My Teaching Origin Story - Try One
In my mid-20s I was a member of four Toastmasters groups at once, which are training and support groups for public speaking. Giving speeches to each other you learn quite a bit about a person, and they learn quite a bit about you. After one session in Muskegon, Michigan on a Friday a few of us went out to lunch. We often did that, just to talk afterward. Everyone was older than me. The two most common people that I went to lunch with after that meeting were both over 80. One had been a Toastmaster for more than 50 years.
On this particular day I asked them, "What do you guys think I should be doing? Like, for a job or career?" The retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel thought about it for a moment and said, "I see you teaching something." I was a little surprised and asked, "What?"
"I'm not sure." he responded, "Something. Maybe to kids, maybe to adults." I looked at the other guy there, a successful real estate agent, and said, "What do you think?" He said, "Yeah, that makes sense." I wasn't sure where to go with that and we started talking about something else, but the conversation has stuck with me ever since, and proven to be somewhat prophetic.
Some people structure their lives around a career. Other people structure their lives around family. I did neither.
When I was thirteen my best friend was hit by a truck at his bus stop and died. My sister and I were already on the bus and it pulled up too close to the scene. I mentally and emotionally broke in that moment, with my vision going grey and the screaming from my sister and the other kids on the bus becoming muted. I just sat back down and stared forward. My entire social network collapsed, especially the adults.
I thought about killing myself. But when I thought through it the thought of someone finding me, and my mother being sad, made me decide not to. I looked into brainwashing and realized that wouldn't work. So I decided to find and understand the meaning of life. That became my mission, and I started reading philosophy books.
Over the next few years I was a mess in a variety of ways. I previously had a business, Jeff's Bait and Tackle, from age 8 to 12. I decided to shut that down because it had grown and I didn't have enough time for school and sports and the business. At 13 I also injured my shoulder in football. That kept me from being able to play baseball, which was my best sport, and I took too many painkillers. I would skip school and stay home and read because I could learn faster. Nothing seemed to go well for years.
After a few years of intensely reading and searching for the answers to the meaning of life, and not just my life because that wasn't useful for what had motivated my search, I realized that life isn't in a book. I would need to be more in the world. Since I had been working from a young age I also saw that waiting and planning for a meaningful thing in the far future was a bad plan, because people often couldn't do what they wanted in retirement because they had already died, were sick, had medical bills, we're out of money, or some other issue. So I decided to live in reverse, doing the things I would want to do at the end of my life first, and to do extra to make up for the unlived life of my friend.
First, I knew I had to deal with my issues with death, and in the end all good therapy is exposure therapy. So, I decided to do Emergency Medical Technician training. As a 19 year old it pushed me and I had a few intense experiences which helped me confront my issues with death, including kneeling in the blood of an old man I knew and holding his head while he was dying. I did a year of schooling and clinicals and completed EMT-Basic and Intermediate/Specialist. I was pushing hard and doing well, second in my class. The only guy ahead of me was my main study partner. At one point I scheduled three full days with no sleep between class, clinicals on ambulances, and working in the college bookstore. On day three I crashed my car and totaled it. My father came and picked me up and I still made it to class, and then work, and then was finally able to sleep.
My grandmother was happy because she thought it would be a good career. With just one more year of training I could be a full Paramedic, and one year after that I could have advanced qualifications and be making good money for my age. She never understood that I wasn't going for a career, no one understood. I had a couple thousand dollars saved to go for the next semester, but I had already experienced what I needed to experience, and a couple thousand dollars was how much I needed to climb Mount Rainier in Washington State.
Climbing a mountain sounded so extreme and adventurous to me, and it's so symbolic of struggle and achievement. I felt like I needed to do it. I started training and getting ready for that. While in school I started running five to eight miles a day. After I crashed the car and finished school I would ride my mountain bike 20 miles from Blue Lake to Muskegon, work a shift assembling and moving furniture, and then ride back home.
Since I wasn't 25 years old I couldn't rent a car. Plus I didn't have a ton of money. So I decided to make it a bigger adventure. I would ride a bus from Michigan to Washington State for 3 days, then ride my mountain bike from Yakima to Mount Rainier for 3 days, then with a guided group and rental equipment climb the mountain. I remember standing on the top of Mount Rainier on July 6, 2008 and realizing that after that moment I had no specific plans in life. That's when I realized you always have to have a next thing.
I had a girlfriend I met just a little before leaving on the trip. When I got back I arranged for both of us to work for the mountain guiding service in the rental and retail shops the next year. We turned that into a road trip adventure doing two months in a small car across the western US including having a tent collapse on us from snow and outracing a sandstorm in the car.
