Beyond the Classroom: A Former Teacher Embraces EdTech
It’s a rare evening in lower Manhattan that I’m the last one in the Campuswire office. Ours is a small company, but I’m seldom the last to head home; our engineers labor over their code late into the night and our founder stays until two or three in the morning.
But last Thursday night I lingered as the office emptied and the sun set. Out the window to my right was a perfect view of the Freedom Tower and the Hudson, so I resisted pulling the shades down even as the sun heated the room and the glare stung my eyes. Finally it was dark and I’d finished up my work for the week. I had half a cup of coffee left and only a brief walk home ahead of me, so there was time to think about my first three weeks here.
It crossed my mind that my work life at Campuswire is unrecognizable in comparison to my work life as a teacher sixth months prior. I’m still working in education, but things looks vastly different.
It was almost exactly three weeks into the school year that I left my job as a seventh grade English and History teacher at a charter school in Harlem. I lasted through two months of training, but I knew in a matter of days in class that, despite eight years of experience as a tutor and coach, I was not going to cut it as a teacher.
I was surrounded by caring, driven, and impossibly supportive colleagues and extremely talented students, but I wasn’t equipped to manage thirty seventh graders for two hour class periods. One moment stands out: our principal, an imposing and charismatic NYPD narcotics officer turned educator, scathingly addressed my students after eight had been sent to his office for a variety of offenses that included flinging pencils across the room, disrespecting their classmates, and being entirely unable to stay in their seats.
He reminded them of the teachers they had driven away the year before and demanded that they correct their behavior and focus on learning. Of course, I was fully responsible for their performance, but when nothing changed about their behavior after his shockingly direct speech, I knew I didn’t have much more to give them.
It was time for a change, and, after a search for the right fit, I started at Campuswire in May. That evening, the transition feels abrupt and the divide between the jobs vast. The differences are palpable: we work on the 24th floor of a skyscraper in FiDi and I walk to work at 10 AM. The landlord would be disappointed to hear the set-up described as merely “cushy.”
Teaching uptown meant commuting 45 minutes on the 1 train and making lesson plans at a tiny desk in the corner of my classroom. I spent my days in the classroom with middle-schoolers doing the most direct and hands-on education work there is. Here, I’m making long-term plans for growth and spending my day at a computer and in a notebook.
But what makes the transition natural and logical, and makes my embarrassingly short stint in the classroom so relevant to our work at Campuswire, is the all-consuming commitment to education and to improving the practice of teaching that I’ve found in both workplaces.
In the classroom, my commitment was to giving each seventh grader the best instruction I could provide. At Campuswire, the commitment is a bit more aspirational, but no less important. It’s to revolutionizing the way college students (and maybe one day elementary, middle, and high school students) all over the country and the world communicate, collaborate, and learn.
Like so many of my teaching colleagues who were motivated by the joys and frustrations of their middle school days, the Campuswire team is guided by the sense that we can lean on our experiences to improve higher education. At Leeds, Michigan, Columbia, and UCLA, we realized that the education world, college in particular, is missing a communication tool that is modern, consolidated, and collaborative. Whether in aerospace engineering lectures, computer science labs, or creative writing workshops, we sought digital collaboration and often failed to find it.
Our goals may appear unrelated, but the team at Campuswire is trying to accomplish the same thing as every seventh grade teacher in New York and across the country. We want to transform students’ educational experiences to make sure they avoid some of the obstacles we faced.
Our purpose is to ensure that today’s college student, and the next decade’s college student, doesn’t feel the same isolation and lack of collaboration that we did just a few years ago. Those students won’t know a college world where they can’t instantly connect with a professor and turn to their classmates for real-time discussion and support. They’ll learn from happier professors who have a tool that saves them time and helps them incentive their students to engage and connect with one another.
I’m sure that most of my English and History students certainly won’t remember their young, overwhelmed, first-year teacher who didn’t even stick around for a month at the beginning of seventh grade. They’ll move on to eighth grade, high school, and college and learn from far more prepared and talented teachers and professors than me. But Campuswire provides an opportunity to guide their educational experience in a new way. It’s an opportunity to build from that shaky first foray into the education world a vital educational tool that will still be supporting those seventh grade students (and their classmates and professors) when they start their college careers five years from now.
-Brian Smith, Campuswire
