Twenty Years in the Classroom: Jane Stobbie Keer on Teaching, Starting Over, and the Business It Built

Ask Jane Stobbie Keer what she actually gets out of her work and she does not talk about websites.

"One thing that brings me more joy than anything else in life is elevating people. To walk into a room, teach them, give them knowledge, and have them walk out an inch taller than when they walked in. So that is true self-actualization for me."

She came by it honestly. Her mother was a special education teacher who worked with dyslexic children, so Jane grew up inside that. She runs Keer Keer Creative in Woodbury now, and she was a guest on East Side Enterprise.

The Apple office in the podunk hometown

Jane grew up in Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire, England. When Apple opened a UK office, they put it on the industrial estate of her small hometown, a place she says nobody had ever heard of. She walked in straight out of college and got a job.

She was there for the Mac SE, and she took one home at a time when almost nobody worked from home.

"I didn't need to date anymore. I had my Mac SE, and I had Crystal Quest. I must have been one of the first people allowed to work from home, because I had this SE, which weighed half a ton."

PageMaker arrived, then QuarkXPress, then Adobe. She gravitated to all of it immediately and started teaching it. She also spent a stretch demoing the Apple Newton MessagePad, the handwriting tablet that came years before the iPad, and she is very funny about how that went.

"I had 14 of them, and I'd go around demoing them, because it was the first technology of its kind where you'd write on it and it would transcribe what you wrote into text. Only it didn't work. I had to demo it, and I learned a few words it could translate, so I'd always write them."

Twenty years in the classroom

She moved to the United States at 26 and started Train with Jane, which ran for two decades. She taught at the Science Museum of Minnesota until they closed their computer education department, and at First Tech in Uptown, and for a long list of her own clients. PageMaker and Quark first, then Illustrator and Photoshop, then the earliest web software, FrontPage and Dreamweaver, and as the web took off those classes took off with it.

What ended it was not one thing. Her kids were young and the classroom did not bend. "That call from the school nurse: your daughter has strep for the sixth time in the last five months." Online training was rising. And the institutions finally arrived.

"It took the colleges and universities about 20 years to catch up on doing what I was doing for those 20 years. But eventually they started teaching it as part of curriculum, which they needed to do. And so I wasn't needed as much in the classroom."

She was already positioned for what came next. Her students had been sending her project work the whole time, because they had watched her do the thing she was teaching.

Starting over, and the two women who made it possible

She moved from Minneapolis to Woodbury and started a web and graphic design company from nothing. What happened next is the best argument for community in the whole episode, and she names both people on the record.

Deb Graff was a music teacher at Valley Crossing Elementary, where Jane's children went, and did web design on the side. When she wound that part down, she gave Jane her clients. She also introduced Jane to a hosting company in the Stillwater area, where the owner's mother, also a web designer, was retiring. She handed over her client list too.

"So there I was with nothing. Two people gifting me a client list from a business I'm starting off from scratch, and I had a place to start. And I started at the kitchen table."

She never actually stopped teaching

The part she could not let go of is the part she still does for free. Jane teaches grant-funded classes through MELSA, the seven-county metro library system, open to the public at no cost. Starting a small business, WordPress, managing your own website, graphic design with Canva, SEO, and cybersecurity classes starting this fall. She mentions that someone once joined from New York.

Her case for why a non-technical owner should sit through one is not about becoming a builder.

"It's not just for the builders. It's for the decision makers."

That connects directly to the thing she and I spent a while on: how often small businesses get taken. Invoices arriving from criminals for hosting they already pay her for, at three times her price. Custom websites that are a stock template with the logo swapped. SEO retainers where the metadata is simply empty. Her answer is always the same one, which is to show people the actual field on an actual screen share until they understand it well enough to decide for themselves.

Where a name like Keer Keer comes from

I asked, mostly as a lark, why the company is Keer Keer Creative and not Keer Creative. It turns out her maiden name was Jane Keer Keer, and the family has two competing theories about how that happened.

In the first, a John Keer was widowed and then married his late wife's sister. The children from the first marriage were Keers, and the children from the second were Keer Keers. In the second, he was leaving the British army under less than ideal circumstances, and the punishment of the day was having your surname stripped. So he had his middle name legally changed to Keer in advance, meaning that when they took his last name he would still be John Keer. They never took it. He was John Keer Keer.

The name traces to the Kerr clan, lowland marsh dwellers in Scotland, and the family still wears the tartan at weddings. And when Jane married Charles Stobbie, she did the math:

"I dropped a Keer, gained a Stobbie, and kept a Keer on the end of it. I had a spare Keer, so I could do that."

The business she runs standing up

Jane has lived for about 17 years with complex regional pain syndrome type 2. A routine surgery damaged a major peripheral nerve, the nerve never fully recovered, and her nervous system never stood down.

"It's like a fire alarm saying there's a fire, there's a fire, there's a fire. And even after the nerve is somewhat healed, that fire alarm keeps going off in your body, and you get pain experiences disproportionately larger than the original injury."

She wanted it in the episode. She pointed to Lady Gaga putting fibromyalgia into public view and called it a call to arms. She cannot wear anything with a waistband, so she wears dresses. Every chair in her house reclines. She recorded this conversation standing at a high stool, which is why the episode exists in the shape it does.

And her account of why she works is the part I keep thinking about.

"I could sit on the sofa under a blanket and say woe is me, and I could cry, and that would make it worse, because there's always a somatic element in illness. So if you let yourself cave mentally, you're going to get worse physically."

She describes Keer Keer Creative as a women-owned, immigrant-owned, disability-owned business, and she is plainly proud of all three. The work is not in spite of the pain. The work is part of how she manages it.

And she is not planning around the pain. She is planning around what happens if it eases.

"I've got a brand new business at 70 percent, ready to get going. If the treatment works, I'm springboarding into that one too. And just watch, see me go."

Listen to the full conversation

This is a slice of a long conversation that also gets into why AI website builders are the same pattern the industry already lived through with Wix and Squarespace, edge processing and using AI responsibly, her mother Carolyn and the Wall of Hope fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, and why she believes there is no better education than living in another culture.

Listen to the full episode of East Side Enterprise with Jane Stobbie Keer at mckinneycv.com/podcast, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.