We only did a couple of months in Washington State. Then we decided to move to Texas because it was different and I had a cousin living there we could stay with. After a few months we moved into our own apartment. I was getting fitness training certifications and she was working on getting dog training certifications, and we were saving up money to hike the Appalachian Trail. Then she got pregnant. Then she miscarried. She wasn't doing well mentally and emotionally, and I didn't know how to help.
We moved back to Michigan to be closer to family and she got pregnant again. To cope with the fear of a miscarriage I was more enthusiastic and had us looking through baby names. That backfired when she miscarried again and mentally collapsed. She started cheating with a guy she was working with, but waited to tell me until it logistically and financially made sense for her when she finished some schooling and the apartment lease was finished. So that finally ended.
I had tried going in the family direction and it worked out quite badly. Now I was thinking about doing something with career, or doing more adventure. I chose adventure, with a bit of business experience that could grow. I arranged to work at a jungle tour company in Laos. They mostly had European clients and wanted to add American clients. The plan was to have me shoot videos to connect with people from the US. I wanted to make it a bigger adventure, so I arranged long layovers in a few places, and a month in Kenya.
I had been doing micro-lending with an online company for people in Africa. They were operating in Kenya, but not yet in Laos in Asia. So I arranged with the CEO to do an internship for a month in Kenya and see how the operation works, and then set them up in Laos while I was there for six months or a year.
I met a guy from Kenya at the college I was working in the bookstore for in Michigan. He had a half-brother in Kenya and I asked if I could stay with him. I figured that would help keep me safe. The CEO cancelled my internship, but I had the trip arranged by that point so moved forward as planned.
Kenya went horrible. I ended up getting poisoned by the nephew of the guy I was staying with and his friend, from a thing they gave me that they said was a potato. Then they took some money from me at the beach. At the hotel I was hallucinating, unable to stand, and vomiting blood. The people I was with told me I was going to die and left. I texted my mother goodbye. She called and threatened some people, and the people I had been with came back and got me. Getting out of Kenya was not smooth.
When I got back to Michigan my father and I went to the hospital the next day. When I told them I had been sick in Africa the woman at the counter jumped out of her chair, threw a face mask at me, and they quarantined us in a room. Eventually a nurse came and asked us if it was respiratory or digestive, and since it was digestive they let us out of quarantine. The doctor said he had no idea what to do and called some people. They gave me an antibiotic treatment that didn't work. Then another that didn't work.
Eventually I arranged an herbal parasite cleanse. When I made it to the east African disease specialist after a few months I had finally killed the infection, but I still had major issues.
I knew a chiropractor from Toastmasters and asked him to take a look. I had a horrible headache, I was sensitive to light, sensitive to sound, and feeling horrible. I hadn't been to a chiropractor before, and even though I've had about a dozen concussions in various sports I hadn't had spine x-rays before. He did them himself. At one point he opened the door, poked his head in and said, "Hey Jeff, have you ever had neck surgery?" I was a little surprised and said, "No." He said, "Weird!", and then closed the door. I was confused by what that could mean.
As it turns out I have multiple spinal deformities. I have partial ribs off of my neck, and a complete extra vertebrae at the bottom of my spine, but my real issues are in my neck where a few bones are out of place, including a kinked brainstem. I also had major digestive issues from the poison and infection.
I tried various types of treatments and approaches, but I started having short and then long term memory loss, along with twitching on the right side of my face, trouble walking, and issues with my heart and lungs. My health went up and down and I pressed forward. I kept assuming that I would get better. I had ups and downs, but I wasn't getting better.
As I got worse I became desperate. I couldn't function well enough to keep a job. I hadn't bought travel insurance, and I didn't have health insurance, and I was paying for things with a credit card assuming that I would get better soon and could recover physically and financially. I was rejected for surgery in Muskegon, and then at the Michigan Head and Spine Institute, then the Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders, and a specialist in KFS (Klippel-Feil Syndrome) deformities at Cornell University.
I was doing online memory tests to track to what extent I was getting worse, or better, and tested in to a computer school in Silicon Valley from a logic test. Since I had been slowly down-trending without seeming to be able to find the answer, I decided to do what might be a last major adventure. Even though I didn't feel great, I had a wonderful month in Fremont, California and met people from all over the world.
