99: Curating Education with Manisha Snoyer

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I'm here today with Manisha Snoyer. She is a teacher and tech entrepreneur with 20 years of experience teaching kids in the public and private sector in New York City, Paris and San Francisco. Most recently, she founded Teach youh Kids, a podcast and online community focused on empowering families to curate their children's education as a supplement or replacement to traditional school. She's building tools to help families easily connect with the ideal tutor classes, friends and curriculum for their unique child. For the last seven years, she's been building tech solutions to expand access to customized education. She created masteryhour.org, a free math tutoring nonprofit for K to 12th grade students. And with Twilio, she founded School Closures, the largest nonprofit effort helping families impacted by school closures with 80 partner organizations and 300 volunteers, as well as cottage class, the first marketplace for pre K to 12 grade micro schools that was part of the Techstars 2017 class. Anisha loves to learn and wants to spread the joy of learning all around the world. Welcome Manisha. I'm so excited to hear more about you.

Thank you Tanya. Yeah, I'm excited to be here and chat about education with you.

I'd love to start with the work you've done around micro schools since I Have a micro school. And I like to say that we were a microschool before they were cool. So we launched back in 2018. But all of the work that you did with cottage class and creating a marketplace, and especially like through Covid building partner organizations, can you talk a little bit about how that came to be and what that grew into?

Absolutely. And I just want to say, I think it's so extraordinary what you've created with UP Academy and the ways that you're able to diversify learning and bring in mastery learning into that microschool environment. Huge fan of your work.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, of course, of course.

So, yeah, I mean, I stumbled upon micro schools before. I think microschool was even a word being used by anybody. I was a teacher in New York City. I had taught as a tutor and a substitute teacher, and every single grade, every single subject you can imagine, from calculus to French to music. And I taught in some of the most elite private schools in New York City and also some of the most struggling schools. And I just started to feel like our education system was broken at every level. From these schools where parents were paying $60,000 a year to attend, to schools that really felt more like prisons than learning environments. And even when the teachers and the principals were amazing, which was often the case, especially in New York City, where teachers are so well trained, it just still felt like there was so little we could do to support children's learning. And so, as I was kind of thinking about this problem, and also, I deeply believe that access to quality education is the root of all of the healing that can happen in our world. I think that it's connected to climate change, human rights, everything. And so I was really looking for ways to try to help expand access to what I saw as high quality education. And I discovered that there was this kind of interesting group of parents who had really reached a breaking point with their local public school where they just. They could not send their child. There just was not a fit. And then they couldn't afford a private school, and so they were forming their own homeschool co ops, basically just hiring a teacher, finding some other parents who are in the same situation. It might be in a parent's house or in a basement. One of the early examples of this was the RAD school.

There was this great article in the New York Times. It was actually a New York Times journalist and a photographer who founded it.

And they just had this group of kids and this little school they'd created in one family's house. And you know Brooklyn Apple Academy, which is a wonderful homeschool co op in Brooklyn. And so I got really interested in these homeschool co ops. And at the same time, I was a host on Airbnb, and I kind of, like, put these two ideas together and thought, like, what if we could do for education what Airbnb was doing for home sharing? And that's what gave me the idea to have found a platform where teachers start their own school schools. And I just. I really felt like these teachers had so much wisdom and expertise, and if there was kind of one point person, then all you needed was a teacher and a space and a group of students. So that's how I founded cottage class in 2015, and we founded a lot of homeschool co ops all over Brooklyn and in other states. And it was a really exciting journey. But through that, I started becoming more and more interested in the parents who were sending their children to homeschool co ops and the kind of learning that was going on in addition to and outside that. And so, for my next company, I decided to start a community for homeschooling families to help empower them to curate their children's education.

And that's what you're currently doing now, right? That's part of teach your kids.

Exactly. So it's a podcast, which is really focused on information and support. And then we have our online homeschooling community, which is about connecting parents with tutors, classes, friends, helping them find the ideal curriculum for their unique child. I've done hundreds of interviews with parents, and I've created 200 different learning archetypes of students. And I have a free curriculum planner that families can use to help find the right curriculum to support their child with math and English language arts.

