Still Curious
Curiosity is a gift we start with but often lose. So what about those people who are still curious? Grokkist founder Danu Poyner meets people who insist on relating to the world with curiosity and care and talks to them about the red thread that runs through their life story and which ultimately empowers them to flourish as their unrepeatable selves. Find out more at https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast
Still Curious
How we design conscious, creative and caring virtual learning - Seth Fleischauer | S2E10
Seth is the President & Founder at Banyan Global Learning, a group of educators who deliver live virtual programs in social and emotional learning (SEL), Digital Citizenship, and Global Citizenship. We talk about what it means to design education that helps us find our place in the world.
Key Topics
- How Banyan Global Learning works with schools to help kids find their place in the world by exploring the intersection of language, culture, technology, and social and emotional learning
- Seth's squiggly career, from wanting to be a vet, to studying psychology, to teaching in high-needs public schools, to starting a company that delivers distance education globally
- What happens on a virtual field trip, why live video matters, and what it means to be a camera-ready teacher
- How Seth's experience of homeschooling his daughter during the pandemic connects to broader issues of reform, revolution and student choice in education
Detours and Tangents
- How being a real-life meme (Sad Mets Fan) is a weird kind of fame because you have to tell people about it first
- How Seth's self-understanding of being a person of privilege has evolved over time
Episode Summary
Visit the Grokkist podcast hub for a full digest of this episode including highlights and links to stuff we discussed: https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast/s2e10-seth-fleischauer
Recorded 10 May 2022
Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon
Website: grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast | Email: podcast@grokk.ist | Socials: @grokkist
Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon
When you're teaching over video conferencing, there is an entertainment value to it that is different from live teaching. There is an aesthetic to it. You gotta to come out the gate, making sure that you are drawing them in, because if you don't, they're not going to be with you. I would say that the biggest difference between a teacher who excels online and who does not, is a mindset that they believe they are sharing the same space with their students.
Danu Poyner:You're listening to the Still Curious Podcast with me, Danu Poyner. My guest today is Seth Fleischauer, who is the President and Founder at Banyan Global Learning, a provider of live virtual programs that prepare learners with future ready skills in digital citizenship, world culture and social and emotional learning. In today's episode, we talk about what's involved in creating engaging virtual spaces for social and emotional learning, from virtual field trips to meaningful assessment, and what it means to be a camera ready teacher.
Seth Fleischauer:Tonight I'm doing a virtual field trip with our sixth graders on Texas, zooming in on TexMex, food as a representation of a fusion of cultures. The students are going to be finding and cooking their own examples of fusion food and talking about the why behind it, why this particular food, how did it come about, what were the cultural factors? What was the improvisation that led to this being created in the first place?
Danu Poyner:We discuss Seth's journey from teaching at the progressive Earth School in Manhattan to a high needs public school in Brooklyn, how his desire to reform the failings of the broken traditional system put him on the path to becoming an educator entrepreneur, and the very different context of setting up live virtual classes all the way back in 2003.
Seth Fleischauer:I did that as a part-time gig while I was teaching full-time and driving out to long island to use the fancy video conferencing box that I had to use in order to be able to make a connection. Be out until midnight teaching and then, because it is Asia time, so classes would end at midnight. And then I drive back to the city and fall asleep and be up at six to go teach again.
Danu Poyner:Seth shares how seeing his daughter's isolation during the pandemic provided an opportunity to put some of his personal educational philosophies into practice closer to home through homeschooling, but also just how challenging that has turned out to be even so.
Seth Fleischauer:I could go straight project-based student choice, life is the curriculum, unschooling, whatever I wanted to do. Watching them respond to that was amazing. Watching the rest of the parents in the group recoil a little bit, cause they were like, you're doing, you're doing nothing. So are you're doing nothing?
Danu Poyner:We also discuss navigating privilege, discovering your core values, growth mindset and grokking, and what it's like to be a real life meme.
Seth Fleischauer:It's fun. I'm the sad Mets fan. The Mets are so sad
Danu Poyner:Seth has spent a long time thinking about what it means to have space online to find your place in the world, and I appreciated his humility, openness and thoughtful perspectives on reforming what goes on in our educational institutions. Enjoy, it's Seth Fleischauer coming up after the music on today's episode of the Still Curious Podcast. Hi, Seth, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.
Seth Fleischauer:Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here and grateful for being invited.
Danu Poyner:Excellent. I've got so much to ask you. We have zero chance of getting through everything, but I'm just going to dive in if that's okay and we'll see where it goes. So you're the president and founder at Banyan Global Learning, which runs live virtual programs to help nurture cultural literacy, educate responsible digital citizens and help connect mind and heart through social and emotional learning. You're an expert in video conferencing, international teaching, social, emotional learning, and K to 12 online education. And you've also been a public elementary school teacher. What would you say is the most important thing for someone to understand about what you do?
Seth Fleischauer:Uh, I guess it depends on who we're talking to, but for your listeners, it would be, I'm extremely passionate about what I do? I lead with my heart. lean on having best laid plans that often get thrown by the wayside as I chase things down rabbit holes and figure out what is right for the situation. That's how I tend to approach my professional life.
Danu Poyner:You describe your work as being at the intersection of technology, language, culture, and social and emotional learning. That strikes me as a pretty crowded intersection. What would I expect to see there?
Seth Fleischauer:Well, you'd expect to see Banyan Global Learning and it's work. Our origin story is one of a teacher me who started a company 14 years ago now and started delivering daily distance learning program to a client in Asia. And, essentially built our services one by one at the behest of what the client needed. So much of what we do was in response to the needs of this particular group of schools in Taiwan and China. But then we pivoted and started looking domestically. What we did there was essentially story of great or terrible timing, depending on how you look at it. It was around January of 2020 that we looked at the domestic market and thought, Hey, let's spin off the most popular part of our daily distance learning program, which is our virtual field trips. And let's start doing those. Of course, then the world changed dramatically and we responded to really, what was my daughter's school community. I saw the life just kinda bleed out of her very quickly when the pandemic started and she was so isolated and I started running these calls with her and her friends that evolved into calls between her and her classmates, and then eventually the whole school. Cause they didn't really have anything up and running. And I had all this experience doing learning over video conferencing. So I was this first access point for a lot of these kids at our school to actually connect with each other during the early days of the pandemic. I happen to have an uncle who is an expert in social, emotional learning. And he was able to really skill me up in what we were doing. So those initial calls evolved into what is now our social emotional learning program, which also includes digital citizenship, which we basically see as SEL online. That's what we've been doing domestically. And then we've folded it back into what we're doing internationally. Our core purpose is to find your place in the world. That's what we're looking to do, to not only do that for ourselves, but especially for the students that we work with. We see that as an internal and external exploration, being able to get to know yourself to the extent that you can look at the world and understand where you fit into it. That intersection language, culture, technology, social, emotional learning, that's what we mean by that. You need to have all of those things in order to be able to flow with this negotiation of where your place in the world is, which is not necessarily a physical place, could be a digital place, could be a place that constantly changes. So that conversation with yourself and the. That's what I mean by that intersection.
