Building an Education Community: Rebooting the MetaPrep Project

The Education Wars Part 18

Other Education Wars articles can be found here.

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This is long overdue, but I'm not taking steps to revive my paused education career.

When the plandemonium kicked off (publicly speaking), I was working on building my Nth education company. I took the risk of pausing projects and letting clients go to work on fixing the extreme, arbitrary, capricious, and deadly one-sidedness of information warfare. It felt like a moral obligation.

I'm not leaving RTE behind by any means. When I came up with the name for this brand (I think in 2017 or maybe 2018), the thought was to create an adult education community without boundaries, and so that's here. And there will never be an end to all that we can learn from one another.

In the meantime, I have many thousands of pages of curriculum and plans sitting idly while there are millions of newly homeschooled American children, and others who might benefit. Here is an example of a 31 page packet that I used to teach a single 2-hour class (included behind a paywall in my last article):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ntajyk323jjujp/IntermASpring6.pdf?dl=0

Note that this may look scary to some high school students who make A's in math, but it's the sixth lesson in a third course on counting, combinatorics, probability, and statistics in my curriculum progression, and many hundreds of students learned at the least the basics of recursion methods in my classes without fail. Other lessons do seem more plain (balancing a standard linear equation such as 2x - 17 = 5 doesn't look too different, regardless of the classroom, right?).

There are hundreds of other such documents that can be used, further developed, differentiated by level of difficulty/depth perhaps (if that's even needed in a good environment).

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MetaPrep Education Group LLC

That's the official name of the little company that I run under which Rounding the Earth is a DBA trademark. Or simply MetaPrep. The Meta aspect simply establishes that there is no upper limit to the ability to zoom out to practical, pedagogical, philosophical, technological, or other approaches, and there is no forced limit on what topics students can learn (not by me, anyhow). Education should be an open field (aside from moral boundaries), like life.

Understand that this is not a test prep company. I'm sure I gave up a lot of money never stepping into that venture, but there is a real tradeoff given how much never gets accomplished during learning time. Students who get their long term educational progression right tend to need very little preparation before taking standardized tests.

Understand that my personal belief is that most education should take place offline for children. It takes times for children (and adults *ahem*) to develop the level of emotional discipline required to handle the online world in the healthiest of ways. But online platforms can allow for high levels of networking among community professionals and parents, and online classrooms can replace scarce expertise at times. But just look at the floor-to-ceiling white boards that were nearly 360 degrees (minus door space) in my old classroom. This allows for total student participation and exploration directly in front of the instructor that is challenging to reproduce online. More importantly, student-instructor relationships (nearly all relationships) achieve higher quality in person—and that matters a great deal. MetaPrep will seek to encourage real world contact, not profit from replacing it.

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The Community Plan

My plan is to open a Locals.com community for MetaPrep. That platform combines Rumble videos well into posts, and allows for a newsletter (I prefer the Substack newsletter, but Locals is a good community education system, IMHO). There, I will start making available curricula from folders to paid subscribers ($5/month). Some items will be shared more broadly for free. The same will be true for other materials. I will likely hire a part-time community leader for the online space at some point, though a large portion of the subscription fees will be used to hire a curriculum developer or two to polish up my materials (they're much like my articles—they could use a little editing before becoming "book worthy") and complete curricula for which I never wrote complete classes (I used one of my old company's Geometry textbooks since writing one takes so long…but I do have one almost half-written and the coauthor offered to help complete it).

It is fair to note that it will take time to get thousands of pages of curriculum online. There will be a few courses worth of curriculum offered almost immediately. Other curriculum will be reviewed for edits. That process will speed up as I can hire a little part time or full time help.

There is no reason MetaPrep should only focus on mathematics, but assume that's where we will start because it's where I have experience. Other curricula will take time to develop. Some people I've met over the past three years have expressed interest in creating Science and data curriculum and courses.

I will also open up the community to those interested in providing their own online offerings. If somebody wants to run an English course, or make tutoring matches, I'll likely allow them to request a posting through the community administrator, though they may have to pay an elevated subscriber fee to pay for community management (at least, that makes sense as a first step plan). They can then charge for their time and services as they wish to price. However, much of that won't take place until the community begins to fill in.

Understand that my first goal is to provide for a smoother transition from public schooling to…anything else. If some students can self-teach the curriculum, that's great. If they need to join a 12-student class, then okay. If some teacher from a homeschool coop wants to use it to teach their nine PreAlgebra students, so be it. Whatever people can do for $5 a month, great.

We hope that the community will also be a place for active discussion. Members will educate each other and share their own solutions. And we will not be a jealous community. We will be happy when people jump into the comments to mention other great resources. We may at time share our opinions as constructively as possible where we have them (as in, "Sure, kumon is fine for the level of repeated practice of the basics of arithmetic, but…").

The overall roadmap is much lengthier, but I'll save that for another time. And it will change. Plans always change. They already did, once.

Launch date: Currently unknown. Likely within the next month. Some of that depends on a few conversations that I need to have to know how ready a few people are who have expressed interest in participating.

Forgive me if I don't answer all questions that may appear in the comments. Most of them will simply become clear as we roll out pieces of the network.