More and more students idolize pro video game players or youtubers. When I was a science teacher, I did not take these aspirations seriously. To these kids though, these people are living the dream; they are rich, popular, and doing what they wanted to do. These kids deserve our respect. They want to be entrepreneurs and public creators.

When a kid expresses interest in starting out on a streamer, we dive right in! We start looking at what equipment they will need to produce the videos that are needed.

I ask students to give a realistic assessment of what it will take to make it as a streamer. I have them read multiple stories of people starting out and report back. One of the stories was posted to Reddit. Here is a key excerpt:

…Now here is the fun part. Many people may look at that and think, “oh cool! See mom I can make money playing video games” and sure… $800 isn’t anything to write home about but I’m more than thrilled with the success I’ve had. But Twitch tracks all the hours you’ve streamed so let’s take a look at that. It took me 132.52 hours from the first time I went live until I got my affiliate status… and afterwards, I streamed for another 351.13hrs making a grand total of 483.65 hrs broadcasting last year. I only streamed about 2-3hrs a day YMMV.

Assuming that was the ONLY time spent working on the stream (there are easily another hundred or so hours working behind the scenes on emotes, graphics, green screen, intro videos… the list goes on and on since I do all my own artwork) my hourly rate from Twitch comes to $1.74/hr. Also this is based off of GROSS income… if I took into account the money spent on a mic, camera, green screen, games, and everything else that I’m writing off on my taxes we would 100% be negative……
So, do you think I’m going to continue streaming next year?!
…
YOU BET YOUR ASS I WILL!

This was this person’s first year. The goal of showing this to kids is to make it clear that it will take commitment and investment to have a chance at this. I would fully support a student diving into this competitive industry. They will be learning far more about entrepreneurship, video production than I could ever teach them. If they decide to move on to something else after some time, they will have a great deal more experience than the student who had their hopes crushed and did nothing. So let’s go for it!