Danu Poyner:Fantastic. Such a great answer. One thing I always ask on the podcast is for people to explain a key term of art as if to a 10 year old. I'm wondering if you could explain what social and emotional learning is as it to a 10 year old.
Seth Fleischauer:It's essentially doing the hard work of knowing what your feelings are and being able to express them, but also knowing the emotions and the feelings of others. The reason that we want to do this is so that ultimately we can make the best choices, choices that are not only good for us, but good for the.
Danu Poyner:I liked this phrase, finding your place in the world. I'm curious how you arrived at that as the framing device for what you're doing.
Seth Fleischauer:Yeah, it's interesting. Arrived at, uh, it was more like uncovered. We actually did some workshops with the leadership team at Bain and global learning and dove into the very question. What is our core purpose? We flirted with a bunch of different ideas, a bunch of different ways to say all of the things that we do and why we do them. It jumped into to some element of what we were doing and I ask, okay, well, why do we do that? And I got an answer and I said, okay, but why do we do that? And it was maybe six or seven layers of why deep that, Courtney, has been working with us for about 10 years now, use that phrase and it really resonated with all of us. What's cool is that it, in many ways it means the same thing, but in many ways it means different things to each of us. I think that is a really important element of a core purpose. It's gotta be able to speak universally, but also individually to everybody who is living it out.
Danu Poyner:It's got a lot of layers, certainly and I really like it. You mentioned that the virtual field trips are the most popular part of what you were doing. Can you tell me a little bit about what happens in those?
Seth Fleischauer:Sure. In the beginning we really leaned into that word field trips. So if you imagine a field trip that happens on a school bus, we were doing that, but without ever having to leave the class. And really leaning into the medium and what becomes available when you break down the four classroom walls and connect to new people, undiscovered places, and fresh ideas. Now the new people that is pretty clear. There are a whole bunch of people who you would not have access to if you were limited to your physical space. Undiscovered places, we definitely want to bring students all around the world if we can, but also to slices of life that they wouldn't necessarily have experienced within their own communities and fresh ideas leans on this notion that not every teacher is an expert in everything that they might want to bring into their classroom. Having this technology available to us to be able to bring in experts and ideas that might otherwise not ever make it there, we think that is part of the real power of the technology. So in our virtual field trips, we take kids all around the world, but we also have puppet shows that teach about social, emotional learning, and narratives that the students interact with to solve problems and exercise their digital citizenship skills. Some of our international trips are really cool. We've got a teacher down in Brazil who is an ex-pat, but married a Brazilian has two Brazilian sons to come along with her on the trip. It's all live. So you've got je ne sais quois, this is element of, I dunno, there's something to live video. There's something to knowing that what you're seeing is what's happening right now on the other side of the world and our teacher, Jill down there takes the students down the main street of Isacare this little beach town that has a pretty diverse culture. The students are all looking for little representations of that diversity. So looking in the storefronts for different cultures represented on this little main street of this little surf town in Brazil. I would say that the secret sauce to what we do, what makes these trips so effective is that we really seek to maximize engagement and do that by leaning into the benefits of the medium. If we have a blended learning scenario where students actually have a second device, we would definitely create a lot of interactive elements there, but for everyone, regardless of whether or not they have that second device, we make sure that there is a central purpose to why they are on this trip. They are trying to answer a question they are trying to investigate in order to be able to answer that question. And it could be one that's framed with a narrative. It could be a more general question looking for, you know, that example of the students going along main street in Brazil, they could be trying to solve a mystery. We really focus on that question. What are the students doing here? Watching video can be a really passive experience and we want to make sure that it is not, that the students are actively participating in what is going on and having an effect on what they see on screen.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, amazing. I live in New Zealand. I noticed you've got a Queenstown experience on there, which leaped out at me. You mentioned about your daughter and how you noticed with the pandemic that the life had drained out of her. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what happened then?
Seth Fleischauer:Oh, goodness. Yeah. She's actually sitting right next to me right now. She's she's
Danu Poyner:that
Seth Fleischauer:uh, yeah, I It was a crazy year, two years going on three. She's a really good student. She's someone who really excels within the traditional system, same way that I did when I was her age. It wasn't until the pandemic when We were learning at home. And that was an adventure for a former public school teacher to have a student at home to work with. In the beginning, I was just like, oh my God, I can't wait for this. This is amazing. I get to exercise these skills. I get to see her everyday. I get to have lunch with her. This is going to be great. Really trying to look at the bright side of what was going on. I quickly realized as I was not only teaching her, but also teaching, we had a learning pod. So there were a couple of other students there. First of all, teaching five kids at home is very different than teaching 30 in a classroom. And secondly, that a lot of the ideas that I had about education were starting to break down for me. When I started being in global learning in 20 oh eight, I was like, I'm going to bring progressive ed to Asia. Here I go. I got there and then I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. They are not ready for this. What's cool. Is that in the last 15 years, we've really chipped away, chipped away, chipped away at the sense of what is acceptable in the classroom, on the part of the administration and the parents that school. We've been able to create something that's much closer to what I thought I was going to start way back when, but it's still more traditional than my personal educational philosophy. That is based on this school that I taught at in Manhattan in 2005 to 2008. It was a progressive elementary school, that was a beautifully diverse place that really leaned into the element of student choice. I realized as I was creating these lesson plans for my daughter at home during COVID that I had this opportunity to actually do that. That there was so much red tape, so many things that might stop you from being able to lean into that fully within a traditional school setting. But here I was with five kids at home on my day to teach them where I could go straight project-based student choice. Life is the curriculum unschooling, whatever I wanted to do. Watching them respond to that was amazing. Watching the rest of the parents in the group recoil a little bit. Cause they were like, you're doing, you're doing nothing. So are you're doing nothing? No, not quite. I'm facilitating learning, trying to explain what that means and what that looks like and really trying to curate the environment as much as I could for the kids. One day my wife had to do that day. I couldn't cover that day. And she's like, you gotta write a lesson plan for me or something like that. I'm like, honey, that's not really what I'm doing with them. So what are you doing? I'm like, okay honey, go outside. Look at the first thing that brings you joy and come back in and tell me what it