A Vehicle to Educational Empowerment

“We can’t confuse the vehicle for the destination.”

Humans each have an individual perspective of their life’s final destination; that is, where one sees themself in the future in terms of family, career or personal fulfillment.

Reaching whatever destination one has in mind means choosing the best vehicle to get there. In the case of educator and empowerment speaker Brandon Clayton, this has meant multiple vehicles that have led to his current ride of choice as a community outreach and engagement specialist for iTutor, a position he built from scratch using all the other skills he had collected while moving from vehicle to vehicle throughout his life.

An Extended Layover in College

Clayton’s first vehicle of life gave him anything but a smooth ride.

“I come from South Dallas and Oak Cliff,” explains Clayton. “And people from my area know that that’s the rough part of town. It’s not the place most go for vacations. In many parts, one could find gangs, drugs and violence. This is where I spent the majority of my childhood.”

That vehicle did not define him, though, and when Clayton was in high school, he chose an alternate mode of transportation and worked to graduate in the top 3% of his class. Then he made the choice to go to college, the first in his family to do so.

“I was so excited because I finally did what I said I was going to do. I went to the bookstore. I bought a t-shirt with my college name on it,” says Clayton. “But in my first two years, I ended up on academic probation. Even though I graduated at the top of my high school class with all these honors, I failed college because I was never given a blueprint of how to be successful on that map. I thought being in college alone was enough.”

Clayton spent eight years bouncing from one college to another, riding his bicycle or taking a bus from various jobs to his classes while trying to figure out life.

“It took me about four or five years to get my head on straight to decide what it was I wanted to do. In total, it took me eight years to get a four-year degree because I just didn’t have the guidance and the clarity of what I was doing. I didn’t know that college was a vehicle, not a destination.”

Hitching a Ride on the Teaching Train

Even after finally figuring out the blueprint of college and earning a degree in ministry, Clayton continued to struggle with which vehicle to choose for the next phase of his journey.

“I had just got married. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and I was working a warehouse job, barely getting paid minimum wage,” Clayton recalls. “I had a bicycle to go everywhere, trying to make ends meet. There was one month I didn’t know if I was going to pay rent.”

Clayton found his way into selling life insurance door to door, but it still wasn’t enough. He recalls being almost in tears on a lunch break, thinking that he had so much talent but was still struggling to make ends meet.

“Then I may have seen an ad or something. I can’t remember what it was, but I just clenched onto it,” recalls Clayton about discovering the path into teaching, which was far from a noble calling in the beginning. For Clayton, education was simply a way to help provide for his family, but he soon realized that he had a knack for teaching and connecting with students.

With an alternative teaching certificate, Clayton hopped on the teaching train in his home city of Dallas. In that first year, he had little mentorship or training and did not even know how to grade papers or where to store them.

“I also did not know that it was the most difficult middle school in the whole area,” says Clayton. “It was so bad that they sent letters home to the neighborhood informing the parents that they no longer had to send their kids there. Gangs and drug dogs coming through were regular. I had no formal education in teaching, so I was walking into an environment that I did not research—a situation that was very hostile and very challenging. In that one year, we had four different principals—four different principals in one year because everyone kept coming in and out.”

During one of his algebra lessons, Clayton walked up to the board to explain a concept in a manner that he himself had little faith in. And when he saw his students, he realized they could care less about that math equation on the board. “I looked in their eyes and realized they needed motivation, inspiration, cheerleading, encouragement, a mother or father, a counselor,” says Clayton. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is huge!’ And that got me set on a different path that first year.”

Realizing His Strength

Clayton quickly came to understand the connections he could make with students because of the background he grew up in.

“I could go toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with them and not flinch because I knew this game,” says Clayton. “I knew what they were talking about. When I saw those kids, I saw myself sitting in those seats, and I said, ‘OK, this is a whole different thing here. I’m not teaching math anymore. I’m a minister. I have work to do here.’”

