Episode 152: Creating Community for Homeschoolers with Ben Somers of Recess
This week on the show, we have Ben Somers, the founder of Recess.gg an education platform built for homeschoolers who learn differently. Recess is a kid-centered product, and has helped kids publish books on Amazon, win awards at Oxford writing conferences, and start amazing businesses.
In this episode, Ben and I discuss how his own frustrating experiences with school led him to pursue education alternatives. Ben shares about his goals with his online schooling platform, Recess, which allows students to pick their own classes. He also provides some notable reasons for getting into the homeschooling market.
Topics Discussed:
Giving personal attention to every student
Family involvement in homeschooling
Being asked to fire 500 teachers
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Ben Somers is the founder of Recess.gg an education platform built for homeschoolers who learn differently. Recess is a kid centered product, and has helped kids publish books on Amazon, win awards at Oxford writing conferences and start amazing businesses. Hey Ben, so nice to have you here.
Ben Somers 0:18
Nice to be here. Thanks, Lily.
Lily Jones 0:20
Well, I'd love for you in whatever direction you'd like to take it, to walk us through your professional journey.
Ben Somers 0:26
Wow, fun. Okay, I'll start way back when I'm maybe 10 years old, and I was a kid who hated school. I had I was a foot tapper, a wiggler, like to stand while I did my work. And I had a lot of great teachers. And then in fifth grade, I had a teacher who was really frustrated by my wiggling and tapping, and I think it was really disruptive to her, and she recommended I get kind of tested for ADHD. I'm gonna give a long backstory here, and she recommended I was, like, a test for ADHD. And I went and get tested, and they were like, Oh, this, this kid's got ADHD. And they so she, you know, recommended that I start taking amphetamines and drugs, and diagnosed me and kept upping my dose. And by the time I was 11, I was taking 70 milligrams of Concerta a day, which is the maximum legal dose. It's the same dose you have a 300 pound man, wow. Kind of all these problems for me, where I you know, I had anger issues. I was kind of like focused. I lost weight. I hit puberty early. There are all these things that can kind of happen when you take really high doses, and that unfortunately developed, made it really hard for me to enjoy school and and felt like this place had asked me to mold it instead of trying to figure out how to, how to mold to me as a student. And yeah, I struggled that even though I had a bunch of great teachers all the way through at the same time, from a young age, I was, like, really interested in building businesses and doing things. And so I, you know, would ditch school and go pick up pizza and sell it during recess. And I would start these, this DJ business and this and that. And by the time I was 17, I made enough money from these random businesses to drop out of high school and move to China. And so I did that, and had a great time and and got to make lots of friends and learn Chinese, and moved back to the US to go to college. I studied statistics and machine learning and started my career as a data scientist and started a company, and we, you know, made some really cool technical products. And then when I was 24 I think, looked up and wanted a purpose, and something that wasn't just about money, was something that I was excited to do every day. And I think like so many other people, thought about my own childhood, my own education, and remembered both that teacher that I had bad experience with and Mrs. Gabriel, who I felt like was a savior in my life, and decided that I wanted to work on education and teach, and that was kind of the big thing that I wanted to do, and I knew nothing about it. And so I tried to figure out, how could I, how could I learn more about education? I bought lots of books like, you know, some anti school people like Gato and Dewey and and then paper and Montessori, and kind of made this big reading list and started going through them all. Started going through them all, and but wanted more tactical, real experience. I had this kind of, like, anti school approach, and had all these great teachers, and so I was interested in, is there a way I could teach without having to conform to the pressure of a school and what what they're looking for and found this one teacher named Josh Don who's really great. He started a school at SpaceX for all the SpaceX kids, and he had all these great phrases like, teach the problem, not the tool. So instead of teaching them math, get them excited about some game, or some reason for them to learn math. And then, you know, then they're gonna come asking you, hey, how do I win this game? How do I do this thing? And then he would teach them math. And so I got really excited about about him, and wanted to go learn from him. And I sent him, probably, I don't know, 20 emails, 30 emails. And he's a busy guy, so he didn't get back to me, but he had just started a company with someone from Class Dojo, one of the early people from Class Dojo, and they were going to take some of these awesome classes they designed at SpaceX and scale them on the internet. And so I reached out to his co founder 11 times, and on the 11th message, I said, Let me sweep the floors for you. And this guy said, Yes. And so I came in and for 15 bucks an hour, I did. I crunched numbers, my backgrounds in statistics and stuff. So I I was telling him, you know, how his business was, and what the user metrics were, and all this kind of stuff. And then slowly convinced Josh to let me be his teaching assistant. So then for the next year and a half, I followed Josh