Teachers without walls

Steve Heimler is a teacher in Roswell, Ga., but his classroom isn’t in a traditional school building. It’s in his basement, where world maps and Raphael’s School of Athens adorn the slate-­colored walls. Yet despite his humble location, Heimler’s students number in the hundreds of thousands.

Heimler, 42, teaches in front of a camera, wearing his signature button-­down and making YouTube and TikTok videos that offer history and government lessons to high schoolers across the country preparing for Advanced Placement exams. Between delivering context for historical events, Heimler cracks jokes and acts out conversations with historical ­figures using modern lingo. He calls his approach “a healthy mixture of seriousness and buffoonery.”

Previously, Heimler spent 12 years teaching at two local homeschool-­hybrid academies. Now with over 445,000 subscribers, his AP prep ­videos make enough ad revenue to allow Heimler, also an adjunct pastor at Roswell Community Church, to teach full time from his basement.

Many teachers have left traditional classrooms in recent years, a phenomenon that gained even more steam, some say, due to COVID-19. According to a working paper published last August by the Annenberg Institute, approximately 36,500 U.S. teaching positions are vacant. At least some teachers who’ve left brick-and-mortar schools, however, have done so to pursue nontraditional teaching careers online.

When he taught in-person classes, Heimler says, his six-subject workload each week made him feel that he couldn’t excel at any one of his subjects. “I was just so stressed out. All I thought about was, ‘Aw, man, wish I could go fishing today,’” he said. “But now, I don’t necessarily need that release.”

Weekly, he writes and produces four to six videos, each taking around three hours to write and film. He puts in long hours and sometimes misses the sunlight in his windowless basement, but he finds it gratifying to produce content for students who choose to listen in. He hopes he can impart a love of learning to them, so that they view education as an opportunity rather than an obligation.

Other teachers who’ve left the classroom to become online educators include Carol Braun, a 42-year-old mother of two boys. She taught at a private high school in Troy, N.Y., but left in 2015 while expecting her first child. She then found a position as an online instructor teaching linear algebra and multivariable calculus, dual credit courses for high school students. “I feel like this job wouldn’t have been available for me to do so successfully, even like 10 or 15 years ago,” she said.

For Julie Kieras, 46, a Hartford, Conn., mother of two, online education became a side job to her in-person classes. In 2010, she quit teaching at a local middle school to become a stay-at-home mom, and four years later began teaching as a seventh grade instructor at Classical Conversations, a homeschool-hybrid program. When the pandemic hit, several parents asked her to continue teaching writing to students online. Through her business, Let’s Write Together, she finds that the online model allows her to tailor lessons to suit the needs of students.

Heimler, meanwhile, has been so successful that he recently hired his first employee. In the next year or so, he plans to make videos on psychology and geography.

“I think the specialization is not in subject matter, but in being able to do what I’m best at,” he said. “And, there’s something pretty satisfying to that.”