You can learn so many things beyond the classroom that when you begin to step outside within its four walls, you find that lessons are best learned there. Lindsey Wander, the CEO and founder of WorldWise Tutoring, has known this to be true. Caught by the travel bug ever since, Lindsey has been traveling around the world, experiencing numerous cultures and encountering different personalities. And she has well-applied these experiences to her passion as an educator. In this episode, Lindsey joins Aaron Civitarese to share with us her journey across different countries and the world of tutoring. She talks about how she started her tutoring business, the current state of education, and why she highly suggests taking gap years. Plus, Lindsey then takes us through her internships, and the skills she thinks are more important now that need to be taught.
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WorldWise Tutoring With Lindsey Wander
I’m here with Lindsey Wander, CEO and Founder of WorldWise Tutoring all the way over in the States. Lindsey, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
It’s my pleasure. We were getting to know each other a little bit before hopping on here. The education industry is something that needs to be discussed openly and frankly. I’m excited to have this conversation with you. Before we get too deep into all of that, tell us a little bit about you and a little bit of background. I’m curious. Who is Lindsey?
I’m originally from Southern California. When I graduated with my degrees, which are very high in Math and Science basis, I decided I wanted to explore different career options before jumping into it and travel the world. I took a bunch of internships nationally and internationally, exploring different ways that I could use because I had degrees in Biology, Chemistry and Math. I’m figuring out, how could I use these degrees before I jump right into a career for the rest of my life?
One of the internships I had was an environmental education position. I fell in love with teaching and ended up scratching those degrees, going back and getting a teaching credential. I was a classroom teacher for several years in South Central California. I was in low-income neighborhoods, teaching STEM to middle school students. I loved it. It was probably one of the best jobs I’ve had, but I didn’t like California. I wanted to move to Chicago.
When I came to Chicago, I tried to find a school that allowed me to have the same student-centered approach and the same freedom to teach and didn’t find it. I found that a lot of the schools I was applying to were very test-focused and focused on those scores. I decided at that point, “I had been tutoring for many years. Why don’t I start tutoring full-time?” I didn’t go into it planning to have a business, but within a couple of years, I had outgrown myself and had to start hiring people and forming a business.
Here I am now years later and helping students, not just in Chicago. I’ve expanded throughout Illinois. I’ve also expanded to Texas and then with recent events, we’ve blown up online. We’ve always offered online, but it has blown up online to where we’ve been able to help students all over the world. It has been a wild ride, but it has led me right where I need to be.
As it usually does, you can look back and connect the dots every time.
Every time, I think I was just where I needed to be every single moment. When you follow that gut feeling, it never leads you the wrong way.
Intuition is strong if you’re listening. You mentioned before you started your career and began your journey in the working world, you wanted to travel. A lot of people take gap years after high school before college. A lot of other people after college travel right away because they know once they get into that corporate structure or whatever, they’re screwed forever. Let’s be honest if that’s the route you’re going. Is that what you did? Was it like, “I need to take a quick break before I move on?” Is that where your mindset was?
When you follow that gut feeling, it never leads you the wrong way.
Yes and no. I got bit by the travel bug pretty early in my life, courtesy of my best friend and her family, who took me up traveling everywhere. If you ask my mom, she blames my last name, Wander, for my love for travel. I got a scholarship for college. It was told to me, “That’s the route you go. You just go high school to college.” I went in that direction, but once I had the degrees, my initial driving force was I wanted to explore careers. I didn’t want to jump right into something and end up hating it.
What had happened is when I started school, I originally went to school for Biomedical Engineering. Once I was in it for a year, I was like, “I don’t like this lab work.” I ended up switching my major to more of an Ecology emphasis. I was worried about that happening in a career as well that I would be into it a year or so down the line and be like, “I don’t like this.” Even though it was told to me from a young age, “You just choose a career that makes you money because you’re going to hate your job anyway,” I knew there was something wrong with that.
Once I had these degrees, I was like, “You obviously want to make a living, but I want to find something I enjoy.” The perk of that is that I got to travel. I lived in the rainforest of the United States. I was up in the mountains in Pennsylvania. I was able to go to Ireland and Asia. There were a lot of places that I got to see where they provided me housing and then I was able to get the experience in the job field but then see the world around that region as well. It was a win-win all the way around.
