When the whole world shut down back in 2020, my family and I sold almost everything we owned and traveled the country in an RV for a few years. I left public school teaching, began tutoring, and taught my own kids. 

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Those years taught me something I should have already known: learning doesn't look the way we've been told it should. It's not linear. It's not predictable. It's a lot like a good expedition—you start with a destination in mind, you get gloriously detoured, and you discover things you never knew you needed to find.

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When I was tutoring during this time, I saw something that had always been there but I'd been too embedded to notice: the gaps. Kids years behind in foundational skills. Teachers stretched impossibly thin trying to meet them where they were. Families carrying losses and trauma nobody was quite naming. The pandemic changed so many of us in ways we still haven't confronted and aren't facing.  Educational gaps were already big before all this, but now they feel like canyons. Behaviors are completely different. Kids have limited foundational skills. The educational system itself continues to be torn apart. 

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And the teachers? The newer teachers especially—the ones stepping in now without resources or systems—they're trying to solve this alone. They're creating materials at night. They're guessing at differentiation.

They're drowning.

That's when I started building differently. Not a perfect curriculum. Not a silver bullet. But tools that actually work for real teachers in real classrooms—where some kids are years ahead and some are years behind, and you need something that meets them where they actually are. Resources that don't require you to be a lesson planning wizard at 6 PM. Materials that are mathematically solid because I refuse to let another generation struggle with foundational skills because the explanations were fuzzy.

Education Expeditions isn't about fixing the system. It's about giving teachers what they actually need to help their kids navigate these educational canyons—one solid resource at a time.

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If you're a teacher navigating these canyons, I'd love to connect. Join my email community where I share practical resources, real talk about what's working in classrooms, and the occasional rant about why this job matters so much. No fluff, just teacher-to-teacher.