IN BRIEF: I plan to start teaching Reality-Based Thinking courses and seminars with live-or-later online offerings, starting later this Fall (2022) or in early 2023. Also, I may begin sometime this Fall taking on local students for beginning guitar, for voice, and possibly for beginning clarinet and trombone.

Last April, we shut down the We, Montana! Great Room, where I had been teaching local students in various subjects for four years. It would seem that there was insufficient interest in the local market to sustain the kinds of things I wanted to teach. (This consisted primarily of courses for homeschoolers, such as band, chorus, public speaking, skits, etiquette, US Constitution, and Reality-Based Thinking—plus a few more that I’m not remembering, or that I had hoped to start teaching.)

I have long resisted teaching online, as it is certainly not the traditional in-person experience that I have always loved. But in a niche market, where there’s just not a lot of public interest, it may be the only practical way to succeed. I’m still not interested in giving musical instruction online, but where it makes a lot of sense is when it comes to the Reality-Based Thinking. This topic is grossly underserved, and is of vital philosophical importance, I believe, to the betterment of our society.

So I’m getting my studio space ready to begin offering online courses and seminars, as early as January 2023. Among other things, I’ll be adapting my in-person course (which I have taught for three semesters in the Great Room) to a 12- or 13-week live-or-later course, probably for a fee of $100. I’ll also develop some free seminars, which I hope to be instrumental in getting the word out and recruiting people for the paid course. And once all that’s in place, there are several other courses that can be developed.

In our culture, most seem to think—as I used to think myself—that their thinking is good enough already. Naturally, then, they don’t rush to your door when you offer a class on how to do it better. I hope, however, that making this available to a market of over 300,000,000 people will bring in enough revenue to support the ongoing modest effort. As this is not my first entrepreneurial rodeo, I imagine that it may take four or five years to make a decent salary at it. But it is important work to me, and that’s worth building.