The travel bug hasn’t left me. I still find ways to incorporate travel now, which is a little easier when you own your own business, especially when a lot can be done online. Maybe that wasn’t a subconscious part of that decision. I center a lot of things I do around wanting to travel, but the main purpose of the time was to explore career options.
Exploring career options is something that everybody should take a close look at. The reality is if you’re in something that you don’t enjoy and you have to do it your whole life, why would you do that? You only get one swing at that with this life, as far as we know. It’s insane. I also went through a lot of careers. I went through banking and insurance. I went back to school to get a Master’s because I was like, “Those were both terrible. They were soul-sucking and I hated them.” The money was good and it could have been a lot better over time, but that wasn’t the point. Even when I was young, I thought that way.
When I went back and got a Master’s, speaking of school, I went through that and that brought me into my corporate hotel world. It’s where I stayed for about a decade. I enjoyed that because I had the travel bug too. I thought to myself like, “I love hotels and traveling. Why not be the manager of that hotel?” That was my thought process and I went for it. I did it. I’m super grateful I did because it gave me a ton of experiences. I met a ton of cool people. It also connected the dots to get me where I am now. It’s where I met my wife as well at grad school. That’s worth it right there.
There’s a lot of knowledge and experience I gained from those internships that I still use now. Maybe even on the forefront of that is the skills you gained from traveling in general, from picking up and moving somewhere where nobody knows you and you have to make do, especially if there’s maybe a different language being spoken or a totally different culture. That in itself is you learn so many valuable skills from that.
One of the major things that have made me successful in my business is my ability to read and relate to people, which I strongly attribute to traveling and being to so many different cultures. At that time, a lot of people were like, “What are you doing? You should be going right into your career and you’re just tagging along.” It was intentional what I was doing. I was having fun and enjoying it, but I knew that I was going to be getting some invaluable experiences and knowledge that I was going to be able to apply later in life and I did.
The thing that I’ve learned a lot from traveling is, first of all, connectivity, that we’re all the same of where you’re from and what you look like. We all want the same things. We have similar values. We want health, love, relationships, and generally happy life. We’re generally loving humans, for the most part. That’s important because when you start realizing that you understand that we are all one in all these “cheesy songs” you’ve always heard and things, they’re real. “We are one,” like we are and you see that when you’re out in the world.
The other thing is nonverbal communication, eye contact, and using your body. You can go as deep as NLP. Someone who doesn’t even speak your language but you can have a connection with eyes and then you can have an unspoken nod like, “You’re having a good day? Yes. You’re having a good day too,” and pass him a piece of fruit or whatever. You didn’t even communicate verbally, but you had a moment together. I’ve had hundreds of those and I’m sure you have as well. It’s powerful.
Also, that gut feeling of knowing someone is a good person. I developed my intuition through traveling, knowing, “This is a good situation and this is not a good situation. This is somebody I want to trust. This is someone I’m going to keep my distance from.” Another thing that has played into my success in being able to get me where I am now is the development of that intuition that is nonverbal.
You have to be on your toes out there traveling. There are loving people, but there’s also a piece of it that’s looking for an opportunity to take advantage of you. You’re very aware. It’s an awareness that you obtain from travel. Let’s talk a little bit about education. We were chatting before we hopped on about education. I would love to have a discussion around the current state of education, how you believe it’s going, and how it has gone before.
I’ll give you my perspective because I was a classroom teacher. I’ve been in that position where you do have state mandates. You do have a room of 45 kids for 50 minutes, but you have to hit these state requirements and I get it. Now, I’m a tutor where I get to have the time one-on-one with the students, see the curriculum and the lessons that are being taught across the world and have a deep involvement with it.
What I think is happening is our school system has gotten too large to be managed well and we try to create these quick fixes. A lot of that entails taking maybe good ideas and almost diluting them down and trying to distribute them to so many kids in the same way. It’s not effective because kids are different and treating them all with the same material isn’t working. Plus, a lot of teaching is classroom management, getting the kids to sit down and be quiet. It doesn’t allow for a lot of opportunity for creativity or personal expression.
