Do you ever find yourself in odd or novel situations, having to make important decisions without enough information? If you are a teacher, the answer is probably yes. After a while, this peculiar brand of insanity becomes your new normal.
I am not a businessman by training, and there are scores of things I do not know. However, I AM a teacher, and there are many things I believe passionately enough to work and risk for them. We don't just act on the things we know, for we never know enough. We act on the things we believe, then learn what we need to know to live them out.
A bit over four years ago, Linguachet was a "wouldn't it be cool if" in my head. From 16 years of teaching, I had realized writing in Latin put a lot of things together for my students, that it could be engaging and fun, and that it could be very concise and powerful in review. From 30 years of general nerdiness, I believed that something like this was possible given current technologies. After discovering that no one had created what my teacher brain wanted, I decided to take the plunge. At the core, it was a simple idea. I figured I'd be done in six months.
Have you ever been thankful for what you DIDN'T know? I am really glad I DIDN'T know that Linguachet would take me almost 4,000 hours of work, thousands of dollars...and counting! That's insane. But when I got my first glimpse of students responding, when I saw how their learning process started to change, I knew this HAD to become reality.
When I started, I just believed that quick, specific feedback and flexibility would be game changers. I figured we might get more of students' best answers instead of just first answers. I hadn't yet figured out that you could design a tool to help teachers differentiate instruction without killing ourselves...to blur the lines between formative and summative assessment, to promote learning as an ongoing process, to put teachers and students back on the same team, to give us new insights into HOW our students learn that we could then factor back into more effective diffentiation. As a teacher, I haven't fully achieved all of these things in my own classroom yet either; it scares me a little to think of it all. But what I have seen substantiates my belief that we truly can do it...and that it can breathe even more new life into the teaching of Latin... and that is what keeps driving me back into code after full days of teaching.
That last paragraph makes it sound like I've stumbled onto some sort of Holy Grail. In actuality, I don't believe there is one; I believe that good teaching is an insightfully blended cocktail of divergent - even contradictory - tools and methods. I believe it must be insightfully blended - with love - by you, the person who knows and cares for your students. Because I believe that teaching is love, I don't believe that technology can EVER replace a teacher. What I do hope is that this tool gives you another lens by which you can see - and an extra arm with which you can help - your students. Maybe it can free you just a little bit more to do the things that ONLY teachers can do.
I know teachers need volume discounts. To work out the details, I need real-world data on how many students I can serve well at one time. The software industry has simulators, and I have tested many of them, but the ones good enough to give predictive data in this case cost serious bling...and they know nothing of rotating class schedules, etc! So, I could go that route - and increase costs, and still be guessing - or I just beef up my server by a lot, take another chance, then crowdsource the problem, and test with real-world traffic as I explain below...
I know nothing about marketing either, but I believe you start by serving. Unfortunately I have learned that many schools will refuse to look at a tool based on price alone...without even looking at the learning ROI...and their students will miss out. So, fellow teachers, take this into your classroom for free between now and Sept. 12th. Make new accounts. Play with it. Have your Latin I students make accounts and play with Latin. Watch some kids race ahead because they can. Notice what kinds of questions you get. Give little review prescriptions to your Latin IIs...or let them choose their own areas of weakness. Then go explore the data and see what you learn about your students. Consider having your administrators in to see how your kids are learning...and let them see the data too. For those at ACL this summer, I'm clearly behind schedule but haven't forgotten what you shared with me in those surveys. Send me honest feedback and ideas at rietz@linguachet.com.
Per aspera ad astra,
George Rietz
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