From Numbness to Conversion: A Teacher's Confession w/ Betsy McClellan | The Furrows

Betsy Brown McClellan spent over a decade teaching medieval history and humane letters in the Great Hearts network—watching students encounter saints, suffer through Socratic seminars, and walk out of her classroom different people. 

In this episode, she traces her own story: from a rich homeschooled childhood into a season of spiritual and intellectual numbness, through a college awakening, and into a classroom conversion she never anticipated. 

What's in This Episode:

• How Betsy's transition from homeschool to public school left her desensitized—intellectually and spiritually
• The role of college, Dr. Peter Kreeft, and learning that pursuit itself is the point
• How teaching eighth grade medieval history accidentally led to Betsy's own Catholic conversion
• What a generation of students dealing with social media, COVID, and loneliness taught her about the healing power of great books
• Why Socratic discussion, not social-emotional programming, is the activity that actually unifies intellectual and moral formation

                                                                                                                                                  .

Chapters:

• 00:00: Welcome and introduction to Betsy McClellan
• 09:47: Homeschooling, early reading, and the first signs of numbness
• 19:14: What was at the center of your education growing up?
• 25:24: College, Dr. Peter Kreeft, and learning to pursue truth
• 35:15: Writing, poetry, and becoming a liberal arts student
• 44:18: How Betsy became a teacher
• 51:30: Teaching eighth grade and medieval history
• 01:00:42: Students, the supernatural, and a generation in crisis
• 01:12:38: Socratic discussion and the healing power of the classroom
• 01:19:55: The community of teachers and a closing poem

                                                                                                                                                  .

Resources Mentioned:

• City Nave by Betsy K. Brown
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• The Dignity of Dependence by Leah Libresco Sargeant
• Arcadia Education
• Classical Learning Test

Hosted by Ryan Klopak (Arcadia Education) and Alex Julian (CLT). The Furrows podcast features leaders in classical education who have been transformed by classical education.

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:09

Welcome to the Furrows Podcast, where we have conversations with classical educators who have been transformed by classical education. My name is Ryan Klopak. I'm the director of Search with Arcadia Education, and I am joined by my co-host, Alex Julian, who is the director of the classical baccalaureate program for CLT.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Nailed it that time. Very good.

SPEAKER_04 0:32

Thank you so much. It took a couple reps, but we finally got it in. But that really wasn't that important because the most important part of the show is the person who is sitting to Alex's right. That is Miss Betsy Brown McClellan. Actually, should I just call you Betsy McClellan? I know her as Betsy Brown. Before she met the man of her dreams and got married and became Betsy McClellan. Betsy McClellan is someone who I spent uh probably my most critical years of my life uh teaching with. Um she was one of my master teachers, someone who I learned how to uh teach medal medieval history from, someone I learned how to teach he man uh he made letters from. Uh but I think really, more than anything, she's the one who I learned what the classical liberal arts from and what it meant to embody um that kind of education and be that sort of teacher who was going through that ongoing transformation with the students in the classroom. Um so I'm very, very excited to have you on today, Bessie. Thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04 1:52

Okay, so the deal with this show is we like to do a bit of an autobiography of Gustin's confessions, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Perfect.

SPEAKER_04 2:01

Tracing through memories of what you were as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

I was born a selfish baby.

SPEAKER_04 2:06

Okay, so let's talk about you as a baby. Maybe not quite that far back, but uh I yeah, so I do want to know a little bit about uh who was Betsy the kid uh prior to whatever her encounter with classical uh education was. Um just just give us a thumbnail sketch of who you were.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Sure. Yeah, I don't think I ever heard the term classical education until I was in college, but thank goodness my parents were giving me the best of it from a young age because we read together all the time. I was homeschooled for the majority of the elementary school years, and so we were reading books like Charlotte's Webb, Johnny Tremain. I read The Grapes of Wrath in late middle school. Uh, and so I knew that there was something in these books that was helping me understand what a good life looked like. Um, but I don't think I really could have put any of that into words. I just liked to read and I liked to write. I liked to take poems and and make my own versions of them. I liked to hear songs and write my own. I wasn't very concerned with the big picture, which as a child makes sense. Um, but I I did love those things. Um, and so that that was a really good start. I I think though that what ended up starting to happen to me in high school was that I wasn't um, I was challenged in certain ways and not challenged in other ways. I switched into public school. Um, I did a lot of writing, which is great, but I kind of started to I just think that I saw education as something I was good at, something I liked. It was easy for me. Um, but I wasn't um I I don't think that I was really looking into anything I was doing uh with very much receptivity, if that makes sense. I was reading a book recently um by Leah Labresco Sargent called The Dignity of Dependence, and she gives this image of uh how leprosy is something that takes away your senses, right? And you don't feel anymore. And I think there was some bit of that, but in a spiritual and emotional sense for me, where I was somewhat desensitized. Um, I don't remember uh reading books and experiencing a lot of compassion or curiosity about how it could transform me. Um, I was more interested in, I think, a combination of being successful, being liked. Uh now we're back to Augustine's confessions, right? I wanted to love and be loved, um, not unique. Uh, and that's perfectly fine. I think that's the human experience, right? But for me, it was it got to the point where by the time I hit college, I was kind of an agnostic who was just somewhat self-conscious, but also just liked books and it's kind of coasting, I guess, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 4:57

Um when did you go from homeschool to public school?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Junior year of high school.

SPEAKER_03 5:02

That's uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Uh there was there were good things about it, and they were things about it that weren't so great for me too. You know, it was a it was a real mixed bag. Um I was really susceptible to just I mean, I I found I found a friend group and I was just obsessed with making sure that I fit in, you know, because I I hadn't really had a lot of experience with group dynamics or conflict or anything of that nature. So there was an adjustment period there for sure.

SPEAKER_04 5:30

You use the word desensitize, which I think is really interesting because uh we just filmed an episode where we talked about having a school experience where there were very vivid memories. Mine I I can remember very few of them, and I can think of a word desensitize, but that sounds actually very familiar to what I remember. Yeah. Um, do you remember is it even possible to uh recall if there were touchstones moments where you just stopped caring?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yeah, I think so. Um there was a lot of community transition in my family growing up, a lot of switching schools, switching churches, that kind of thing. Um, and I think there came a point where I was really, really tired, especially of switching from church to church to church, and just declared myself not religious anymore because I saw a lot of hypocrisy around me. And I thought, why would I want to identify with this at all? And that was right around junior, senior year of high school. That I think that accumulation of five or six years of seeing that as a pattern in people uh that I'd known was just, I was really fed up with it. And I just said, no, I would just rather accumulate experiences and have a good time and not really, I don't care whether or not anything's good or true or beautiful. I wouldn't have been able to use those buzzwords, but that was exactly what happened. I remember distinctly my senior year of high school saying, I'm not claiming anything anymore as as certain or even as worth discovering as certain. Um, I don't think I could have made that that subtle difference between those two things. But I do remember saying, well, I'm an agnostic now. I remember making that choice. And a lot of it had to do with just wanting to pursue whatever was fun and pleasurable in the moment and being rebellious and hypocritical and very typical, you know, teenager things like that. So I think that does that answer your question?