Those are the skills that people need to branch off and be successful to be innovative thinkers and to create new solutions to problems. We tend to suppress that in our children to get them to be quiet and get a pencil out. We don’t give them an opportunity to explore. I’m a huge proponent of student-centered learning where the students are the ones who are in control in directing their learning with structure that is provided by the teacher. They’re still able to explore their own personal interests and let their mind carry them where they need to go while you’re still hitting the required content and completing certain tasks that they need to know like they need to know how to write, speak and those kinds of things.
The problem is, it is a lot of work for teachers to set up student-centered learning. It’s difficult. Sometimes it’s easier to say, “Here’s the worksheet and do the work.” I get that and you have to be dedicated to it to implement it completely. What’s happening is we have a lot of amazing students who are titled as problem children, ADHD, or whatever it might be who are being put into a box and not allowed to express who they truly are or explore their personal interests.
It’s suffocating them and I’ve seen it. It’s sad because if we let those kids go and be their authentic selves, it’s incredible the things that these kids come up with. The tutoring company was originally designed to help those kids that the traditional school system was not serving them to give them a place to be themselves, explore who they are, and foster them that individuality and the entrepreneurial mindset. I also tell them I’m thinking like a scientist. There are lots of different skills we work on with them that you don’t have time for in a school system.
I feel like school back in the day was to prepare people to get a job. Baby Boomers, even older than that, our grandparents, Industrial Age, and all these things, “Get a job, stay there 40 years, and get a gold watch.” That was the norm and that was built for that. I personally feel that the school system now is grossly outdated. I feel like people get more value, myself included, from masterminds, mentors, coaching programs and real-life experiences. I feel like education is, instead of regurgitating information on a test, it should be through personal experience and your observation of releasing ignorance from the experience. What do you think?
We have a system that’s so large that’s being handled. We’re talking like, “Chicago’s Public School Systems and LA Unified are massive.” When you’re having a system that large, it’s difficult to provide those individual opportunities to students. One of the things that have to happen is they got to get restructured into smaller units because it’s like any organization. When the person managing it at the top is so far removed from the people that they’re serving, you lose touch with what’s going on.
What you try to do is these mandated, take the ACT, “The Math section will tell us your problem-solving skills. The Grammar section will tell us your ability to write and articulate yourself.” They’re still trying to find ways to assess those skills but in a mass way. It’s not as effective as if we treated the students like the individuals that they are. It’s a flawed system for sure.
You understand yourself a lot more and your own upbringing, country, and culture by exploring others.
I see what you’re saying. It’s so large. It’s this massive thing that it’s like, “How do you even start chiseling that thing away to change it?” There’s someone like you. You’re an independent business owner. Tell us in your own words. Can you remember when you were like, “X, Y, Z is this and I’m going to do this because of this?” Can you recall that and put that into words?
There was an exact moment, but it’s similar to some of the things you were saying. I’ve always believed that you should question the answers and express yourself if you had a different viewpoint. I found myself being suppressed when I tried to do that. I was like, “Get me out of here. This is not the right or best way to do it. There’s a better way to do this. Why are you not giving me the chance to share that with you?”
As a teacher, once I did start teaching, I encourage dissenting viewpoints. As long as you’re respectful about it, I encourage you to think beyond what is happening in your homework or that you’re getting taught in the classroom. If you have a better way of doing something than the way that I’m showing you, tell me like, “These are the skills.”
After seeing students blossom with that kind of environment, I developed it more and more, “What else can I do to get them to innovate and to be creative problem-solvers, advocate and to be leaders, and be active in their own lives and the lives around them?” It has been many years now that I’ve been in this industry with tutoring and I’ve seen these kids go through school, college and their career. I see what kind of people they’ve grown to become. They come back to me and tell me, “These are the skills that helped me,” and I know it works.
I’ve tailored in on that, that it’s not just like you were saying, memorizing all the rivers in South America. I tell my kids, “If you can google it, I’m not going to have you memorize it. That’s ridiculous.” Instead it’s like, “What can we do with information to think beyond what’s being told to us?” Question what you’re being told and think further. That’s a little bit where the think like a scientist comes in. You’re constantly looking at the world around you, “What are the problems? How can we solve them?” and coming up with solutions.
