24: Mike's Personal Education Story: Beavers In English Class And Other Learning Adventures

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A single misheard word in fifth grade quietly derails Mike’s understanding for years, until a later breakthrough makes the whole pattern obvious. We connect that moment to a repeatable set of study tools that help kids, teens, and adults rebuild fundamentals and learn with confidence. 

• Mike’s “beavers” misunderstanding and how one word blanks a whole lesson 
• Why students hide confusion and then forget the exact cause 
• Discovering study technology and committing to educator training 
• The value of children’s dictionary and grammar basics for every age 
• Key distinctions in language that improve vocabulary and comprehension 
• The look, learn, practice method and why drills matter 
• Backing up to phonics and easier readers when needed 
• From junior high boredom to risky choices and the path back 
• What parents can do to support real understanding 

If you have any questions, of course, always reach out to us. Check out the show notes for links to books that Mike mentioned and in ways to get in touch with us.

Click Here to get your FREE Parents Survival Guide and Good Choices Downloads and Booklets!  

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to L. Ron Hubbard library for permission to reproduce a selection from the copyrighted works of L. Ron Hubbard. 

Transcript

Episode Welcome And Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode. Today we're going to be going over something I think everyone will find extremely interesting. It is the origin story of Mike's journey as an educator. And we're also going to kind of sum it up with the tools that Mike has found to be always working and getting results and helping anybody who's had a study bug improve their educational journey. So, with that said, Mike, why don't you start us out at the beginning as to kind of where this all started for you? Sure.

