not working any harder that week. He had been inside the system longer. The curriculum was built so each year rested on the one before it, which meant nobody had to carry four years in their head at once. The structure carried it for them.

The student who arrived late did not fail for lack of ability or effort.

He was handed a cram test for something everyone else had absorbed over years.

Episcopal Was the First Brick

I want to say something directly, because it shows up in nearly everything I write and it should be claimed rather than implied.

Episcopal made me.

I arrived at fourteen, on financial aid, at a fully residential school. You cannot live at a place like that and come away without knowing what it costs to do hard work and navigate inside an institution at the same time. There is no separating the academics from the athletics from the awkwardness. It is all one experience, running twenty-four hours a day, and you learn to read a room because you never leave it. The trials and the triumphs are the same set of years.

That is the first brick. Everything after it rests there.

I know this is not only my memory, because I have had the conversation with other Episcopal alumni, people who took that same exam in different years. They bring it up unprompted. They describe the same thing I do: the ones who were there from the start were consolidating, and the ones who came later were building from scratch. Different people, different classes, same structure, same conclusion.

When a story repeats across people who never compared notes, it has stopped being a memory and started being evidence.

Two Words for What Was Happening

There is a word for what that curriculum was doing, and it is worth naming plainly.

Pedagogy is the method and practice of teaching: how learning gets structured, sequenced, and built so that it accumulates rather than scatters. Pedagogy is not what you teach. It is the architecture of how you teach it, and in what order, so each piece can hold the weight of the next one.

The Shakespeare exam was possible because someone had designed a pedagogy. Four years of sequence, deliberately built, so that by senior year the foundation could bear a hard question. And the assessment matched the design, which is the part people miss. A shortcut proof exam is only fair if the school actually built the four years underneath it.

The second word is the one my work is named for.

Educational Navigation is how Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC) describes the gap that exam exposed. Getting through the door of an institution is not the same as thriving inside it. Educational Navigation is the work that lives in that gap: giving students, graduates, and professionals the map to move through environments that were not built with them in mind, and helping institutions become places where that movement costs less. BLAC works both sides because they are the same problem seen from two directions.

Access opens the door. Navigation is everything after.

The junior who arrived without four years of Shakespeare had access. He was in the room, holding the same exam as everyone else, working just as hard the night before. What he did not have was the sequence underneath it.

What I Finally Understood

My own arc was built the same way. Episcopal, then William and Mary, then an MBA that taught me to see institutions as systems with economics and not just cultures. Corporate project management taught me how work gets scoped and delivered when good intentions are not enough. Independent school access and equity work brought me back to the room I came from, standing on the other side of it. Each one was only usable because of the one beneath it. Brick by brick.

The practice took longer to learn. For years I worked the way a junior takes the Shakespeare exam. One piece at a time, each engagement held together by my memory and my effort in the moment. It worked, because I cared and I remembered. But it was construction every time, never consolidation. If I was tired, the work was tired.

What I finally understood is that the work becomes sustainable only when it links back. When every piece connects to Listen, Learn, Lead and the five pillars, so each one rests on the ones before it and holds up the ones that come after. Not because a framework is tidy. Because that is what stops the work from being a pile of one-offs that only I can hold together.

That is pedagogy applied to a practice rather than a classroom. Sequence, so the work accumulates. Structure, so the architecture holds the memory instead of the person.

What Got Built

The curriculum map exists. It is on the site: five disciplines, in order, each one resting on the one before it. Listen gathers lived experience. Understand turns experience into meaning. Build turns meaning into design. Apply puts the design into practice. Multiply makes it outlast the person who started it.

That sequence was not designed in advance and then filled in. It was written into existence, blog by blog, over years, until the structure was strong enough to stand on its own. The writing did not describe BLAC. The writing built it.

And it was built on other people's stories, not mine. More than forty recorded conversations with graduates. A hundred and eighty published alumni accounts spanning more than ninety educational institutions. Consulting contracts and speaking engagements. An accepted workshop at NAIS Gather in Boston this December. Mentorships. Resume, cover letter, and interview coaching for people moving between jobs and industries. And hundreds of hours with students and families in mainland China, working through an American admissions process written in a second language and built on assumptions nobody had ever explained to them.