The entrepreneurial mindset is a lot of being able to implement those solutions that you came up with. That includes planning, prioritizing, task initiation and all of these things that no one has ever taught. Given so many different tasks, they’re expected they’ll figure out how to manage all that, but no one has ever taught that. We have to keep in mind how children’s brains develop. The part of their brain that handles decision-making which has a lot to do with this is the prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of their brain to develop.
It’s harder for these kids to handle these things because simply they aren’t equipped to do it. Having someone to train their brain and how to do these things gives them that extra step ahead because they already have the IQ, imagination, passion and heart to help. The generation that we’re working with, they’re incredible the things that they come up with, but they need the skills to implement and make things happen. As a former classroom teacher, sometimes you don’t have the time to teach them all these things, even though they’re extremely valuable.
If you can google it, I’m not teaching it. Thank you.
There’s no point in memorizing it if you can google it.
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying to myself and my wife. I don’t go around talking education very much. Maybe I should, but this is one thing that I talk about a lot. I say it all the time, “Why do they tell you to memorize the presidents? They should be teaching you how to build your credit so you can get a business loan. This is something you need to learn.” You could google that, but memorizing things takes up space in your brain and you only got so much space in there. We can go into the whole structure of the mind and stuff. There’s no need to take up space doing that.
I said I had a funny story about memorizing regurgitating. I was in Finland going to school. I did a study abroad in college. I went over there and studied Economics. I was studying the EU economic system in Finland, which is interesting. I was memorizing machine. There was no critical thinking. It was like, “You need to remember this stuff and write it on the test.” I wrote it on the test and failed the test. I wasn’t the best student. I didn’t like memorizing things and I didn’t put a lot of time into it. I did not pass the test.
That’s weird, but that’s how the structure was there. I rewrote the test the next day and except in this test, I brought my phone with me. I had one of my friends texting pretty much openly in front of people. I had my phone here and I was texting, “What’s the such and such?” He would text me back the answer and I would write it on the test. I’m not proud of it, but I am because I don’t need to memorize these things and I needed to pass my test so I could go onto my next semester back in the States where I was going to school.
I found that mind-blowing like, “That was the standard at which the student was held. If you failed yesterday, you can take it again tomorrow. If you take it again tomorrow and you’re struggling, go ahead and text someone. We’re not going to check that so much.” I was like, “Wow.” I went back to the States where I was in college and I also had a scholarship there. Similar to you, I just went because I had a full ride and I was like, “I’ll go to that.”
I was not engaged in school. I didn’t go to a lot of classes and I was also doing the same thing there, regurgitating just enough to get by. I was way more interested in hustling a little side income entrepreneurial thing in the parking lot. I was way more into that. I remember there was one teacher. He taught Entrepreneurship. There was one class of Entrepreneurship. I have to give him credit on that. He had a T-shirt business and I loved that class. I went to every class. Maybe I skipped 1 or 2, but I was at most classes.
I was always attentive and interested. I was like, “What do you mean? You’re selling T-shirts. How much do you pay to get them made? How much do you sell them for? How do you market that thing? That’s cool. How much did you make last week?” I was so engaged and I thought to myself, “I wish every class I went to was about building businesses and stuff because that would be cool.” I graduated and I went and worked at Wells Fargo Bank. It was like, “I got to get out of here ASAP.” I do hear you.
That’s the root of a lot of it. When a lot of parents come to me and say, “My kid is not motivated,” it’s usually one of several things. One, they’re not interested in the content and the curriculum. Two, they’re bored. I got a lot of kids whose IQs are off the charts, but they’re failing every class and I was one of those. I was a problem because I was bored. I wasn’t being challenged and given the opportunity to have my voice and so I acted out. Three, it could be simply that they’re not feeling what the point of all this is. They’re not seeing the connection between what they’re doing and how it’s going to help them in life. They’re like, “This is a waste of my time.” In all of those cases, the blame is the content and the schooling, not the student.
