The Honor Code & Terms of Participation

By creating an account, posting a class, or attending one, you agree to everything below.

What this place is

This is a practice space. The people teaching here are practicing managing a room, engaging a group, pacing a lesson, recovering from mistakes.

People here are amateurs. It is not a school, marketplace, or stage.

The Honor Code

What honoring the code looks like

• Show up. If you register for a class, attend it. If you post a class, hold it. People rearrange their lives around your commitment. If you must cancel, do it as early as you possibly can, and tell the people affected directly.
• Teach from your convictions, but do not expect others to agree. Your beliefs, philosophy, faith, and politics may inform how you teach and may surface naturally in discussion. You can use this space to test your theories, but do not use this place to push your theories.
• Be honest about what you are. You are practicing. Never present yourself as giving any professional instruction, advice, or certification. Again, this place is intended for amateurs. If you are a professional you must be considerate and not crowd out the amateurs. You may use this place to experiment or iron out kinks in your material.
• Let the teacher practice. Students are here to be a real audience. Unless the teacher asks for it, do not engage in domination, heckling or derailing the class. Do not take unfair advantage of someone who stands up to try.

Subjects

You may build a class around nearly anything: a language, chess, long division math, public speaking, how to run a game night. Two constraints:

1. Do not list, as your subject, topics that are recruitment-prone: sex, politics, or religion. These may come up incidentally in any classroom. For example, a language teacher may dip into the vocabulary of real life, including sex and scandalous words, or a high school teacher may discuss current events, or a game night might foster some dark jokes. If you are a student, be prepared to accept that these things might surface occasionally in a classroom, and they are something a teacher has to learn to diplomatically handle. If you do not like the way the teacher handles them, help the teacher hone their teaching skills, or if you notice your fellow students getting out of hand, help the teacher rein them in. These are topics that often blindside a teacher in real life; do not expect that these are easy things for a teacher to handle, especially an amateur. If you are a teacher, post neutral topics as the subject you will be teaching, to lessen the chance of attracting malintentioned students.
2. Do not list, as your subject, anything where an amateur being wrong could hurt someone: medicine, mental health treatment, foraging and mushroom identification, legal or financial advice, safety-critical procedures, and the like. If your error could have a victim, practice that subject somewhere with supervision.

When in doubt, ask the Board of Directors before posting.

Feedback and reviews

This platform has no public reviews. Amateurs need a place to practice and to be bad at teaching. Hopefully it will be a place they can get their jitters out of the way, acclimatize their stress hormones, figure out survival techniques, and maybe even one day get good at teaching.

Teachers who want feedback may ask their students for it, in whatever form they choose, and students may honor or decline that request. Feedback belongs to the teacher. It won't be posted on the platform.

Minors

• We do not collect proof of personal information from anyone. We do not know the actual age, name or parental status of anyone claiming to be who they are. As a student, your participation is bound by the Honor Code; do not claim to be a different age than you are. As a teacher, assume everyone is a minor if you have no proof otherwise.
• No one under 13 is allowed to participate, as teacher or student.
• Participants under 18 should have a parent or trusted guardian who knows they are here, knows what class they are attending or teaching, and is welcome to drop in unannounced at any time. Teachers must welcome such drop-ins without complaint.
• Any adult participant's conduct toward minors is held to the strictest reading of the honor code. There are no warnings in this category: if there is any evidence that someone violates the code as relates to a minor, the user will be banned, no matter how mature the minor presented themselves to be. Again, when in doubt, assume everyone is a minor.

Risk and responsibility

Everything here is amateur practice, offered and attended voluntarily and free of charge.

• Nothing taught here is professional advice of any kind. Do not rely on it as such.
• If a class involves physical movement or activity, your participation is voluntary and at your own risk. Know your own limits because no teacher here is qualified to know them for you.
• You participate at your own risk. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the organization, its Board of Directors, and its volunteers are not liable for injuries, losses, or damages arising from participation.
• Classes must be held in public venues (libraries, parks, online platforms). The rules of those venues must be adhered to as well.

Enforcement

If someone takes unfair advantage of you — a no-show, a recruiter, a misrepresentation — tell one of the Directors from the Board of Directors.

There are currently just two people on the Board of Directors. Either of them will look at the complaint and decide how to handle it. Perhaps in the future we will set up a participant-run committee to review complaints.

Depending on severity, the response is a warning or removal. The Director's judgment is final. We are treating this as a living room, not a courtroom.

Impermanence

This place exists as long as it is alive and no longer. It may close at any time, without notice, and no one is owed its continuation. If it ends, it will end the way a good dinner party ends. This is an informal place!

See also our Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy, and Legal pages.