The Accidental Teacher, Glennallen, Alaska
I taught middle school in a Title 1 school in interior Alaska. In May 2026 I left the building and kept the job. Now I build curriculum, books, and software for families who worked out that their child does not fit the box.
I am a former middle school teacher, a homeschool dad, and a homeschool coach. I live in Glennallen, Alaska, population four hundred thirty nine, about two hundred miles from a real grocery store. My family runs Next Chapter Homeschool. Everything I make comes out of the same question: what would this look like if the plan had to fit the child?
I taught for two and a half years in a Title 1 school where roughly sixty five percent of my students were Alaska Native. I greeted thirty four specific children by name at ten past eight every morning. I finished a Master of Arts in Elementary Education in December 2025, and my teaching contract ended on May 24, 2026, by my own choice. Leaving was a grief event, not a career move, and I will say so out loud.
On July 1, 2025 I had never written a line of code. Since then I have built fifty five repositories and better than three thousand commits of working software: a school management system with real sign in and row level database security, a print factory that turns one lesson spine into four different finished products, and an audiobook pipeline that pulls its own narration off a live page the moment the text underneath it changes. I did not learn to type syntax. I learned to specify, to architect, and to audit. I have shipped real security holes and caught them, and the honest version of the story includes those.
In that same twelve months my A1c went from 14.7 to 5.1 and I went from 363 pounds to 254, with no medication. I am not selling a protocol and I never will. That is testimony, not treatment.
In June 2026 I spent three days in the Young Electricians Teacher Fellowship with IBEW Local 1547 in Anchorage, because I was not willing to tell somebody else's child that the trades were a real option until I had stood in the booth myself.
I have been president of the deacon board at Glennallen Chapel since 2022. I preach four to eight weekends a year and I am finishing a four year trip through the whole Bible with a congregation that does not always land where I land. That has turned out to be a more useful business skill than most business skills.
Seven chairs. Tell me which one fits your audience and I will bring the receipts for it. If none of them fit, I will tell you that instead of talking my way into your show.
Everyone is arguing about whether machines will replace programmers. I was never a programmer. I ship working software every week and I can say plainly what the job actually is once the typing stops being the job, including the mistakes I shipped and how I found them.
What a Title 1 classroom in rural Alaska actually looks like, against what the policy conversation imagines it looks like. Why scaffolding is the whole job, and what happens to a child when the scaffold comes in one size.
I build a year of curriculum around one named child at a time. What that costs, what it produces, how it is actually assembled, and the honest limits, including why most families should not buy it.
What an electrical apprenticeship actually pays, actually requires, and actually feels like on day one. How a family builds a trades pathway into a homeschool year with no school district behind them.
One man, one number, nothing for sale. What a 14.7 means, what I changed and in what order, and doing it two hundred miles from a real grocery store. I describe what I did. I do not tell anybody what to do.
Running several businesses from a town of four hundred thirty nine people where it gets to fifty below. What actually breaks that far out, what turns out not to matter at all, and why the isolation is an advantage as often as it is a cost.
Building a business while the money is not there yet, without turning it into a prosperity story. What four years through the whole Bible does to the way a man runs a company.
There is no assistant and no form that goes nowhere. Write to me and I read it. If you are booking a show, tell me your audience and which chair you want, and I will tell you honestly if I am the wrong guest. If you bought a booklet and something in it is wrong, I especially want that one.
Twenty five two-page investigations, from living and nonliving things and photosynthesis to the water cycle, moon phases, compass directions, food chains, and rocks. One pencil. Whatever is outside your door.
Ten amendments, ten pages, four editions from kindergarten to high school. Each page starts with the thing that went wrong for a real person. Plus the nine-book shelf.
Our family's homeschool store. Curriculum, books, and the customized curriculum maps we build for one child at a time.
What homeschooling actually costs. How to tell if it is the curriculum or your child. How to choose without drowning. Useful, then honest, then useful again.
The useful stuff goes on the blog, One Size Fits One: what homeschooling actually costs, how to tell whether it is the curriculum or your child, how to choose without drowning. Put your email here and you get one email when a new post goes up, and word when the next thing I make exists. No drip, nothing you did not ask for.