was. She walks outside, she looks at some flowers, she walks back in, she goes, okay, I'm going to have them make flower arrangements. I'm like, there you go. You did it. So she had this whole day where they went out and picked flowers and made these little flower arrangements and it was beautiful. We had days where we went and picked cherries and made cherry pie, right? Had them pit all the cherries and then weighed them and did all the math with the recipe of making the pie and got to actually taste the thing that they were creating. Had to figure out how they were going to get up high, to get the cherries off the tree. All these little problems that life throws at you when you have a goal to do something you haven't done before. We just tried to replicate that over and over again. And then when she went back into the classroom, it was this really weird feeling for me of, almost like a sadness around it where, I was like, okay, now she's going back and doing a lot of the same things again. I wonder how many parents feel that same way, where there was a little bit of a helplessness after having the ability to shape so much of what they learned for so many months and then to have them go back in and have some of the same old, same old come back. So I started letting her like stay home a lot and just create her own learning at home. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't. Screen time's an issue, she really wants to lean into some silly games sometimes where I'm not sure I'm doing this right. There's a lot of thought and reflection and conversation that goes along with it to make sure that it's something that feels optimal. But at this point, I'm letting her do that. I'm taking her on ski days. I'm taking her along with me when I can to do some of my own work. In the early days of the pandemic, she was on some of those first social, emotional learning calls. She was my cohost, because she was learning from home. I'm like, all right, Vieta, this is how to put on a live virtual program. Here we go. And that was amazing too. I should say my son too, my son is six. He was in daycare just every day during the pandemic is a small enough it stayed open. And then he started at a Montessori school. So watching his engagement with Montessori Has also really shaped some of my thinking around how to optimize learning for any given kid. My philosophy has honed. To the point where I believe traditional school should exist. I'm not one of those people that is like burn it all down. But I think that ideally everybody should have a choice to be able to pursue the type of education that they think works best for them. My daughter is an open question for me. My son's thriving at Montessori, my daughter, we just got her in two other schools and we're debating as like active debate right now on what we're going to do with her education. And it's hard. Part of me, I wanted to put it on her to make the decision, because I thought that she might've been capable of that. And she, one night, just broke down crying because she didn't want to leave her friend. She didn't know what to do, but she might want to go to be with her brother at his school, but maybe she wanted to go to this other school. I realized that, against my philosophy of let the kid drive everything, she needed help making this decision. So now we're weighing in a little bit more on what we think might be the best call, but it's hard. It's hard to know what the best call is, which is a folly of having choice. Right? One of the drawbacks is that you have to live with your decision whether there's good or bad, but my personal life philosophy, there are no bad choices, right? There's just the lessons that unfold for you in the roads that you choose. So we're looking at that as we move forward, those are very long answer to your question.
Danu Poyner:It's a great answer. But the thing that strikes me most is the language that you use to talk about these things. It's very energizing language. And you described homeschooling as an adventure, which is not the word I've heard many people who've gone through that experience use, but you also talking about expanding global empathy through authentic experiences that learners wouldn't have had access to otherwise student choice. I've heard you say society is the greatest stakeholder in education, and you're talking about making, learning more student driven, where teachers are less gatekeepers and more of a guide on the side, rather than a Sage on the stage. This energizing language, where does that passion and energy and your philosophy come from?
Seth Fleischauer:One day at a time, really? I've been inspired by some key players along the way. One of them was that experience at the earth school in Manhattan. Just a super beautiful progressive place that I had the privilege of teaching at when I was a young teacher in my twenties. My first three years of teaching at a high needs public school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that was huge in bringing me outside of myself and understanding the impact education can have, I'm still in touch with some of those kids all these years later, as they're having kids of their own. I'm an optimistic person in general. My spiritual life really helps with that. I have uh, practice around meditation and healing that really helps me look at fear in a way that really helps me create good from it. One of the biggest things that happened in my recent personal evolution was that I stopped hiding from myself and I stopped trying to bottle up my fears and instead looked at them straight on and looked at them for what they were here to teach me and I was then able to create positive changes a result. So if you bring that into my professional life, nothing seems too much, nothing seems too challenging. If something goes poorly, it's just a lesson. Obviously that is a beautiful thing to say about education in general, too. Right? That everything that happens in front of you, any trial or tribulation, those things can be turned into something good. I have another person who really inspires me, his name's Dr. Trevor. He's a friend of mine through a friend. I met him in March 1st of 2020. And he got me onto LinkedIn and LinkedIn is a place where I have a really awesome community of educational radicals who are all a bit more radical than I am, but really inspire me in the way that they believe that something better is possible. That was all happening at the same time as I was teaching my daughter at home and everybody in the world had this time to sit and look around and be like, is this working right? This enhanced consciousness that happened as a result of the pandemic, I think is something that the world direly needed. The great resignation I think is an amazing exercise of power. And, uh, people just looking around and understanding what they have the power to do. The choices that they can make. The combination of that enhanced consciousness that the pandemic was bringing plus this opportunity to teach my kid from home, plus this opportunity to be connected with all these people on LinkedIn, mostly via, Trevor's network. That mixed with my personal professional experience gives me some real optimism for the direction that I think things can go. The world is a scary place right now and just the science behind it all makes it seem like it's pretty dire, but I think we're figuring some really crucial stuff out, right in time for us to make a last stand as a species. Right. Like I think that this new emphasis on mental health is one that is so needed. And finally de-stigmatize this idea that you can take care of yourself. It's okay. And we're now teaching that to kids who are four and five years old. That's amazing. Imagine these kids, when they grow up.
Danu Poyner:It really is a moment in time right now, where there is a mood of possibility and asking questions. Many of the ideas have been around for a long time, but it seems like they've had new life breathed into it. So that's really interesting. You mentioned that you started Banyan about 14 years ago, which is a very different technology time to be starting a virtual business. I understand. Back in 2003, you started Tiger tutoring where you assembled a small team of Ivy league tutors and solicited money from elite private New York schools to tutor their high needs students. Can you tell me about how that came about and how it worked.
