Emily
10th Grade Student
Like many of her peers, Emily wasn’t thriving in a traditional brick-and-mortar school environment. Academically, the curriculum offered no real flexibility for her as a learner. Whether or not she had mastered the material, the teacher was already onto the next subject. Even more troubling, there were times at school when she didn’t feel safe.
A Better Experience in Class… and Out
Great Lakes Learning Academy offers a flexible curriculum, allowing each student significant latitude in how they learn and in the pace. “You have more time to study different subjects,” Emily says. “It’s fun and you learn more.” That approach presents a stark contrast to her prior brick-and-mortar experience. “In-person schools have to test and move on,” she explains. “You don’t go back [to] subjects” if you haven’t yet learned the material as much you need to, or would like to.
Emily is also thrilled that another previous issue has disappeared altogether now that she’s at Great Lakes Learning Academy. “In public school there were just a lot of threats and bullying,” she recalls. “We don’t have that problem at all here.”
Emily is more excited about school than ever before. She’s joined the art club and the movement club where she “gets to do different exercises.” And she’s making plenty of friends, including friends who live in Ohio, Kentucky, and Arizona. “We like to share stories about our animals and hobbies.”
A Future Paramedic
For Emily, one of those hobbies is solving 3-D puzzles. These multidimensional, complex puzzles typically take many weeks to solve, sometimes months. “I can build a 3-D puzzle in a week,” she says. Her father adds that “she’s hard to keep up with,” and that they have to buy new puzzles all the time.
Though only in 10th grade, Emily is already looking toward her future. “I want to become a paramedic,” she says. She hasn’t begun any kind of formal training yet, but she is taking the initiative to start learning the enormous amount of medical information that is required of the profession.
At Great Lakes Learning Academy, Emily is thriving.