(Note: This is the long-winded personal reflection on a big change in my business model. If you just want to see the nuts and bolts, check out this post).
Everything about doing this work — this teaching and developing materials for the secular homeschooling community — has been a practice in recognizing my own values as they relate to a complicated world.
This is not the career I envisioned when I got a PhD in English. In fact, homeschooling wasn’t on my radar at all. I — like so many secular homeschoolers — found myself thrown into the deep end when my own daughter’s learning needs were not being met. Homeschooling was something I came to in crisis, a place I planned to catch my breath before figuring out the next move.
Then I fell in love with the possibilities.
Homeschooling provided me ways beyond my imagination to meet my own daughter’s needs, but it also provided me a glimpse at a different way of doing things on a broader scale. At the time, I was an Assistant Professor at a community college, and I had a front row seat to the way that the traditional educational system was not working for so many learners.
As someone who specialized in “developmental” writing classes (non-credit-bearing college classes required of those who tested below requirements), I knew all too well what didn’t work. My work there focused on taking learners who had heard too many times that they couldn’t succeed, that they were lacking, that they were failures and building up an educational environment built on trust, respect, and high expectations with a lot of flexibility on how to get there.
Homeschooling Perfectly Fit My Teaching Philosophy
As I spent more time homeschooling my own child (and, later, children), I realized that the rigid standardization of the traditional educational system failed in so many ways to allow the key principles of what research and experience told us worked.
As I started dipping my toes into the waters of teaching for this community more fully, I was blown away by the possibilities.
Here was an environment where I wasn’t swimming against the tide to implement the kind of practices that I knew — from research, from experience, from practice — worked.
Here was a place where I could build learning experiences that centered respect, trust, flexibility, and learner autonomy.
I didn’t have to try to rebuild those elements out of the scraps left behind from a system that hadn’t worked. I could do it from the very beginning.
It was exhilarating, and — most importantly — it worked.
Considering Financial Accessibility
As I shifted more and more into making this work the focus of my professional goals, I was also reflecting on my values for education more broadly. I have always valued high-quality public education as a right and part of our society’s responsibility.
Creating high-quality classes is time intensive and involved. Giving personalized feedback on assignments, designing materials that stay up-to-date and engaging, developing live meeting plans that fit the best practices in online teaching, researching those online teaching best practices, taking part in professional development to ensure that my materials are responsive and ethically created — it all takes time and energy.
Figuring out how to value that time fairly (and practically) while making sure that my classrooms remain financially accessible has been the biggest challenge of doing this work. I LOVE the teaching. The students I have met since focusing on the secular academic homeschooling community have been among the most curious, delightful, and surprising I have ever had the pleasure to know. I leave classes feeling energized and excited for what comes next.
But making sure that I’m both setting up a sustainable model where I can do this work long-term and creating a classroom that is financially accessible for as many students as possible has not been easy.
Pandemic Reflections
I was already sitting at the intersections of those discomforts when the pandemic made everything . . . more. More intense. More confusing. More pressing.
As the collective urge to “get back to normal” opened up space to question what “normal” had meant, I saw so many inspiring calls to build something new.
As I reflected on what that meant for me — as a mom, as an educator, as a human — I realized what I really wanted: to build a sustainable community for meaningful, challenging, respectful ELA education.
I started researching what that might look like, and I talked with some very smart people who helped me build out a framework.
Starting with this upcoming semester of classes (which will be going live within the next week or so), I have a new plan in place. It consists of multiple elements that, together, I hope will give me the best chance at putting the values I hold for education into practice in a way I can sustain.
You can read the more detailed explanation here, but the basics are this:
- My longer, core classes are all offered on a sliding fee scale. Families can choose to participate at the market rate, at a rate above the market rate to help me subsidize reduced rates, or at a rate below the market rate. There’s no application process or proof of hardship required. I trust the members of this community to reflect on their own needs and choose the option that fits at that point in time.
- I am holding one scholarship spot for each class.
- I am committing to donate a minimum of 10% of my personal profits from this work into organizations committed to social justice, equity, and educational access.
I am excited about these shifts in my model, and I am hopeful about what it means for the growth and continued momentum of my classes, materials, and offerings.
As always, I want to express my appreciation for those of you who trust me with teaching your learners. It’s a privilege I don’t take lightly, and I hope that these changes reflect a continued commitment to doing the work of building an education community rooted in shared values and a hopeful future.