Seth Fleischauer:It was a public school teacher making, I don't know, not much for living in New York city. And I needed another income and obviously staying in education made a lot of sense. Had a couple of other alumni from Princeton where I went that were interested in joining forces. And we went around to some of the prep schools in the area, thinking that we could essentially get them to pay for the tutoring for some high needs students. Cause we knew that there was a lot of good financial aid available to a lot of those students. One of the high schools liked what we had to say and set us up with some of their students. you know, It was three of us doing tutoring, two, three nights a week. So it wasn't a huge operation or anything, but it was my first adventure into entrepreneurship, I guess. I didn't really see it as that at the time. I just saw it as like a way to have some money to go out, to eat every once in a while. But it was great. I'm still in touch with a lot of those kids actually. Tutoring relationship, because it's one-on-one, is a really close relationship. You end up getting to know these kids really, really well. It was a great experience. One that I had to stop when I started this other company, I didn't have the bandwidth to do both. But I set them up with some of my tutoring friends to cover that for them. I started Banyan and I did that as a part-time gig for a year while I was teaching full-time and driving out to long island to use the fancy video conferencing box that I had to use in order to be able to make a connection and it became too much pretty quickly, to be out until midnight teaching and then, because it is Asia time. So classes would end at midnight. And then I drive back to the city and fall asleep and be up at six to go teach again. Eventually I moved to the west coast for the time difference and built it from there.
Danu Poyner:A lot of what I see is sharing what might be described as un-schooling stories, which is certainly something that resonates with me and it's locating the problem in institutions, but not wanting to throw the institutions away. So I guess you're more of a proponent of reform rather than revolution.
Seth Fleischauer:Yes. I'm a reformer, not a revolutionary because I believe that there's still a lot of good in the system. I look no further than the people who are in it, many of whom are wonderful people who are doing the best they possibly can within a system that seems to be very broken and not serving a lot of people. I do acknowledge that being a reformer is a position of privilege. This system is one that worked for me, and that is working for my kid and isn't actively undermining them the way it might be undermining some other students. I have a great Montessori public school that I was able to get my kid into the lottery for that. So. Kind of dodged that bullet because I didn't think that he was going to do very well in a traditional system. I understand revolutionaries and I am friends with a lot of them. I understand the sentiment. I just worry about what happens when it all comes falling down. And I see the powers that are at play in America right now. I just don't know who comes out on top in a situation where it all crumbles. That gives me pause. I believe that You know, the radicals should have their radical choices and then the traditionalist should have their choices as well. And I believe that everyone, regardless of who their parents are, what they believe or where they lie politically, they're all entitled to a good education. What that means obviously is an active societal conversation but I do believe that people, including parents, I think that parents should have some influence over what their kids learn. Even when that's not something I personally want them to be learning, I just think that choice is important.
Danu Poyner:Great answer. Thank you. I want to talk a little bit more about the founding of Banyan global learning because you mentioned that you had the taste of entrepreneurship, and I assume that you were trying to bring some of this educational philosophy into what you were doing with Banyan. How did that start 14 years ago? You mentioned that you were doing daily distance learning and it grew really organically. What was the need as it was expressed then?
Seth Fleischauer:It was some really good timing. I guess I went and taught abroad at this school in Taipei in 2007. And the school was in the midst of a bit of a rebrand. They had become really well-known for athletics and they wanted to pivot back into academics and to emphasize English and technology. In the midst of them doing this rebrand, I came in and taught abroad in-person over there and had a wonderful time. Loved the school, loved the people. Taiwan is an incredible place flies under people's radar. At least in the U S it does. Half the people in the U S think it's Thailand. The other half of the people will think that it's some developing nation or something. Don't understand that when things were made in Taiwan in the eighties, they took that money and they invested it in infrastructure. It's actually quite a developed nation now and beautiful, and people are kind, and the food is great and the transportation's easy and it's a wonderful place to be. I loved my time there. I really didn't like what I was teaching. It was basically what we would think of is quote unquote, teaching English, a lot of grammar and vocabulary. I was like, where's the meat here. I'm not feeling this. But I knew that they were going through this transformation. And I knew that they wanted me to stay. They asked me to stay on for the year and I thought, how can I stay without actually staying here? I had some ties back in New York that were keeping me there. And here was this new technology that seemed like a really good fit for that. Amazingly, they were game for not only going for it, but creating the infrastructure at their school in order to be able to make it viable at that time. So that's a couple of classrooms that were formatted specifically for this technology to work well. Little things to control the echo and microphones all over the room and good projectors and screens and things like that. They put a little bit of an investment there and then essentially used the opportunity for this new program to also showcase there different way of thinking around education that could differentiate them from their competitors. But also Use it as an opportunity to experiment with curriculum and pedagogy. The result 15 years later, it speaks to what I was trying to do when I first got there. When I first got there, I was essentially adapting a bunch of curriculum for the space, and I had to learn what it meant to even teach online and how to do this well and what tools we had and how we could make sure that it was interactive. There's a lot that you lose. If you don't know how To make that happen in a virtual space. As we chipped away over the years, now we have something that is, I wouldn't call it project based, but there are a lot of projects. We have a central text that we've written with the help of my friend Caz. Who's an amazing storyteller in Hollywood. And she helped us create some narratives of these Taiwanese adolescents that travel the world. And each chapter is about a different country or city. And each chapter is also a jumping off point to a project. The core part of the curriculum is a series of these projects. Where we're going with it as one that's even more project-based. We're getting there slowly over time. I think that the experience of running this company for the past 15 years is a story of slow change. I've been really inspired by the types of changes that you can make when you point in a direction and say, we're going to get there eventually. Get a bunch of people I'll take one or each and just start rowing in the same direction. you can do some pretty cool stuff. For many years, the approach was just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. What we ended up with after that was a series of units that were essentially very popular. So it was just, oh, what did the students really like? Okay, let's build on that. We ended up with this hodgepodge curriculum. that was really fun. Kids really liked it, but it lacked backbone. We did this exercise maybe four or five years ago. Where I hired a consultant to come in and look at our assessments, because I just knew from my time at the earth school, we're not using assessments correctly. We are assessing kids and we're using it as an evaluation. We're not letting it inform our teaching. It's broken. We're better than this. How do we fix this? So I brought in this consultant and she was like, all right. So, what are you looking to measure? And I'm like, we should probably answer that question. Whatever I said to her at the time was. Sound right. Didn't feel right. It just felt like, okay, we have to back all the way up and we have to ask ourselves, what is it that we want to measure? You measure what you value. So really, it was an exploration of our values. After a long process, two years long of talking to all the stakeholders and doing these real deep reflections on not only what we could do, what we were doing, but what we wanted to do, we came up with our ESLRs, expected student learning results, which is essentially a list of standards, but they're applied a bit more loosely than that. Objectives is a good way to think of them, but essentially we've got three categories, language, culture, technology. The language stuff is what you would think of the stuff that I was doing back when I taught abroad there, we are teaching English. The culture stuff is essentially global citizenship and the technology stuff is essentially digital citizenship. We've got these three statements that then get broken into five statements each that then get broken into like 20 statements each that then get broken into more. So we've got this huge resource where each one of these things is a lesson objective and each one of these things traces all the way back to something that we all know we care about. In that way, we were able to create a real backbone to the curriculum. One that was customized specifically, not only for us as an organization, but especially for the students and other students like them. That I would say was a huge leap forward for us in terms of having a curriculum that wasn't just one that the students really enjoyed that they got meaning out of as a bonus, to one that was meaningful from the start. That was probably the biggest, most significant change in the 15 years.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, I'm interested in what the students like the most and also if you have any examples of assessment so that people can visualize how this works.
