Phone School
Brill's Content Magazine, April 2000

Tom’s calling in from New Jersey, Holly from Texas. There’s a click on the line and a bass pipes up. "Hi this is Dave from Germantown." Darlene starts shooting the breeze with Deb – they’ve met before, in the middle of this nowhere -- while the rest of us eavesdrop. Veronica drops in from London, where it’s midnight and she’s tired, but she’s here because she's that committed. Sandra, our host tonight, assures her "we’re going to make it worth her while."

First, Sandra reviews the etiquette for the next hour we’ll spend together – no cellphones (the signal breaks up too much), no dogs, no TV, and no dish-washing. She wants our undivided attention. Then she opens with a line "from T.S. Eliot": "Sometimes things become possible if we want them enough." The aether percolates with a quiet chorus of Hmms and grunts of acknowledgement. "If your middle name is tenaciousness or persistence, hit the pound key," says Sandra, which we do, and it’s as loud and close to bedlam as you can get over a phone line. "That’s pretty strong confirmation," she says, and you know something? It is.

Right now, at 7pm on a Monday, some 30 people from across the country have gathered on a "bridge" phoneline in Florida for a taste of an idea whose time has come, gone, and miraculously swung back around again: "teleclasses," or school by phone. Tonight we’re in Sandra Schrift’s "How to Succeed in the Speaking Business." But it could have been "Stress Management with a Chinese Twist," "How To Make Love 52 Ways Without 'Doing It'," "Teleslimming" (losing weight by phone) or any of the 250 active courses now offered at Teleclass.com, the nexus for the phone-school phenomenon. If you’ve been on a conference call or jumped a party line, you know how simultaneously strange and natural a Teleclass can be. You hear people’s chair creaking. You hear garage doors closing. You even get to like the guy with the deep belly laugh – Tom perhaps? -- because you feel that as long as he’s making noise, you can believe for a moment that you’re actually in a room together.

The Teleclass operation, with over 6000 registered students, was started last spring by Thomas Leonard, a 43 year-old "retired" entrepreneur lives out of his motor home half the year and communicates via, naturally, cellphone. (When he needs a landline to teach a class, he hits a phone booth in a hotel or at an RV park.) For the past three years, Leonard has been living off the $4 million nut he got for selling CoachU.com, the phone university he designed for business coaches. Last year, he wanted to expand the phone-school model, to see "see if the public was ready," and to do that they keep 80% of the classes free. "You give what you can away to see if people will become tied to you in some way," he says. "It’s like Yahoo!"

But if you’re serious -- and Veronica isn’t the only one -- you can pay up to $200 to enroll in 8 week-long phone-schooling session. You can learn to lose weight ("teleslimming") or "POWER SHIFT"™ in your relationships. There is even a class in dealing with "the dog nose prints on the car window" and "other unfinished business," says Randa McIntosh, the Teleclass spokesperson and the only employee in the company besides Leonard himself. School here is taken only in the broadest sense. Frustrated by the extension cord that has nicks in it? Or wondering what the hell "bcc" is on your email? There’s a teleclass for you. No doubt it takes a particular kind of person to get something out of a teleclass. For the most part, the students are motivated entrepreneurs, the kind of folks who have ".com" after their name (schrift.com, thomasleonard.com), and business models to spare (like Leonard’s own VennDiagram.com). They are the kind of people that have many middle names, and they are all adjectives.

Most, if not all, just want to be better students of their own life. On a Tuesday night, right about at the 15^th way of 52 ways of "making love without doing it," Mara, the instructor, walked us through her methods. Leslie from Florida asked the class, "I really would like to know about romance, because my husband and I, we’ve never really…" and trailed off. The rest of the sentence was obvious. Nobody said a word.

Then Mara, bless her, suggested a "surprise jar," full of fun ideas, and each day her husband could choose one. Donna, another student, offered up peekaboo notes stuffed into his socks. "One of the things I find most romantic is to watch my partner doing something that they think they are beautiful doing, that makes them proud." That was me speaking, stunned that words were coming out of my mouth. The idea had never occurred to me before – it just popped out. That is the quality of school by phone: participatory, spontaneous, and casually confessional.

"Oh, that’s a great idea," Mara told me. "I’m going to make that #53."

If there are 300 classes at Teleclass.com, there’s one core subject matter: the phone itself. It makes sense. Just when we thought we were evolving beyond Ma Bell, we’re falling back in love with our phones again. More than ever, we’re managing our careers, our relationships, social lives, and self-image largely by phone – why not take a class in it? Leonard calls it "cyberskills" – that learning to take a teleclass is a skill unto itself. "You’ve got to scent like a dog and pick up everything little thing that’s going on," he says to his Teleclass trainers, but it’s sound advice for the rest of us. "You can’t do brain surgery training,…but you can learn to listen."