← Unlearn16: Class is in Session
Unlearn16: Class is in Session
The One Where The Tide is Out...That's Not What This Book Is About
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Class is in session. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session today. I'm in the drama room at Metro. Now, for those who are just tapping into this. And it's before July 1, 1919. What is wrong with me if it's before July 1, 2025? I was born in 1975. I'm about to turn 50. Maybe I'm having some sort of memory glitch, perimenopause. Nonetheless, if it is before July 1, I have yet to release my very first book. That's not what this book is about. And each chapter correlates to a particular podcast that you're watching right now in order to do a little more, a bit more of a deep dive and discussion based on that chapter and what I talked about it and how it turned me into a teacher. Now, it's funny, as you're watching this right now, you might already have the book in your hand and you've used the QR code in the chapter and it's brought you right to me. So welcome, welcome. You're going to hear stuff in the background of this, but I'm going to film it regardless. At Metro, we're currently renovating and building a science lab, a. A genetics lab. And the guys are taking stuff out sort of behind me, but nonetheless, that's what goes on at a school. Guys constantly moving, constantly going. All right, so this podcast and this chapter in my book, again, that's not what this book is about. You can go get it on learn16.com talks about overcoming fear. So the beginning of the chapter, and you guys can read it, it's about what I learned how to surf in Costa Rica. And I was told that the tide goes out at a certain time of day. And I thought I could get one more surfing, I could go up one more time, one more wave, and I would come back in the. Shelly, who I was surfing with, was on the beach napping, and I go out, and as I went out, the tide was going out. I don't know if you've ever experienced the tide actually going out when you're on something where you have to actually physically paddle to go to a certain direction. Right there's. And at that point, the. The ocean went flat, no waves of any kind. So I was out, however far, yelling to Shelly on the beach in Costa Rica, couldn't hear all the while. I. There was no waves and. And the tide was going out. So I realized I was getting pulled further and further out. And as I was getting pulled further and further out, I started to really worry that I was going to end up in Ireland. So I started to paddle. And as I was paddling, I was keeping an eye on the shoreline and keeping an eye on the shoreline to see where I was. Was I getting closer? Because it was really hard to tell depth. Right, right. And I am paddling my first year of teaching, by the way. So I was. How old was I? 27. First year of teaching, my first vacation, and I'm paddling the hardest I can and I'm. I'm just keeping up with like, I'm just not moving. So I'm not going further out, but I'm not going into shore either. And I'm starting to sweat. Have you guys ever sweat while you're in the ocean? You know how hard you have to be working to sweat in the ocean? I'm panicking, panicking, panicking. I get off my board, I start to just swim. It's a. It's a situation. And then I see the tiny. Right when I'm about to give up, right when I'm like, I've had enough. Ireland will be nice this time of year. Take me away. What are we going to do? Tiny wave kicked up, pushed me into shore. And after I kill Shelly. I had that moment and I. And I don't think I realized it in that moment, but this notion that a lot of the times, life, you do scary things, you take risks, you do things that bring you joy. And there is such joy with surfing, but there are, there's also fear. When you're four, five feet up on a wave, there's a level of exhilaration that is only. You only get that exhilaration. You only get that feeling of freedom if it's kind of coupled with. At any given moment, this wave could crush me or draw me out to Ireland. Why is that? Because I think we're not really living in a real authentic way unless we're doing things that scare us. Now, I'm not interested in doing things that actually can harm anybody. You understand that? The Ireland thing, You know, as much as I like a good four leaf clover, I didn't. That wasn't my thing. And I'm not a huge physical risk taker. However, I think there's a lot of things in our world that we don't do because we're afraid of the outcome. We're afraid of failing. More importantly, we're afraid of looking stupid. We're afraid of feeling so horribly insecure that we don't even want to give It a go. And I think that those limitations that we have placed on ourselves and sometimes very internally and subconsciously. Right. Limit who we get to be, where we get to go and the things we get to experience. So in that moment, I don't think I recognized that. I don't. Well, I didn't. I didn't recognize sort of its metaphorical impact. All I recognized was the fact that I almost got pulled out and thank goodness I wasn't. And I love surfing. But that's it, right? As a 27 year old, Brain is very limited scope. Flash forward. In my educational life as a teacher, I say all the time, or I used to say, monotony is the spice of life. Now the reason why I say that is because there's a control factor you get the perception of a control factor you get by doing things monotonously every single day. I eat breakfast McDonald's every day. I come to school, I sit down, I put on a show for about 20 minutes. I do history 10, I do politics, I do volleyball, I do. There's a