Finding Study Tech In California

B Verbs And The Misunderstood Word

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I would say that the story begins in fifth grade, where I was attending a Catholic elementary school. And one particular day, and the trouble may have started earlier than this, but this is the most pivotal point, really, that I can think back to. I had an English teacher who started the day out with telling the class, today we are going to talk about beavers. Beavers. And this is English class, you know, and I'm I'm sitting in the back of the class and I'm what confused, immediately confused, why this would even be a subject. But then she starts writing on the chalkboard all this stuff. And it doesn't, it doesn't have anything to do with beavers. And I'm looking around the room at all the other students and they're all paying attention. And I'm thinking, what does this have to do with anything? You know, and I I I just I'm watching her write out some sentences and stuff, and then she'd turn around and she's talking, and she'd, every once in a while, she'd say something about beavers again. And I was just like, I have no idea what's going on. This is right. This is the most confusing thing. You know, I tried to look like I know what's going on. You know, certainly there's a lot of things I wasn't doing. Like I wasn't raising my hand and saying, what in God's holy name does this have to do with beavers, or have to do with anything? No, no, no. I was I was just an average student and uh making making mediocre progress in in elementary school. And by fifth grade, pretty introverted. Okay, didn't really know what was going on. So that speaks to earlier confusions that must have already piled up, but I don't know what those may have been. So the end of the class comes, you know, I think the bells used to ring or something like that, and would tell us when to so then I I shuffled my way down the hallway to math class where I was performing very poorly in math, right? Probably due to the confusions that I had stacked up in my English class, right? So I was falling behind in math class as well. I think on Fridays we used to have quizzes, right? So you get to Friday and and quizzes handed out of the stuff that we've covered that week and passing a quiz, that's that's easy, you know. It's just it was like fill in a blank, okay? I blank hungry, so I'm going to get a snack, you know, and you write in there am or something. Or feel, right? You could put feel or am or whatever, and you just fill in the blanks. And I could do that because I was already reading. I was lucky enough to have a mom who was feeding me books from the library at a at a very early. Luckily, she was smart enough to know not to overwhelm me with any other kids. My bro, my older brother, my younger sister, not overwhelm us with books that were too difficult. So we enjoyed reading. We would read lots and lots of books. Okay, reading was enjoyable. And she was quite literate. My dad was quite literate, and I interacted well with him uh at at the time, and had an environment where there was plenty of people around me who spoke English well enough that filling it, filling in the blanks on a on an English quiz in fifth grade is is not a problem. 100% A plus, whatever, whatever kind of grade you get. And I forgot all about it and just moved on. And I I honestly never gave it a single thought until many, many, many years later, 1892 to be specific. But there's a little bit of a gap in there that we have to fill in. But we'll fast forward from my fifth grade, which is you know, whatever year it was, we'll fast forward to when I was 21 years old, and I was out in California living and working in a Hindu temple of all places, which is about as far away from your friends and family in the Midwest as you can get without a passport, is the way I like to frame it, you know, uh which which gives you some indication of like what type of life I led between fifth grade and and age 21. And we've talked about this in several other episodes about how you slide toboggan slide downhill from being a confused kid in elementary school or at any age into a lot of errant behavior and teenage rebellion and all that sort of stuff. We've covered that connection elsewhere. So we're just gonna fast forward through all that and go, okay, at age 21, I'm out in California working as like a little maintenance guy in this Hindu temple, and I had these, you know, construction skills and stuff that were valuable to them. And I it afforded me enough time to do what I love doing, which is reading. I would I had enough petty cash to handle the uh maintenance needs of the of this temple, but I also could go down to the local used bookstore, pick up books and stuff. And so I was just reading, I was an avid reader, and that's when I found out about this study technology. And I at that time took steps to get myself trained in how to help people study, okay? And so that started, let's see, it would be it would have been 1989, early 1989. And so I was help helping people, students study in like a life skills classroom for a few years, and evenings and weekends type of thing. But it was the the real pivotal point was in 1992, which for anybody who's watching video clips of this, these books came out how to use a dictionary, how to use a dictionary to picture book for children, and grammar and communications with children, published by published by Applied Scholastics, right, which is the the educational licensing agency our nonprofit is uh licensed by and under which we operate. So it was 1992 that these books came out, and at that time I had parents enrolling their kids on these children's courses. And so I didn't need to study the books myself because as an educator, I was trained to help the student find whatever they're having difficulty with and get them to help them to understand what they're studying. And here I've got people enrolling on this thing, and the and the first course, the dictionary course, takes up different ways that words can be used, often referred to as parts of speech, such things as nouns and verbs and all that sort of thing. And uh, that's when I found out that a noun is not a person, place, or thing. It's actually a word that's being used to name a person, place, or thing. And it that seems like a very subtle difference, but it's important when you get into learning new vocabulary and so forth, right? And practicing with words. Okay, fine. So then when my first student on that course got to the section on verbs, I'm reading their example lessons that they have to give. And it's just like, okay, I hear some verbs that express action. Okay, and then like the next section is the section on verbs that give a state of being. There's no action. Like in a sentence, the t the tree is tall. Well, there's no action going on, it's just is tall. Tall is a word that describes the tree, and is is the verb that expresses just a state of being. And this is when the lights went off. First student getting through the section. That's when I realized what my fifth grade teacher had said that I that I misunderstood. She introduced the subject by saying she's going, we are now going to talk about beaver. And I had heard beavers. I mean, I don't know what I was doing. I was looking around the room, checking out some girls or something. I don't know how I was doing in fifth grade, you know, but I just I didn't understand what she said. One single misunderstood word, one misinterpreted word. I thought she said beavers. That's not what she said. Nothing else she said that day, a fifth grade teacher, made any sense whatsoever. I sat there just confused, blank, utterly, you know, trying to pretend like I knew what was going on, and I didn't. And then I subsequently forgot all about it. This is the way it goes with misunderstood words. Okay. Here I was at age, I must have been about 24 when those books came out. I think it was summer of 1992. And at age 24, I found out that I had huge gaps in my command of the English language. And I was a 3.5 uh GPA student or whatever it's called. You know, A's and Bs in English. I mean, I'm talking English literature, British literature, advanced placement English, which is like a college-level class in 12th grade, lots of science, lots of math. I could ace all that stuff, right? But these huge gaps in my fundamentals of the English language is what I now know was the beginning of my demise in the educational field and ultimately my demise turning into a productive adult, which which took which started in in 1992 when I filled Okay, wow. Shoot. Yeah, sort of froze up.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