Wow. Amazing.

How are parents finding you?

Or how or why do people seek you out?

So we have families in all 50 states and 60 different countries around the world.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's a combination of various things. I mean, there's the blogs I publish, so if people are googling homeschooling, they might find my blog on socialization or curriculum. And then I have a lot of relationships with curriculum developers, just, you know, hosting them on the podcast, and then they'll share our work. Then there's also my community, which has just been growing since the first family I spoke to when I started college.

Class in 2015, and my cousins and my mom and everyone.

So for me, and probably you experienced something similar, Tanya, it's really about those personal connections. And then one person tells a friend and then that friend tells another friend, and it grows organically that way.

So how did you decide to get into education? Can you share a little bit about your personal journey and background?

Well, I like to say that I never decided to get into education. The last thing I wanted to be was a teacher.

I went to an elementary Montessori school and I loved it. I loved elementary school. And my mom, I guess you could say we did reverse homeschooling because my mom actually became a teacher at my Montessori school so that she could afford to send me to a private school. She was a single mom and the principal did something quite clever, which is that they would recruit parents and then send them for Montessori training and then the children would get free tuition. It was kind of ingenious. So my mom was a wonderful Montessori teacher. She's still alive, but now she's a pre med advisor.

But I thought, okay, no way am.

I going to be a teacher. Teaching just felt so dull and boring to me. And I think that's probably how a lot of people think of education as kind of dry and dusty. And you do this and you do that. Didn't feel alive and vibrant and whole. But then I was on the path to being an actress. I was a child actress, a regional child actress. And then I. I moved to Paris because I was going to be an actress in Paris. And so I was studying in an acting school and I had a problem, which was that I did not have any money.

So the only thing I really knew how to do, because there's some things.

That some people are not good at.

And for me, that's waitressing.

I just don't have that type of.

Skill set, really admire people who do.

So I started tutoring this kid for the ssat, which is an entrance exam. And then, you know, I got another tutoring gig for two Australian boys who are going to the American high school in Paris. Then I moved back to New York. Still was not making it as an actress, still needed money, and just tutoring was kind of the natural thing. And I started to really enjoy it more and more. And then before I knew it, I had taught over 2000 children in three.

Countries in every single subject.

And I started to feel at a point that I couldn't really make the impact in the world that I wanted to make through acting, you know, the auditioning and just kind of where I was. And so I wanted to do something else. And I kind of, along the way, started a foreign language school.

But that didn't really feel like it.

Was making the impact. And so I decided to focus on education, and all my teaching experience came in handy. My accidental teaching experience.

Yeah, absolutely. I find that when I ask that question often it's either I loved school and it was something I knew I wanted to do, or I hated school and it was something that I wanted to change. You seem to fall into a little bit of a different category in that I loved school, but I still didn't want to do that.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It's what I say about sales. My first career was in sales. I sold beer for almost a decade. And so when people ask, like, how did you fall into that? I'm like, I feel like sales is the thing that happens when you don't decide to do something else. Like you fall into sales somewhere. So it's interesting that you kind of fell into education in the same way I did.

It was my destiny. It's so weird.

I mean, sometimes I even wonder, how on earth did I get into homeschooling, you know?

But I love it.

And I think one thing I realized recently is that I love spending time with children and I love learning, but I just don't like instructing. And I think there's a big misconception about how children learn that. It's like the teacher is kind of going through a medicine cabinet and figuring out the right strategies and the right medicine to kind of insert this information in a child's brain in the right way. But I think a truly gifted teacher is going to understand how to support a child's natural curiosity and identify social, emotional blocks to learning. I got to be quite an elite.

Tutor in New York City. I was very good at it. And at one point I really felt.

Like all I was doing was just saying, I don't know. You tell me.

It's a conversation I have with my.

Kids frequently when they ask me a question like, I don't know. What have you already tried? What didn't work? What should we try next? But I think it also goes back to something that you've already said, which a lot of people think of education as being this dusty, old, dirty, dry career that's going to be boring. But when you really look at students and you're working to bring out the best in them and you're looking at the world through their eyes and their ideas and their perceptions and their curiosity, just how alive and vibrant of a profession and of a school that can create.

