While I am not going to be able to share every story from my time as a student, I can share with you some interesting experiences in high school that make how I think about school a little bit different than other people...

Private School

I went to a private school very similar to you all growing up and through this I had the benefit of serving the Lord by working for the church at an early age. I took a video editing class freshman year of high school where we would prepare video curriculum for the children's ministry of churches around the nation. After this class, internship and continued work for the church, I had gained a lot of skills in preparing and employing video in an educational environment. 

Geometry & Algebra 2

While I was enjoying the challenge of learning new things in video editing, I was very bored in my math class. The content was very intuitive to me, and I would complete all my assignments very quickly and play Minecraft for most of the class period. My teacher and I came to an agreement that if my grade ever dropped below an A+ then I would stop, but it didn't. Following that school year, it was suggested that I complete Algebra 2 online so that I could move to a higher math class in the coming school year.

As my first introduction to online learning, I learned that it can be very unengaging and, without much accountability, I put off most of the class. Even when the content was easy, I needed a teacher to at least hold me accountable. Eventually, I completed the remainder of the class in about two weeks. 

Pre-Calculus

The next level up was pre-calculus, and I was learning things in class on par with other students. Many of the concepts that I breezed by in Algebra 2 were not cemented in my brain and required some refreshers. I found myself needing to do math homework to practice. But, my teacher assigned so much homework. By the time I was confident that I had mastered the skill I was supposed to know, I was only halfway through the problem set. This eventually led me down a path of cheating in school. While the work had become easy, it was still a significant time sink that didn't produce any real performance differences on tests or quizzes. This was the reasoning I used to justify my lack of integrity. 

BC Calculus

Junior year, I began taking Calculus AB and the class was very similar to my Pre-Calculus experience until we got a new teacher midway through the year. He had a different teaching philosophy called standards-based grading. With this method, for the first time, I was being graded based on my mastery of a particular concept and not on assignments. I found myself doing less homework at first and really loving math! 

I fell so deeply in love with math that about a month and a half before the AP test, I asked my teacher if I could try taking the BC calculus exam instead and if he could point me in the best direction to support that. He did! Class time turned into a workshop where I was able to ask him questions about topics that I was confused about, get some one-on-one or small group instruction, and confirm my abilities by working through practice questions straight from old AP exams. 

When I went home, I would spend an hour or sometimes multiple hours grinding math on Khan Academy just for the love of the game.

When it came time for the AP exam, I passed the BC Calculus exam with the highest score possible. 

AP Chemistry

The same year I took BC Calc is the same year I took AP Chemistry. At this time, there was no AP chemistry course on Kahn academy and chemistry was the science course that was the most perplexing to me at the time. While I was getting good grades in class and was doing better than most if not all of my peers I still lacked confidence in my ability to do well. I needed extra practice, not because of my grades, but because I wanted to learn.

Physics

By senior year, I had determined that I was going to study something sciences realated in college and noticed that colleges required science students to take a physics course. So, I put physics on my course load for the year. 

This class was my worst nightmare. My school had recently shifted to conceptual physics for freshman away from the algebra based physics for juniors. I was a very over qulified senior in a class of all freshman. But, I tried to make the most of it. I treated the whole class like a study hall and when the work sheet for the day got passed out, I'd knock it out in five minutes so I could go back to what I was working on. That was until one day my teacher decided that I was not allowed to work on things for other classes and that instead I needed to help other students. I was not about this.

At the time, I was a math and science tutor for students at my school and got paid to do what the teacher was asking me to do. I told her I wasn't going to do that; it wasn't my job. She basically told me too bad, so I went straight to the office and dropped the class. 

Tutoring

The problem wasn't that I was being asked to teach other students, but rather that I had no incentive to. The reality is that I loved teaching. I would spend multiple hours a week tutoring other students. Even through college, I tutored other students. 

After I completed my bachelor's, the COVID-19 pandemic created an even greater need for tutoring, as students were all pushed through school without being required to learn for 1-2 years. It was during that year, 2020, that I began incorporating my love for games into my tutoring efforts. Just like Khan Academy used to give me the hits of confetti and evolving my avatar for completing some math problems, I would build whole board game-like tracks for my tutoring students to complete as they participated in their required school activities. At a time when students were historically least motivated, my students were having more motivation than ever before.

Beginning Teaching