SPEAKER_04 7:32

Yeah, so the spiritual numbness was uh running parallel to the intellectual numbness going at the same time. So it wasn't uh like just I'm becoming more or less interested in God and becoming more or less interested in things altogether.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Right, right. I and I think um just teaching was eventually the thing that really transformed that in me. Uh, but it started in college uh because I went to a very small liberal arts school in New York City. Um I remember looking back recently at some of my annotations, though. Uh there were some very serious things that we read and tragic things. And some of my early annotations were my books, are just like, I am embarrassed about who that person is. I'm laughing at things that are not funny, and I'm not laughing at the things that are funny. It's like, come on, where does that come from? Um, but that was part of it, I think, was just my um my numbness to a lot of things started to shift. I fell in love with uh philosophy and reading and literature again in college, and I started working really hard. And so I think that for me the transformation was intellectual first before it was emotional and spiritual. But then as soon as I finished college, I realized it's not just a hobby anymore. Um, and teaching really put me in a place of realizing there's something really serious and human here that's going on. Um, this isn't just about like, oh, I'm a person who likes books and I'm good at it. And so I'm gonna teach people how to do the thing that I like and then I'm good at it. It was something far more, but I didn't realize that until I entered the classroom and I stood in front of everybody instead of sitting in the chairs.

SPEAKER_03 9:13

And I definitely want to spend some time there. Um but when you went into public high school, was it something you wanted to do? What were you clamoring for that? And your parents were like, okay, here you go.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Or we were all open to it at that point, I think. I'm the oldest of five kids, and my mom was busy and pretty tired. And so by the time I was 16, uh, we just took it year by year, and that was the decision that we made. Um, just kind of made it easier on the family. Um, so yeah, I don't think anybody was really opposed to it. Um it was just what happened at that point.

SPEAKER_03 9:50

Do you know if the intellectual kind of numbness, spiritual numbers? I know, I know there was like some moving around and all that. But was that made worse when you went into school or did that already start in the homeschooling space too?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

I think the homeschooling space started out being a really rich community. Uh-huh. And then when that community fell away and it was a lonely place to be, um, I was ready to fill that vacuum again. And I filled it with some great friends, but a lot a lot of us were pretty aimless. I in particular, at least I could speak for myself, felt pretty aimless at that point. And um, and so yeah, I don't think that it started because I was I think it I guess it started because I was lonely in a sense, and just bored and thrilled to to fill that space that had been empty for a few years at that point. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Yeah. Uh one of the episodes we we filmed recently, the we were kind of asked exploring this question of what was at the center of your schooling experience? You know, and you were saying friends, right? And the guest was saying really it was teachers, at least early on. Um do you was there Can you remember where that may have shifted or where there was was it always friends that kind of was at the center, even in a homeschooling community? Was it teachers? Was it your parents?

SPEAKER_00 11:28

That's a good question. I think I started out with my parents at the center, for sure, and they both taught me so much, and I gained my just real wonder and curiosity from both of them and my desire to discover things. Um as I got older, my parents were more on the sidelines. And I think at some critical stages where I needed to get closer with adults that could have been mentor figures, I just didn't. Um I think between the ages of you know 10 and 20, I didn't really confide in any adults. And I look back on that now and I think, oh, that's actually that's actually a lack in my life. At the time it felt completely normal. That's part of the desensitization, is like I only confide in one or two friends, and I laugh at at suffering in a way that is flippant, and I don't really care if things are right or wrong. I want to please myself. Like that's how it came out. But additionally, the part that I realized when I became a teacher is oh, I have kids telling me things I never would have told an adult ever in a million years, but I'm so glad they are because and they were incited to do so because they were reading books with an open heart and they were listening to their teachers with an open heart, and there was a sense of vulnerability there. I can't say exactly where it came from, but the students were willing to do that in a way that I never was. And that amazed me, you know, and and I saw their transformation, not simply from talking to just me, but me and a large number of teachers that uh you've experienced this as teachers too. We've shared some of these students, students who want to ask really painful and hard questions and they're not sure who to ask. And so, hey, I know I know Mr. Klopack and Mr. Julian are willing to talk about that stuff because we talk about it when we read The Great Gadspee or when we read Augustine's Confessions. So I'm just gonna go for it. And looking back, I wish I'd done that, you know. Um, I'm so glad they did because some of them are adults now, and I've seen their growth from that openness.

SPEAKER_04 13:35

So did you know you were numb or unhappy, or was that really only in retrospect that you discovered it?

SPEAKER_00 13:42

In middle school, I knew I was lonely. In high school, I thought I'd fixed that problem. I was like, I'm fine, you know. Um it this the suffering was was not uh out in the open so much. Um, and that was true for a lot of people in my family. When I finished college, a lot of us were able to finally open up and say, hey, I was actually suffering, and I just wasn't honest about it. Um but I think looking at suffering as more than just like feeling unpleasant is an important like philosophical distinction here because suffering includes feeling unpleasant. But for me, a lot of the suffering was just what I was missing and didn't even know I was missing. Um, and a lot of that had to do with honesty, with challenging myself, with um living unselfishly, just things that I wasn't doing. That uh I mean, evil is a lack, right? And so there was a void there, and that was the type of suffering I was dealing with, not the type of suffering where I could say, Oh, I know exactly what I've lost. But it was just, it was just not there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:47

So interesting, parents are the primary educators for a good while, and then that stopped. You know, I uh I have boomer parents, and their attitude was like, Oh, you're a teenager now, uh the basement now now go be in the basement by yourself, and we don't, you know, we'll leave you alone.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

That's what I did too.

