Find Your Grind Find Your Grind is deceiving schools into paying good money on bogus lesson plans and slick videos. Techers are getting suckered by Find Your Grind’s message that it’s ok to drop out of school and play video games. Los Angeles California

I am a school administrator. I am in agreement that Find Your Grind is a scam designed to separate school districts from scarce money provided by taxpayers. There appears to be no basis in educational research or academics backing up the claims made by Find Your Grind that some students would be better off dropping out and playing video games. In fact, the people behind Find Your Grind are complete amateurs with zero experience in real-world education.

I first came across Find Your Grind when a teacher brought the program to my attention. Their website is slick, but deceptively uses real-life examples of successful people to trick people into thinking that the Find Your Grind program was behind their success. There’s even testimonials from purported teachers singing the praises of the program, with buzzwords like “virtual textbook” and “self-discovery platform”, whatever that means.

But then you see quotes from one of the co-founders, Mike Smith, telling teachers to “Put down the 20-year-old textbooks”, and another to “Ditch the corny and cheesy activities”. Do you mean dump classics of literature and history that, by definition, are older than 20 years? Find Your Grind is instructing teachers to dumb down their lesson plans for the benefit of a handful of students who can’t seem to appreciate a practical or classical education. Worse yet, the implication they make is that if school isn’t aligned with your “passion”, then you should drop out. This is worse than fraud, it’s malpractice.

What’s equally disturbing is Find Your Grind cites the largely discredited and pop-psychology “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” as part of its so-called curriculum so students can supposedly “learn how stress and failure create obstacles in their lives.” First off, “failure” is barely mentioned by Maslow, and “stress” is primarily brought up in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by war veterans, not bored kids sitting in a classroom. In other words, Find Your Grind is making it up as they go along. This is hardly a recipe for educational success.

If this is supposedly an educational enterprise, why does Find Your Grind try to sell so much merchandise? It’s called exploitation. Just like the corporations that use Find Your Grind to worm their way into schools under the cover of Find Your Grind’s program. Find Your Grind promotes “free” concerts, for example, that are sponsored by Amazon and seem to mostly be an excuse to promote co-founder Nick Gross’s boy band of wannabes. What any of this has to do with education escapes me.

Co-founder Mike Smith uses Find Your Grind to promote his multi-million-dollar professional speaker business, and another of his companies that sells marketing campaigns to such educational-centric companies as Red Bull, Vans and the private-equity-owned Jostens ring empire. Another co-founder of Find Your Grind, former s****.>