The Most Common Human Fear Just Became My Reality
How getting humbled by a 14-year-old reminded me why Acton Academy matters now more than ever
I was so embarrassed.
I had suddenly become white as a ghost, like I was public speaking, naked on a stage in front of thousands of people with nothing to say—totally exposed.
I felt like I’d let everyone down: my family, my community, my-self.
I trusted a vendor to do what they said they were going to do without checking their work.
And it had been going on for six months.
The story
“Why don’t you go over my website to make sure everything works? That might be really helpful,” I’d said to the new 14-year-old intern—a freshman in a local high school—just a week before.
“Mr. Blatman,” he said, “I found a number of issues with your website: including broken buttons, missing Meta tags, and other issues.”
My stomach got heavy. “Google doesn’t understand your page, and so the SEO blah, blah, blah… the button for the free download just goes to the top of the page… Meta tags don’t have keywords blah, blah, blah…”
There I was, on the other end of a video chat, getting schooled by a teenager.
“Oh, NOoo!” I thought to myself.
The worst feeling in the world overcame me and I suddenly felt ashamed and embarrassed, like the common greatest fear, being naked on a stage in front of thousands of people.
“This is what our website has looked like for six months,” I realized. “No wonder it feels like we have a fancy-looking billboard in the desert facing away from any roads!”
“So, these are some important issues I’d recommend you get fixed,” he responded—calmly, coolly.
“I… I… I’m speechless,” I slowly stammered, still shocked. “wow, thank you for showing me all that. I had no idea. I’ve been focused on meeting families, supporting my own family with our newborn, and I just trusted that because we had a website, the website was fine.”
“Yeah, sure, but I’m not sure that the website is doing the job you want it to be doing,” he responded.
I smiled, and said, “kinda reminds me of the traditional education system,” trying to bring some levity to this—quite frankly—dire situation, and we both laughed.
“I can work with kids and play music—no problem—but it never occurred to me that grownup professionals wouldn’t do a professional job. We never learned any of this stuff in school.”
“Okay, last thing,” I said, “Can we go through this item by item so I can give this list to my web development team? I won’t tell them a 14-year-old found all these issues. I don’t need to embarrass them, but I need this stuff fixed, like, ages ago.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, and we wrote down 14 big things in outline form, and I started the message to our website team by saying, "heads up, this is going to be a tough email.”
Concluding thoughts and highlights of the genius of Acton Academy
The Acton Academy model is built; I have more teaching experience than most Acton owners; and we live in a city that’s 10x the population than towns with thriving Acton Academies.
I believe there’s more to be excited about than to be afraid of with our new Acton Academy here in Mason, Ohio.
And I want to wrap this post up by sharing some important lessons I’ve learned from this experience that I wish I would have learned in elementary school, like our Acton heroes will learn at our alternative k-12 school right here in the greater Cincinnati area:
The sooner you find a problem, the better and cheaper it is to fix.
That’s why one of Acton’s sayings is, “fail fast and cheaply; learn fast and grow quickly.” No one wants their child to work their whole lives to be a veterinarian and then have them wake up in medical school to the realization they don’t like doing surgery.
Children are far more capable than most people realize.
A professional web development team of grownups made numerous errors with our website. I didn’t catch it. No friends said anything. A teenager saved us.
Trust but verify.
It’s important to be trusting, but not blindly; verify that work is done correctly. That’s one reason the Acton Academy “Learner Driven” education model has “running partners,” where each child has—and is responsible for—someone else’s work.
Don’t just try to wing it and build a school yourself, though.
Keep your job, and send your child to your closest member of Acton Academy’s network of 300+ schools that have developed an education model that works for your family first.
RSVP to come to our Family Info Night on May 31 and find out if Acton Academy North Cincinnati is right for you!
Still feeling raw, but grateful;
Yours Truly,
Joshua Blatman