SPEAKER_03 15:09

Yeah, because you're gonna rebel anyway, so we'll just like uh cut you off before you're gonna rebel.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

And you know, now now having experienced a lot of what families are doing from the school perspective and um having my own kids, it's like no, they need you throughout their life in different ways, but at no point should it be like, hey, teenager, you're com you're on your own. You you live under my roof, you need to do these things, but otherwise uh you're you're kind of on your own. Um the kind of the happiest kids I see are the ones who can go to their parents as teenagers and ask deep, difficult questions and confide in them. So was it part of that now looking back or yeah, I I think so.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

I think that what comes to mind is oh, I lost it. Hold on, let me remember. Oh, right, okay. So one of my favorite college professors, Peter Kraft, helped me make a distinction that I'd never made. I think I assumed that if there is absolute truth in the world, then it was easy to see and easy to believe. So it exists and it's easy. Um and if it's not easy, then it must not exist. If it's hard to find, if it's hard to access, if it's hard to believe, then what's the point? Uh and Dr. Kraft was able to show me through his philosophy classes wait, that's actually not how it works at all, right? We are pursuing like the idea of pursuit. Uh, we're pursuing truth, we're pursuing what is real. And certainty doesn't mean that you wake up every day and feel like God exists, or you wake up every day and you feel like doing the right thing. I mean, certainty uh simply means I am going to continue to pursue that God is real, or that there is such a thing as compassion and taking care of people, and it's possible to do that. And there's more to life than just being an animal, right? Uh and so when I I think if I had realized earlier that pursuit was okay, uh then I would have tried that, right? I think I was afraid of asking questions, I was afraid of being wrong, I was afraid of just being met with, well, why don't you believe that yet? Or why don't you you you should fit. I I I there's the whole growth mindset thing that we talk about a lot in teaching was actually huge for me, right? Um because what that means is I think that's what leads teenagers to be able to be open with adults, is they don't think that they're either going to be affirmed immediately or shut down immediately, but that there's actually going to be a pursuit together of, oh yeah, that is a hard question. Let's explore that. And I love you enough to explore that with you. And I love you enough to tell you that you're right, it's not easy. And maybe it's easier for me now that I'm 36 than it was when I was 16, but that doesn't mean it's easy, right? So I guess that's the that's the roundabout way of answering that question. You know, it's just that's a really, really important distinction for me is that life is more like climbing purgatorio than it is like being at the top and already having the map of the universe and saying, Well, I've got it all right here, you know, every realm that Dante made, I know it back to front. It's like, no, you're in it. You are inside of it all the time. You're a human being. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:51

Yeah, that's interesting. Sometimes when we talk with educators about kids, um the kids turn off because they feel like well, if I'm if I'm not interested in this, then I it'd be disingenuous for me to pursue it.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah.

unknown 19:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

Right? Uh or if I don't feel this way, it'd be disingenuous for me to try to feel this way. Uh and just explaining to kids that part of habituation is taking this ironic stance of, well, that seems good even if I don't feel like it is. And so I'll pretend like it is and I'll act like it is until it's until I feel until I'm like desensitized or sensitive resensitized. I like it.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

I like that word. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:41

Yeah. Um and and so I when I was teaching, I would tell kids that like, look, uh studies have shown that, and everyone knows this now, like if you smile, you'll start to feel happy. If you frown, you'll start to feel sad.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Right.

SPEAKER_03 19:57

If you sit in my class, like you're at the beach and you're falling asleep, you're not learning. So, you know, that's why I care about your posture so much. You know, that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:08

Um, but is that kind of similar to what Craeft was telling you about pursuing?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

I think so. Because if uh feelings are good, feelings are a gift, but if that's all you are, then the most important thing is to express exactly what you're feeling all the time, right? Which for me in math class would be I am at the beach, you know, and I'm going to drink a painkiller and not pay attention. Right. Um, but if we are more than our momentary fleeting sensations of like, oh, this is hard. Oh, this is uncomfortable, then we can we can work. And then eventually the work can be joyful. And I think if something is actually good, it eventually will create joy in a person, but it's not always quick, right? So yeah, I think that's a big part of it for sure. Um and yeah, playing pretend, I think, is a chapter title in mere Christianity, potentially. I remember when I read about that, and that was more with how you treat others, right? Pretend that you know the person in front of you is acting worthy of, you know, being treated with respect or something like that. And I was like, oh, so that's not a lie.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

That's not lying? I thought it was lying, you know, and I mean which it's kind of a twisted way. You have to untwist it and realize like what it really means to be genuine is a much larger panorama of things than just whether or not you express your emotions, right?

SPEAKER_04 21:40

Tell me a little bit more about uh Dr. Cray as a person. What is he like? What is it like being in that class and writing?

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Oh, God bless that man. He's been old for like 45 years. Um and I I just I love him so much. Uh he would walk in in his powder blue suit with his beautiful smile on his face, and he would just say any questions. And that was all he said. And then the rest of the class was just us asking questions. And because we had we had read whatever we'd read for the week before, and then it was our job to start the dialogue. So he was the first teacher I ever had who wasn't just standing up there assuming that it was his job to form those questions, but that it was our job. And he was very funny. He told ridiculous jokes and it was really sweet. Um he loved to go surfing, even though he was in his 70s at the time. I think he's in his 90s now. Um and yeah, also one of the first Catholics I ever met and grew to respect. And eventually I converted to Catholicism many years later. And I sent him an email and I said, I think you were the first person who was Catholic who I really loved and respected. So thank you. And he sent two-line email back that just said, God does funny things. He wrote an ass into Jerusalem. So that's really the only story you need to know what Peter Kraft is like. So I am so grateful that I got to be the kid in the front row of his class asking questions for four years.

SPEAKER_04 23:12

How did you see his Catholicism coming out? I'm assuming he wasn't just uh proselytizing or anything.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

No, he wasn't, but he his anthropology was really good. And he had such a crisp and lucid way of communicating it. Uh he would say things that just shocked me and amazed me that were so simple and yet changed my point of view on something that I'd never thought about before. Like he said, pornography doesn't show too much of the human person. It shows too little. And I'm just sitting there like, wait, what? That that's crazy. Yeah, those are the kind of things that he and and he was so good at teaching logic, he uh he could just in one or two sentences, he just had a gift for that uh of speaking truth about what it means to be human. Um so I didn't really know that that was his Catholicism speaking at the time. I just thought he's really old and smart and he's a good teacher, and he's kind of famous, and that's cool that I'm in class with someone who's kind of famous. You know, I didn't it took me years to realize how how lucky I was to get just sat down right there in 2007 in front of this man, you know, who would have thought that that would happen to me?

SPEAKER_03 24:28

So we could spend this whole time talking about Kraft. Uh, but I want I want to know how did you go from being in public school and high school, kind of dispirited, desensitized, to picking the right college. Like that's a really hard, it seems like that's a hard thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah, my parents kind of persuaded me to try it out. And because it was in Manhattan, it wasn't that hard for me to say. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was very grateful. I look back on that, it was probably the most important thing they ever did for me, honestly, was convince me to go to that school. Because I don't think I would be married, Catholic, living in Arizona, or as happy as I am today if that hadn't happened to me first. Everything was dominoes. So thanks, mom and dad. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

All right. Well, that's problem solved then. But wait, no, hold on. Problems not solved. Because so it was it was the lore of Manhattan that got you there in that space. Yes. Okay. It was.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Um, and as soon as I showed up, I realized I I wanted to study journalism at a state school because I just loved to write. And but I very quickly saw how important it was to have a well-rounded liberal arts education when I got there. I said, wow, if I had gone to OU or OSU, I never would have taken Socratic logic. I never would have taken Plato and Aristotle. I never would have taken probably even Shakespeare. You know, and and I was, I just loved my classes so much that uh, and I loved my friends, of course, right? And so it took me about one semester to change my mind.