What is a person to do, in your opinion? For example, someone reading this right now. Let’s say they’re 18 or 19 years old and they’re considering going to college. What’s your opinion on gap years, traveling, and seeing the world? Maybe you’re familiar with Gary Vee. He has a famous talk. He basically was saying, “You shouldn’t be allowed to go to college until you have a gap year or three and literally go out to the world and see what you’re passionate about, where your interests lie and what’s going on.
Make an educated decision on maybe what you want to do instead of just being pushed directly into it from high school.” Let’s be honest. When you leave high school, you have no worldly experience whatsoever for the most part for most people. You just go into something because it makes the most money or it’s, “I’m a doctor or a lawyer and that’s the best thing,” because that’s what you heard growing up.
You’ve been classified as that type of student. I have a lot of students who have been classified as Math students. They automatically go into Math and then I’m like, “You’re really into art.” My perspective of gap year hit me when I was traveling the world at 22 alongside these 17 and 18-year-olds who had been to way more countries than I had, who speak way more languages than I do, and who are way more world-savvy than I was. I attributed that to their gap year.
In most places outside of the United States, that’s very common to take a gap year. There are a lot of things with the United States. We’re in our own little bubble and I don’t know if people recognize the value in spending time outside of their country. We already talked about the value in understanding other cultures and people, but you understand yourself a lot more and your own upbringing, country, and culture by exploring others.
Education shouldn’t be about memorizing.
Maybe there’s a fear of people becoming an unpatriotic or I don’t know what it is. You sometimes are more proud of where you’ve come from by being in other places if that makes any sense and I know it does to you. You start to become proud of who you are and your upbringing. Because you see how it is in other places, then you’re more able to identify and distinguish yourself and figure out who you are as a person.
I definitely have suggested gap years to a lot of people, especially for students who are eighteen and have no idea what they want to do. Most eighteen-year-olds don’t, but a lot of teenagers at least have a subject that they know they’re interested in. They’re like, “I like doing entrepreneurship stuff.” At least, they have an idea. I’ve had some kids that have no idea. They’re completely uncertain and I’m like, “You need a gap year. You need to go explore.”
What ends up happening is these kids go into college. Parents are forking out, I don’t even want to tell you how much money, for them to get these degrees that they don’t even end up using. I see it happen over and over again, for these prestigious universities to get a Bachelor’s degree, which as much as I can say until I’m blue in the face, it does not matter. It’s a Bachelor’s degree. Go somewhere and get your Bachelor’s degree.
If you’re going to get it, it’s the Master’s and PhD. The name is maybe a little more important. I do think traveling is not for everyone personality-wise and also financially, although I traveled the world for free through internships. There are ways around it. For the ones who it makes sense because they’re a little lost, that’s a perfect solution for them and I’ve seen it work.
Internships, that’s funny you mentioned that. My wife had pretty amazing internship locations. She worked in the Maldives. We were in Singapore working. We were in the Philippines all through hotels. If you’re reading this now and you’re wondering what a good industry is for internships, education is one. I have lots of teacher friends that they teach English or languages in places and are equally as openly opportunistic as hotels because that’s where I came from. I see so many people bouncing from country to country, working and living for free and getting paid to travel.
You’re not going to be rich, but you’re not going to go broke and you’re seeing the world. They give you enough money to survive, housing, food or whatever that might be. I had enough to stay in one place but still traveled around and I was able to do it all debt-free.
You’re getting experiences. Your experience is rich, which at the end of the day, it can be argued that’s more valuable than money.
Not only that, I’ve gotten job interviews. I went to a no-name college and I’ve gotten job interviews where they were like, “Your experience is interesting. I wanted to talk to you.” It had nothing to do with my degrees, honors and all these things. They were like, “It was cool all the places you’ve been and all the jobs that you’ve done.” Now, as a person who interviews, I do look at their degrees just to see what they are, but I want to hear about their experiences, talk to their references and talk to them as people. That’s much more valuable than some Bachelor’s degree.
Talk to us a little bit about WorldWise Tutoring. You built this amazing company. Technically, what is it that you do fundamentally?
People reach out to us for the basics. They’re like, “My kid is failing a Math class or they’re prepping for the ACT.” I’m like, “We’re going to get him a good grade or score. Here’s what we’re doing.” The point of my company is to get them to not need a tutor. We try to get them to be confident and independent lifelong learners. That entails a lot of very deliberate lessons that we interweave into our instruction.
