A woman with a passion for traveling is still able to teach students here in Michigan.
“It allows me more freedoms but also to provide a quality education to students and myself and find ways of improving my skill and my craft,” said Brit Quarnberg.
Brit Quarnberg has spent almost 20 years as a teacher, including the last three at Great Lakes Learning Academy.
The academy is 100% online and has been since before the pandemic.
Quarnberg has always been a world traveler. Her husband is from Iran, but they met in Sweden and they go back to the Middle East to visit family.
So, they've really incorporated travel into their lives, even with their 2-year-old daughter.
Quarnberg teaches math, so she doesn't usually incorporate her travels into the curriculum.
But her experience with language and cultural barriers has helped her connect with her students in a unique way.
“The main thing that it helps shape is how I adjust my worldview and understanding different students that we get at Great Lakes Learning Academy; we have students with lots of different backgrounds and lots of different preferences with how they learn, how they grow, how they like, what they need. And I feel like it's been able to help me meet their needs better,” explained Quarnberg. “You can still help them as they need; you can recognize when they're struggling and reach out and help them and it's more of a personal one-on-one experience for that student.”
Quarnberg tells us she wants other teachers to know a virtual academy is very doable if in-person learning is holding them back — all you need is reliable internet.
The ability to continue to teach is especially important right now as the country faces a teacher shortage.
According to a February report from the bureau of labor statistics, there are more than 300,000 teacher vacancies in the U.S.