SPEAKER_03 26:06

Yeah, isn't that amazing, the whole like uh No, no, no, go. No, no, no. You want to go?

SPEAKER_04 26:13

No, you're already three-quarters of the way down the track. Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 26:18

Universities want to sell themselves by being uh giving you the menu that they think you want, coming in as an as an unformed or underformed 18-year-old. Um but then and you and you were that person, but then within a semester of a university saying these are the absolute best classes we could offer you, and you are going to take them, uh, it totally shifted you.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yeah, it made me realize that I don't always have the best ideas. Very simple. It's a really important thing. Yeah. Yeah. And that I was becoming the kind of writer I wanted to be because I was doing all this reading and exploring New York City and having challenging conversations with people and meeting professors that I really respected. You know, it was making me the person that I had wanted to be, but it had been like really nebulous in my mind. It was like starting to sharpen that. So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:22

Okay. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because the question that I ate that I was going to ask was uh how did your writing change uh as you were going through college? Because if I know anything about you, it's you and writing are almost one in the same. Um, how did what were some of the changes you noticed?

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Yeah, good question. Um, I was already writing poetry by the end of high school. I kept writing it through college. My poetry just exploded in college. I wrote so much more of it. And not all of it was good. Actually, most of it wasn't good, but it was it was uh it was pursuing, right? It was making I was making progress. Um I I think how did my writing change? Again, I think that the most important thing I did in college was not what I what I um not the ex not what I um oh not the it was the input, not the not what I gave out. Uh if that makes sense, right? And so I just wrote all kinds of essays about everything from you know Socrates to Tarantino. I was just having fun, but I was learning a ton every time I wrote something because I was constantly, you know, going to museums, watching movies, reading books, going to poetry events, you know, that kind of thing. And so the writing I did was it was a little bit like like going to boot camp, you know, like you don't go to boot camp because it's the end goal. You go to get strong and to learn a lot and to be messy, and you know, that that's what I did. And so uh my poetry evolved. It looked like Whitman, it looked like Ginsburg, it looked a tiny bit like Robert Frost, thank goodness. Um, but it was just like, oh, what can I try? What can I try? What can I try? What can I try? So uh that's what happened to my writing in college was it was informed constantly by um writers and formers of culture over the last few centuries and few millennia, you know. Nice. That's great. And that it's not my babysitter, so I am not answering it. All right. Yeah. And then after college, I think I had done enough of that input to start creating things that I still look back and say, oh, okay. Yes, I would show that to people, and I wouldn't have to say, Oh, I was 21 when I wrote that. You know, I wouldn't have to make that disclaimer anymore. Like something that had a little bit more of a lasting quality to it started to happen after after I finished undergrad, like during grad school years.

SPEAKER_04 29:58

So you mentioned your annotations being very cringeworthy before. Did your annotations change in college too?

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Uh I think they did. I've used the same copy of Confessions for 15 years. And so I have the earliest annotations that are like, he's a Gnostic, lol. You know. And my and then my new it's like so it's really dumb. Uh and then my new annotations, which are slightly better. Uh and uh it's it's kind of fun to see the evolution of that, you know. Um but but yeah, again, I I want to emphasize college was really just me taking everything in. I had the energy to do that. I don't really think that I could have uh yeah, I don't think I became a real adult until after all that was over.

SPEAKER_03 30:47

Okay. Yeah. What were the most formative experiences for you in college in terms of the texts that you read?

SPEAKER_00 30:56

I think we we read a lot of Plato and Aristotle. That was really important. I think that helped me form those conversations that I described to you with Kraft about uh what it means to pursue truth, even if it's challenging to do so. You know, asking questions. What is, how do you define this term, right? Um, what does it mean for something to be good? The first time I read Confessions, the parts about friendship and ordered loves was really significant for me. And other than that, there were so many good classes. It's very, very hard to narrow it down. But I always think of Augustine, I always think of Plato and Aristotle, and then I had an amazing poetry teacher named Robert Jackson who probably is one of the most definitely is one of the most influential teachers there that I had, for sure. Uh and yeah, it's got me thinking about talking about it.

SPEAKER_03 31:58

Because he's pretty well known in this movement now, and he's not here, so we can talk about him whenever we want.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 32:05

Um yeah, but I just I don't think I think because he's such a humble guy and he's not teaching right now, people don't really understand how incredible of a teacher he was, or you know, his grasp of poetry and all of that. So uh yeah, can we can we spend a few minutes like talking about that?

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Oh, he's he's one of the best teachers I've ever known. Yeah he just knows people really well. Like I was always so impressed with his his attention that he paid to us as human beings and his affection and care for us and just remembering who we are and what we were about as individuals. Um and so that was part of it, was just relationally, he was so gifted, still is. Uh, he also just has a way with he just has a catalog of beautiful things in his mind that he remembers and loves and that he's always looking forward to talking about. Uh, but he never divorces that from the human person, right? And so there is this real sense, uh, and that's I I my husband and I went out for drinks with him just several months ago, and it was the same way. We can sit down and and in 15, 20 minutes, I can walk away and say, Oh, that conversation is gonna keep me going for for days. It was just really encouraging, um honest, and uh yeah, he he's a very, very good man, and I'm grateful for him because he convinced me to move to Arizona and teach. So it's his fault that I did this thing for so long.

SPEAKER_03 33:34

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:35

Well, were there any poets that he particularly helped you to love more, or did he form you as a poet yourself?

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Yeah, definitely Robert Frost. We talked about him all the time and read his prose and his poetry, and I still I still quote Frost a lot when I'm writing about poetry or talking about it with my students. Um, so that was, I mean, Robert Frost is the number one for sure. But he also introduced me to Richard Wilbur, he introduced me to Philip Larkin, uh 20th century poets uh that I had never heard of before. And uh yeah, those were but I uh it'll always be frost when people ask me that question. It's hands down.