Absolutely. Especially if you have the privilege of teaching at a place like UP Academy. Where as a teacher, you're allowed to be creative and really focus on social emotional development, not just mastering these academic skills that are deemed important by the powers that be.

That's changing. We're hoping that's changing.

It is.

Especially with, you know, the onslaught of we have an encyclopedia in our pocket and the change in AI and creation, and we still need to have a lot of the skills and the knowledge. But it's what we do with those things that are going to make such a difference for our students in the future.

Absolutely.

One of the things we've been talking about as a school is how to talk about challenging conversations and how to bring up things to students or to groups of students when we don't know how to talk about them ourselves. Do you have some ideas or advice about how to have difficult conversations or how to know what to say when you don't know what to say?

Absolutely. So there are a couple things that come to mind immediately, such as the debate around teaching sex education in school, different feelings around inclusivity and diversity. And I think when you are teaching someone else's child, it can be especially challenging because you are aware of what values that parent wants to instill in their child. And in some ways, it's not your role as their teacher to tell them that they're supposed to live in a certain way beyond, you know, the agreed upon values of the school. Compassion, nurturing. But on the other hand, I think doesn't really help people to necessarily just be politically correct all the time. You have to have the courage to speak your truth. And I think ultimately, as educators, we need to model that courage to our students. So I would say the way that I try to talk about difficult conversations is to be a really deep listener and to also be authentic about my own feelings and my own confusion around the issue. For example, if a child has a question about war, for example, you can start by asking the child what's on their mind and how they're feeling about it. And there's a lot to explore just in that. And then after reflecting that, you can make space to express some of how you're feeling as well.

If I was going to simplify that into a framework, it's a ask questions, reflect, and then share authentic stories and feelings with them. Like, what are you thinking? What brought that up? What did you hear? What are you curious about? And trying to get an understanding of where a student's coming from. And then working through those thoughts and feelings and then sharing our own just ideas and confusions like I don't know what's happening. I don't know why people behave this way. You know, using your example of war. Like, I don't understand war. As a human, I do not understand what type of deep hatred brings you to dislike an entire group of people who you've never met. I just don't have comprehension of this. And so talking through that in a classroom is really challenging to try and share. You know, there are groups of people that dislike each other and have been fighting over areas of land or disagreements about beliefs for hundreds and thousands of years. For me, as a human, I just don't understand what brings us to that level of hatred.

For sure. And I think always in those situations, it's important to be aware of the power dynamic because even the strength of your feelings can have a really big impact on a child. And as they try to sort through the situation themselves. I mean, and there are other examples, too. I mean, where a child might say something that feels violent or racist or homophobic. And, I mean, I can just give an example. I don't know. Without getting too political. I once had a conversation as a college student where someone said to me that they thought the solution to the. Well, I'll just say it like, the solution to the Israeli Palestinian crisis would just be a genocide. Like, they saw that as an effective solution. And so I kind of started asking this person more questions about that perspective instead of just saying, oh, you're so horrible. And then I started saying, well, when I hear that, it's really hard for me to connect with that because I see the faces of children that I've met in the Palestinian territories, and I just don't feel good about the idea. And so it's just. I feel like people are more open than you would expect. But if you do listen deeply, there is headway that can happen. I mean, people can almost, like, start talking themselves out of ideas. Listening is not just about repeating what someone says or paraphrasing. It's a physical type of engagement. Like, your whole body is focused on being absolutely present and receiving what is going on with the other person and also receiving what is happening inside yourself. And if we can be with children at that level of presence, I feel like there's real transformation that can happen.

That's the piece I missed when I tried to succinctly share Reshare. What you had said was listening. And I think you made a really good point about understanding that when we share our stories and our authentic ideas, that sometimes if those feelings are strong, they can really come across that way to students and to younger children and really create an influence and to be aware when we're having those conversations what that might feel like or look like for the person you're having the conversation with. And to wade into that gently and with a focus on listening for sure.

And even kind of a less charged example is when I was teaching online during the pandemic, I had these group of three kids who were just constantly bickering with each other. And I would say, you know, I feel frustrated right now and it's hard for me to know how to teach you because you are talking and over speaking in each other. Can we find a way to create some space where we can have a good lesson here? And they totally got it.

