“A beginning is a very delicate time”
-Frank Herbert, Dune
For this first blog entry, I want to explore something that feels both important and, perhaps, obvious. I’m not sure. But ever since I was diagnosed with kidney disease—caused by a medication that was slowly destroying my kidneys—I’ve noticed a striking parallel between two professions that don’t often get compared: nurses and teachers.
Now that I am no longer in the school system, I’ve gained some distance and a clearer perspective on the profession I was once part of. You could say I’ve been looking at both through a critical lens. As I’ve become a frequent visitor to the healthcare system, I’ve had time to observe and reflect on nurses and the work they do. What I’ve found is that both groups—teachers and nurses—exist in systems that quietly gaslight them.
The truth is… both teachers and nurses are gaslit. We are told we’re heroes. That our work matters. That we’re essential. And yet… we’re rarely compensated in a way that reflects that value. As a teacher, I never thought of myself as a hero, and most of my colleagues probably don’t either. We were professionals—tired, overworked, and constantly trying to do right by our students. Once a year, we’d get a few slices of pizza and some salad to say “thanks” on teacher appreciation day. And then it was back to work.
The administration shows its appreciation by piling on more PD that most find a waste of time. Appreciation isn’t another pile of paperwork. It isn’t being asked to stretch our already limited time and energy even further. Good teachers have no life during the school year. Sure, we get summers off—but from September to June, we’re haunted by the idea that we could always be doing more: reading more, learning more, planning more, analyzing more. Like artists, we often abandon our best ideas before we ever get to fully realize them.
Both nurses and teachers service and empathize with their customers giving deeply of themselves. They live a life of service. They are empathetic. Compassionate. They care about the people they serve and often go to great lengths to support them. And what do they get in return? Low pay. Chaotic, often demoralizing work environments. And top-down decisions that frequently defy logic or care.
So, the gas lighting continues.
Some teachers probably deserve to be called heroes, but most are just humble people doing their jobs and not getting properly compensated for their knowledge, time and sweat. Nurses are no different.
One way to fight back is to take what we know, what we’ve honed over years of hard-earned experience, and bring it to the open market. That’s what my colleagues and I are doing with Project Prospero.
We’re offering something real: high-quality, individualized teaching informed by deep experience and practical insight. In return, we get is the freedom to be intelligent creators of what we know works, and the space to practice that and be compensated.
The school system is a giant squid, its tentacles tangled in textbook publishing, high-stakes testing, bureaucracy, and city politics. We are choosing to escape that monster and chart a new course.
I’ll end with Tennyson’s words from Ulysses, which, to me, describe what we’re trying to do better than anything else:
“That which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Take this journey with us.