While in California I started thinking that maybe I could get better, and that I would then like to try traveling again. I wanted a job that could help with that, and I needed something that wasn't physical. Teaching English online seemed like it would work well. One day I messaged 50 teachers asking them on advice for what certification to take. Most people didn't respond at all. A few offered advice, and I did start a certification from a university, and one guy in Thailand offered me a very part-time job teaching Chinese kids, which I took. Then I visited my older sister in Nebraska for a month, who I had discovered accidently through DNA testing. At that time my grandmother died and I went back to Michigan for the funeral.
A cousin mentioned that his digestive issues were helped by taking digestive enzymes when he ate. I tried it, and it helped me too. I looked into it and realized that because I had a severe digestive infection for months it could be that my stomach wasn't producing acid correctly. I decided to do an elimination diet and went full carnivore, and that helped immensely.
At the same time I had a friend who recommended a chiropractor in Whitehall that adjusts the skull plates, and I thought I might have an issue with that because a Physician Assistant had mentioned that near the top of my brain there was a small cavity. She said that it might be because of bacteria eating my brain, and then shrugged and walked out of the room. I remember wondering if I was becoming some kind of real-life zombie. I didn't hear any more about that, but I was still wondering about that cavity. The chiropractor pushed my top vertebrae out of my brainstem, and that was the key.
I also had to figure out ongoing pain management, because I had a headache that never went away. It was like having a constant concussion. I actually saw stars every day for over a year, along with a continually racing heart, even while sleeping. I had taken too many painkillers as a teenager from sports injuries. At one point I took a 30 day supply of Vicodin in three days. People at school commented on how my personality had been different, I didn't remember everything, and that's when I realized I had a problem, so I stopped taking painkillers completely, including common things aspirin and ibuprofen.
I was having such difficulty even focusing after my misadventure in Africa and the issues with my spinal deformities that I thought if I could just get the pain to go away for a while I might be able to think clearly and come up with a solution. Every time I went to see doctors they always offered me painkillers, and I turned them down saying that I wanted to solve the cause, not just the symptom. But, after a few months I said okay. I told them if we're going to do it then give me the strong stuff. They gave me two injections, and it didn't seem to do anything other than make me less steady on my feet, so I went back to not taking any type of painkillers, but I still had the pain problem.
I had trained with an Ishaya monk in Grand Rapids for mantra meditation for a year previously and had some amazing experiences. I had gone to my first session just to meet people and as a social curiosity. I had been to two breathing meditation sessions before in my life and hadn't found any benefit or enjoyment. This was completely different, and that's why I had kept going for a year. After my health issues began I tried to use it to help with the pain, but it just wouldn't work. I could distract myself slightly, but the type of pain I was having was too intense and it was constant, and overwhelmed the technique, and overwhelmed me.
I heard about a different meditation technique of mindfulness focused on the body called Vipassana. It was a crazy idea, but I needed something to manage the pain and it was worth the risk, so I signed up for a ten day silent meditation training and retreat. There were short periods where you could go and ask the monk a question. On the second day I was failing. On the third day I was doing worse. The pain in my neck and head were so intense that when I tried to focus my attention on a different part of my body my attention went back to the base of my skull. I already had special permission because of my spinal deformities to sit in a chair instead of with my legs crossed, but I still couldn't handle it.
On the fourth day I went and told the monk that I wasn't there for spiritual enlightenment, I was there to handle my physical pain, it obviously wasn't happening, and I didn't think I could continue. I didn't want to quit because they ask you to make a commitment at the beginning to stay the entire time, but I didn't see a point in torturing myself for six more days for no reason. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, with him raised up on a small platform. When I stopped talking he looked down at me without reacting and didn't say anything at first. Then he said, "It'll get worse.", then he paused. I almost thought that was all he was going to say, then he said, "And then it'll get better."
At that point I thought, "Okay, might as well go through another week of torture then, or I'll just wonder later and I have no good alternative leads anyway." I thought that was going to be his whole thing, like talking with a fortune cookie, but he did explain more. He explained that I would need to focus on the pain area instead of trying to keep my attention away from it. I should try to feel it as much as possible, to feel every cell, to find the specific point where the pain was emanating from.
I started doing that and it was even worse. Two hour sessions at a time, some sessions as a group with an audio program guiding us, some sessions in my bunkhouse alone or with the roommate there being quiet as well. Up to ten hours per day. I remember being in the large group meditation sitting in the silence focusing on feeling the pain with tears streaming down my face like I had left the water faucet in my eyes on. I wasn't sobbing or crying, just tearing like a river. The pain was this intense stabbing sensation at the base of my skull where the head and neck connect.