schedule and a monotony. I come home, I watch a little show, I take the dog out and all of those things. What they're doing for me anyway is they're giving me the illusion and the comfort of predictability. Now, if anybody's lived past any sort of age where you see very clearly whether you try to eat McDonald's every morning at the same time, life is absolutely unpredictable, uncontrollable. The only constant in life is change. I hate that. So we spend the better part, and I've spent the better part of my life trying to mitigate for that. How do I mitigate for change? How do I slow it down? How do I avoid it? How do I deter it when in actuality the change isn't the problem? Change. Change is actually usually quite beautiful. Transition sucks. And it's the unknown that is the problem for me. The unknown of what that next phase is going to look like. But once you're in that next phase, you're like, oh, why was I so afraid of it? But then you want to stay put in that phase. Transition is hard and I think we try to avoid that. And we live in a world now where you can't. I think that's one of the biggest realities about our world and our educational models and our work models as of today, everything is in constant flux, in constant change. Right. I think you've seen change throughout the years, but it kind of comes in, there's the innovation or the invention and then slight innovations along the way. But the Internet, which is really only, you know, 25 years old, which isn't a long time, the Internet, social media, AI, these things have very quick, massive changes to who we are and what we do. And so I think when people talk about social anxiety and they're like, I never had social anxiety when I was a kid. No, because when we were kids, you had one phone, you had five channels that you had to get up and change. You had certain news affiliations that you had to listen to, or you picked up the newspaper at the end of the day. You played with your friends until the sun went down. Your parents had the same job for 30 years, got a gold watch and called it a day with a great pension. We don't live there anymore. Now we know about what's going on in countries and communities 15,000 kilometers away from us. That seems far. But you understand what I'm saying now we have unlimited choice of what we watch now. We don't just have news affiliates. We have everybody reporting from their backyard to their front yard to the war zone to wherever it is they are now. People change careers every five to 10 years, and whether it's their choice or not, it just changes. You want to talk about social anxiety? That's where it's coming from. There is very little consistency. The underfooting for which we derive a lot of our calm or try to derive calm has been shook, and now we're constantly just waiting for the next tremor. So all of that is to say fear is a good thing. Facing that fear, engaging with that fear, talking about it out loud, that's the better thing. Embracing transition, being okay with not knowing, but doing it anyway. I say to my students all the time, you know, and I know it's an old saying, but. But courage isn't doing whatever. You know, courage isn't just doing scary stuff. I mean, it is, but it's about facing. If you're afraid of something. Courage is like doing it anyways. Okay, that's scary. I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do it anyways. I'm not going to mitigate it. I'm not going to try to subvert it. I'm not going to go around it. I'm going to do it anyway. That's courage. And I think more often than not, most of us try to avoid. So what does this have to do with teaching? Well, I'll tell you, because as adults, and as an adult that was raised, you know, in the 70s, and 80s, I have to be pushed as an educator. I can very comfortably sit in monotony. Same job, same courses, slight changes to curriculum, same year plan. I know what to expect as a person, as a human, if I don't seek out those kind of risks and then say yes to them, then I'm not growing. Then you're not living fully. And the opportunities that you didn't even know you wanted are right around the corner that you just need to say, okay, so flash forward after Covid. Okay, so Covid, everything gets locked down. I think Covid was this very strong shift too, where it really said, listen, at any given moment, Mother Nature can also sit you on your butt, so pay attention. So after that lockdown, we come into school the following year, okay, And Ryan's doing a school play. Now, you got to know, and I know this is odd considering where I am now, but understand this was a big shift for me. So right after Covid, I start doing TikTok and some videos, but very minimally, it's nothing huge. It's getting. It's gaining a little momentum and I'm feeling more and more comfortable lip syncing on streets with fake guitars. And we come back to school and we want to do another school play. Now, I've been working with Ryan for 22 years. 