And it wasn't like I'm really frustrated, stop doing this. But just really checking in with myself and kind of trying to almost explain to them like a scientist what was going on me and how their actions were impacting me. And let's figure out different way together.

You're having these conversations in small groups. You're tutoring, you're working with homeschooling families, you're working with micro schools. As you've seen that change in the things that you've created over the last, we'll call it eight years, going back to like 2015 and definitely longer than that. What do you think is coming in the future? Like what change do you see? If you had a crystal ball, what would education look like in the next 20 years?

Well, I've started to feel more confident in my prophetic capabilities since I was so gung ho on micro school in 2015 and everyone did not think that was going to be a thing.

Now I'm starting to feel, to me, I see the future in a very simple way. Like Microsoft just made sense, you know, okay, great teacher, group of kids seems simple enough. And now I start to feel like the future of education is much more modular. I think we're still at a phase with the micro schools where we are recreating the aspect of school where parents, and not to say this is the case with UP Academy, but in some level are outsourcing their children's education. Another person has ownership over the outcomes. And I think we can really get a sense of the future of education with this growing secular homeschooling movement of families who are curating their children's education. So there's a component that's parent led. Some of it is adaptive learning apps, some of it is nature based education. Students might Attend micro schools two or three or four days a week. And there are really big blocks of self directed learning. So I think in the future we're going to start seeing more and more of this modular learning that has these blocks of the one on one mastery learning, the experiential self directed learning. Definitely some component of micro schooling, Even like one day a week seems to be a common theme. But when I think about the future of education, I think of that and I think that there's going to be more and more incredible adaptive learning apps that are going to emerge, but we're also going to feel more and more the importance of balancing that with time in nature, with really physical time as well.

Yeah. The fear I have with a lot of the edtech and the apps and the things that happen, I think that some of them can do a lot to supplement learning. But my fear is that we're taking too much human interaction out of the equation. And that's one of the things we talk about here is like we're a personalized learning environment. But that doesn't mean we put your kids on apps all day. It means that they're with persons. Like it's personalized. There are actual people who are involved with that education. And I recently heard a statistic about Gen Z saying that they had on average 10 hours per week less time socializing with peers and hanging out with peers because they're spending time online, they're socializing online, they're on social media, they're playing video games together online, but in different locations. All of these things that are designed to interact and connect have actually created this experience where we're spending a lot of time, less time together. And I'm just throwing it out there. I don't know that there's a solution, but I'm throwing it out there is. This is one of my fears. Like the apps and all of the online education, so many of them are wonderful and there are a lot of really intelligent people creating super useful things for our kids. But also how do we continue to ensure that they're with humans and they're building social skills and they're socializing and they're going through those uncomfortable moments and those weird conversations. Those are things that we just have to do as people so that we continue to connect and stay together.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that Nir Eyal, who wrote the book Indistractable, has a really wonderful theory on this, which is that when children are spending a lot of time online, it's because they're lacking in another psychological nutrient, such as relatability, real connection with others, autonomy, self determination. I'm forgetting the third one right now. And so what he does is he kind of focuses on, like, what to add instead of what to take away. And, you know, when students are attending these schools where sometimes they're getting up at as early as 5am they have little to no recess, they're returning home exhausted, and they are really lacking this connection with others, they're lacking any kind of agency over their own lives. It's natural they're going to go to these very addictive apps to find that. So I think that often what I see with homeschoolers and unschoolers is, you know, maybe they'll get on the app for a little bit and then they'll get bored and do something else. But I do think, you know, you have a really great point, which is that engaged educational screen time is so different than playing Fortnite for three hours in a row. And generally, you know, when I organize tutoring sessions, we'll have a child work through an adaptive learning app with a live tutor. And the learning is just so much more powerful that way.

That's a great insight. As one of the last questions, I love to ask guests what they remember from their elementary school experience. Can you share a story of something that you remember from your time?

I would love to. So in addition to running to my.

Mom'S classroom at any opportunity, because the poll was so great, I was always getting into trouble.