SPEAKER_03 34:19

And for his style, was it like um you're discussing a lot of poetry, you're reciting poetry, you're reading it out loud, all of the above, or it was very balanced.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Um, we read a lot, of course, we talked about it. We wrote our own poems, we recited poetry, we memorized and recited, uh, and we wrote papers about the poems we wrote, so we kind of annotated our own work too. And one of I have lots of catchphrases from him, but one that I remember early on is that poetry is essentially an oral art form. It's not primarily about what's in a book, it's about what is spoken. You know, Homer told these stories, and uh people heard these stories around fires and they passed them down through song or through chants. And so poetry is incomplete if it's merely an intellectual exercise. It is it is meant to be experienced musically in a sense, um, and not necessarily with the actual sheet music, but I just mean aloud. Yeah. Right. And so the the memorization part was very significant for me. And then reading our own work aloud together when we were in class. Uh, and yeah, it it was there was so much, it was very lively and helped me understand what poetry was more completely than I ever had before. And it fit too, because I was also working in like the slam poetry uh clubs downtown for the summer. I was an intern at Bowery Poetry Club, and so I saw how it all kind of fit together, whether it was like urban slam poetry written last week or the epics, there it had this thing in common where people are rallying around something that they're hearing and appreciating, um, mainly with their ears and their hearts, and sometimes their eyes, and that's great too. But you know, the more you memorize, the more you've got forever.

SPEAKER_04 36:10

So how would you get into teaching?

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Uh Rob called me and said, Teach. And I said, Okay, I guess I will. Um I did not.

SPEAKER_04 36:19

Was that even on your radar? Just the idea of teaching after college?

SPEAKER_00 36:23

I originally wanted to get paid to write uh as a journalist, but then had a few conversations with professors and realized, oh, I can write whatever I want if I'm teaching. And if I'm being paid to write, I'm just gonna have to write whatever other people want me to write. So I'm gonna teach. So that's how it started. And um I wanted to do college, uh, I want to teach college, and uh I have an MFA, so eventually maybe I will. That's why I got it originally, was so I could teach college. Had no idea how much is happening in kids before college. Again, part of that is because of my own experience where so much of me had been shut off before college. I did not realize what was possible. And then it was even hard for me to leave teaching fifth graders. You know, they're young, but we we got to do so much together. And I I knew I wanted to move into older grades, and I did. But after that first year of teaching fifth grade, uh, which was what Rob recruited me to do, I thought I never could have imagined that so much intellectual and emotional depth could all just be happening in this room with these 10-year-old kids. And so good.

SPEAKER_04 37:38

The fourth grade and fifth grade to me was shocking. I didn't realize how much was going on uh behind their little eyes. Yeah. There is a lot of depth. There's so much depth. When when did you start to notice it?

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Um I had kids on the playground asking me to read their novels, and that was really fun. Um, and so I got to read a couple of a couple of chapters of of books that they were working on together, which I did that at their age too, but I was so honored. I'm like, they want me to look at that? That's so cool. Um, we read aloud together a lot. Uh, I remember reading the end of the red where the red fern grows. Oh man. And we were reading in the voices of characters, right? And so one of the little boys was playing the boy as the dogs died, and this boy is literally weeping as he reads the lines, you know, why did the dogs have to die? And I'm just sitting here, oh man, this is really real right now. Um, or reading the end of the hobbit out loud together and grieving the characters together. Um, just I think seeing that their ability to um yeah, to really see what's good and to see its loss as something that's really worth being sad over. Like there was like real high highs and real low lows. It wasn't just, oh, I'm here with kids trying to make sure they know how to read. Like, no, we were experiencing what it means to be a person in this world together. Um, and my husband, future husband, was teaching in the room next door too. Little did I know. So there's a lot of good things going on that first year in Arizona.

SPEAKER_04 39:10

Yeah, I we taught uh where the red furn fern grows for fifth graders also, and that was uh day the that scene we just had to shut it down pretty much for the rest of the day because everybody knew what was about to come.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:25

Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting because even the kids knew it was coming because it was sort of legendary, yeah, the story. Yeah, but there was something so intensely real about it that everybody wanted to participate in it, even though they knew it was gonna just crush them, which I thought was super interesting.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

I think that's so important though. I mean, just that that point itself, we live in a consumer culture where it's like, oh, well, I've already consumed that, so um, you know, it it's not gonna be as exciting as the thing I I haven't consumed yet. Uh whereas I think for most of human history it was like, no, you had the few really precious stories, and you went you return to them over and over again.

SPEAKER_04 40:15

I mean, that happens in your friendships where you're sitting down, you're having a beer, and you're you're talking about all those things that happened, even though you've talked about them a thousand times before. But yeah, there's a there's a reliving, there's a memory that's being accessed that I don't know why it's so much more satisfying than uh that consumeristic thrill, maybe not in the sensual way, but they're I mean that's what we want, really.

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Yeah. Yeah. Chesterton says God's younger than we are, right? Because he's watches the sunrise every morning or makes it rise every morning. Both, right? Yeah. Um, and my son thinks the same things are funny every day, right? And he's six months old and he's much happier than most adults.

SPEAKER_03 40:59

Yeah, that's that's neat. Yeah. But even that that point you made about sharing the same stories over and over again, I think a lot of people don't talk that way anymore. Like younger people, you get together and you're like, what are you watching now? Or what's the new thing you're doing that we haven't talked before? Like what's new with you rather than reminiscing or storytelling.

SPEAKER_04 41:22

Um it's probably harder when you have less and less experiences to draw from.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Yeah. Well, I think though that's part of what made teaching transform me more than being a student. Because when you're a student, it's all about what's new. But when you're a teacher, you have to teach the same thing multiple times, usually. Um, and I was lucky enough to teach many things, but that I still got to teach the same thing at least two years in a row, and sometimes four, five, six, seven years in a row. And that's where the depth happened was like the first time I think I told someone this very recently. The first time I read Crime and Punishment and A Tale of Two Cities, I didn't catch 90% of the humor, of the pathos, of the of the hints of what was to come, right? My favorite time reading a book is usually the third time at this point. And to be able to say I've read a book more than once, I think shows that my growth because I'm not just checking things off, like you said, and seeing how many I can read and reading it because people told me I should, which I still do that sometimes, and then I have to pause and say, wait, why am I doing this? Yeah, was this is this important, or is it just an accomplishment that you know is actually empty? So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:46

It's good.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:47

So when did you switch to high school and why?

SPEAKER_00 42:51

Um I was with the fifth graders. Well, I should back up. I taught preschool in New York City for one year. That was fun. That was that was really fun. Uh little kids singing in French, you know. And while I was in grad school, it was a good fit. And then I did one year of fifth grade in Arizona, and then I moved to the school where I taught for a decade. And during that decade, I started with eighth graders, and then the school grew as I grew. And so I taught every grade from eighth through twelfth, and I basically moved up with the same students for the whole the whole time. Yeah, we're gonna have to talk about that.