20 years at this point. Every year he's asked me to be in the play. Every year I told him to get away from me. It's terrifying to me. Acting's terrifying to me. Prior to now, Halloween was even terrifying to me. There was something. I was always confident standing in my own self on stage or in the front of people and talking, that didn't scare me, but pretending to be something else, having a level of an artistic something to it. I didn't know how to do that. And so I just avoided it for 20 years. Now we get to this. The school is doing Sweat by Lynn Nottage. If you want to look up a great play, please, for the love of God, go read it. It's incredible. Talks about a community in Philadelphia. It talks about the opioid crisis. It talks about losing work and what happens to those communities, what happens to those people. It about race, it talks about sex, it talks about all of those things. Anyways, a fantastic play. So as he's preparing for this play, he asked me, I say, no, go away. And then at some point in that year, because kids were having a really hard time coming back from COVID so some kids, any kind of stress, it was just too much. And we had A student who was going to play the role that, you know, this. This very important role. I didn't realize how significant because it was like you had the main character, and then you had this role that was, like, right beneath it, if beneath it at all. And she was just overwhelmed. She couldn't do it. So Ryan comes to me in March. The play is going to be in June. They'd been practicing since November. Ryan comes to me in March, right before March break, and says, joe, the student had a dropout. I need you to play this character. If you don't play this character, we're going to have to cancel the play. And I was in a very specific mindset where I was deciding to say yes to things that presented themselves to me, no matter how scared I was. So instinctually, I said yes. He's like, what? I'm like, I'm in. He goes, well, why don't you look through the play and decide? I'm like, I'm in. I'm going to look through the play, but I'm in. I'm in. Let's do it. And then I went home and I started highlighting all of my lines and realized half the damn book were my lines. And I'm like, oh, my God. And then I realized I needed to memorize these lines, which I'm not very good at. Other people's words, other people's cadence, other people's anything. And by the way, I've never acted a day in my life, so that wasn't even talking about what it was going to feel like to be on that stage and actually perform and actually get in character. I had no comprehension of it. So I said, okay. I would say for. I have never done something, including almost getting taken out to Ireland. I have never done something so scary and so terrifying. And it built consistently every single day for months until that play was over. I Doing the lines, one thing, sitting in a room, running lines, all right? Knowing that I had to be off book at a certain time, that messed with my head. And then when we started to block and blocking is when you do lines on the stage and, you know, where you're supposed to move and how it's supposed to flow and all of those kinds of cues. It was in that moment I knew I effed up. Like, I'm like, oh, no. And then I realized I wasn't acting when I was up there. I was just being me, right? I didn't know how to act. Like, Joanna will be fine for this character. And Ryan's like, you got to be less Joanna, you got to stop moving around, stop moving your hands so much as I am. You got to ground yourself. You got to understand when you raise your voice, when you keep it down, you got to understand where the audience is. You got to understand that it's. Let the lines do it. Don't try to affect the lines. Let the lines affect you and all of this stuff. And, guys, I'm sitting there like he's speaking Greek, and I'm just like. I had no idea what he's talking about, but he was so. Ryan was so good at pushing me when I. Because I really do need to kick in the butt. Pushing me, building me up, pushing me, building me up all the way through this. And then what was beautiful about this play was that I had students that were in the play with me who had done plays with Ryan before, who had a calmness about them, who would sit with me or who would act with me and say, okay, Joe, why don't we just try it this way? Or maybe do this or. That was really, really good. Okay, let's. Let's run it again. I had kids that would, like, say, I'm not comfortable with it. Can we run it again? Like, they're saying that. But the only reason they're saying that is they know I'm not comfortable with it, and they're just carrying that. So I had my students teaching me, helping me, supporting me. We did the show for five nights. It was incredible. Amazing. Best thing I ever done, all five nights. I thought I was going to die, pass out, throw up. I didn't know what was going to come first. I even had a student that had a big scene with. And he was really. This kid was on memorizing lines. Like, he would memorize my lines, his lines, every line. So we had this. This dialogue back and forth, sort of in front of the scrim, very. Just each of us just lit. And every time I did this scene, I wouldn't have my lines perfect, right? I'd kind of adjust it, I change it. And we'd go off the set, and his name was Phil. And he'd get me off the set, and he goes, joanna, you drop four lines. And I'm like, I know. I'm sorry. He's like, those are my cues. You gotta. You gotta hit those lines. I said, phil, here's the deal. I'm doing my best, I promise you. But if I drop a line and you think there's a pause, just pick it up. You gotta help me, okay? Because I don't have it perfect like you do. And he's like, okay, I got you. I got you. He goes, so if you pause for too long, he goes, I'm just gonna pick it up and I'm gonna run with it. I said, thank you so much. And I got better as my nerves got a little less. And every time we go off stage, he goes, oh, you only dropped two lines there. That part right there, that wasn't right. You moved over here. It was incredible. Absolutely incredible. And the fact that I learned from those kids, the fact that I have never been more scared in my entire life, and I felt that at age 45, or however old I was, the fact that I felt that then