Our Story | Milo by NextClass

Milo

12 — Lhasa Apso Shih Tzu, foster turned forever home therapy dog

The namesake. Stubborn, picky about food, but the calmest, most beautiful dog. Obsessed with his toys — can play for hours on his own. Melts in everyone’s arms.

Rish

Founder of NextClass

Ontario teacher on leave — 10 years in French immersion & split-grade classrooms.

I’ve been a junior teacher in Ontario for ten years, mostly split-grade classes. But my path here wasn’t exactly straightforward.

I started working in special education at fifteen — autism support. Then I studied yoga, moved to India and started a pop-up vegetarian restaurant (and learned French, somehow). I worked with refugee youth at the Red Cross in Paris. Eventually I came back to Toronto, went through teacher’s college, and worked with youth at risk in Windsor before landing in a French immersion classroom.

That time with youth at risk changed me. I saw firsthand the incredible disparity between learning experiences and learning opportunities across demographics. It stuck with me.

Through all of it, I’ve been a lifelong learner. DJ sets on the side. Projection mapping. Sourdough pizza. I’m neurodivergent and have always needed to keep my hands in a lot of things.

Teaching was where it all came together. I loved making birthday poems for my students, coding games for them, having fun while learning together, creating class community, appreciating our differences. I created custom learning content — AI-powered projects where each student got their own personalized research guides based on the curriculum. They made incredible things in Canva. I watched them find their passions.

“But the paperwork was killing me.”

Report cards alone would take forty to sixty hours. I’d fill every comment box to the last character — administrators would send them back, but parents loved reading them. It was exhausting.

Then came November 2022. The first time I used ChatGPT. I realized: if I could couple curriculum content with the right grounding knowledge, teachers could differentiate content AND fulfill all the requirements. The Growing Success document asks for a lot. No single teacher can do all of it alone.

So I started building. I painstakingly created my own database of the entire Ontario curriculum. When I visited my co-founders Marley and Aidan in Australia — they’d both worked together at SupporterHub, and Marley had watched me teach during the pandemic — we built the first prototype together.

I named it after my dog.

Milo is twelve now. He’s a Lhasa Apso Shih Tzu — a rescue whose original pet parent passed away. He landed in my lap as a foster. I failed. He’s stubborn, picky about food, but the calmest, most beautiful dog. He melts in everyone’s arms. He’s been a therapy dog for a lot of people.

(He’s still struggling to figure out the camera, by the way. As many photos as I have of him, he doesn’t return the favor — even though I gave him the camera.)

Right now I’m on a leave of absence. I miss teaching — I really do. But I took this time for two reasons: because teachers deserve tools built by someone who actually understands what they’re going through, and because Milo is getting older. I want to spend as much time with him as I can while I still have him.

As much as people are hesitant to use AI, there are so many good things it can do when wielded as a tool. While many fear being replaced by AI, this tool is made to augment teachers and enhance their abilities and democratize education. Like electricity, like fire, like dynamite — there’s good and bad. It’s a matter of how we use it.