SPEAKER_04 43:26

Um and I know eighth grade included medieval history.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 43:31

Yeah. If anyone knows anything about you, teaching that class just rocked your world. It did.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

Oh, why? Oh, there I if I were to name the top three reasons, I've thought this through because it was so important to me. One was that it I accidentally catechized myself and became Catholic. Oops. Yeah, that was great. Um, so just have being forced to talk to talk about and teach about the saints four times in a row, five days a week. It you know, it's gonna it's gonna infect you eventually, right? Um, and so that was huge. It changed me spiritually. Um, the second was just that eighth graders are at such a crux in their life. Yeah, I was able to see their suffering. I mean, it made the wet the red fern incident feel like small potatoes, right? I mean, I suddenly I my co-workers and I had kids dealing with uh suicide attempts and family trauma and uh the student who was killed in a plane crash. And so I I just there was no way for me to ignore or be set desensitized to suffering anymore if I was going to be a responsible adult. Um and the desensitization was just gone too, because of the time that I'd spent, I think, with my really fantastic community of teachers, who that's really the third thing, was the adults that I was around were people that I admired and that I really that really amazed me and that that were doing things that I had never thought about before. Um like going to mass and to talking to kids and kids' parents about very serious things that were really important and realizing, like, oh, this is on the table, this is something we can do, is we can we can love people in this way. Like teaching is a human job. Uh, my friend Cammy uh Litchfield at the time was my first mentor in the Great Hearts Network, and she said, Teaching is a human job. That's probably the most important thing I ever heard. And so, yeah, there was there was the subject of medieval history, there were the kids, and then the teachers. It was just the perfect recipe for my own, I guess, conversion experience, really reversion slash conversion experience.

SPEAKER_04 45:50

I don't know if it was so much of this with that particular class that you taught, but I one of the things I really loved about eighth grade was it almost felt like a game. Um, as far as I knew a lot of kids came in desensitized or thinking they were more desensitized than they were, and they wanted to show you how cool and jaded they were. But it was almost like a game of like catching them unawares and off guard that something is actually really cool and drawing them into it. Um, I don't know if you've ever experienced that dynamic of uh need or feeling like you needed to surprise them or catch them off guard.

SPEAKER_00 46:31

I was caught off guard myself first. So as time went on, I can relate to that. Yeah. But at the beginning, I was right there with them. You know, I walked into that room anxious and nervous and not sure what to do. And by the end of that first year, and way definitely by the end of the second year, I I think that's why I was able to have those relationships with those students, is because they could tell that it was real for me too. You know, I I didn't walk in with um with a whole lot of idea of what was coming, and then it just hit me like a truck. Uh, and they could tell.

SPEAKER_04 47:09

You know, they're like, oh, this is this is new for her, too. I just want to know what truck she got hit by in medieval history. I mean, you mentioned a little bit of the saints, but were there particular stories or lessons?

SPEAKER_00 47:19

Yeah, I mean, there were there were let me think about this. Yeah, there were so many. Um early on, we would discuss monasticism. That was really big for them. Uh, I would tell them about the amount of time that trappists spend in silence, and some of them would look horrified, but so many of them looked hungry and like they didn't know they were hungry until that moment. And we would have little monk monk days where I would bring in all of my fake candles and turn them on, turn off the lights, turn on the Gregorian chant, and say the only thing you're allowed to do right now is read or color in these coloring pages from illuminated manuscripts, and that's all you can do. And if you need to ask to go to the bathroom, you have to write it to me on a post note. And um, just seeing them be really intrigued by what it means to live a simple life, a life where you work and you pray and you serve people, they were so interesting, interested in that. And I had a couple of friends who had uh actually spent some time in monasteries who came and they would do interviews with them in class and QA time, and and so seeing those students find something beautiful that was so different than what they'd ever known was really big. And then the saints, I mean, Joan of Arc, St. Francis, um, Augustine, we had a great time talking about them. Yeah. That was really big. And uh yeah, there were even when we talked about St. Francis, I told them the story about how Francis and Dominic uh allegedly saw each other in separate dreams, and then they saw each other on the street in Rome and they recognized each other and they gave each other a hug. And suddenly I had students raising their hand and saying, something like that happened to me. Something like that happened to me. I I just they started telling me these wild stories, and it it wasn't the attention-seeking kind of wild stories, it was like the actually um this happened to me.

SPEAKER_03 49:13

Can I tell you about like I I never would have said this otherwise if I didn't know another human being may have encountered it.

SPEAKER_00 49:19

Right. So I had kids telling me, you know, oh, I've yeah, I've I've had a dream that came true. I saw an exorcism, or oh yeah, I think I've dealt with the same thing that that saint dealt with in the desert. Like, oh, okay, well, let's let's slow down. But it became clear very quickly that these kids were, I mean, it's it's a tough, it was a tough generation. You know, they came of age during a period of time when I mean the the combination of what was happening to them with social media and COVID and everything was just so hard on them. And so I'm I'm just grateful I got to be there as one of this group of teachers who were available during that time to try to direct them to their families, to counselors, to whoever, you know, because there were dozens and dozens over the years that needed to say, I've never said this before, but fill in the blank. It just it happened every month or two, my whole career. So yeah. It was intense, but I loved it.

SPEAKER_04 50:20

And I'm I'm also remembering now why medieval history was so much fun to teach. It was the first time I, and I would imagine a lot of them, had a classroom, a subject that was dedicated to talking about a world that was just saturated in the supernatural. Exactly. Like that is what we're gonna talk about today. Um even with the architecture unit, um something which isn't uh immediately supernatural, when they became immersed in that unit and they were realizing the symbolism behind everything, and they were um getting to look at the the pictures of the cathedrals and the the statues and hearing the Gregorian chant as they're ex being exposed to these things for the first time. Um I think I think that was probably why so many suits that I taught underwent conversion at some point was because they had been uh forced to reckon with a world, maybe just for like a half second, that was animated by something more than just material cause and effect, and they believed it.

SPEAKER_00 51:34

Oh, certainly. Yeah. And honestly, if I look back, I taught a number of kids that could have identified as materialists, but the majority of them really didn't. Um, and that could mean a number of things. Sure, it meant that some of them were Christian or Muslim or Jewish, but more often than not, it meant that after their friend died, they tried to contact them through the supernatural realm or something like that, or they were playing around with wondering if this stuff was real, you know, and looking into it themselves. And I mean, sometimes it was something that had to do with what could be the occult potentially. Other times it was prayer. A lot of these kids were just, they they were like, something's out there, I just don't know what it is, you know. And it was usually very mysterious for them and sometimes aligned with a lot of a lot of emotional and mental health issues for them too. Um, other times aligned with a very powerful faith that wasn't always rooted in like, oh, I was raised in church, and I know this is true because I've always believed it was true, but just they knew that their suffering had to mean something. And so there was there was a faith there, even for kids who weren't very religious, I think.