That day my experience of sensation and pain shifted. I could still feel the pain, but it wasn't a major distraction like before. I no longer needed to get away from it. I remember walking outside after the sessions for the day and looking up at the night sky. It was a clear sky and I could see the stars. I remember feeling like I was me where I was, and I was the star so far away, and I was the space in between. It was like I was aware of everything and accepting of everything as it was at that moment. Over the next few days my sessions became excellent, and I found the side benefit that the meditation brought up traumatic memories and released the repressed emotional reactions to them, including things I thought I had dealt with previously.
Having made progress in a few health areas I started to hope that maybe I could fully recover. My IQ had dropped significantly. Fluid IQ is a measure of how fast you recognize patterns, and crystallized IQ is what you've learned and attained. Normally these track with memory, and my short and long term memory loss had reduced mine significantly. Normally you don't lose IQ points and then get them back. But, there was no downside to trying.
I set a goal of joining Mensa, a group that admits people in the top 2 percent of IQs. When I was younger I would have been able to join. Since I naturally had a high IQ I had taken it for granted. Now that I couldn't function well I realized how rare it is. The goal seemed ridiculous and I had significant doubts that I could do it. I didn't tell people I was trying, because I didn't want to later tell people I failed.
I had gone through a major identity collapse. Before I had identified as intelligent, active, and adventurous. All of that had been taken away. There were times I would get lost driving on roads I had driven a thousand times. I couldn't remember things from my past that I should remember. There were times I struggled with reading because I couldn't recognize all of the words. There were times I could barely walk across the house, and could just lay down with no light and sound and just felt pain in my head. I felt like testing into Mensa would give me part of my identity back.
The best way to train for a test is to do practice tests under similar conditions, and then review all of the questions you get wrong. I bought a stack of practice tests and started going through them. It was frustrating, but I kept going. I also had a lot of books with underlining in them, so I could read just the highlighted areas and move through them quickly. That's how I learned some highlighting on some types of book pages will disappear over years, and I switched to underlining with a red pen. I also started looking through old photos and some of those memories started coming back. That's when I started appreciating pictures.
Eventually I thought I was close to hitting the mark and went to a testing center. I tested in right at the line and joined Mensa in 2018. I went to a few in-person meetings and it was interesting. The online discussions were often just as stupid as any other online discussion groups, which helped me realize that a high IQ isn't necessarily that impressive, just one of many important aspects of life.
I increased my teaching hours and started working for a Chinese company, and later a Russian company teaching people of all ages in Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. I handled introduction sessions for the Chinese company, and filled in when other teachers needed time off, so I ended up with over 1,400 students in total with that company. With the Thai company I had some students for four straight years that I was able to see and help develop. I was able to get one student above his grade level in reading, writing, and math, so that he was further ahead in English than he was in his native Mandarin Chinese school work. With the Russian company I was able to talk with some people about growing up in the Soviet Union. It was a good variety of experience. Plus, with teaching English you end up teaching everything from writing and poetry, to math and science, to history and politics.
I also had other interesting teaching adventures. I helped some homeschoolers in creative writing and public speaking groups ranging in age from 4 to 14. That was a lot of fun.
I even had a philosophy discussion group with teenagers. A parent and I had talked about the idea and she arranged it, but the other parents were skeptical that it would work, so they came to the entire first session and watched. I worked with the kids on choosing a topic from some books that I brought, how to think through presenting their idea, how to prepare for their presentation to the other kids, how the other kids should listen and think of questions, and then how the question and answer period works.
It was a friend group that already existed and had a weird spread of religious beliefs. There was a Christian, some agnostics and atheists, and a satanist. One of the agnostics did the first prepared presentation in the second week on William James' version of pragmatism, and it went well. The Christian was afraid that if she presented her ideas she would be ridiculed. I told her I was there to moderate and advise. I would offer a suggestion when no one had a question, and say "You can do it." when someone paused and looked nervous while presenting, and made sure everyone clapped at the end of presentations. She ended up doing a presentation on the general history of slavery across the Atlantic Ocean and from Europe and Africa to the Middle East. It was well received and sparked good discussions.
Word started to spread among some people about my unique work with students and I ended up with some requests specifically for me. One unique case is Angelina, a 12 year old girl in China. Her parents were very frustrated and had tried several other tutors. They came to me desperate because they were moving to Australia in a few months and Angelina wasn't doing well at English. She wasn't doing well at any subjects in school either.
