Sit a Spell

Raise the Curve is not about pickleball. It's not really about me either. It is about people.

The idea for Raise the Curve started years before my pickleball obsession. I was working in education, where the bell curve was a pretty common way of thinking about performance, tests, behavior, and learning. After more than 20 years in education, I started noticing something that bothered me.

It seemed like it had become normal to be normal.

Average became acceptable. In an academic setting, that often meant being okay with doing just enough. Pass the class. Check the box. Get the degree. Move on.

To be clear, not every student thought that way. I had plenty of students who were motivated, curious, and willing to push themselves. But I also saw a pattern. A lot of students were capable of more than they were giving themselves credit for, but something kept getting in the way.

As a teacher, that was frustrating. Not because I expected perfection. I did not. It was frustrating because I knew they could learn. I knew they could improve. I knew they could perform better when the environment supported it, the expectations were clear, and someone actually believed they were capable of doing it.

At the time, I was in the middle of my dissertation work and thinking a lot about classrooms, learning, communication, and student support. Around the end of 2018, I started playing with the idea of creating a podcast for educators. The focus was going to be helping students in the classroom by talking through the things that affect learning.

At one point I was having a conversation with my husband, well more like a rant, and I remember saying something like, “Why can’t we just shift the bell curve one standard deviation?” More "blah blah blah" ranting, then he looked at me and said something like, “Oh, like...raise the curve?”

And I just stared at him. Silent. A miracle really, me that quiet. But that was it. Raise the Curve! *music plays*

I think I Googled it the next day or the following because I thought surely someone had already taken it. It felt too obvious and too good to still be sitting there. Nope. All mine. My precious. 🤭

RTC debutted as a YouTube channel where I started an education-focused podcast. I think I recorded somewhere around 12 or 15 episodes. Then life did what life does. I finished my doctorate. The podcast took a backseat. COVID happened. Coming out of COVID, I started seeing the impact it had on students in a significant way. I also started seeing the impact AI was having, and at the same time, I was experiencing changes in my own job that were hard to reconcile.

Education shifted. Students shifted. Teaching shift. I too, inevitably shifted. For a few years, RTC lived more as a philosophy in the back of my mind, quietly guiding me towards this realization that this was how I saw everyone, not just students, but me, you, the world.

We are all working with different histories, skills, patterns, strengths, limits, and assumptions. Some of those help us. Some of those keep us stuck. But most people are capable of more when they have support, effective tools, and a little more awareness of what is actually happening.

About a year before I actually left my solid teaching gig, was when the unfortunate realization that I desperately needed a sabatical enveloped me like a wet blanket. I did not know exactly what would come next, but I knew I needed to branch out on my own.

Then everything started changing at once.

I went through a major surgery that shifted my health in a good way. I found pickleball and got completely obsessed with it. I left my job. I started going through menopause. I was also doing therapy and working through parts of my past that I had carried for a long time.

So, you know, just a casual little season of life.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, RTC started coming to the forefront of my mind more often. At first, I thought it might become more of an education consulting thing. That made sense on paper. I had the background, the experience, and the training for it. But after leaving education, I realized I did not really want to stay inside that world in the same way. I still wanted to use everything I knew about learning, communication, assessment, and growth. I just did not want to keep doing it in the same system.

That is where pickleball came in.

Pickleball gave me a new place to apply the same questions I had been asking for years. Why do some people improve faster than others? Why does one explanation click for one person and completely miss another? Why do people know what to do but still struggle to do it in a game? Why do some players stay stuck even when they are trying hard? Why does communication matter so much? Why do confidence, frustration, fear, habits, and feedback change the way people perform?

Apparently my brain cannot just have a hobby. It has to turn it into a full investigation. So Raise the Curve started taking a new shape. Not because it suddenly became about pickleball. Ok, maybe it did a little lol. More because I needed a hub. An outlet. An online she-shed if you will. 

A place where I could put the ideas, questions, observations, resources, and occasional word vomits somewhere other than Facebook. I am an extrovert, an ENFJ, for anyone who likes that kind of personality stuff. I am an educator. I am a creator. I am a supporter. I am a communicator. I am someone who likes to understand why people do what they do and how they can grow from where they are.

So this is not going to be only about pickleball. It will include pickleball, because that is a big part of my life and a big part of what Raise the Curve is becoming. But the larger idea has always been about people. How we learn. How we get stuck. How we communicate. How we adjust. How we build confidence. How we notice patterns. How we raise the curve, even a little.

So I guess that is the long version.

Raise the Curve is me, but it is not just me. It is you too. It is all of us.

Or at least, I think it should be. ✌️🫶