SPEAKER_03 52:46

So I I think that that combination of medieval history and eighth grade, and I think that course like ties all three of us together. Because I think the first time we talked, we were talking about medieval history and resources, yeah, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 52:59

Help me with the homework. I don't know what to do for homework. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

Yeah. Um but sometimes when we do teacher training, there's there's this there's this habit you have to shock them out of because they don't realize they're doing it because it's like the water we're swimming in. And that habit is um we just psychoanalyze people from the past, or we automatically assume that we're superior to them. Right. And students do it all the time, but but we as adults do it too. Yeah. And so what's interesting about eighth grade and medieval history is these people are so different. They maybe even feel more different in some ways than studying like the Greeks and the Romans, because there's this like, I don't know, it that it's a pagan culture, and we kind of live in a pagan culture, and the heroes they have are heroes we talk about. Right. You know what I mean? So big empire and we live in the world. Right, but it's like, oh, the dark ages, you know, that's when people really couldn't get it together. Everything was falling apart and nothing good happened, right? And you and so when you start to say, like, no, let's study this individual or these individuals or this event and try to understand what it was like to be them and think like they thought, uh, then it's almost like you when you travel that far, it's almost like now you can finally look back at yourself almost from their vantage point and say, Oh, maybe where I'm at isn't as high or great or perfect as I thought it was. You know?

SPEAKER_00 54:45

Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a good way to describe it. Um I have to pause and read a poem because it's like five lines long. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 54:54

And it's related to the I mean, we're gonna get there anyway, so that's perfect. I I wrote this set this up by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:03

Sure. What are you reading? So this is my book, City Knave, which is my poetry collection that came out in 2023.

SPEAKER_03 55:09

And it's good. There it is.

SPEAKER_00 55:10

It is published by Whip and Stock. It is available on Whip and Stock and on Amazon, and maybe, maybe Target, I'm not sure. Um, but a lot of these, most of these were written while I was a teacher. A few of them were written in New York City, um, but most of them were written during teaching. But I keep on wanting to say how eighth grade connects with medieval history, and so I'm just gonna read this tiny poem instead of instead of rambling. Uh the poem is called Dark Ages, and it goes like this the young pagans band around the picnic table and scrawl inky runes into their hands with cheap pens. Around them the world falls and wonders if they will learn to rebuild it. So that's what was going on. They that they're not that different, you know.

SPEAKER_04 56:05

Did your kids make that connection that they were watching the world fall?

SPEAKER_00 56:13

Oh, absolutely. I certainly think. I think so. I think so. I mean many of them certainly did. I think.

SPEAKER_04 56:24

I think it at at least happened during COVID. Certainly.

SPEAKER_00 56:27

They didn't know it then. I yeah, and I wrote that poem long before, well not long before, but a couple of years before COVID. Um and I think yeah, I was definitely seeing what you're describing of like pagan culture. If that means worshiping things that are of the body or nature or uh even oneself in a way, if that's how we're defining pagan, then absolutely. Um and then the the students were yeah, they they they weren't able to fully express it, but I I think especially over the years, the ones that I saw all the way through senior year, they started to be able to communicate what I just communicated in their own words too.

SPEAKER_03 57:20

And I don't think we realized it at the time, but I mean you said this in another conversation that 2015 I think it was 2015, was like the first year where uh the cause of death for teens was it was high uh suicide was a more common cause of death than car accidents for like the first time.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

Yeah, I wish I could cite this more precisely, but I know that Jonathan Heid in the Anxious Generation pinpoints 2015 as the hinge point year. And that was the year I started teaching teenagers. And it was the year that uh I I think if you were to do the math, it was the first year that those kids would not have known life without their iPhones if their parents gave it to them at a young age because the iPhone came out in 07. So but whatever the case, there was a lot of things that just kind of converged that year. Yeah. Um and I saw it firsthand in so many people.

SPEAKER_03 58:21

Yeah, I think I think uh history will look back and see this like we look at everyone smoking indoors. Oh, definitely. Yeah, how dare they? Yeah. Strange. What? Uh and you're doing that and you're letting like children participate in that?

SPEAKER_00 58:38

Right. You know. They were accidentally the victims of a horrible experiment. Um, and were given tools that nobody has the capacity to use well, but especially not young people, right? Um and yeah, I saw that a lot, whether it was um and I heard about it a lot, whether it was video games or pornography or Instagram. I mean, those are the top three, uh, or group texts, let's put that in the top four. Yeah. Let's just put that where. They really should. Um and how many times I said to a teenage girl, did you talk to her face to face before you got to the point where you were on the verge of a mental breakdown? No. Why would I do that? And it's not really I it if if you grow up this way, you you've been taught that this is normal. And so a lot of these kids were completely confused. They they they had no idea, you know, that they were that they were distancing themselves from reality and from relationships in a way that was harming them really deeply.

SPEAKER_04 59:40

Yeah, and I guess COVID was like the full manifestation of that growing reality that they didn't realize they were living in.

SPEAKER_00 59:46

Well, yeah, that's when I saw kids get way better or way worse. Yeah. Depending on where they were at home, honestly, because all of a sudden they're at home. And so either they were, you know, sitting in the backyard playing the guitar and swimming in the pool with their with their siblings, or they were in their room you know, smoking weed on their on their computer all day. And sure, there was some in between, but there was a lot of polarization during that time. And and when they came back, there was a lot of, oh Miss Brown, this happened during COVID, and this happened during COVID, and oh, that was really hard. Um, and the casualties, so to speak, are still coming out of the woodwork, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:29

So how how did you know that can be really demoralizing as a teacher? Um, but I I felt like even when things were hard, you you see it seemed to you, it seemed to me when we were talking about it, that the work you were doing in the classroom felt like it was overcoming some of that. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

Yeah, I mean, I think that every student who was willing to be open and vulnerable was very full of hope. Um, and that means open and vulnerable, not just with, you know, finding me or the school counselor after school and saying I need help. Sure. But it starts before that. Like that's kind of the the breaking point. Uh for a lot of them, it started sitting in that room being open to whatever it was we were talking about. Um, and reading A Tale of Two Cities and watching students cry when they read about Sidney Carton and how unhappy he was, and realizing that either they knew someone like that or they were that person, you know, uh, or reading Augustine's Confessions and realizing, oh, I also have no idea what good and evil is. And I wish I did. I wish I knew more about this because it's been bothering me my whole life. You know, and just seeing students um find yeah, the the common humanity between themselves and the writers or the characters, um, if they were willing to start there, then great. I would rather have a class of 30 hyperactive, miserable kids who were willing to talk about stuff than a class of five desensitized, dead-in-the-water students who had given up, right? I mean, and and I I've had both. And the first group made me a better person, and the second group made me a worse person because I was not saint enough to to to tolerate it and grit my teeth. I came home every day like, oh, what has happened? I used to I used to be good at this. Uh so yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:37

How did the the mode of education or the activity of it help the kids or you or both?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:46