This revelation shifted his mindset from teaching to earn a paycheck to teaching to make a difference in his students’ lives. “There was a need, and I had to fill it,” says Clayton.

With a better understanding of the education system, Clayton made his way into teaching at other schools while building his pedagogical knowledge, but as he moved away from the more challenging settings, he felt incomplete. “I ended up wanting to go from a top-notch school where parents were paying a lot of money to live in the community to a school that was struggling, a school where teachers were breaking their contracts to leave.”

During a lunch break, Clayton drove to that school, put in an application and asked to shake the principal’s hand. “I wanted to look him in the eye so that he knew who I was. I didn’t want to be picked up by any other school; I wanted to be in that school,” says Clayton.

With his personal drive, motivation and ability to establish a rapport with the neediest of students, Clayton was granted a teaching position in that school. By his third year, he was honored as Teacher of the Year as he and his fellow teachers helped propel those students to earning top scores in the district on the state standardized test.

“This is the school that nobody wanted to go to, but those same kids performed at a high level, and we had a blast doing it,” says Clayton. “I loved to rock with them. We’d fight back and forth, but we were having fun doing it because I could look in their eyes and say, ‘I know you, and you’re going to do well.’”

His success was more than just being the support and encouragement his students needed. It was finding a way to eliminate every excuse his students had for not completing their work and learning the content. With a transient population who often would not show up for class, Clayton turned to YouTube to teach his courses, establishing a channel called “The Algebra Guy.”

If students missed a class or made up an excuse for not doing their homework, Clayton would direct them to his channel, where he posted the lessons.

“I was trying to fulfill a need in my classroom that turned into something much bigger because there was a huge need for this type of additional virtual support across the state,” says Clayton. “The skills that I made as a speaker and video creator didn’t come because I was focused on learning those skills. They came because I was focused on a destination; I had to get my kids to learn, and I needed to find the best way to do that.”

Through education, Clayton found a calling that he had never heard before. Even as a minister and speaker to a congregation of others who were seeking life’s enlightenment, he found a gift he possessed as a teacher that could change students’ lives.

“For me, it’s not just education. I thought I was coming in to teach academics and I realized, ‘No, you’re giving life to people.’ Education has changed me and moved me and helped me understand who I am.”

The iTutor Boat

As Clayton expanded his expertise in education by earning a master’s in mathematics, taking on a role as a behavior specialist, and even acting as an interim principal for a time, so too was his home life expanding, with more children and a desire for a home that was above budget.

“It had a basement,” says Clayton. “And we decided to move there with the intention that I was going to make that extra space an opportunity to make more money.”

How exactly Clayton would do that was still unknown, but with four kids at the time, his schedule was tight. He was already doing a lot, both in his ministry and academically, so he wanted to be able to work from home in that basement.

“I fished around what was out there. I searched and searched, and I ended up finding iTutor,” says Clayton. iTutor is the nation’s leading provider of K–12 certified virtual educators, connecting students with teachers for core or supplemental instruction.

“iTutor worked for me because I didn’t have to reinvent myself: I learned to leverage what I already had. I had a master’s degree in math and had been teaching it for 10 years. I had a website, a course and a YouTube channel.”

With iTutor, Clayton was able to use the same content and experience he had used in the classroom with students on the virtual platform. He didn’t have to create anything else, so planning time was not a contributing deterrent. He had the content, and so all he had to do was press play and talk about it with the students.

“As the bell rang for school, I would press start for one of my classes right there in my classroom,” says Clayton. The effects of iTutor were almost immediate, for both Clayton and his virtual students. “I love to be close to the kids. I love to look into their eyes. I love the ebbs and flow of the classroom, but I was able to get that fulfillment through a virtual space in a way that I never thought possible.”

His talents as a speaker in the classroom and through his YouTube videos helped build a virtual community that allowed the whole class to connect with one another.

