Reader,

This is it!

I'm as relieved as you are that this is finally launching. Mannn, I put more time and energy into this course than I've put into any 1 project in my career.

And I did it because in a way, it was a gift to myself, but not in the way you might think.

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I've always wanted to be a teacher.

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It must run in my family or something, because my mom's side has a lot of public school teachers.

I even got my degree in Spanish Education for the high school level, but I turned down the opportunity to go for my teaching license.

For a few reasons, actually, let me show you why I had a change of heart...

1. Spanish Summer Camp

I worked at a dual language immersion summer camp called Concordia Language Villages as a camp counselor at the camp El Lago del Bosque.

The summer started off with a bang. I was speaking Spanish all day for the first time since coming back from my semester abroad in Sevilla.

It was fun. Meeting other counselors, getting to know camp traditions, and none of the kids were there yet.

But then everything changed.

You know, the reality of being a camp counselor set in. After the kids arrived.

A week went by, and I felt like I was having some serious growing pains. I wasn't just teaching kids, I had to wrangle them too. You wouldn't think this would be a surprise, but I'd never had to deal with that before, and it sucked. I was not good at it.

It felt like every other counselor knew what to do while I was floundering. I couldn't focus on teaching the kids because I spent all my time dealing with classroom management issues.

Turns out, I didn't feel motivated to get the kids to pay attention, which made matters worse.

After 5 weeks, I was so miserable, I asked the camp director to cut my contract short. I asked him to let me leave with the 6-week contractors instead of staying my full 12-week contract.

I didn't care that I didn't have a job lined up. I hated it that much. After trying to convince me to stay, he finally accepted my heart wasn't in it and let me leave the following week on the bus with the 6-week counselors.

That was the experience that showed me I had zero interest in the classroom management side of education.

Unfortunately, I knew that was a major red flag for anyone going into public education. It's like when you're a kid and the sight of blood makes you squeamish, or you hate needles, you just know you won't like working as a doctor or nurse.

But at the same time, even though it was way too late to change my major, this realization opened my eyes to other things I didn't love about public education.

2. The Standardization & Mandates

Since when did we decide it made sense to teach everyone the same content in the same order at the same pace?

It always gave me hella anxiety thinking about adapting instruction to varying ability levels when I was responsible for teaching 30 kids in 1 room for 1 hour each day. And that's the only time the students had access to me for the most part.

I didn't understand how it was even feasible. Intuitively, I knew instruction was best done at a 1:1 level, because I'd been tutored by a violin teacher for a few years in grade school, and the attention she was able to give me for all the unique mistakes I made allowed me to grow out of those bad habits more quickly.

Individual attention is king in education.

And it's not the norm.

I knew I'd never get the chance to give every student what they needed and that bothered me deeply, even if I knew they didn't all need my undivided attention to be successful.

On principle, it didn't feel like a fit for me.

3. The Pay

Yep, you knew I was going here eventually. While I was in school, I read a book called The $100,000 Teacher and it made a lot of sense.

Teachers are the backbone of the education system but are often treated like peasants.

Admins get all the money.

Parents get all the power.

Kids get whatever they want.

Teachers? They get what they get and don't throw a fit.

Seems like a dumb way to run a country's education system. And they can't even make executive decisions about the curriculum because it's decided for them by committee at the state & national level.

Most teachers know more about what their students need than any of the other stakeholders. They should be getting paid more than they do, but unfortunately, I knew I could never expect that kind of salary from a teaching career.

So I pivoted to something more lucrative that could give me the life I want.

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This is why I made the bootcamp

I started doing cohort-style 1:1 teaching in my first tech job where I trained QA Analysts into QA Automation Engineers.

But that felt limited by what the company needed me to teach. And it wasn't ever my top priority. I always had other work to do.

This bootcamp is my way to finally give the educational experience I want to see in the world.

And it's the first version of it.

I'm already seeing a lot of promising feedback from it, and I'm excited to see just how much we can do to change how tech is taught online.

Bootcamps are expensive.

University degrees are criminally expensive for many.

Online courses are too self-paced, with no accountability or support.

And there aren't enough instructors offering 1:1 coaching at an affordable rate.

And free resources are easy to never use because there's nothing to lose by letting them gather dust.

And I'm honestly sick of courses that are just 100 hours of repackaged documentation done "slightly differently".

I just wanted to make something easily digestible, high-quality, with collaborative learning baked in, and direct access to me.

Most of all, I wanted to teach skills I see as valuable to anyone's QA career going into 2025 and beyond.

So if you're ready to take a bet on yourself before Social QA Bootcamp gets more expensive -- because there's no question, it absolutely will next time I launch it -- then you know what to do.

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​>>> Get into Social QA Bootcamp before all the spots are gone​

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Oh, and Happy New Year 🎉 Here's my wife & I enjoying the Cherry Drop tradition in Sister Bay:

Hope you had a fun time yesterday! Let's go get 2025 🔥

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Cheers,

Steven