and really felt it as an adult is incredibly important as a teacher. And here's why. We forget what it's like to do things for the first time. We forget what it's like to be so be shoved out of our comfort zones because we shove kids out of their comfort zones all the time because it's all new for them, right? We're always like, well, you got to do physics. You got to do this. You got to go on this trip. You're not social cool. You're going to do this. Whereas adults, you get to insulate yourself and limit those new experiences. If they don't make you feel good, they make me scared, they don't make me feel good. I'm not doing them. And as an adult, unless you put yourself in a position to be pushed into that fray as an educator, you're not going to be able to connect. You're not going to get it. Number one, you're not going to learn. And if you're not learning as an educator, you're becoming worse. It's kind of like inflation. You know what I mean? Like, you're staying here when you should be grading up. Number one, you're not. You're not going to be able to explain things. You're not going to be able to do things as well if you do them the way you've always done them. And number two, if you don't know what fear feels like and how you put yourself in a position to overcome that fear, how in the hell can you ask and encourage and empower students to do the same thing? I don't think you can. And I think up until that play, I'd been doing not enough as a teacher, a disservice to those. To my students, because I didn't know that I wasn't facing those kind of fears. And since I wasn't facing those kind of fears when I was demanding of them, it was asking too much with no context. It was asking too much without me giving them ways to empower themselves, it was asking too much. And I truly believe this is the heart of education. This is it. And a lot of people will say a lot of different things, but when I think about all the different things, the heart of education, the heart of anything we do in this world. By the way, guys, the heart of education is how do I. How do I encourage and empower kids to do scary things that they're not good at? They're good at them. They're not scared of it. Everything about school should be and about young years. Empowering kids to do things that scare them, that are out of their comfort zone, that aren't in their wheelhouse, whether they're successful or not, and celebrate it. You're scared to do karate. Cool. Guess what we're doing next week? You're scared to take a physics class. Amazing. Let's get into it. You're scared to be in the play. I'm going to give you a small role. We're going to see how it goes. So I just think that there's all of these different things that teachers don't necessarily see, and I didn't for a very long time until I was shoved into it. And I. And I think this is the heart of education now, because the kids that are good, the kids that school comes easy, the kids that aren't scared, guess what? As a teacher, how much do you really have to influence them, encourage them? How much do you really have to build them? You don't. You just get the hell out of their way. But it's the other 80% of students that aren't good at something, that maybe have a different learning ability, that are maybe battling something that have social anxiety, that, you know, have issues within certain subject areas and they just try to avoid it or they don't ever go close to it. Those are the kids. That's where education is. It really isn't teaching. When the war of 1812 ended, 1814, just so you know, and by the way, Americans, we burned down the White House. It really isn't teaching that it should be put them in a position that doesn't feel good, that is scary, that they've never done before, that they don't maybe even want to do and say, don't worry, I got you. We're going to do this together. And if you don't do well, here's the second half. Because not all stories are going to be, like, fine. When I did sweat, people said. And it seemed to go very well, and people liked what I had to do. It could have gone the other way. That doesn't negate what I did and what I overcame. You could take a physics class and be horrible at it and get a 62. But you. That was a hard 62. That's a success. Throw the parade, throw the fanfare. And we are so built in our world about only giving accolades to certain marks, certain achievements, certain whatever, as they pertain to sort of a comparative analysis rather than being like, holy crap, you got a 72 in English. And for the last three years, you've been battling and trying to mitigate and deal with a significant form of dyslexia. What? How does that not get a parade? Doing things we're not good at. But then here's the key, and this is the hard part. I think when you don't get met with success, most of us, myself included, would want to give up right away. The first test I get, you know, 42, I don't want to do it anymore. If I would have come out that first night of sweat and, like, people are like, oh, it's a good job, Joanna. I mean, I would have been. I would have done the rest of the show, but I would have not been heartbroken. And so what do we do? How do you overcome that? Well, a couple things. Number one, if you build a school community where everybody. Everybody, because everybody has something they're not good at, is kind of pushed into that fray and is forced to. You might not be good at it, but cool. We're gonna do it anyways, and we're gonna make sure. We're just gonna hope and we're gonna push and we're gonna empower for you to get better at it. And then the kid that gets the 98 math without even