Seth Fleischauer:The students still like our virtual field trips more than anything else. Tonight I'm doing a virtual field trip with our sixth graders. There's three teachers who are each cooking a fusion meal. So they're each in their kitchens. And they're talking about why they came up with this particular meal, how they got the ingredients. And then they're showing preparation of it. And then they'll maybe even make the kids really hungry by eating it in front of them. This is part of a unit on Texas zooming in on TexMex, food as a representation of a fusion of cultures. The students are going to be finding their own examples of fusion food, and they're going to be doing their own cooking and talking about the why behind it, why this particular food, how did it come about, what were the cultural factors? What was the improvisation that led to this being created in the first place. There's stuff there around culture, there's always a language component that they are using in order to express that. Then the technology piece, there's a lot of tech skills and presentation skills that they're using. That would be one example. When the students get a bit older in the junior high, one of the great tools of assessment that we use with them is their metacognitive blog. It's essentially a once per week thing that they're doing where they're writing about what they're thinking about in their other classes. Training them up on how to think about thinking, is one of the Best ways that you can assess students in one of these more progressive types of curricula where we really want to deemphasize information recall and these broken old ways of the traditional system and instead figure out okay, how do we know that they got meaning out of this? And what does that meeting look like for them specifically? So the metacognitive blog, I think is a really great example of how to do that.
Danu Poyner:Have you ever found that any particularly surprising reflections they have in those kinds of blogs?
Seth Fleischauer:Absolutely. Kids get surprise you every day, right? Even M more traditional assessments. For a class full of students at a uniform school with 48 kids in the class. All the kids have to have the same haircut, there's some very traditional aspects to this. And it's a collectivist culture. But it's one that obviously embraces Western culture enough to have this crazy program that they had for the past 15 years. The most surprising parts are the truly individual acts that come out of their work; something that is really deemphasized within the rest of their school day, but is part of our real value add in terms of connecting them directly with Western teachers, this idea of being able to come up with original ideas and feel like it's okay to share them. That second part is huge. We really celebrate that. Those are the moments where we know it's working.
Danu Poyner:I actually interested in the kind of teachers you have populating these programs. Your jobs page says you're looking for camera ready, dynamic and charismatic teacher tour guides, which has an interesting kind of characterization. What can you tell me about them?
Seth Fleischauer:Yeah. That particular job listing is for virtual field trip purveyors, people who are onsite and can take us around to somewhere in their locale that has cultural value. That's just the tour guide part. The rest of it. Yeah. That's what we're looking for. It speaks to the fact that when you're teaching over video conferencing, there is an entertainment value to it that is different from live teaching. I'm someone who always brought an entertainment value into the classroom, regardless of whether I was doing it online. That was just my particular style. In modern life, We have certain expectations of what screens bring to us. They bring an entertainment value that is different than real life. In real life, if you're sitting in a room with someone there's this unspoken pressure that you feel to actually pay attention to them, right? It's like, oh man, they can see if I'm looking at them. So I guess I'm going to look at them. I feel like it buys you a little bit more leeway than it does in the virtual space where you gotta to come out the gate, making sure that you are drawing them in. Because if you don't, they're not going to be with you. The teachers that are able to do that, we say camera ready. There's gotta be an understanding of how to use the camera. Of how to lean in a little bit, when you want to make a point or exclaim and throw your arms back when there's something incredible happening. There is an aesthetic to it where you want to have good lighting, you want to be well-framed. You want to Look engaging. Your background can have some bright colors in it, but not too many, there's all these little things, uh, just about the aesthetics of it that come into the camera ready bit. What we also mean by that is, specifically video-conferencing camera ready, where this was much more true before the pandemic, but there were people before this who were like video conferencing. I don't ever want to do that. Right? Like people who are just like, that's uncomfortable. Why would you want to see someone when you're talking on the phone with them? I would say that the biggest difference between a teacher who excels online and who does not, is a mindset that they believe they are sharing the same space with their students. And it's huge because you see when it's not happening and you see when it's happening. When it's happening, it's not very different than if they were actually in the classroom with them. It feels the same because you are in the classroom with them, it's just a virtual classroom. But when it's not happening, you see people talking under their breath, into the microphone as if everybody can't see them and hear them, or shuffling papers and just unaware of what they're bringing to the space, you know? That's something that for the most part, you can't really train it. It's just kinda in their head. So that's something that we look for as well. And Then we just look for solid teacher chops, diverse viewpoints, different life experiences that can round out who we are as a company and a group of teachers. We look for age level experience. We look for ed tech, which again, used to be a bigger deal than it was. And then for this program we do look for a certain amount of international awareness. It's a bonus that people have taught abroad, but they at very least need to understand world events. They need to know where Taiwan is, and maybe know a little bit about its relationship to China. Although it's honestly something we never really talk about in the classroom. We leave that to their local teachers. They talk about their stuff and we talk about the rest of the world. Recruitment became a whole lot easier for us in the pandemic because the entire world, all of a sudden has experienced doing what we do, that's one thing. And then the other part of that is just sad, which is that a whole bunch of teachers are leaving the classroom. It sucks to know that we are somehow benefiting from that. But I see it as a way to keep them in the classroom, basically, just in a virtual one, but Yeah. I've had a bunch of people apply or just like, Yeah. I'm transitioning and it's just not working for me anymore. I understand it. I did it myself. I left the classroom 10 years ago, 15.