I must have lost connection because of the Why we just continue from the A's and B's. I was an A's and B's student. Okay, let's see. So Because I can edit that in.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah, so let's see. Let me get my my train of thought here. I'm talking about fifth grade. Um because I've gone back to fifth grade, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Yeah. You mentioned you were an A and B student at that time, even though these confusions were correct.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Yeah. Wow, we missed all that. Well everything after that, huh?

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

No, it's so uh nothing about the Hindu temple or nothing?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Yeah, no, you started out with that. Okay. So but then you came back and you said the books came out, and Oh yeah. You know, I had the realization that she was saying B verbs. Right. And then you said, and I had all these confusions because that whole day was blank, you were in that area.

Look Learn Practice For Any Student

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Right, I gotcha. Okay, so I'm telling it from the perspective of me realizing me realizing at age 24 that I had huge gaps in my understanding. Right. Okay. So I could just start from that statement and and Yeah, absolutely. Okay, good. All right, we ready to roll?

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah, we're recording.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Okay, cool. So, so there I was at age 24, realizing that I had huge gaps in my understanding of the English language, and I got very interested in these books, right? The dictionary book and the grammar book for children. And I have delivered those two courses to more people than well, anybody I know. I've been doing this for decades, right? And uh the fact is that, and I I did additional training later on too. I I went to uh applied scholastics in St. Louis at the the worldwide headquarters and training center for educators there, and did a whole program in phonics delivery, which is a complete undercut, I just wasn't interested, was and still am interested in all things related to education. So I decided to, well, how do you how do you even teach people how to read in the first place? Right? That's not uh an area that I had spent a lot of time working in. So I decided to go get the professional training at it. And it has proven useful. I've run into groups of kids who were totally confused by the more advanced classes that their parents were expecting them to be able to do. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's back them up and just let's get them back on the little red hen, you know, the readers that just like let's back it up to that stuff, okay? And so I've I've worked a bit in that area. But most of the people that I've worked with over all the all these decades have been people who were already reading, already studying, already trying to advance on to higher levels, but they're hitting that barrier, they're hitting that ceiling where they just are struggling with study. It's always so hard, right? And all these years, I have never failed to take one of these people and find them to be complete experts and masters of these children's dictionary and grammar books, which which any student in a competency-based school would have mastered by the time they're 12 years old. You'd be introduced to it, therefore, eight to twelve year olds. And and that that would be, you know, eight years old, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. That's five full years that you would be expected to work with this material and just grill it over and over and over and practice with it. Look, learn, and practice the old formula that we have from our good choices book and Win a Happiness book. Look, learn and practice. If you if you were to look, learn, and practice for five full years on these basic, basic skills, the world is open to you. You can just go study anything you want and master it. And so that's that's where the passion comes from is just like taking taking the students. And of course, sure, I've been paid uh quite well to work with the the people who are really up against the brick wall when they're really causing trouble for themselves and others. You know, some of the some of our other episodes focused in on that type of thing. It always comes back to these basics, though. Okay. So whether the person is working hard on getting that that next level of certification in their field, maybe their master's degree, their this, that, or the other thing, or they're working really hard on getting arrested, right? Living off of their parents' dime, you know. Either one of those situations is resolved by just backing it up, filling in the gaps, moving them forward. It's it's it's 100% successful. I've never failed to crack a student's study case with these tools.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Awesome. And that's such a good testament to how widely applicable they are, like opposite ends of the spectrum. And you apply these tools and you get the same results. And I have to say, I just have to comment, the other day I was actually working with a 10-year-old doing, I forget which one, one of those books, but I was, as I was re-going through and helping him through these drills and whatnot, I noticed it's built right in there. The the practice, the the look, the learn. Like the way the books are laid out, you can't help but understand by looking first. It's so simple. And then you learn more about it. And then there's all these practical exercises to drill it. And I was like, oh my God, this is what Mike and I talk about all the time.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Yeah, these these books are absolute gold mined. The drills are built right into them. You can just take these things and just do the drill, just read, you just read it, drill it, do it, and practice, practice, practice. And I've been fortunate to have delivered this material to so many people. Now it's just whenever I want to go and study any new area, I know I can just dive into stuff and just roll up my sleeves and and I I can succeed at studying anything that I want to study because those those books give you the confidence to just know, okay, you go in, you figure stuff out, you clear it up, clarify things, look, learn, practice, look, learn practice, bingo bango. But you're you're not being held up by what's being said here. Does that really mean, you know, oh it's no, you can you can just take apart text rapidly, any text, and then translate it, translate that into now what do I have to do here? Okay, I gotta do this. Okay, let me fumble around with this thing. Uh now now you're into practice. Look, learn, practice, and get right into practicing and figuring things out. And uh, it's just made learning new subjects such a joy.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Yeah. Well, and bringing this back to your story and how this all came about, I know that you have mentioned many times that you were very adventurous in in your younger years and your youth, so to speak, and that this was for you a turning point, put you on a different trajectory. Can you talk about how you experienced that yourself a bit?