blinking becomes the kid who can't draw a picture and the art student who draws incredible portraits but can't get a 50 in math. Guess what? They're on more of an equal playing field. Now. What we do in our society is we elevate the math and we marginalize the art because we think this skill is more important than that skill. That's a failure. That's a failure of our system. And in all fairness, the only reason anyone's ever done that is to save money. Cutting the arts is a failure of our system. Growing stem success, but doing it to the exclusion, marginalization, and negation of the arts. Ridiculously. Stupid. And again, it is just done for money. And under this auspice that, well, you only need these courses to go get that job and go make that much money. Forget being a whole person, forget being a happy person, forget being a person that doesn't just exist in its, in itself, you know, singularity. To do a job, to get a paycheck, to get money to buy a house, to, you know, to. To have a full scope to understand that music is important for everybody's brain. So is math. I don't want kids dropping math any more than I want them dropping music. I don't want kids being on their phones 24 7. And I don't just want kids only in the gym. It's about breadth and it's about expanding your mind, not narrowing your focus. And now more than ever, with the advent and the Internet and AI, shadow cloud, whatever you want to call it, not only is it happening whether you want it to or not, it is necessary. If you don't figure out how to become multifaceted and purposeful and capable of pivoting as change happens, because guess what? You don't just have one skill set in your back pocket. You haven't only done the things that you've always been successful at. You know how to struggle, you know how to overcome. You know how to get better. You know how to set your mindset so things aren't terrifying. Because you know what? I've done scary crap before. I struggle. And guess what? I'm fine. I'm fine and I'm better for it. Isn't that the lesson? Now here's the problem. My mentality, my philosophy is going to cost money. It's going to cost money, it's going to cost time, and it's going to put parents and kids in positions that they don't want to be in. They're going to say things like, but, Joanna, I'm really good at math. So if I take history and I'm not good at it, it's going to take away from me just doing math. Okay, stop just doing math. Well, then I'm not going to get 98 in math. We need a shift. And I understand it needs to come from the universities, but I think it's happening. You're seeing more and more universities. You're seeing law programs getting rid of standardized testing. Why are they doing that? Because they understand that the mark isn't the indicator of a great doctor or a great lawyer or a great whatever, that the grade doesn't dictate how they do in this world. But funnily enough, a lot of people have weaponized that reality and said, school doesn't matter. No, you got it wrong. You're going the wrong way. Of course it matters. Of course education matters. You're just trying to negate it because of money. Because if you were about empowering people, you would say the problem with education is the narrow focus. So what do we need to do? We need to broaden the scope. We need to understand that a holistic person coming to a job that has many abilities, that can multitask, that know what struggle feels like, knows how to overcome struggle, knows what failure feels like, and they're good, they'll still push on. That's the person I want to hire. That's the person in life that is going to do better, that is going to be resilient. If I'm going to hire somebody, those are the people I'm going to want. So why is the education system not preparing for that? Because we can do that. It's just going to take a little bit longer, and then it's going to take more time to understand the person rather than the transcript average of your best six courses. Because I don't think that's what makes the best anybody. I'll even go as far as to say the people that everything comes easy to, I think actually are less productive in society. Oh, I'm going to get some hate about that. I really do. 99 in math. 99 in math. 99 in Math. You don't know what struggle feels like. I don't think you do great things. I've said it. I don't think you do. You need to know what struggle feels like. Because if you don't know what struggle feels like when you come up against it, you won't know how to pivot. You won't be able to dig down deep. You won't know what that feels like. You will feel like that's failure and it's the end game. You won't be able to push through. And anything great that's ever happened in this world, any huge things that people have done, you have to be willing to go past failure, horrible failure, devastating failure, Life crippling, altering failure. So let's embrace failing. Let's embrace having to do something again. Let's embrace trying to change how we're doing it. And let's stop pretending as though there's only five courses that matter or three disciplines or certain job tracks that matter. And the education has to directly tie to that. Let's stop all of that and let's go back to this idea of a Renaissance person. That person is going to be more powerful, more capable, and will change the world quicker than anybody else. And to think I learned that entire thing while getting swept away to Ireland. Well, thank you so much for hanging out, guys. Go check out my book. That's not what this book is about. Unlearn16.com and I will see you next day. Same bat time, same bat channel. Dismissed.