around and watched him. I. Uh, do what he does, and he was pretty there are a few things that were really special to me about how he taught. One, he had this way of making all the kids feel really important, and like the work they were doing really mattered, and that they mattered, and that they mattered to him. And that was very special. And I saw how hard all the kids worked when he did that well. And he, you know, after every class, he would always take one kid aside and talk to them for 10 minutes. And that was just a small little thing, but it struck me as so special that I hadn't seen all the other teachers online do. Just, you know, make this one kid feel special and seen for that day. And, and, yeah, so I was pretty moved by working for him, and by by working with him, and that company, Synthesis, had grown really big. I was kind of, I joined them really early, like their first non family employee, and by the end, we were doing something like 20 million revenue after two years. And so it was kind of explosive growth. And we decided, you know, one hard part about being a venture backed business a startup is you have lots of investors and investor pressure, and you have to keep growing at these crazy rates. And they decided ultimately that teachers couldn't be a part of the product, that it was going to hold us back from growing. And so my last, my last task was figuring out how to fire 500 teachers in a weekend, and I basically decided not to do it, and got in a big fight and got fired for that. And that day, decided to go start this new company called recess. And I was still very interested in technology and how to use technology to help teachers be better teachers, and how to help kids do things that are more exciting. And so I started this new company with this idea of, we're going to build amazing tools for teachers. We're going to market these products to home schoolers so that, you know, they lots of students. And then we're going to go try and recruit these great teachers to teach what's interesting to them and exciting to them. And we're going to put them all together and create make it really easy for teachers to earn a great living, for these kids to get special educational experiences, and and, and then keep going. I can talk about, you know, what's unique about our platform against some of the competitors and whatnot. But yeah. And then fast forward a couple, a couple years. Started the company a couple years ago, and there's, you know, I think 80 or 90 teachers that teach on platform. Some of them make $280 an hour. I think the lowest anyone makes is $30 an hour. And they get to teach what they like and what they're excited about, and they get this is really important. This is something that's really different. Is at recess, which is the name of the company, the kids pick all their own classes. That's why it's called recess. Is that the kids get to choose they do and what that means, I think there's actually a really special a big difference is normally, at least every classroom I've taught in half the kids don't really want to be there. They're kind of there by force, whether their parent forced them to be there or the school forced them to be there, and the energy of the room is a little bit off a recess. Since every kid picks the class, 100% of the kids in your class are pumped to be there. That's the thing they're looking most forward to that day. And I think the energy is palpable, and everyone's excited, and it's electric. And, and, yeah, and so that's, that's our vision is to, is to figure out how to give teachers more leverage, help them earn more money, and how to give kids experiences that they're really excited about and not coerced into. And that is my background up to today.
Lily Jones 8:30
That's amazing. Thank you for walking us through it. I have many parts that I want to touch on and relate to. I mean, I think just first off, your own experience is so powerful. You know, feeling like you had to fit into this mold to be a part of school. And I think so many kids feel like that. Yeah, so my teachers feel like that, right? Like, that's one of the frustrations I had being a classroom teacher for many years. Was like feeling like I had only these, this mountain of wiggle room, right? Like I knew what my students needed. It wasn't things I could give to them. You know, they needed to be outside. They needed to be running around, they needed to not be stuck in the school building all the time. Or they needed, you know, more freedom to explore the things they were interested in. And I think that's a huge cause of burnout for teachers too. You know, not being able to teach the way that we want to, and we often get into teaching because we're also like choosing the subjects and getting excited and digging into the topics. So I appreciate that you've created something that's not only student centered and has student autonomy, but also teacher centered. I mean, I think that story too about like, firing all the teachers like, so sorry. That's awful, you know. And going back to even the things you said, of like, the connection, the seeing someone. Like, there are many amazing things we can do with tactic. We can't really fully see someone, right? And so there's some human element that I think always has to be there.
Ben Somers 9:51
Oh, I think fundamentally, it's the our product is built entirely around teachers. Like, it would not work. Without them. And I think any education product you run into that doesn't do that always feels a little flat. And the kids, it's, it's, yeah, you want to infuse excitement. And Richard Feynman is, like this famous physics guy, and he said the most important part of a physics teacher is they're excited to teach physics. Yeah. And I think that's that's so true. And, yeah..