I try to break it into categories to explain it. We try to help them with metacognition, which is thinking about how you think. We’re giving them the opportunity to understand that they think about things differently to describe, comprehend and then apply that to future learning experiences. There are also executive functions, which are what we were talking about, the planning, prioritizing, time management and task initiation.
It also has an emotional self-regulation component because, as entrepreneurs, we know there are a lot of ups-and-downs. When you hit it down, you have to be emotionally strong and resilient to get out of that low, rebound knowing what got you to that point and come out of it better than you went in. We work with kids on that resiliency as well very deliberately.
Beyond that, once you have the knowledge and skills, what are you going to do with that? You have to interact in the world. We also work on social, emotional, or interpersonal skills, getting them to have empathy, leadership skills, and be advocates for their own lives and the lives of others. There’s a lot of other active listening. It’s what we were talking about before with the nonverbal cues, making sure that they’re getting good nonverbal cues, which also helps them to listen better and have good communication and conflict resolution.
There are a lot of things. It’s the entrepreneurial mindset that you hit along the way in the world of having to interact with other people that we want to teach them in our lessons. They’re going to get a good grade in Math, be able to successfully do this on their own, and wean off of us within a few months, but what the real big picture is they’re going to be successful in their other classes. They’re going to be successful if they do decide to go to college and whatever career they go into in their relationships.
In all of these things, they can apply these skills because having the knowledge is only a part of it. You have to have the right mindset as well. My final line is we’re trying to get them to be competent and conscious leaders, not just have the knowledge and skills, but also have the right mindset to do something wonderful with that knowledge and those skills that impact the world in a positive way. That’s what education should be about. It shouldn’t be about memorizing. We’re shaping these young minds who are our future and who are going to determine the route that our society takes.
I know a lot of us right now are sitting here, wishing we had some competent and conscious leaders above us now or we wouldn’t be in some of the positions we’re in currently. The great thing about this next generation of kids is they have the heart. They’re so empathic, understanding, and open-minded. That stuff is the hardest stuff to teach. Now, we got to give them the skills. What do you do with that rather than bottling it in? What do you do with those feelings? You have to go out and be an agent of change in the world.
With social media and people being out there more being visible, people can stream themselves live at any moment or any day for free to as many people as they want. There’s a level of vulnerability that comes with that, especially if you’re being authentic and being your true self, which is something that you’re always teaching people. If they’re doing public speaking or they’re going on stage, you’re always like, “Don’t act. Be yourself. Be authentic. People are attracted to authenticity and vulnerability.”
Thought leaders, influencers, business owners, and entrepreneurs are talking about this a lot now. You hear a lot of people bring this up as we are right now on the show. I feel like compared to our older generations, it was more, “Wear a mask and act.” It’s not “cool” to show empathy, love, and emotion. Whereas now it’s becoming almost the norm.
I even know on the marketing side of things, people overuse it, which also has some dark magic, but that’s also happening. What you mentioned there where this generation, the younger kids now who are our future, they have a lot of empathy and emotion already. Where does that come from, in your opinion? How do they have that and we didn’t when we were kids, for example, because I sure didn’t?
It’s probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I do attribute it to social media and the fact that our world is so much more connected. They’re able to see these people in other countries. Before, we would just read about them in a history textbook or maybe see it on the news if we watched it. Now, we’re getting information from across the world live and seeing what’s going on. How can you not relate to a person that you see is suffering?
I also do think that humanity tends to go in cycles and we could get spiritual in that route. I talked to a lot of people who have more of a spiritual background. They’ve said the same thing that this next generation is they’re like the feelers for sure and I’ve seen that in the kids I’m with. The problem is, a lot of them have a lot of anxiety and depression. A lot of that has to do with how you cope with those feelings of stress or worry that they’re holding in because their parents are of our generation, where they’re saying, “You fall down. Don’t cry. You’re fine.” That’s our automatic reaction.
We’re shaping these young minds who are our future and who are going to determine the route that our society takes.