It took me a few sessions to convince Angelina to actually answer me when I asked her, "What are you interested in?" I tried a little conversation, a few different things to read. She wasn't interested in anything. Finally she told me that she likes dresses. But, her parents had banned her from looking into fashion because they wanted her to work on her English, Chinese, math, science, history, etc. Since they were desperate and had heard from someone that I might be able to help I had permission to do whatever I wanted. I had told Angelina that we could study anything she wanted, we would just have to study it in English because that's the only language that I know.
Once we started to study fashion things changed rapidly. Over a few weeks I showed Angelina how she had to know the history of the Silk Road, the geography of Europe, Chinese for manufacturing, English for selling, math for material sizing and pricing, science for material and dye selection, etc. Her parents messaged me and told me she started showing up for my class 15 minutes early and just sitting in front of the computer waiting. She asked for homework and started doing essays on fashion in her own time. Her English improved, and her grades in all subjects in her school in China improved.
At the time I thought, "This is how education should be." Focused on a subject area the student is interested in, with all other subjects connected to it, like a hub with spokes. But, I couldn't really implement it because I was working for corporations with their own agendas and constraints, and the private clients I had were mostly adults that were beyond that point and knew what they wanted help with for their careers. That insight never left me though.
The next year, in 2019, my township sued a farm I went to. I wrote a blog article against it, then another, then filed a police report, then did two recall attempts against the township supervisor, then ran for election, and won in late 2020. I wasn't sure if my health would hold up, but both FDR and JFK had been President of the US with severe health issues, so I thought I could tackle politics as well. And I had read 'The Question of German Guilt' by Karl Jaspers and felt called to take on the responsibility for self-governance.
In my first two days I remade my office so that I could use a standing desk, which works better for my spine. Over a few months I weaned off my teaching clients because I started putting 80 hour work weeks in at the political office. It took about 2 years before I could start lowering my hours. I only wanted to do the one four year term. I reformed zoning to make it easier for farming, businesses, and building houses, along with fixing a couple million dollar deficit in the sewer fund that the government had been hiding, added full-time firefighters for the first time in the township, digitized and released thousands of documents to the public on a new website, replaced people on the planning commission and zoning board of appeals, and other reforms. Politics was my primary focus for about five years.
Since I was going to be focused on the political career for a few years I figured I might as well finally get a degree. I had always wanted to do a philosophy degree, there just isn't a reason to, and it's hard to justify the money. I figured that since I had lowered expenses while living with my mother I could pay for the degree cash if I went through the distance program offered by Birkbeck College through the University of London. It was something I had looked at before and taken one class.
The university has an interesting history, being founded in the 1800s as an alternative to Cambridge and Oxford so that non-Anglicans could get degrees. I also liked that there isn't general education. Every class in my bachelor of arts degree was a philosophy class. I also liked that the entire program is reading and writing. The grading is done by essays at the end of the class. Either you can answer the questions well when put on the spot, or you can't. With that structure half of people that take classes don't end up even trying the exams, and 25 percent of those that do still fail. So, most people fail. But, I liked the self-study option and the entire program fit me well.
I started that at the same time that I started the political role. Studying wasn't too bad because I read a lot anyway. I've read thousands of books. However, my writing has taken a lot longer to develop. When I was left on my deathbed in Kenya I had a few regrets. One of them was that I hadn't really written anything. Since then I have corrected that, publishing over 500 blog articles on philosophy, politics, fiction, children's books, education theory and practice, and anything else I want to write about. But the writing pushed me hard.
A year into that degree I realized that I could do a master's degree in public policy and management through the University of London as well, and focus on township issues for many of the essays and the dissertation. I requested permission to start it before I had finished the BA degree. At that point I was trying to get the political role to less than 60 hours a week, but to do it well it required a massive amount of time, plus I was doing two full-time degrees that I was paying for in cash. I was also publishing articles on township politics in a local newspaper, did three zoning certifications through Michigan State University, and a property tax assessing certification through the state of Michigan.
I had doubted if my health would be able to withstand the pressure test of the political position physically and emotionally. Since I was going to push it anyway, I decided to push it all the way. I even hired an employee in Argentina very part-time and did experiments for two years to learn the best way to teach meditation to people to help cure anxiety and depression. I finished by BA in early 2023 with a dissertation on dialogue, and my MSc in late 2023 with a dissertation on employee turnover in Dalton Township.