Lily Jones 10:26
Yes. And it's cool seeing how teachers and students can reconnect to that outside of a traditional school, yeah. And so I'm curious a little bit too about, just like we've heard a little bit about what recess offers, how about so now, you know, educated forever. We have programs for teachers. We also have a curriculum agency. So I am, like, nerdy about curriculum design. I'd love to hear more about, just like, what are they teaching? Who's creating it, and also just about what recess offers?
Ben Somers 10:55
Yeah, I would say that we started totally extracurricular so things outside your core academics. And not even by I mean, not by choice, not like intentionally, really, what we did is we said, okay, teachers, you can teach whatever you want, and kids, you can sign up for whatever you want. And unsurprisingly, core academics was not something that a lot of teachers chose to teach and was not something that a lot of kids chose to sign up for. It's becoming more popular now because it turns out that math and writing, for example, are really useful in tons of things. Like, if you want to be a filmmaker or make good YouTube channels, you have to write well. And if you want to build rockets and code your own video games, you kind of have to do math. And so we started off with courses like that, like how to build and launch rockets and kernel space program, how to design and build your own computers in Minecraft, which is really about building trap doors for your house so no one else could get in. But secretly, it was a class on electronics and computers. You know, short story writing, how to publish your own YouTube channel, how to get your first 1000 followers on YouTube. You know how roller coasters are designed, all of these kinds of things, and then, and then, yeah, and each teacher designs their own curriculum. We make this tool. I think it's pretty different than some of the other platforms out there. We make this tool called challenges. And so teachers can design these set of challenges, and there's a couple of rules, so they have to be objective. So you can't, for example, make a challenge that's make a song about a feeling, but you can make a challenge that is, make a song that uses at least four instruments, lasts at least 32 measures and uses arpeggios. And so that's a challenge you can make. And so every teacher makes their own challenges, and those are for free for any homeschooler, and they're actually a huge source of class registrations. So when you design these challenges, kids like to do them for fun. They're always trying to do cool, hard, new stuff. And when they beat your challenge, or they can't beat your challenge, more commonly that they sign up for your class, right? And so you design these things that are hard and exciting for them, and then your classes essentially, usually a string of challenges. And so you say, we're gonna cover this, and we're gonna learn how to do this, and we're gonna learn how to do this, and by the end, you'll have done all these things and and, yeah, and so we make that tool and make it easy to create those challenges, and we have tons of cool AI tooling and other things to make them beautiful and easy to create. And, yeah, and those are the curriculums. They're pretty open ended. Every teacher gets to decide how their structure of the class meet, once a week, twice a week, 30 minutes an hour. How many kids are available in the class? They get to kind of design their own setup.
Lily Jones 13:42
I think the challenge model is so interesting too, because it seems like it's related to kind of project based learning, but framed in terms of challenges. And I think that's just interesting to think about what we're setting people up to be able to do in their lives, right? Like we all have various challenges that come up in our lives, and so having this mindset of like, oh, this is a challenge. Let me make a plan to move through it, rather than like, Oh, it's a challenge. Oh, my God, I gotta shut down. Like, this is too much. And so I appreciate kind of, like, the SEL bent on this too.
Ben Somers 14:12
There's a.... so my hero is this guy named Seymour Papert. And so if anyone has not listened to this book, Mindstorms or the children's machine, you've probably heard us in the products he invented. So he invented logo turtle, which was like a computer program way back in the day that was supposed to teach math. And that product became scratch, cool, the kids programming language. He also created Lego robotics back then was called Lego Mindstorms. So he's really cool, but he's got this quote, and I'm probably gonna mess it a little bit, that goes kids school has something to learn from video games. Kids don't, don't dislike school because it's easy, because. It's hard. They dislike it because it's easy. Basically, that kids love to do hard things. They love to have a challenge. They love it. When you say, I don't think you could do that, or I bet you can't do that, or that's impossible, they go nuts for that.
Lily Jones 15:12
People love learning,
Ben Somers 15:14
Yeah, yeah. And we love, we love overcoming doubt.
Lily Jones 15:17
yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like being in the flow of trying to figure something out, which I think it's like, you know, was also a huge frustration of my being a teacher, like, people are learning all the time. We're all learning things all the time, right? And yet we have this mindset that it's like, Oh no, it's just in a school totally like, No, we're all learning all the time, and so I haven't met a human who doesn't like learning if they're interested in it, right? If it feels relevant to them, and it feels like they have agency, and it feels like it's a problem to solve, right? So it seems like, really, having that student led part is so important.