SPEAKER_00 17:17

But yeah. Well, when let's take it back to junior high school. Actually, the transition from elementary school to junior high school was critical because I went from a Catholic school, private school, where I was a mediocre student, to this public school, seventh grade. I guess there was some testing involved to figure out where to place me. And it turns out that what I was doing mediocre with in math in fifth grade, I'm now suddenly I'm like an advanced student. So I was put into this enriched math class in seventh grade. Okay. So what was hard for me in the fifth grade is now it's like, okay, well, we they backed, they backed it up. Now I'm studying stuff that we did two, three years ago. This is easy. And it became very easy for me at that point to just memorize things. And I went about memorizing math. And yeah, sure, I learned it, but I had no use for it and I wasn't trying to apply it to anything. So I just I just learned math and passed the tests, and then I just learned some more math and passed the test. I think I had studied the entire year of geometry in eighth grade in about three weeks, which then then what so so now what do you do? I have no passion, no purpose for being in school, for be for getting educated. So I found myself involved with other purposes and other people's purposes, which is to party, get to experiment with drugs, to find find out what what my capacity for liquor is. I'm talking about at age 13. It's ridiculous, right? But this is the environment that I was in. And and so I made all the bad choices in the world. Okay, it all comes back to my own personal choices. And so I chose all the wrong activities to get involved with. Sports was my only saving grace, and so I managed to maintain some sanity through my junior high and high school years by being involved in sports, specifically wrestling. It was the last and the most long-lasting one that I got involved in. But outside of outside of sports and outside of wrestling, I was just a disaster. I was I was finding out how much trouble I could get into all the time, okay, which is probably why I later became the specialist of handling the troubled teenager, is because I know that I know that situation extremely well. And I have compassion for that kid because I was that kid. And and I spent my entire adult life learning how to take that situation apart and put that person back together again and put that person on the road towards being in control of their own life and and navigating their own career path. And that's that's that's why you and I are working together now.

Questions Links And Goodbye

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Yeah, absolutely. And it's it is awesome to see that happen. The the almost magical transformation by just applying these simple tools. So great. I think there's some great takeaways in this for parents about how to go about helping ensure that their child is able to understand things by just doing simple things. It's not like there has to be some drastic measure. These books you talked about, learning how to learn, learning how the language works. They open so many doors and uh and have for now for at least thousands of people, probably a lot more. So yeah. So, okay, great. Well, thank you everybody for listening. If you have any questions, of course, always reach out to us. Check out the show notes for links to books that Mike mentioned and in ways to get in touch with us. And we'll see you in the next episode.