While in office I offered to help at a local middle school. The kids learn about the basic structure of the federal and state governments, which are similar, but they don't learn about the local level. I think this is somewhat ironic. If you wanted kids to become citizens that could do something you would teach them local government, because most likely they aren't going to impact anything at the state and almost certainly not at the federal level. They could certainly make a difference at the local level. However, that's exactly what they don't learn. It's different between states, but that's no reason not to teach it. It does make sense though considering that government schools are made to mold children's minds to conform to the benefit of the government that they are being trained to serve.
For two years the middle school had me come in and do a full day where all of the 8th graders went through a class with me. I gave a basic explanation of the existence of counties, townships, villages, and cities. I gave a short explanation of how the township works and what it does from taxes and elections, to the fire department, to contracting for roads, parks and cemeteries, water and sewer, etc. Then I had them dive into a practical exercise.
I had them break into small groups of seven people to act as a political board that would have a discussion and take a vote. I used a real agenda item that I had brought to the real township board for a vote recently, and I used the real documentation that I had given to the board of trustees when making the decision. For instance, the second year was about signing a lease contract for a cell tower to be built on township land. I included the same financial projections and contract that the adult board had discussed.
Both years the discussion amazed me. These 13 year olds had the same discussions the adult politicians had. They took votes and largely came to the same conclusions. I think it's possible that if elected officials were replaced with random 13 year old kids, nothing would actually change, which is an odd thing to consider because it doesn't seem like that should be true, but it might be.
At the end I had a completely open question and answer session. Kids in school are so used to everything being so heavily filtered to them that at first they don't believe you'll really answer their questions. I kept it PG rated, but otherwise I answered their questions even about the attempts at bribery, blackmail, and the death threats I had received while in office. Once they realized I would answer whatever they asked they became more enthusiastic. At one point I explained the basic techniques for alligator wrestling, because I had done that before and someone asked about it.
A number of the kids got the point that they could actually make a difference at the local level. I remember one girl that raised her hand. When I called on her she had a complaint about her road. It was hilarious to me, and no one else, because road complaints are so common in government that they are cliche. I explained about road budgets and how the planning works and said I would look into it.
When I got back to the township office that day I emailed the road commission about her section of road. Projects for the next year were already decided and the contract was being worked on, but the year after that her road was one of the projects. I have no idea if she realized when she was 15 that it was her question from when she was 13 that resulted in her road being done, but it's a great example of how learning should occur, and how it doesn't normally in schools.
While at the township I had signed up to be part of a genetic test through a university about my spinal deformities, but I never heard back. Still, I thought the miscarriages from when I was younger could be due to the spine of the fetus not forming correctly. Because of my brainstem damage it's likely that I'll have a somewhat shortened lifespan. Plus I had chosen a couple of times to not pursue having kids with girlfriend's by that point. I didn't want the guilt of having a kid with a deformity having known that it could happen, and the potential of dying while they were young seemed doubly cruel, so while at the township I made the decision and got a vasectomy.
With my four year term approaching an end, and knowing I wasn't running for office again even though many people were urging me to, I started thinking about what my next steps might be. I thought teaching at a college would be fun, and luckily an opportunity opened up for me. In my last few months in office I taught Introduction to Humanities at two in-person locations for a local community college. It was interesting. I was given a textbook that I had to work out of, but otherwise I could teach how I wanted. I even brought my younger sister's two oldest kids to one class each when they were just 7 and 6. They loved it.
During that same time, late 2024, my father died and I managed his probate court and finances. I was still deciding what to do. The college didn't pay very much. They wanted me to continue with my two classes, but it didn't make financial sense by itself. I told them if they could give me some more classes in political science or philosophy I would continue, but they couldn't. I had saved up some money and was debating between buying a house, or traveling. In the end I decided to travel.
While looking for houses I had emailed a small college in West Virginia and ended up designing a course on ancient, medieval, and modern thought for them. That lead to me teaching classical ethics and working online for them for a little over a year while I did quite a bit of traveling. First I traveled around the world for five months including two months on the island of Crete in Greece, where I was maced and tear gassed by police in Athens in large protests I got too close to. I spent a week in Rome, a few hours walking in Singapore, a month in Taiwan, a week in Hong Kong, five weeks in Japan, a couple of days in Hawaii, a week in Las Vegas, and then back to Michigan.
At that point I realized I had visited most of the US states, but was missing quite a few small states up the east coast, so I did a two week road trip and visited many of the Founding Father's homes and some Civil War locations, and came back to Michigan through Montreal in Canada. After that I decided to drive through Central America, but 1,000 miles in to Mexico I had been searched by the police many times and got robbed by the cartel once, who had also threatened to abduct and kill me, so I turned around and did a two month road trip back through the US visiting family and getting up to 49 states total.