Ben Somers 15:57
I think we're, I mean, yeah, we're hardwired learners. Like you start off as a baby, you don't know anything, and you watch babies, and they're looking around and they're picking things up from we come out of the gate wanting to learn stuff. Sorry. You have to make it relevant. You've been interesting, and it's tough in school, because the you want to cover all the material, and you want to cover it in an efficient way, right? And you want to scaffold their knowledge and their learning. But sometimes when you do that, you end up removing the context from the problem by accident. And then the kids don't get why they're doing it, and then they ask you, how come we're learning this? And you're like, well, I could, well as that's a big, actually kind of a big question, sometimes.
Lily Jones 16:33
Yes, in our curriculum program, we always go back to the question of, why, like, why are we teaching this and why are we teaching it this way? And students should know why, and we should know why, right? Like, it's not just because, oh, the standard says that I need to teach fractions, right? It's like, well, actually, why? Why is this even something that someone decided we should teach in schools, and do we agree with it? Right? Do we want to change it? Do we want to adapt it? But I think often students and teachers get so disconnected from the why, and that's really so key to strong learning.
Ben Somers 17:07
Have you heard of I think it's Goodharts law?
Lily Jones 17:09
I don't think so.
Ben Somers 17:10
It's a when a measurement becomes a metric, it ceases to be a comp. Be a good measurement. And I think when we introduced standards, schools were teaching kids to do all these wonderful things, and they said, Hey, let's just make sure that everyone's we're measuring how well they're doing. And then those things became a metric, and everyone started training on, well, how fast can we hit these goals, and the funding tied to it, and then all of a sudden you're teaching just the standards and and, and, yeah, I think it's a bummer for everyone involved,
Lily Jones 17:43
Absolutely, absolutely. And so again, disconnected, like starts with a good intention and then gets so far off from that, and everyone can feel it. And so I appreciate kind of the focus on just what's important and engaging students in a real way. Yeah, and I know that recess also engages both students and their families working with homeschooling families, you know, can you tell us about what's the family involvement like?
Ben Somers 18:08
I mean, we think that the parent is, you know, a super important part of the equation. And I have this story that I tell about I played a lot of this game called The World of Warcraft as a kid, which was like, it's like Geist at the time, and I played a lot. I mean, my parents would wake up middle night and find me snuck out of my bed to be playing at like, you know, 3am or whatever. They're kind of worried about it, and they didn't like it. And one day, my mom came and sat, like, two years of her being angry with me for playing this game, and just kind of like always telling me to shut it off. And she came and sat behind me and didn't say anything for 20 minutes and started asking me questions about what I was doing. Like, oh, why did you go there? Or why did you do this? And you know, 20 years later, I remember that moment, and she took an interest in what I was interested in, and then she took the time she was into business, and she took the time to I was trading things in the auction house, and she started explaining to me about commodities and and getting, you know, getting special information and how that could help you make more money, and and it led me down this whole rabbit hole of reading the patch notes and trying to figure out which materials would be more valuable Next, in the next release, there in this release, and then I would buy those all up, and then I would resell them later. And one turned kind of some mindless playing into a really strong educational moment where I got to learn something about how the stock market works and how trading works and built, you know, now, my mom and I had this thing we could talk about at dinner, and she was really excited about it, and I think it made us closer as, you know, mother and son, and that's another big part of what we work on is, you know, kids have all these interests, whether it's Minecraft or blowing up rockets in Kerbal Space or doing. This, and it's hard to understand those things when you're a parent, because you know those are, I work 10 year olds all the time, and I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I think if we can figure out how to make their interests more legible to parents and understand them better, we can help parents and kids become closer, and we can help the kids feel more loved and let their parents are more proud of them, and we can give them something to talk about. And, you know, I think we can help the parents have more pride and look at their kid in a different light. And maybe think, maybe this mindless game playing isn't so mindless. They're probably doing this for a reason, right? What's the and so if we can, if we can kick start kind of those conversations. I think that was really special. And and so, yeah, what was the parent experience look like? There's a few things, one for all these homeschool parents. Sometimes, you know, people talk about lack of socialization. It's kind of a trigger word for homeschoolers, and rightfully so, because, like, they they are very well socialized. If you're on most homeschoolers, they're so eloquent, they're confident, they're put together, um, but they do, I think