Danu Poyner:On that point, having made that transition yourself and knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to young Seth doing that?
Seth Fleischauer:I'm not a big regret person. I don't regret any decision I've ever made. I left the classroom because I had to. I remember the moment when I was like, I can't do this forever. And that moment defined what I could bring into the classroom because I had felt that burnout. I knew that I was never going to be a hundred percent again and that influenced the decision to leave. I think I felt pretty bad about it at the time but I don't think I necessarily should have. I think I did the right thing for me and for my students because if I'm bringing less than a hundred percent I shouldn't be there.
Danu Poyner:Are you happy
Seth Fleischauer:Um,
Danu Poyner:about that moment at all?
Seth Fleischauer:oh yeah. Still in touch with that kid. It was a kid who I'd worked really hard with and he had backslidden in spring right around this time of year. I was working two jobs, I just started the company. I was tired. And when he backslid in a way that felt like it was even worse than when I started putting probably 15, 20% of my energy into this one kid. It was too much. I remember sitting there in the classroom and just being like, there it is, that's burnout. That's the feeling. And still really care for that kid. He's got a kid of his own now. But yeah, that was the moment. And within two weeks I told them I was not just leaving, I was moving across the country to go with this other job full time. I think it was the right thing to do, but it was hard. That was professionally one of the hardest things I've ever had to do for sure was leaving that school. Then in terms of advice for me, like starting the company, that those expected student learning results, the SLRs that I told you about, I would have been like, Hey, check these out Much earlier. That's kinda the only thing, the rest of it has just unfolded the way that it needed to. And even that one thing, I learned so much in the meantime. Again, not a big regret person.
Danu Poyner:That really comes through. I'm curious, just to go back for a moment, to the point about creating an online space that feels like the same shared space. One of the Interesting comments I've heard from people who've been hurtled into that remote working situation and people trying to carry on business as usual but online is they feel really, that there's an imposition of having all of these people they don't like from work now projected into their living room, into their personal space. And it's got quite a psychological toll. So that shared space phenomenon is really interesting; that you could bring the virtual into your own physical space. I'm just curious if you have any more observations about what it means to create a shared online space.
Seth Fleischauer:Yeah, it's a similar exercise to just building culture in general. I heard a great quote, cultures, what you see when you walk past or something like that. If you don't actively build a culture, the culture will build itself. The things that you need to do in order to make people feel loose and comfortable online There are things that you need to do in terms of figuring out what the group prefers around protocols. Do we share our camera? Do we mute and unmute? Which meetings or phone calls, which meetings are video calls. Asking ourselves at any given time, does this need to be synchronous? Does this need to be video, creating a virtual space doesn't mean creating it whenever you can at all costs. There are certain situations where maybe it doesn't make sense to have it be a video. Maybe someone doesn't feel well that day or is in a space where they can't do it or doesn't necessarily want to share their background. I would say before, you're expecting people to share their home with each other. You should really make sure that you are building that online culture. And that sharing of a home can be part of the online culture. So you can see me on video right now. I have a plain white background that I often use virtual backgrounds on. I see you have a bookshelf, so I'm kind of spying on you and seeing what you read. so questioned: what made you choose this space to be the space that you set up your camera? Was that out of necessity or did you want the bookshelf in the background?
Danu Poyner:that is a great question. It is mostly necessity in that I live in a two bedroom apartment and there's only one space that I could use for this. And I have put the bookshelf and the white board and the desk and things in it. It's not really the best room for lighting, but it just has worked out that the book case is there and makes me feel safe.
Seth Fleischauer:Yeah, people's bookshelves has been one of my favorite little quirks of the pandemic, right? A lot of people that are sitting in front of bookshelves. Little things like that, right? I just invited myself into your home, but I felt like you were kind of showing it to me. So it felt safe for me to ask that question. There's great options now in terms of virtual backgrounds so that if you are sharing your person, that you have the option to share more or not. We've done a whole lot of work around trying to build a remote culture. Cause we were all based in LA. I moved up to Portland, Oregon four years ago. Then when the pandemic hit, everyone just like we're all over now. We've got teachers in Minnesota and Florida and California and Oregon and Washington and trying to build an office culture when people don't share a zip code is hard. There are a lot of different tools that you can use. Gathers a fun one to use, but really, no matter what you're using, there's a substance that needs to be addressed and what that substance is going to be different for every group of people, depending on what your certain mix is of introverts versus extroverts and people who like to share and people who don't. We have a slack channel for our company and one line of questioning that we've started to do, that's been pretty fun, is, tell me about the blank in your city. What's the best restaurant, what's your favorite park? What's something that locals know that nobody else knows. If you've got a friend from out of town, where are you taking them? Little things like that, that people can respond to and share a piece of themselves but also we can lean into the fact that we are decentralized, and that we all have these different lived experiences as a result of where we are. More generally for people who are asked to join some sort of virtual space, whether it be in education or in the professional world, I think it's really important that people have a choice at least some of the time. And that people bring consciousness to why they are doing things. If you're having a video call and you can't tell me why you're having a video call, then maybe it shouldn't be a video call.
Danu Poyner:I'd to hear a little bit more about young Seth and his hopes and dreams and fears. I know you're not a regrets person but I'm curious to get into your mindset when you were just starting out. Did you have a plan a for what you would be doing?