 “One student asked if I wanted to go bear hunting with him!” recalls Clayton, and another student reached out to iTutor requesting to have Clayton again for his next class. “You can’t put a price on that, when a student says ‘you made such an impact on my life, I’m going to request your name’. While you miss the brick-and-mortar, you still get a lot of connections with iTutor that are very satisfying.”

Clayton would stay an extra hour or two and then head home. It worked perfectly for his schedule, even if he wasn’t using that extra basement space to do it.

After three years of meeting with students for virtual tutor sessions, Clayton joined Clerisy, the professional development program for iTutor, and began to produce content for the company.

Becoming an iTutor Captain

“I remember sending an email that said, ‘Look, you know, it’d be great if you guys could create a job that does A, B, C, and D.’ I literally wrote out the job description and said this is what I would love to do. Fast forward, and here I am as community outreach and engagement specialist,” says Clayton.

The skills he had gathered from the multiple vehicles of life led him into a space of excellence and into an environment where he can support others.

“The pandemic has forced us to realize that the virtual model is not as bad as we may have thought it was. Students love the virtual space because they are able to get attention that they are not able to get in the classroom setting,” says Clayton.

iTutor allows students to make genuine connections on a more intimate level with instructors, which opens their minds to learning new content.

Clayton’s current role allows him to connect with and support other iTutor educators. “Sometimes they’ll give me testimonies without even trying. That’s how you know it’s good. We are just talking, and they just want to brag. And the phrase that I hear all the time is, ‘I love iTutor because of how flexible it is.’”

Flexibility means different things for different people. “There’s so little freedom that you have in education,” says Clayton. “And that’s just the nature of the game. We’re not mad; it’s just how it is. You don’t get to choose what class you teach. You don’t get to choose how many kids. You don’t get to choose your subject. You don’t get to choose your pay. iTutor says, we’re going to give you a choice in all of those areas.”

Clayton needed that flexibility when he found iTutor. “And that’s why educators are celebrating. Flexibility in pay, flexibility in course choices, flexibility in time, flexibility in what classes you choose which students to choose, flexibility in where you get to do it,” says Clayton. “I pulled over one time on the way out of town to a restaurant and was able to do a class there. It’s just the freedom you have. That’s the one common denominator that I hear come up quite a bit when talking to educators about iTutor.”

The Ultimate Destination

“Here’s my ultimate destination,” he explains. “I want to be able to control my time and what I want to do, when I want to do it and how I want to do it.”

Clayton’s passion for ministry is most prevalent as he uses this current vehicle to reach his ultimate destination. “The truth in everything I do is always going to come back to ministry. The reason that this outfit with iTutor works is that I get some of my time back.”

Choosing your own vehicle to happiness isn’t always an easy decision. “If you choose to opt out of the system completely, you sometimes get this look of, ‘you left us and you’re part of the problem of the exodus now.’ The reality is that oftentimes in education, people want you for what’s best for their community and their organization, not what’s best for you.”

“By God’s grace, I’ve done so many different things, and I can still do so many different things, but on a personal level, I strive to stay true to that true north, to keep going and not feel boxed in by any system that says I have to stay this way and do it that way. Rather, I continue to change vehicles. Because we can’t confuse the vehicle for the destination.”

Although that ultimate destination of ministry work on his time is still visible in the distance, Clayton couldn’t be happier for the position he has with iTutor.

“I’m just excited for this journey. This is so fun, and I’m looking forward to where it’s going to take me,” says Clayton.

Visit Brandon Clayton at brandonclayton.org.

About the Author

Maria Grosskettler a Staff Writer of EdCircuit is a lover of the written word. She knows the power and magic it holds. As a teacher, she strives to inspire this same love into young readers and writers. As a journalist and published author, she strives to bring that magic into the hands and minds of readers- no matter the genre. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Maria enjoys spending time with her husband and two sons seeking adventures every day. As a family, they enjoy traveling, hiking, biking, kayaking, and playing disc golf. She lives in Maryland for part of the year. The rest of the time, she travels the world creating her own adventures which are often the inspiration behind her stories.