sometimes lack social interaction. They can find it, but it is. It is a little bit hard. You've put more work in, right? It's just harder. The school makes it easy, and so you have to sign up for your kid for sports, or think about theater or for Co Op, but still, most of the time the kids are home alone, and the parents don't have the PTA, right? They don't have those the Mommy and Me classes when you're young, and all these different things. And so they have a hard time getting to know so their parents. And so what we do is we introduce parents. When kids make friends on recess. Because friends is a really big part of our platform. We introduce the parents, and they get to know each other. And so one thing about who is my kid playing with online? Like, is this some stranger? No, I actually know who the other parent is. I can talk to them. We can set up play dates. We can organize go meet. That's part of it. So we help them build a social community on top of their kids interests. And for some of these parents whose kids are like crazy into coding, you know, they might not know anyone else who's crazy decoding. And so now they've got a little bit of a support system for everyone else who who has a kid with the same kind of unique set of characteristics as they do. And and the other way is we've got this feed and these emails that where we describe what your kids working on, what they're doing, and try and make it easy for you to understand. And usually we end it with a dinner table question. So we give you a question that you can ask, and the kids like, how do you know what that is? Smart you know? So instead of saying what you do at school today, nothing you can say, I heard you got another red armor today. You know? How'd you do that? Then they go, Oh, well, actually, I built teleport. I put a bunch of TNT under this thing, and it recursively did it, and it blew their pole. And then I went down and got this. And, yeah, so those the couple, the couple ways you try and make the parent experience good.
Lily Jones 23:00
That's great. I love hearing about that. And I think it's so smart having those, like, seated questions that cause interaction, and also really just bringing the parents into this social scene, like, again, bringing the human element into it. And I appreciate how that's front and center.
Ben Somers 23:18
Yeah, yeah. So she's here with homeschoolers because they they already spent a lot of time together, so and have good relationships all the time.
Lily Jones 23:25
Yeah, cool. So I know that you have a co founder who was a home schooler and a famous programmer as a kid. Can you tell us more about that?
Ben Somers 23:35
Yeah, Caitlin Hooper was as my co founder. We met maybe four years back, but he was home schooled in a cult in East Texas, and kind of like a very religious community, um, really small community, and they had a school there that was really, really bad, and his parents were smart enough to pull him out of the school and say, Okay, we're going to educate you separately. And so he was homeschooled in the in the middle of nowhere, and he got really into rockets as a kid, and really wanted to build the rockets, but didn't really want to, you know, I don't think his parents were cool with him blowing stuff up in the front yard. And so they were like, Well, maybe you shouldn't hook up tons of fuel and light this stuff on fire. And so he looked, he turned to the computer to try and figure out, well, how can I build rockets or mess with rockets? And he found this application that let you design objects and then write code to make those objects do things. And so he was going to try and make rockets. He would design something that looked like a rocket, and then give it propulsion and do Lily things. And messed around a lot on that. And it ended up becoming a gaming platform. It started off as kind of a creation platform, and became a gaming platform, and he had gotten really good at building with it. And so for a while he was a top 25 poster. Yeah, and had built these games that had hundreds of 1000s of plays, and that that program ended becoming Roblox cool. He was one of the earliest users on Roblox, like in the first 70,000 users, and that's how we got to start programming, just self taught himself. And that's that was kind of his, his background. I think it's cool, because he can relate to the kids on, you know, I went to public school. He can relate to his on recess. So well, he like remembers, and he made tons of friends on the roadblock forums and with other kids who are into programming. And I think it was a big part of his is a formative part of his experience. And so, yeah, it's, it's fun to have him and and, yeah, he can, he feels the product, I think sometimes in a way that I don't even.
Lily Jones 25:47
Yeah. And that seems like such a cool model for the kids too. Yeah, I think it's fun, you know, but different experience and be able to hear from him along the way,
Ben Somers 25:57
Totally. I think it is, yeah, it's fun to them. And then we got another one of our co founders now she's been.... Natalie. She's been homeschooling for 10 years. She's got three kids. Oldest ones just got done. Second two are coming through. And so she's great and gives us tons of insight and helps things about stuff. And then we just brought in this new kind of co founder engineer who was the CTO at synthesis. He was like one of the first engineers at Khan Academy, and he's homeschooling his eight year old for the first time. We've built a nice team of people who really care about the users and care about the product.
Lily Jones 26:36
Yeah that soudns great.
Ben Somers 26:37
Yeah, it's pretty special.
