My own education history

I've taught French, Spanish, Chinese, humanities, and biology. I've coached tennis and baseball. I've advised Best Buddies, Creatives for Social Change, Thespians, and clubs I helped build from scratch. I've served on safety committees, sat on textbook adoption panels, written curriculum, translated documents, interpreted in real time, and once built an entire course over a weekend because administration needed something by Monday.

That course was called SHWIT: Study Hall With an Intellectual Twist.

It put the highest-performing students in the room with the ones falling through the cracks. The brainiacs tutored. The overlooked students were heard. On Fridays, we pulled real school problems out of a hat, wrote about them, argued solutions in front of administrators, and actually implemented a few.

That's not a credential. That's what happens when you believe every student deserves a seat at the table.

Before education, I spent 18 years in the restaurant industry. That world taught me how to read a room, communicate under pressure, and find the right word at the right moment. It turns out those skills matter just as much in a classroom as anything listed on a credential.

Gradeness is built from all of it. The classroom, the coaching, the clubs, the languages, and the course built over a weekend because someone needed it.

Practical. Purposeful.

Built for teachers who are still in it because they care. That's who this store is for.

By the way, my wife still doesn't know exactly how many languages I speak. I've stopped counting, too.