With us and we will get for kids is we give them an outlet to identify and express their emotions rather than bury it but to also learn coping mechanisms. Not to bury and hide it, but to overcome those feelings, use them for positivity and move beyond them. A lot of the root of depression, anxiety and even addiction comes down to not ever learning coping mechanisms for your emotions or even how to identify them. In schools, you don’t always have the time to do that as well. That’s definitely something we work on with our kids.
We could go deep on a lot of verticals here. It’s cyclical. This generation is the feeling generation. I’ve done some reading on that myself for sure.
With the way the world is going on right now, everyone is so sad and worried about it and I’m like, “Don’t worry. These next kids are coming in and they’re going to fix it.” I feel positive about it, especially knowing the work I do and the kids that I’m working with. I see their brilliance. Why I think especially our work is so important and the message needs to be heard by these people who you’re saying are talking about the authenticity and all of that, this is becoming not a fad.
People are starting to realize these aren’t just nice-to-have skills. These are things that we need to know that people have to have to be successful. We can all think of adults in our lives that lack skills like this. It would be nice if they had better active listening skills or time management skills because it would be much easier to interact with them. The messaging has definitely changed in reflection of the times, but it’s a good change. I hope that people heed that advice of knowing that their kids need more than just rote memorization.
I do think that with the pandemic and parents having their kids at home and seeing, “My kid is not self-directed at all,” hold on. We have a problem here. It has put a spotlight on this that people are like, “There’s much more to education than what I was expecting what was happening.” I was handing my kid off to school thinking these things were happening and now that I see them home for six months and I’m like, “My kid cannot do these things.” Parents are looking for a change.
They’re seeing what the kids are doing and they’re like, “This is not congruent at all.” That’s so true. I love the fact that you’re on the front line of this and WorldWise Tutoring is bringing the future generations through the proper channel. We need that clearly. We have a lot of 60, 50, 40, and 70-year-old children walking on the planet. It will be a beautiful thing when this generation has empathy and they can deal with it emotionally and learn the structure and all of this as well. They can go out and impact the world positively. I see your vision of positivity and I stand on that side of the coin with you as well. That’s cool. For WorldWise Tutoring, where can the readers come find you, check out what you’re doing and look at your amazing work?
The best place to start is the website, WorldWiseTutoring.com. You’ll see my messaging has changed a lot with the times. We’ve always done these services, but people are more ready to hear what’s going on. There’s a lot of information there. Also, there are parents or educators who are thinking, “How can I do this myself?” I started to put more day-by-day tips of how to do these things on your own and be more deliberate about instilling these skills in the youth around you in my blogs. You can read those as well.
I have a student handbook, which has a bunch of information for students to help them with their studies. You’ll see on there I started the learning pods because I do like the idea of these smaller micro-schools that the kids are getting more individualized attention. We started a whole enrichment program where kids can explore those personal interests in a short-term way to see if that’s something that they’re interested in pursuing. They go range from acting and theater all the way to coding and personal or public speaking. There are all kinds of things there to see so they can play around.
I also started a student sponsorship program for kids who are falling behind and widening that achievement gap. Especially now with the remote learnings, you can learn more about that if you’re a business looking for some feel-good marketing or if you know a student that could definitely use some help but can’t afford it. There’s a lot there on the website. We’re also on all social media. If you find WorldWise Tutoring, you’ll find us everywhere, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I have a lot of information that I’m diluting day-by-day for people so that they can implement these things themselves as well.
Lindsey, thank you so much for coming to the show. A wealth of knowledge, WorldWise Tutoring, changing the world one child at a time. This is very cool. Thank you for being a guest.
Thanks for having me, and thanks for letting me tell people about our services and this important change that we’re having.
Important Links:
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- https://LinkTr.ee/WorldWiseTutoring
About Lindsey Wander
Lindsey Wander says “I am a firm believer that lessons are best learned by stepping outside of your comfort zone and taking action. This is maxim I don’t just use with my students, but one that I also apply to my own life. To date, I’ve traveled to more than 25 different countries and 35 American states. This exposure to numerous cultures, belief systems, lifestyles, and personalities has shaped my passion for learning and helping others to succeed. Not only this, but traveling extensively requires a lot of on-your-feet thinking, patience, and the ability to read people quickly—all of which are vital skills of a successful educator.