In late 2025 I was thinking about doing something on my own in education, because there are better ways than what is normally done. Even with all of the research and theories education hasn't actually gotten better since ancient Greece and Rome. That's obvious when you start thinking about the ancient philosophers, poets, architects, farmers, generals, lawyers, politicians, etc. There are genius modern educational theorists and practitioners, like Maria Montessori and Toru Kumon, and I've written about many of them; but once you look at it, no one has really improved on Quintilian from almost 2,000 years ago.
I had been writing articles on teaching for years, but now I started writing articles about my ideas on how I had realized you could make a process that actually involved the judgment of the parents, followed the interests of the kid, developed writing and presentation skills, along with negotiation and initiative. It's a combination of the best of ancient and modern education personalized beyond anything a school does.
While writing these education articles, and still teaching for the college online, I flew to Costa Rica for a couple of months and made a simple gaming app there that I published on Google Play. I also started designing a children's book based on a story I had written adapting an ancient fable, 'The Tortoise and the Hare V2.0'. Then I went to Peru for six weeks, climbed Machu Picchu and visited the Amazon jungle, then a week in Colombia, and then back to Michigan.
That brings us to the summer of 2026. How can I contribute to people in a meaningful way? There are two obvious ways, and they both involve teaching.
One is a side project, a meditation support group. It's changed my life immensely, and I worked on developing unique teaching techniques that help others learn quickly and effectively. It's something that should be in the world.
The other is educational tutoring to help people who are skeptical of schools that are designed for the indoctrination of their children. Obviously that's what religious schools are for, and that's what people want for their kids when they choose a religious school. However, many people don't realize that's what government schools are for as well, and they don't know what belief system their kids are being indoctrinated in to. Often it's a belief system opposed to what the parents would support, which is part of why schools often keep things hidden from parents.
There are three obvious stakeholders in education: the student, the parents, the teacher. Yet in modern schools none of the three are the most important influences. The two most powerful influences in schools are the government and teachers' unions. That's why schools don't care about students, because the people that care about students aren't in charge and can't be because of the design and structure of the entire system, and governments and unions always have and always will view students and parents as pawns to be manipulated for their own ends. Government schools are established specifically to indoctrinate students to have a useful belief system for the benefit of the government.
These things have always been true and will always be true. Ancient Sparta had a unique and specific education system designed to produce soldiers useful to Sparta. Ancient Athens had strict laws governing schools. In ancient Rome Pliny the Younger talked about how it was important and more effective to have parents pool money to fund schools rather than have a rich person or the government fund them. These are not new discoveries. It's just that most people don't know, and seem to not want to know.
Yet there have always been people that choose a different path. Socrates was killed for teaching unapproved ideas to students. One of his students was Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, and from that group a lot of what we know as western culture emerged and re-emerged. In the ancient, medieval, and modern world there have always been people that have chosen to have private tutors for their children. That's the normal path that the nobles and royals of history have chosen for their children to learn to govern and rule.
There are also some unique organizations that are able to break through. James Tooley's research has shown that private schools are where education really happens in the poor areas of the world, Maria Montessori has shown how children will learn the skills presented to them in the environment, Toru Kumon has shown that with guided self-study most children can be ahead of grade level in language and math. Yet all of these meet with resistance from governments, because they reveal the truth about the purpose of the government schools rather than the propaganda that they are sold on.
Reforms don't work well in government schools for a number of reasons, essentially for the same reasons that other government programs also don't work well and why free markets are important for providing actual solutions and producing wealth and results, since the organizations that fail are actually allowed to fail. In a government system the failing systems continue to exist, and usually the funding to failing government systems is expanded.
One of the most ironic complaints about government schools is the desire of people to get politics out of schools. It's a reasonable request on the surface. But, it's foolish once you think about it for two minutes. Government schools are made for political indoctrination, even if it's normally lied about and denied, many people are also quite open about this. It's literally asking to get politics out of politics, government out of government. It's an impossible contradiction, a ridiculous idea, and most people don't even realize it.
Humans naturally learn, so many methods can and do work. Here's a short overview of a great method that I innovated that you can implement with a tutor, or adapt to do it as a parent, that incorporates the best of classical rhetoric and presentation, modern research and writing, negotiation, parental involvement in subject choice, and student-led subject choice and personalization that can be adapted to any situation. I'll give the example using a tutor.
