Nancy and I, the co-founders of Vint Hill Academy, come to this work from years as classroom teachers. A teacher’s day is a complex thing, involving meetings, lesson planning, assessment, duties like monitoring the parking lot and lunch room, taking attendance, sponsoring clubs, paperwork, and (oh, yeah, I almost forgot!) teaching. There are so many teachers out there with excellent content knowledge, teaching skills, and intentions—not to mention herculean work ethics—but somehow there always seem to be students whom we “can’t reach” or “don’t have enough time to fix.” The truth is that today’s classroom teacher is, in most cases, responsible for so many students and standards that he or she must focus on what will serve the needs of the many. We don’t see this as a failure on teachers’ parts; many of them are excelling within the demands placed upon them by the educational system. We wondered, though, what might happen if the teacher were to be taken out of the classroom and freed to become the master of his or her own time. Could we serve a smaller number of students better? If so, how? Would we miss the hustle and bustle of the school environment? Would we be able to make ends meet without our school salaries?

While we are still in the process of answering these questions, some things have become clear in our first few months in business. First, while we suspected this all along, we are now certain that education is not one-size-fits-all (or even most), nor is it scalable. We have had our best successes when we have listened carefully to parents and student, applied our teachers’ brains to the student’s needs, and developed an individualized plan for instructing the student. In fact, we now begin our relationships with families by consulting with the student and his or her parents for at least half an hour. Having the chance to take an educational history of each student and to truly think about the approaches that might suit the student’s goals and learning style has led to more authentic instruction and deeper, more fulfilling relationships with students and parents.

We have also enjoyed the flexibility of being a small organization. We have been free to experiment with how various technologies, such as blogs, Google Video Chat, and iPod flash cards, might be productively used in instruction without having to provide technical instruction for an overwhelming number of students and colleagues. These technologies can be incredibly powerful when deployed at the proper moments with students who are ready to receive them. They can also be too much for some students, who are still struggling to master the basics of reading and writing, skills which are most effectively built through face-to-face interaction among student, text, and teacher.

Most of all, given the slower pace and lower volume of our teaching, we have become much more reflective practitioners of our craft. We are able to do much more professional reading than we ever could as classroom teachers. More importantly, however, we can spend much more time considering each student as a whole person, not just as one of 25 students in our first period American literature class. We think less about whether the student will pass next week’s test, and more about what seems to ignite the student’s intellectual passions and what skills the student is developing. As we proceed with our work with various students, we find ourselves wishing that every student could receive such attention from a teacher in his or her life. We intend to do our best to offer such attention to as many students as possible over the coming years.

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