Press Release:
Every fall, capable students hit the jump to high school and struggle from the first week, and their families hear the same three explanations: not enough discipline, not enough caring, maybe not enough ability. Author Greg Wilson argues the real gap is none of those. The planning, tracking, note-taking and follow-through that school demands were once absorbed as a byproduct of how school itself worked. Class structures have changed, and technology now carries much of the work students used to carry in their own heads, so the skills stopped being absorbed. Nothing was put in their place. Students inherit the gap, and then they inherit the blame for it.
Field Guide to High School teaches those skills explicitly, at the moment they start to count. It is an eight-week executive function program written directly to the student, ages 11 to 14, at twenty to thirty minutes a day, and it is printed to be written in rather than kept clean. The program does not hand a student a system to adopt. It teaches the loop that builds one: make something, use it, look at what happened, change it, and run that again. Which is why the same book is built to end up different in every house.
Field Guide to High School: Adult Companion runs the same eight weeks from the other side. It is written for two readers, families at home and educators, counselors and clinicians using the program in their settings, and its argument is that the adult’s job during those eight weeks is smaller than they expect. The two books sell separately and are written to be used together.
Wilson built the program for his own son during the summer before ninth grade, after watching the standard advice arrive as objects rather than instruction. The planner showed up, the folders got labels, and the science folder stayed empty. He is a practitioner, not a clinician or a researcher, and the books say so. What he built is grounded in published cognitive science and current research on how skills actually form, not in conjecture or one family’s story.
Wilson appears at the Collingswood Book Festival in Collingswood, N.J., on October 3.
Field Guide to High School
Greg Wilson · Dotted Eye Press · Published July 11, 2026
Paperback, 660 pages · ISBN 978-1-972263-00-6 · $34.99
Ages 11 to 14 · Study guides and test preparation
Field Guide to High School: Adult Companion
Greg Wilson · Dotted Eye Press · Published July 11, 2026
Paperback, 362 pages · ISBN 978-1-972263-03-7 · $19.99
About Dotted Eye Press
Dotted Eye Press is an independent publisher in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, an imprint of Dotted Eye LLC. It publishes practical skills programs for students and the adults who support them.
Contact
Greg Wilson, Dotted Eye Press. greg@dottedeyepress.com ·
For all the latest news, follow us on Facebook or sign up for Glenside Local’s “Daily Buzz” newsletter here.