The student and tutor work together to come up with a proposal to the parents about what the student wants to learn. In the case of Angelina this would have been on dresses and fashion. I didn't have this system fully worked out at the time, but how it would have worked is she would write up this proposal. I would help guide her through thinking about it from her parents' perspective with their concerns, including how it could actually help her in other subject areas. She would decide on a specific project. Let's say she wanted to write an essay on what the most important fashion centers in the world are.
She writes the proposal for the project, and I work with her to prepare a presentation for her parents as well. The parents are given the proposal to read, and she gives the presentation to the parents. At the end they can ask her questions, and we've worked on her being prepared to answer them. If they approve the project then she starts her research and writing her essay. If not, we take the feedback and adjust.
Maybe the parents are also specifically worried about math. Angelina and I would talk it through and maybe we decide that she'll also do a project on the average amount of material needed for different types of clothes, or the cost of an average dress to be manufactured in China and sold in Australia. Maybe the parents are concerned with her history knowledge, so we expand the essay to include the history of the fashion centers of the world. Maybe the parents are concerned with her Chinese, so she'll do the essay in both English and Mandarin.
Then she would give her parents the updated written proposal and a new presentation. As the tutor my job is to help the student understand and adjust to the perspective of the parents, and for the parents to understand and adjust to the perspective of the student, to bring them together on common ground. An approved proposal might take a week, or it might take a month. Notice that interesting learning has been occurring during this entire process. The process of making and negotiating a proposal is part of the learning process.
Once a proposal is approved we begin work on the projects themselves. Depending on the project that might take two weeks, or it might take two months. The student is going to document the process and produce a written report, and give a presentation at the end. If they're doing an essay they will produce both the essay and a paper about writing the essay. If they are painting pictures then the paintings will be a portfolio, they will write a paper on the portfolio of paintings, and give a presentation on the project. If they design a video game then the report can include screenshots of the development process along with explanations, and the presentation can include playing demonstrations. If they are making a dress then the report can include pictures of the process along with explanations, and the presentation can include live or manikin modeling of the designs. If the project is a lawn care business then the report can include activities, costs, expenditures, leads, follow-up, revenue, profit, and plans moving forward, and the presentation could ask for investment.
For a proposal like the making of a dress it would make sense for a student to include cost estimates for the parents to approve or deny, along with a time estimate, expected learning benefits, and addressing any objections they think the parents might have. This also applies to a student doing a plumbing project, or an exercise program. A very young student may need a lot of help in writing up a simple proposal. An advanced student may be at the point where they are making academic citations in their research. It's adjustable to the level of the student.
When the project is complete, with the report submitted to the parents and the presentation concluded, the process starts for the next proposal. This can be related, or it can be different. Angelina would certainly want to continue with fashion. Someone else may want to make a video game app one month, write and publish a children's book over the next two months, and start a business over the summer months. The possibilities are expansive.
This is not a structured curriculum. This is an organic process of growth. Life is an organic process. It's based on what the student and parents are interested in and think is important. The structure of the process provides the skills of initiative, decision making, judgment, negotiation, presentation, research, discussion, and writing. Into that structure can be added any curriculum that's appropriate to the goals. That can be done for learning a specific subject, or for becoming a building contractor, a computer programmer, or a lawyer.
Someone that wants to become a surgeon knows the steps they'll need to go through, and even making the plan to understand that process could be a good project for them as a teenager. Then they can start working on the college admissions tests, along with the specific subject area tests they'll need in pre-med like biology, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, knowing that they'll need to eventually prepare for the MCAT exam. It's simple to plug that type of work into this personalized tutoring system, which also allows the student to step back and evaluate their own projects from another perspective when considering the approval of their parents.
My hope is that by offering this educational tutoring service the parents and students that choose to break free from the confines of government indoctrination will be able to do so and achieve what they want to achieve. Life is hard and messy, but achievement of important pursuits chosen by the individual are possible. I needed to discover the meaning of life, and did so. (There are levels to understanding it, but at the most basic level the meaning of life is value attainment. How valuing and attaining work are both complex.) I wanted to adventure, and did so. I wanted to recover from brain damage and join a high IQ society, and did so. I wanted to reform my local government, and did so. I wanted to write, and did so. I wanted to travel the world, and did so. These types of attainments are possible for anyone that realizes they are both free and responsible.
Here are ten phrases that act as useful reminders to me, and may be so for you as well:
Reality is not a concept. Words are concepts. Words are not reality.
Choose your hard.
Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.
You determine your own level of participation.
Make your choices and live with the consequences.
Work the problem.
Life is meaningful strife.
Life is a process.
Take the win.
The meaning of life is value attainment.
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