Today we’d like to introduce you to John T. Conner.
Thanks for sharing your story with us John. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs as the son of a minister and a second-grade teacher. I attended Amherst College where I studied American Studies and Spanish and had with dreams of returning to the Midwest to attend Northwestern University Law School. After graduation, I found myself wait-listed there and decided to make back-up plans to travel in Europe. Northwestern accepted me in early September – but too late! I had already bought my tickets to Europe. This decision literally changed my life—I fell in love with Spain and its people, language, and culture. Two years later, I began my graduate studies in Spanish at the University of Wisconsin.
I returned east after graduate school and landed my dream job at Groton School, a private school outside Boston. Groton School is considered by many to be one of the top educational institutions in the United States. I started teaching Spanish at Groton in the fall of 1981. I’m now entering my 37th year of service as a teacher and now Dean of Faculty.
My company, Breaking the Barrier, emerged from my work at Groton and, more specifically, my dissatisfaction with the textbooks my students were using. Nearly twenty years ago, I started creating simple worksheets for my students because our textbooks were not providing what I thought my students needed to develop true fluency. Over time, this growing collection of resources evolved into print books and now award-winning digital books and apps.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Competing with much larger publishers is an ongoing challenge, and the requirements to participate in large state adoptions can be overwhelming for a small, independent publisher. I have lots of great product ideas but know that we need to balance that fact with resources. I try to pick the best possible projects to work on. We always stick to our grassroots approach, providing a limited but high-quality product line and connecting with teachers through conferences, email, our newsletter and word of mouth.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Breaking the Barrier – what should we know?
Founded in 1997, Breaking the Barrier is a global leader in print and digital language learning. Featuring instruction in Spanish, French, and English, Breaking the Barrier offers students the fastest path to true language fluency. Our Breaking the Barrier world language series gives learners a rock-solid understanding of language fundamentals and cultural insights through engaging, multisensory digital content. The series expertly presents vocabulary and grammar through history, popular culture, and current events to build knowledge and language fluency.
The Breaking the Barrier series was developed and refined during my thirty-seven-year tenure at Groton. As I mentioned earlier, I began by creating simple worksheets for my Spanish 3 students in the summer of 1996, having decided that I could not subject my classes or myself to another year of frustration. I felt that my students deserved better, and so the process of creating my own materials began. I started simply by writing down clear explanations and tips that I handed out to my students. My students truly seemed to really appreciate them so I continued to expand and improve them by adding additional explanations and exercises. Over time, one topic led to the next. I gathered and photocopied the pages and stapled them together with a bright red cover sheet imprinted with a woodcut logo created by one of my students. After a year of work and the help of a neighbor and friend, Cindy Beams, the first full edition of Breaking the Spanish Barrier was released in the summer of 1997. And it was this first simple edition, imprinted with a logo that we still use today, that ultimately led me to create my own company, Breaking the Barrier, Inc.
I have never deviated from this basic approach: understand a need based on daily classroom struggles, create materials that effectively address those needs, incorporate them into my books and digital courses, and make them so affordable that they are in reach of anyone who wants to use them. Now in our 21st year, Breaking the Barrier has won numerous accolades for our Spanish, French, and English language learning products.
Most people are surprised to learn that these beautiful, engaging books celebrate the structure of a language: its grammar. I honestly believe that grammar is essential to mastering a new language, but I think it is our ability to engagingly mix grammar with authentic culture and essential vocabulary that sets our series apart from other textbooks.
Like many world language texts, Breaking the Barrier books include stories that describe people and places from Spanish, French, and English-speaking countries. But unlike most books, we have included unique and authentic stories about ordinary people—people I’ve met through chance meetings on the street, in a taxi, or in a restaurant. I love people, and I think my genuine interest in their experiences has led many to share their stories without hesitation. I often use my iPhone or iPad to capture video on the spot. You will find many of the videos documenting these encounters incorporated into the cultural articles found in the books. I’ve written articles about aspiring athletes who dream of competing in the Olympics, of cooks whose delicacies fill lunchrooms and bars, of dancers who compete to be the best while sharing their rich cultural heritage, of designers with a unique vision of style, and of poets who sit on street corners ready to create poems-to-order for those who pass by.
We aim for perfection in every detail. Each sample sentence in our books has been painstakingly recorded by native speakers from around the world, enabling students to train their ears and develop their own precise accents. Learners must be surrounded by authentic resources as they progress along a pathway to fluency—hearing, seeing, imitating and speaking in a new language.
Our pursuit of perfection has paid off. Our iBooks textbooks have placed Breaking the Barrier among the top five textbook publishers on the Apple iTunes Store. Apple has also featured our Essential Vocabulary Flashcards apps on the App Store. These apps have been described as “groundbreaking” for their incredibly sophisticated voice recognition capabilities. We have two significant announcements planned this fall that we believe will delight our users and attract even more people to our products—and we will continue to innovate as we work to fulfill our mission: To help the world communicate—better—by offering the best materials available for mastering a new language.
Breaking the Barrier has also been recognized as a leading resource for homeschoolers. Our “work-text” format and fundamental pedagogy are well-suited to this setting, and we are proud to be working with more and more homeschoolers every day.
What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
When our new Spanish app was featured by Apple as a “New App We Love.” There are over two million apps, but our Essential Spanish Vocabulary Flashcards was placed on the very first page of the App Store, right below new apps for the NBA and Major League Baseball! It was a thrilling moment when I first saw it. It was a dream come true.
Contact Info:
- Address: Breaking the Barrier, Inc.
63 Shirley Road
Groton, MA 01450 USA - Phone: 978-448-0594
- Email: info@tobreak.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BreakingTheBarrier
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