Saturday, August 19, 2023

The Week in Review (August 19, 2023)

This week flew by. Four big moments. I preached last Sunday at College Wesleyan Church. I flew on a private plane to Missouri and back on Wednesday. I finished the draft of some algebra course materials for an algebra course. And by God's grace, I was able to check the box on a major stressor on Friday.

1. You can see the general outline of the sermon in the previous post. You can even watch one of the services here. Preaching is sometimes a surreal experience to me. Last week was that way. It was like I was hit by a car and was in shock. I wasn't quite sure what had happened afterward.

2. Flying to Missouri was fun. It was a business trip. Our Campus dual enrollment business is ramping up! Our first partner in this initiative is Oklahoma Baptist. Lots of Christian high schools are signing up and their students are signing up. Many of these students will only pay $300 for a 3-hour course.

This is flowing because we are more or less running it. Colleges are so inefficient, so full of friction, so un-business savvy, so unable to get out of their own way that they make things incredibly difficult. I was on the phone with a homeschool parent amazed at how easy it was to register. She couldn't believe it. A lot of this is a testament to our partnering school. 

This is going to snowball. We've always had a product the student wants. Colleges just don't want to give it to them. Now we've found a path to get it to them. I've predicted for two years that there will eventually be an Amazon tipping point. We're not there yet.

3. One of the courses that is getting a lot of traction is College Algebra. We have found an optimized formula for creating courses, and it seems to be working. I was excited at the subject matter expert who is teaching this class for us. For the moment, I am doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes grunt work to ramp up these sorts of classes more quickly. I actually created about 100 pages of raw material to be processed for this class. I'm looking forward to doing more, given my interest in just about any subject. 

Biology is on the docket this fall. If demand continues, I can see myself creating the raw material for calculus, chemistry, and physics online to be handed off to a subject matter expert for perfecting. What fun that would be! With algebra, I created "Conic Land," a section of a math amusement park where the rides are modeled on conic sections--parabolas, circles, ellipses, and hyperbolas. I thought about writing, Algebra: The Novel.

4. The Lord seems to get me through puzzles I don't always know how to solve. I used to trust that everything would work out. I used to trust in my own ability to come up with a solution. "I'll figure something out." But God doesn't rescue every situation. Romans 8:28 is about the eschaton and it's corporate, not necessarily about individual lives on earth. One of the hard even if obvious lessons of the last few years is that I'm not as smart as I'd like to think. I can't figure out a lot of important things.

Having said all that, hitherto hath the Lord helped. Yesterday was another day of thanksgiving, and I am grateful to the Lord yet again. 

5. I lay awake last night trying to figure out what project to work on. My problem is always that I have too many. Hardly anyone buys the books I self-publish. Which book that no one reads should I finish next? 

I should launch a Romans course on Udemy later today. 

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