There was something that happened to me which had a really big impact. One of the things that I've learned about children who are diagnosed as gifted or profoundly gifted is that they have a very strong sense of justice. And it's extremely jarring when they see something happens that seems unjust. So when I was in elementary school, actually, I was in sixth grade, it was the last year we had a little kind of like a mail service in our school where you could send letters to other children, and someone sent a hate letter to another child. And so my school shut down the whole mail system and told us that we could not get the letters that were on route if we didn't let them read them. And I had a letter en route.

To a little preschooler that I had an epistolary relationship with.

And I was so enraged because I had learned in the Constitution that you weren't allowed to seize somebody's mail without, you know. And so I made this case to my school that they could not read my letter. They needed to give My letter back to me and it escalated and escalated and I actually ended up getting suspended.

From this tiny little Montessori school because.

I was so angry. And I feel like that just had such a huge impression on my life. My mom actually took me to Friendly's the next morning and we went through the Constitution and wrote three page argument for why they should not be able to seize my mail. But it just made me realize so much how important it is that we honor children and we don't teach them something and then go against what we have taught them, that we really respect them and honor their autonomy and integrity.

Yeah. And I'm not sure that the Montessori mail operates by the same regulations as the United States State's postal service.

You know, they should have brought up that point, but 30 years too late.

But yes, I hear you. And yeah, I love the energy and the idea. My daughter, when she was younger had a very different but similar in feeling and in value. She was invited to an American Girl birthday party and told that if she didn't have an American Girl doll, she could bring any animal that she wanted to bring. And she had this large, I think it was an alicorn, like a pegasus and a unicorn in one, but it was big and so it didn't fit in the little seats that they had for the chairs on the table for the American Girl dolls. And she got really upset and said, if you're going to allow kids to bring any size stuffed animal, you need to have accessible seating at the table for any size animal to be able to sit in. And she ended up coming home and she was still working through it and processing that she felt so left out and so like she didn't belong because she had a different stuffy than everybody else. Even though that was part of the invitation it was supposed to be welcomed and allowed to bring. She ended up writing a letter to the CEO of the company of American Girl, sharing if they're gonna invite all different size animals and stuffies and dolls, that they should have different size chairs for them to be able to sit in at the table. Unfortunately, we never heard back from them, but it was that similar thought of justice and the way things should work in the world. And just seeing this outright example of this is the way I believe things should happen. And it's not happening and it's not right and hypocrisy.

I mean, basically saying you have certain values and then acting against those values. And your daughter was probably raised with a spirit of inclusion, but it can be so jarring and upsetting. Children see things so clearly in the way that sometimes adults don't. And you know, your daughter was completely in the right.

Thanks.

It's intense to learn that I do have a connection to the CEO of American Girl, but she sold the company.

So I don't know how much she.

Has or how important it is. Your daughter at this stage, this was.

Seven or eight years ago. She's passed it now. She's worked through that. Manisha, how can people get in touch with you?

Oh yes, well, first of all, please get in touch with me. I have a website, teach your kidspod.com you can also listen on Apple and I think the best is just to go to my website. You can contact me. If you subscribe to our newsletter, you'll get an email and if you just reply to that email, you'll get access to me and I respond to every email that I get and try to be as supportive as I can to anyone. So please, please don't hesitate to reach out.

What a wonderful resource. Thank you so much for your time.

Manisha, thank you so much for having me. It was just a delight to speak with you. Tanya.

Likewise. Thank you.

That's it for another episode of Rebel Educator. Thank you for joining us and thank you for spending your limited time with us learning how to be rebels in education. If you'd like to learn more or access our project library, you can go to rebeleducator.com if you'd like to learn more about our progressive elementary and middle school in the San Francisco Bay area, check out upacademy.com Interested in learning more about our Rebel Literacy Project curriculum or launching your own school and joining our affiliate network? Visit ProjectUP US and if you haven't read it yet, pick up your copy of my book, Rebel Create classrooms where impact and imagination meet on Amazon or anywhere you read or listen into your books. If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to leave a review and rate our show so that others can find it and love us too. Look forward to talking to you soon. Keep Resisting tradition Rebel educators.