Seth Fleischauer:I was going to be a pilot. That's the first thing that's going to be. Yeah. I remember meeting a pilot when my grandpa was visiting and singing in a hotel and there was a pilot in the hotel and the jacuzzi and he was talking about his job and I was just, that's the coolest. One of my ideas about education right now is that the line between, what is school, what is college? What is the workplace, this should all be kind of blurred. Looking at a more European model of trade schools and people deciding earlier on what they need to do. You look at my own life. There's no way I would have been a teacher. I had a lot of other things on my mind. I was going to be a vet until they had me shadow a vet when I was in like sixth grade. And I was, well, that was not what I expected. I wanted cute fluffy animals, not blood so didn't want to do that anymore. Then I went into college. I was pre-med. I was going to be a doctor. I think I just wanted to help people is what it came down to. And, Science got too hard. I remember the day I dropped out, I went to like a first day lecture of microbiology. And I remember sitting there just lost because when I was in high school, instead of taking AP bio, I took astronomy at the local city college, which is amazing. Loved it. And, ended up taking astronomy again in college. My professor was someone you may have heard of, Neil deGrasse Tyson. That was really cool. So that day in microbiology, I just remember being lost and then saw a friend of mine after the lecture. And she was like, oh my God, did we need that much of a review? And I was like, I'm not pre-med anymore. Then I was going to major in politics, but I realized that what I liked about politics was the sociological component of it, the human behavior aspect of it. And that led me to psychology. I majored in psych and then worked at the American psychological association for a year after college, transitioned to the New York academy of sciences, where I was running educational programs. There were six days of the year where we actually worked with students and those were by far my favorite days. And I was like, I think I want to be a teacher. But I actually was applying to New York city teaching falls, which is like teach for America but for New York city and to get a master's in social work, those were the two things I was looking at. I ultimately decided that. First of all, I could get a master's and get it paid for and get paid while I was getting my master's. That was probably the biggest deciding factor. But then also social work as an empath, I thought I was going to have a hard time bringing work home with me. I feared that I was not going to be able to separate myself from the work enough. Ironically, some of those early schools that I worked at, I was essentially an unlicensed social worker. I think a lot of teachers feel that way. So I did bring a lot of my work home with me, but again, no regrets love where I'm at.
Danu Poyner:Thank you for sharing that. Along the way, I see you managed to become a real life meme as a generic, sad Mets fan. I don't think I've ever met a meme before, what's it like?
Seth Fleischauer:Yeah, here I am. It's a really interesting type of fame. One that you have to tell people about in order for them to know about it. It comes up every now and again, a friend will be like, I saw you on ESPN, if I meet people and I'm talking about baseball, it's probably the third thing I'll say. It's definitely something I bring up. It's fun and the Mets are just like, I'm the sad Mets fan. The Mets are so sad. It's to be emblematic. It's bittersweet, right? Because I want to see them do well. I want to see my picture become irrelevant. But I also really enjoy connecting with people over it. It's a lot of fun.
Danu Poyner:it's got a very expressive face in that picture. You sound really over it at this point. I have to say.
Seth Fleischauer:As a Mets fan, you get over it quickly. There's always the next season of disappointment. Yeah, there they're priming me right now for a hard fall. They're doing great this season.
Danu Poyner:Given your stance on regrets and positivity and looking forward, is there a belief that you've changed your mind about over the years and what would that be and why?
Seth Fleischauer:The first thing that pops into my head is that I used to think that core values were nonsense. I thought that because I couldn't find mine and I couldn't find mine because I felt like I brought a different part of myself into all these different scenarios. Then I realized that one of my core values was adaptability. But in doing core values exercises with my company, I was able to really discover my own core values and now I see them so clearly. It's Interesting to me that they were such a mystery for so long. I realized the way that I make decisions about who I want to spend time with and what I do with my time that these things are dominated by my core values. Kindness is a big core value of mine, curiosity, which I see is not just learning about things in the world but also having the humility to really wonder about people especially in today's polarized world that you don't agree with. And having the curiosity to understand their humanity is really important to me. Community is really important to me. Leadership is really important to me. I really had to grow my way into it. I think I had one too many comparisons to Michael Scott and the two thousands where I was like, they mean that as a compliment, but I'm not taking it that way. Cause I was trying to be like, Hey guys, I'm cool. It's okay. I'm your friend. People need a leader, right? People need someone who occasionally is going to make an unpopular decision because no one else can. It's something that took a long time for me to believe that I could be and to see that I had value as, and I'm still working on it to be honest, but I've really come into myself more and more as a leader and understanding my role and understanding that it's one of many roles. It's not better or necessarily even more important than a lot of other roles. Everybody's got to have a handle on that oar, and rowing in that same direction or else it doesn't work. That's been another thing that has evolved for me personally, and then a growth mindset. That's another core value of mine. That's one that I didn't necessarily have until I went through some physical injuries, back and hip problems and started doing some rehab on those injuries and discovered the intersection of emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual healing. There's this great book called, The body keeps the score', about how our body holds on to trauma and pain. I remember rehabbing my back injury and being on the massage table and just. And being reminded of something that happened in childhood. That sent me down a path of really trying to uncover what the real thing is here. Another huge change in my life is, I've been sober for about four years. I used to drink, not destructively. Part of the reason why I drank so often, because everything was fine. I was a happy, drunk. I didn't. Treat anyone poorly? I didn't let it affect my job in any negative way or my family life. But I was using it as a way to hide from myself. I was not feeling my feelings and once I stopped drinking I started feeling my feelings in a way that really allowed me to grow and that I was stunted before then. I've made a lot of really amazing changes in my life since then, having to do with adopting this growth mindset, right? It's not a brick wall. It's a hurdle. That's been incredible for me, a real blessing for me.
Danu Poyner:Thank you for sharing that. I'm going to look up that book as well. The body keeps the score. My friend used to say that the massage therapist would really touch her in the feelings. I know that experience as well. It's fascinating. And that burnout really, you hold in the body as well. We've talked a little bit about privilege and what I want to ask is you're a Princeton graduate and you've had what might be called the front row experience of life in many ways. How much of what you're doing is predicated on that privilege. And how you thinking about that? The reason I ask is a little while back, I did a podcast with someone who specializes in chronic disadvantage. And then we talked about how many people don't have the opportunity to experience the joy of curiosity based learning and student choice, because they're so occupied with the grind of just getting through life and surviving. In that scenario, education is a means to an end and primarily about its use value. That comes through that understanding in the way That some of your marketing for lingo loop is presented as well. So I just wanted to ask you how you thinking about that and reconciling it. You're very reflective and I'm certain that you've reflected on this a lot. And I suspect we'll all be a little richer for hearing those reflections.