Lily Jones 26:39
So I'd love to hear a little bit about your advice for educators. You know, a lot of our listeners are educators who are probably like, oh, that sounds so cool to teach in a situation like this, or to teach on a platform like this, and they're really trying to figure out a way to stay in education, but maybe not in a traditional classroom. Do you have any advice for them?
Ben Somers 27:02
If you're trying to leave the classroom?
Lily Jones 27:04
Mmm hmmm.
Ben Somers 27:06
So I'll give you some stats that I think are relevant or interesting. When my parents were kids, one in 1000 kids were homeschooled. When I was a kid, it was one in 100 this year, it just hit one in 15. Interesting. And if a couple predictions just came out from big census and polling sources, and they're saying that 30% of kids in the US will be homeschooled by 2035 Wow, which means, and there's a couple of things that are kind of moving this trajectory forward. If I don't have you guys follow essays, education savings accounts and school choice, sure. And so you kind of, regardless of your politics, this is a thing that's happening, and it's, you know, 18 states now have very widespread, not necessarily universal, but really popular ESA programs. And in some states you can get eight or $10,000 a year per student. Per student. And what that means is, for the first time in the history of the United States, there is a 10 billion plus dollar direct to consumer education market, and that's massive. And most families are looking for great teachers, and they're looking for experienced teachers, and they've got money to spend coming from the government directly. And so I think if you've ever thought, you know, maybe you could go off on your own and launch your own small company, or build your own small program, be an independent earner. This is, this is the best time that's ever been. And I think we've got, you know, I know tons of teachers who started their own businesses now. They employ four or five of their teachers teaching what they like, and they make 250 grand a year, 300 grand a year. Their businesses make 600 700 grand a year. They're able to provide the living for themselves and to their employees. And so if you're an enterprising teacher who's got interesting ideas and enjoys you have to do more. You teach few hours. You teach way few hours. You can make $200 an hour, $120 an hour, no problem. And so you can teach 1015, 20 hours a week and make a great income. But you do have to think a little bit more holistically about your career. You have to learn how to market yourself, right? You have to learn how to talk on camera. You have to learn how to put up a simple web page that talks about your services. And you have to learn how to do customer service, you know. And you have to really take those parent calls seriously and reply to their emails quickly. But if you do, you know, after a couple years, it's, it's not uncommon for me to meet people making 300 400 grand a year. So you have to upskill, you to do all those things, but it's possible now, and there's a big rising tide that's making it easier and easier for you. So that'd be my advice, is find something you love. You know. Or go on recess dot g and launch a course and sell it. Go on india.com if you want to be independent, you don't have to do it through us. And launch a course and and drop into some Facebook groups and and introduce yourself. Start a short little tick tock and say, Hey, I'm, you know, I'm Miss Jones, I'm Lily. I I teach creative writing and these things, and it's really good for kids who are neurodivergent and struggled in school. And, and if that sounds interesting to you, you know, come check out my page and just get started in these small, little ways. And, and I think if you, if you work, you know, as hard as you work at your normal teaching job with it, I think you can, you can make way more money and have a lot more independence.
Lily Jones 30:43
That's great advice. So yeah, and so many possibilities out there. So I appreciate that too, areas that teachers maybe haven't thought about, or haven't thought about using their skills in all these different ways.
Ben Somers 30:55
And you can teach anything. What's weird about the internet and homeschoolers is like, you can teach, you know, like the you can teach conspiracy theories. You can teach the history of your favorite video game. You can teach this and, and, yeah, you'd be surprised at how big the demand is for for kind of weird, interesting, as long as you're excited about it, people want to learn from excited teachers. Excited teachers. And so anything that gets you excited, you can you can teach.
Lily Jones 31:29
And if you're excited about it, chances are there are other people out there. Kids are grown up who are going to be excited about it too.
Ben Somers 31:29
Totally. And once you've relationship with them, you know it's also very they often want you to teach them math and teach them other things, sure. So once they like you as a human and like you as a teacher, it's easy to kind of even just expand. You don't even need that many kids. You could live have a really good full time income with 20 or 30 students.
Lily Jones 31:50
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Ben, it's been such a pleasure getting to know you and hearing more about recess. Can you tell folks where they can connect with you?
Ben Somers 31:57
Yeah, you can send me an email at ben@recess.gg you can find me on Twitter or X, I guess at Ben, underscore, M underscore. Summers, I tweet a lot, and I always tweet out all the insights from whatever we're learning. And, yeah, email me, DM me on Twitter, and we can hang out.
Lily Jones 32:21
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Ben Somers 32:22
Thank you.
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