Sit a Spell

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

After more than 20 years in education, I kept noticing something that bothered me: somewhere along the way, average had become the target.

Pass the class. Check the box. Get the degree. Move on.

To be clear, not every student approached learning that way. There were plenty who were motivated, curious, and willing to push themselves. But I also saw a pattern. A lot of students were capable of more, more than they even believed I think. When the environment supported it, expectations were clear, and someone believed in them, they did do more.

That part stayed with me.

At the time, I was in the middle of my dissertation and thinking a lot about learning environments and support services. Around the end of 2018, I started playing with the idea of creating a podcast for educators. The focus was going to be on the things that were happening during the learning process.

Not just grades. Not just content. People. Learning. Support.

Somewhere in one of those conversations, I remember saying something like, “Why can’t we just shift the bell curve one standard deviation?”

I was talking to my husband, and he looked at me and said something like, “Oh, like...raise the curve?”

And I just looked at him.

Because that was it.

That was the phrase.

Raise the Curve.

I probably Googled it the next day because I thought surely someone had already taken it. It felt too obvious and too good to still be sitting there. But it wasn't and from that day forward the seed was planted.

Raise the Curve was created in early 2019 and 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 accept.

For a few years, Raise the Curve lived more as a philosophy in the back of my mind. Over time, I realized it was not just how I saw students. It was how I saw people in general.

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 with the right support, the right tools, and a little more awareness of what is actually happening.

About a year before I left my super solid teaching gig, Raise the Curve 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 wanted something different. 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 way.

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 confidence, frustration, 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. Because pickleball became one more place to study things.

That is also why I wanted this space. I wanted a hub. An outlet. A place where I could put the ideas, questions, observations, resources, and occasional word vomits I have somewhere other than Facebook.

I am an extrovert. I am an ENFJ, for anyone who likes that kind of personality stuff. I am a teacher, a coach, a communicologist (that's just fun to say!) and truly enjoy helping people find solutions.

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. ✌️🫶