Seth Fleischauer:Well, you're too kind with that last part, but yeah, I appreciate the question done a lot of thinking about it. I understand that I'm a person of privilege. I did not always understand that. Going to Princeton, I was the son of a social worker and a music teacher amidst this population of the world's most powerful people. Right. It's all relative but as a more mature person, I understand that being a white male is obviously a huge amount of privilege that I try to balance with gratitude. Just having consciousness around Really everything but especially my own impact on a room on a given group of people based on my race and my gender, my own racial identity, what that means to me. I think that the biggest thing that I do, I think the biggest opportunity that I have is that my company is setting the tone for my group of teachers. We brought in some experts to do some workshops with us. It's been a little over a year now where we've been hitting this head-on and making it part of our consistent professional development and really exploring racial identity and what that means to each one of us personally, but then for us, we have our work that we do with students in the U S and Canada that are the one-off and short units in world culture, digital citizenship, social, emotional learning, but the stuff that we do with the students in Asia, there's a whole lot there in terms of how we approach that with a conscious mind towards our own racial identity, as opposed to doing it unconsciously, where we might fall into some trappings of educational colonialism and try to tell them that our way is better. That is not what we're trying to do. We're trying to come in with a consciousness around who we are, what we bring and who they are and give them the tools to have that same. That's where the biggest impact opportunity for me is to work with my team to have those understandings and bring it into the work that they do. Beyond that, I think that it's tough. I was in some of the highest needs public schools in the country when I started my career, like many teachers and then moved on to a more progressive school that was still had a lot of students from a lot of different walks of life. Now I work with public and private schools across the U S and Canada but then also the schools that we work with in Taiwan are private schools, not really by the same token that you would think of in the U S where it's 30 and$40,000 a year. It's not like that there. But they are people who are relatively privileged. I think of the work that we do at this still fairly small size as being work of open-heart. I believe that regardless of who you are and where you are, that you deserve love, and you deserve the opportunity to connect with people, whether you Are the most disadvantaged kid in the world or the most advantage get in the world. There's a whole army of educators out there who are ready to find their place in the world and figure out how to best have an impact. I have dreams of what we can do once we've better established ourselves. Right now we don't have a grant writing team, so we're not able to give stuff away for free as well as we could, although anybody who's listening, please write to me, Seth, at being in global learning.com, if your school feels like they could benefit from this sort of thing, drop me a line, let me know. We'd love to accommodate what we can. What we are looking to do is to partner with institutions that do have grant writing teams. I've got an exciting opportunity that I'm working on with, uh, University that is doing some nutrition-based education and thought that virtual field trips would be a great way to bring in the cultural piece. The woman I'm talking to is really inspired by our social, emotional learning work and thought that was a huge component that was missing from her nutrition education, which I thought was so inspired. To consider SEL as this necessary component of nutrition education. As a privileged person, I put things into my body that are what I would consider high quality ingredients. I feel good about that. I feel good about sacrificing some other things so that I can afford to do that. You could imagine the way that people who don't have that choice, how that must impact their emotional mental health. Being able to partner with institutions that have those grant writing wings, where we can become a part of that to reach those populations that can't necessarily afford the services, that's in the short-term plan. And then the long-term plan is to have those efforts of our own, once we have scaled up enough to be able to afford that sort of work. That is the direction that we're headed. I just did all this work around vision for the company, revisiting this stuff after all these years. And that was one of the big parts of it. What is the path? What do we need to do? How do we need to succeed in order to be able to get to a point where we are in a position to give more stuff away for free, essentially. We're not quite there yet but with any luck and humility, we will get there.
Danu Poyner:Thank you for engaging with the question. I appreciate that. I like the framing of finding your place in the world that is the theme of our conversation today. One thing I always ask people on the podcast is if you could gift someone a life-changing learning experience, what would it be and why?
Seth Fleischauer:There's a member of my family that hasn't adopted the same growth mindset that I have. I see the potential of them having that and feel that it would be such an amazing experience that ultimately they're, I think, afraid to have. I'm not sure what the experience is. I've done some out there stuff with body work and Reiki and some of these spiritual things. What would work for any given person to shift a mindset like that I think is a very personal thing. I don't think I have a way of predicting what that would be for this person but the end result is what I would give them. And I wish I knew how to get them there.
Danu Poyner:I've really enjoyed speaking with you today, Seth. We've covered a lot of ground. I should give you an opportunity to share with people how best to get in touch with you and where would be a good place for them to look if they wanted to find out more about the work you're doing.
Seth Fleischauer:yeah, thank you. LinkedIn is a great place to get in touch with me. Seth Fleischauer is my name. I'm fairly active. They're not as active as I used to be but I really do enjoy the community and the discussions that happen there. So that's my social media imprint. If you want to hear about the Mets, I'm also on Twitter. Louche Seth, which is Chinese for teacher. And then global learning.com is our website. That's a good place to go for information about who we are and what we do. We're looking to deliver our amazing services wherever we can, at schools that otherwise outsource content, right? Schools that are open to Bringing in subject matter that maybe their teachers don't have the access or the expertise for and we're really all about engagement, right? It's all about students who may or may not be engaged with any given subject matter. We come in, we make it breathe, we bring it alive. And we inspire students to bring their best self, not only to that moment, but to the moments that come. So, if anybody out there is listening, that sounds good for anybody that you think it could be good for. Please send them our way.
Danu Poyner:Fantastic. Thank you so much. Is there something else that you'd like to talk about that we haven't covered today?
Seth Fleischauer:I'm interested in this idea of grokking, but it's more like questions for you. Do you know where the term came from? The first time I ever heard it was in your podcast. and then. after you said it, I heard it a couple of other times and I was, oh, apparently I've been missing this word.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, that's the lore of learning new terms. Once you hear them, once they pop up everywhere, it's got its own little life that phrase, but it comes from a science fiction book, written by Robert Heinlein is stranger in a strange land and he uses it in lots of ways, to understand something, intuitively empathically to take it into yourself. So it becomes part of you, and in the computer programming world, they used a lot to get across things and to make it be part of you. I thought it was a really nice way of encapsulating, a way of going about learning that's a little away from the formal structures, and I thought that will be a nice way to think about my project.
Seth Fleischauer:It feels almost spirits. Cause you talk about an intuitive, right? So there's this leap of faith that a person has to arrest their understanding and be open to new understanding. I think generally, a lot of my learning is still stuck in the traditional system. But there are things I would say that gardening is a big thing. I'm a self-taught gardener. I really love talking to people being inspired by people asking questions. I've always said that the secret to gardening is the ability to fail, the acceptance of failure and paying attention. If you do those two things, you'll be great. I'm going to be looking for more grokking opportunities as inspired by you. So thank you.
Danu Poyner:Oh, thank you, sir.
Seth Fleischauer:Thank you so much for having me on today. It was a real pleasure and I love what you're doing. I love your project. I look forward to seeing how your community grows.
Danu Poyner:thanks very much. I really appreciate you making the time and it's been a great conversation. Keep up the good work and we'll keep in touch.
Seth Fleischauer:Yeah. Thanks. You too. Have a good one.
