Today we’d like to introduce you to Christy and Garry Shriver.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We are both career educators. Garry taught AP Psychology, AP US History, and AP Government at Bolton High School for 30 years before retiring from the public school and teaching in the Catholic system currently at St. Agnes here in Memphis. He had also coached boys basketball and girls volleyball on various championship teams over the years. I, Christy, taught English in several public schools around Memphis: Overton, Central, Bolton, and currently at Bartlett High School.
I have also taught in Wynne, Arkansas, Fortaleza, Brazil, and Shizuoka, Japan. After getting married in 2018 and being impressed with the new technological innovations available through the internet, we wondered if there was a place for two veteran educators with a passion to make learning equitable for ambitious learners who either had missed opportunities presented OR had never received upper-level educational opportunities for whatever reason. Garry specifically had, for years, received emails, texts, FB, and Instagram posts reaching out to him with political and historical questions from former students. Many of them confessed that they regretted not paying attention in class to things that at the time seemed irrelevant but now seemed important to the point that they wanted to connect with their former teacher.
My experience was different. I was raised in Brazil as the daughter of an international missionary. Over the course of my growing up years, I attended 11 different schools and lived on three different continents. Although this was enriching in some ways, it was a failed attempt at education for the most part. I had attended Brazilian schools, little academies, and even a fancy international school, but when I arrived at an American university at the age of 17, I was bilingual and well-traveled, but I knew almost nothing about American literature, history, and culture.
After discussing these two realities, we saw a niche for two teachers. We wanted to make an educational product that met the needs of both types of learners. We wanted to make a product that was fun and easy to understand even if you were not a native English speaker. We wanted to engage a world of curious, intelligent self-learners with content that did not depend on a vast amount of previous knowledge. We saw an opportunity for current students of English and history or former students who want to revisit old “friends” from high school. But there was more reach than that.
As teachers in the public school system, we knew there are millions of first-generation Americans that have never attended school in this country. We wanted to give them an opportunity to become students themselves. We want to offer them an opportunity to listen to the same discussions we’ve had in American schools with their children, so they can discuss what their students are learning from THEIR perspective.
This became our mission. Garry is also a Memphis musician. Because he has played professionally, around town for years, he had the musical skills as well as the production skills to develop the technical side of the podcast. Christy, as a nationally board-certified teacher with teaching experience around the world, had the broad-based curricular knowledge to make relevant literary decisions on meaningful choices for discussion. That was 147 episodes and 48 authors ago.
Our focus primarily is English language literature, but we also include significant pieces of translated material that have influenced our culture today such as the Iroquois Constitution, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Ibsen’s Doll House, to name a few.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Of course, it has not been a smooth road. The first struggle was perfecting our art. The first episode we recorded was on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic story The Scarlet Letter. We picked this book because we were both passionate about its theme- the cost of secrets and the value of living a transparent life. Over the years it has touched so many lives and encouraged so many to become brave and assume personal agency. However, as we listened to our discussion, we were distracted by the amount of “ums”. The first episode was also an hour long. It was too much.
The episode is still there, and it’s not terrible, but we recognized we had some growing to do. It wasn’t long after that we made the production decision to script our episodes. It isn’t that we don’t go off script, of course, that’s always an option, but the script is there to make sure, we don’t waste valuable listeners’ time with redundancies and annoying ticks. The second challenge is in making the venture profitable. Our company is a 501c3 educational non-profit called How to Love Learning. The goal is not necessarily to build personal wealth, but it is to grow. Our first strategy was to finance the venture through public educational grants. I have reviewed grants for the federal government as well as different state governments several times and knew the money was available. Unfortunately, we learned fairly quickly that grant writing is a political activity.
Since our goal is to reach a broad-based apolitical audience many of which are international after several failed attempts, we decided we did not currently have the expertise to make this work. We want to connect with a global audience and represent our hometown of Memphis, our home state of Tennessee, and our home country, the United State of America from a place of open-minded academic acceptance. Our second strategy is to find sponsors. We have had more success there, but finding companies that have an interest in promoting equitable learning and sharing our vision is always difficult.
Our third challenge is marketing and promotion. It is the most difficult challenge to date. What we have learned is that marketing is time-consuming and an art in and of itself. We have great respect for those who are successful, and we listen to what they have to say. This is where we are currently. We have recently started our newsletter where we discuss things we’re talking about and connect with our listeners.
We also have active Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn presences where we engage listeners, talk to them about things we are discussing as well as take suggestions for works they are studying. We know this is where we need to grow as we develop as a company.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
We’ve talked about this in question one, but one thing we didn’t discuss was Garry’s artistic venture as a musician. As everyone knows, Memphis is a music town. We love that and are proud to be from the Birthplace of Rock and Roll and Home of the Blues. Garry grew up in a small town of only 1500 in Missouri.
When he was 13 years old his mother gave him a guitar for Christmas. This sparked a life-long passion for music. As the son in a single-parent home, lessons were out of the question, so Garry bought a Mel Bay book and taught himself, first on an acoustic but then on a Teisco electric guitar from Sears and Roebuck.
Although professionally he became an educator, on the side, he has played on many stages here in Memphis including most of the casinos in Tunica, The Shell at Overton Park, Lafayette’s Music Room, and, of course, the Mid-South Fair with various bands over the years. Although his current band, The Ruckus, has been mostly inactive since the pandemic, the music you hear at the beginning of our podcast was recorded in his office in our home.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
I wanted to take a minute to talk about how our podcast series is organized because that is one way we are different from other podcast shows and hosts. Our episodes are academic and highly researched. Every month, we feature a new piece of literature and go through the piece chronologically. In episode one, we discuss the life of the author, the historical and cultural context of the piece, and give an introduction to the work itself.
The next two or three episodes explain the story, the themes, symbolism, literary significance as well as the current relevance. For example, over Christmas, we did a two-part series over Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. In episode 1, we talked about Dicken’s life, the history of Victorian Christmas, the issues of the industrial revolution that inspired him to write it as well as the first stave. In the second episode, we finished discussing the story itself as well as providing the thematic understanding that has made this work so popular over the years.
Some pieces of literature, like A Christmas Carol, “The Night Before Christmas”, we did that one too, only take one or two episodes. Other pieces, like the one we’re doing now on Homer’s The Odyssey, require four or five. Our goal is that after you have listened to a series you have a wonderful understanding of a cherished piece of literature that will not only enhance you academically but will also enrich your life on a personal level.
Contact Info:
- Email: christy@howtolovelitpodcast.com
- Website: howtolovelitpodcast.com
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