Why I’ve Moved Our Whole Blog to Medium
On June 6, 2012, I was falling in love. No, not with my husband, he was old news by then (jk, Babes), but with my current field — college planning. On that date, I wrote my first ever blog post. It was titled School Sucks and it was merely a short commentary by yours truly and a link to a cool little video I particularly liked at the time.
I was working in a different field at the time, but during my off-time, I’d fully geek out on this new one that I yearned to be a part of.
I needed a creative outlet to share my burning questions, evolving beliefs, and colorful opinions. So, I started alexellison.com, a Wordpress blog. Hello world.
My little blog only had a few readers, but it showed my passion, helped me work through my ideas, and played a huge part in helping me land my first job in college planning. Later that year, I got my feet wet working with students and helping them find, not the best college, but the best college for them.
Eventually, that job came to an end, and I went out on my own. I could have just named my new business Alex Ellison College Planning, but instead, I wanted to build something bigger than myself.
I could have picked a normal, conservative, professional-sounding name. That’s what everyone told me to do (including my attorney, who’s a well-meaning friend of mine). But I wanted something irreverent. Something that went against the status quo.
Unlike many in the industry who target affluent parents, I wanted to relate directly to the students. And so, Dunce College Planning was born. The word Dunce is a story in itself. A label placed on brilliant, albeit rabble-rousing students by authoritarian teachers whose task it is to make students sit in straight rows and follow instructions. I enjoy working with the students who kick and scream and spit spitballs when asked to do this.
As many of you Medium readers know, this whole factory-inspired mindset has been blown out of the water. But, that’s for another post…
With the inception of Dunce, my blog at alexellison.com moved to DunceCP.com, which was also a Wordpress blog.
Opening up
Our little list has grown to almost a few hundred people — mostly friends and clients (and my mom, of course).
I thought twice (at least) before fully committing to Medium. I was nervous. I’d always followed the concept of keeping my content somewhat gated. I read that digital sharecropping was a no-no. And it made sense.
But after reflecting on it and taking into account Dunce’s values, it’s time to open things up. To venture out in front of a crowd of like-minded people.
One belief that I try to encourage my students to adopt is to be generous with their knowledge, opinions, and ideas. But, we’ve been taught to not show our classmates our answers. We cover them with our arms as we take the test.
Moving our blog to Medium is my way of standing on the desk and showing our answers — right or wrong — to the whole damn classroom, and inviting you to join me.
If you’re a long-time reader of the Dunce blog, our archive of old posts will still live there. However, on May 30th, we debuted our first post on our new Medium publication (you may have noticed our last few posts have been posted here) titled The Dunce Cap.
Giving students a voice
I don’t want posts to come solely from me and the Dunce Labs staff anymore. Although I welcome contributions from “experts”, there’s one group of people I really want to have stand on the desk with me here… The students.
I believe that the reason for Dunce’s success so far is that we’ve always listened to the students. Not so much the teachers. Not even so much the parents (Dunce parents, we love you too, but we love your kid even more — we know you understand).
Students matter. Yes, every awkward, quirky, brilliant, tenacious, shy, outgoing, hyperactive, ‘attention-deficient’, incredible one of you.
We love Medium because it allows us to amplify your voices (as well as ours) to an audience who ‘gets it’. This is where you can speak up (one of the first things we strongly encourage our students to do is to start a blog — from now on, we’ll be pointing them towards Medium thanks to the ease of set up, immediate audience, and plethora of other benefits of this platform).
So, if you’re a student, and you have something burning in the pit of your stomach you need to share — an idea, a problem, an opinion, etc. — get at us here. Same goes for anyone who has the backs of today’s students. Any leaders, teachers, parents, mentors, entrepreneurs, movers or shakers who want to add to the conversation — we’d love to hear from you.
Or, if you’re just reading along, we hope you enjoy what you see. Please support us by sharing the ideas of ours that resonate with you far and wide.
Let’s remove the proverbial Dunce cap from the heads of today’s teens once and for all.
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Dunce Labs is an explorative space where students launch their futures — to college and beyond. To find out more about what we’re doing, click here.