That last group taught me the most, because they made the problem impossible to miss. They were bright, prepared, and working as hard as anyone I have ever coached. They were also standing outside a system whose unwritten rules were invisible from where they stood. They had access. What they needed was the map.

That is Educational Navigation, and it is the thing being built.

What Is Still Being Written

The institutional results are still being written, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. School change runs on school timelines, measured in enrollment cycles and board calendars, not in the weeks it takes to publish an essay. What exists now is momentum, and momentum is a real thing to have. A framework in use, a curriculum map on the site, an accepted workshop in Boston, people in coaching and mentorship, and a body of conversations that keeps growing.

The rest is being built in the open. This series is not a report filed after the work is done. It is the running narrative of the work happening, which is the only honest way to write about something you are still building. The Shakespeare sequence was not designed by someone who already knew how the senior exam would go. It was designed by someone who trusted that if each year held up the next, the foundation would be there when the hard question arrived.

So the discipline is simple, and it is the whole method. Every story gets listened to before it gets interpreted. Every insight gets placed in a pillar rather than filed loose. Nothing gets published that does not connect to something already standing. And the unwritten rules, the ones that usually travel person to person or not at all, get written down, because a foundation nobody names is a foundation only the early arrivals get.

That is the difference between a person who does good work and a practice that can outlast the person.

One runs on energy. The other runs on architecture.

No Summary Version

Here is the last thing Whit taught me, and I did not learn it until I started building something of my own.

There are no Cliff Notes for this either.

Institutions want the summary. They want belonging without the listening, the outcome without the sequence, the senior exam without the four years. I understand the pull. Sequence is slow and the calendar is not. But there is no shortcut through the middle of this, and anyone selling one is selling the plot of Macbeth to a room full of people who are about to be asked who said the line and why.

You cannot skim Listen and arrive at Multiply. You have to do the reading.

Whit gave a room full of seniors an exam that could not be faked and, without saying so, showed us what four years of deliberate sequence makes possible. I did not have the language for it at seventeen. I do now, and I am building with it.

Listen. Learn. Lead. In that order, on a foundation, brick by brick.

If this sounds familiar, somewhere in your organization there are people who arrived late to a sequence everyone else absorbed over years, and who are being measured as though they did not. A student who transferred in junior year. An employee hired into unwritten rules nobody ever wrote down.

If you want to talk about where that gap sits in your own place and what it would take to close it, my calendar is open.

A note on sources and method

This account of the Shakespeare exam is my own recollection, written twenty-five years after I sat it. I have described its structure rather than reconstructed its contents, and where I do not remember a detail I have said so rather than filling it in. Whit Morgan read this piece and approved the use of his name.

Episcopal High School is named here on purpose. It is my own school and this is an account of my own experience inside it, not an assessment of the institution.

The corroboration I describe comes from conversations with other Episcopal alumni who took the same exam in other years. Those are recollections offered in conversation, not a survey. I treat their convergence as evidence that the structure was real, not as a measure of how many students experienced it that way.

Pedagogy is used here in its standard sense: the method and practice of teaching, including how learning is sequenced so that it accumulates rather than scatters.

Educational Navigation is BLAC's own term. Its full definition is published on the BLAC site.

BLAC's archive holds more than forty recorded conversations and 180 published alumni accounts spanning graduates of more than ninety educational institutions, gathered since 2021. It is a body of accounts volunteered by participants, not a sample drawn to be representative of any school or of the sector. The work with students and families in mainland China is separate from that archive and comes from five years supporting internationally enrolled students after they arrive at their schools.

The workshop at NAIS Gather in Boston, December 2026, was selected through the conference's proposal process.

Jonathan E. Lee is the founder of Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC), where he studies how people learn to navigate environments that were not built for them, and builds the systems that make that navigation teachable.