Welcome Back to School: A Letter From Our CAO

A little back to school cheer — This week all Kiddom employees (many of whom are former educators) received the following letter from our Chief Academic Officer, Abbas Manjee. We were super inspired by it, so we had to share!

Kiddom Team,

School is officially back in session.  

This time of year impacts an entire ecosystem of folks we serve:

1. Students, who may be excited to reconnect with friends and keep learning to feed their budding curiosity 
2. Teachers, who may be ecstatic to implement the good and hard lessons learned last year
3. Administrators, who may be anxious to see their school or district vision implemented with fidelity
4. Parents/Guardians, who may be so proud of their kids they might cry alone in the car the morning the first day of school

To kick this season off, I’d like you to meet Mr. Smith (name anonymized for privacy):

Mr. Smith is the proud father of Jack (also anonymized), who consistently struggled in high school. On this day, Mr. Smith learned his son had passed a key mathematics exam, which had been preventing Jack from graduating high school for three consecutive years. I was Jack’s math teacher, but I had never met his father. Mr. Smith showed up to my school and demanded to see me. Our school administrative assistant called me out of the classroom and pointed me out to him. 

Mr. Smith came running at me like a madman. He lifted me up, and shortly after this photo was taken, he put me down and started sobbing on my shoulder. School is a funny place. It’s where families come together to share and make their hopes and dreams a reality. 

Four years ago, Kiddom evolved from offering math games on iPads to a platform designed to support all teachers. The work of teachers impacts generations at scale. All of us have been inspired, challenged, and elevated by teachers. They’ve guided, supported, and provided us with a bedrock of knowledge that will forever shape who we are. 

Don’t forget that. 

As such, it’s imperative we connect our day-to-day work back to the people we truly work for. Every code review, every outbound sequence, and every UI mock at Kiddom can significantly impact young people. It’s critical we focus even harder in the coming weeks, months, and years because the young people we serve today are growing up in a time where the future appears less promising than the future we were brought up in (e.g. here, here, and here).

Ultimately, I don’t care about making a list on Business Insider. We need to work harder towards unlocking potential for teachers and learners because our work helps prepare young people to make data-informed decisions about themselves and the world around them. And young people are our future.

Get some rest this weekend; the world doesn’t change itself.

Thank you,

–  Abbas

At a typical Kiddom school, hands are in the air, there’s a buzz in the room, and teachers and students are energized. Kiddom was designed to help improve teacher retention and increase student performance and graduation rates.

For the first time, the most important parts of teaching and learning are connected and simplified in Kiddom. Curriculum lives in one place and is easily measured and refined, instruction is personalized to meet the needs of each student, and data serves as a powerful system of support for every member of the learning community to keep students on track.