It's a very discussion-based school. Um but both well, I won't say both. I'll say all the institutions that I've worked with uh in the classical world have been very focused on Socratic discussion. And so the students are asked to be involved, right? Uh if if it's a lecture style course or a fill out this worksheet style course, then we might as well just all only do online school forever, right? There's no point. Uh what makes school special is human interaction. That that's what makes it unique. And so um that was, I think that was why so much happened, is that I heard so many of the students' voices. The best days were the days when I spoke very little because they were so eager to talk about whether or not Frankenstein's monster was a was a human being or not, or whether or not he deserved to die. And they were just so thrilled that they were the ones answering one very carefully tailored, pointed question and responding to my nudges, but they were doing the work. Uh, and so I mean, that's really the bottom line is if if the students aren't going to be willing to do that, then why are we even in the room?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:02

That's interesting. Yeah, this um the talking about it as Socratic discussion and what that does for a community of people versus just what that is as a pedagogical tool. You know, because if you think about, okay, what a lot of schools do is they do a lot of lecture, they do a lot of test taking, they do a lot of paperwork, and but then they're like, oh, you know, uh most of this is output from us and input to the students. Um, so then they'll say, then they'll shift to like, well, what how do we do this pure inquiry thing? But then it mostly ends up being um, like, how are you doing today? Like uh uh social emotional, yeah, vague social emotional stuff. But but what you've done is like you've basically said all the activity of the school is us talking at you and you uh you know regurgitating to us, and then all the activity of the human being is you, the student, just telling us how you're feeling. And like you don't actually end up talking about anything. No, you don't mold the intellectual and moral and emotional formation then of the kids together, yeah. And then it's like you're kind of not ever knowing someone on a deeper level. And so it's not really surprising then that so many kids feel isolated in school.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:32

Yeah. Yeah. And it's just it's a really big tragedy that we've divorced things that really naturally are unified, you know. Like when you ask the question, why did Raskolnikov murder the pawnbroker in crime and punishment? It's an intellectual question, sure, because you have to read this very well crafted novel to figure it out. Um, but it's also a question of what's happening in his heart and any student. Who is honest with themselves is going to see that that's about them, but it's also about their friend or their parent. Um, and that if they're experiencing compassion for this axe murder and they're experiencing, you know, anger as well and a desire for justice, then there's something really complex about human beings that is worth talking about. But we don't start with how are you feeling today? Nobody wants to answer that question anyway, right? At least most people don't, unless they've chosen to go to therapy for it. Right. Um, but if you start with why did Raskolnikov kill the old woman, and then finally get to a point of saying, Oh, actually Raskolnikov and I are very similar people, now you're getting somewhere, right? I've had students admit that they reminded them that they were reminded of Raskolnikov when they looked in the mirror. Or and that was very a very humble thing to do, you know, because unless you actually are making those connections and reading well and loving what you're learning, you're never going to discover that.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:02

Right. And I that's what I try to tell teachers is look, students are so self-absorbed, children are so self-absorbed naturally anyway, right? I'm not like trying to be critical. I'm just saying that's how they're absorbing things into themselves. Right. Like so uh so when you double down on that and make everything about them, then they're caught in this like internal feedback loop. But if you make it about the text or the great conversation, you don't have to explicitly make it about them. They're gonna do that naturally.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:37

And I should clarify, I'm not saying that we're on a secret mission to do therapy with books. No, no. Um, and I know that's not what you're saying either. But the reason I'm making that point is because again, you have to look at the whole picture, right? It's like if the first things, you know, seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be gathered, right? Like if if people are looking outside themselves as something good, they're like Dante does at the end of parody. So he is going to be so in love with it and absorbed in it, um, it is going to heal him and make him better. But at the end of the day, that's just one of the many good gifts he's receiving, right? Like it's much bigger than that. It's not ultimately about him. It's about I like Anthony Esslin's translation. He says that when we get closer to God in Paradise, so we are in selving. We are becoming more the people we are, right? And why? Because we are we are connecting with something beyond us. It's the beatific vision in Dante. Uh in class, it might simply be taking joy in solving a problem together, right? Right. Um so yes, it is about the healing of the human heart, but that's almost like that's just one of the much bigger thing, which is encountering the good. And and because it's worth encountering.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:01

Yes. And I I think we this has come up a few times in this podcast, like the goal of the goal of uh adult life is not independence, it's interdependence in a community. And I think the activity in a school of taking a text and making it the central point makes everything actually safe for students to then engage that. And then because we're all engaging that together, that conversation can now continue on outside of the classroom and be about deeper things that we can talk about that we would never would have talked about together.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:38

Right. And I'm thinking about how true that is for the community of the school as a whole, like those kind of conversations you were talking about that were so forming between you and students. We saw the same thing happen between teachers um in the in the lunchroom. Yeah. Um we don't have a ton of time left, but I I I wish uh well, could you maybe just talk a little bit about uh that community of learners that you found within your colleagues and how that formed you?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:09

Oh yeah. So many good people. Um there was the the great thing about Phoenix is that there are so many teachers that uh a number of us formed a community in an apartment complex. And so we would just call up our landlord and say, Hey, tell us when an apartment's available, and then he'd call me and I should have I should have been asking for commission on that, honestly. Um and so over I am not exaggerating, in a decade, I lived in a small apartment complex, and there were over 40 other teachers who moved in and out of those apartments. Uh, some of them were from my school, a lot of them were from my network, some weren't even from either, but we were all and we just got a little bit of that small town medieval village experience. Like we we would encounter each other and we would spend time together, and we would write together, we would sit around the campfire smoking together. It was great. Um and that overlapped with my community at my specific school because a handful of my closest friends from the school where I taught also were my next door neighbors. And so during during COVID was was really fun. I would just poke my head out the window, and my friend John and his little kids would be running around in the yard and we would chat about the thing we had just been talking about on Zoom and our separate computers, but we'd just come out and talk together and then and then we talk about more fun things, you know, what we were up to and we were reading and what the kids were doing. And um just it was it was so the the local community aspect was unique and a delight. And I had that for 10 years, the same 10 years before I married my husband, and the same 10 years when I worked at that school. Um, I was also living and eating meals with and reading books with and reading the book of Genesis with these people. You know, they're just lovely human beings. Um that's so neat. Yeah, and then at the school, it was really important that we had good friendships because when you're dealing, we dealt with so much um confidential information. We needed each other. You know, there was never this one person who was the island, the confidant, and the kids all rushed to that person and nobody else. Like that would have been damaging for that person and the kids. Uh, they the kids knew if they came to Miss Brown, then Miss Brown would probably talk to Mr. So-and-so, and then the two of them would, in a really gentle way, figure out a way to get parents and counselors involved. And but they they wanted that. They wanted to be known but by people they trusted. And so having a few really close friends who I also worked with and we prayed together, and we um we we did extracurriculars with the kids together. We went hikes with the kids and their went on hikes with the kids and their families together and things like that. Uh, there were so many ways to uh just build that trust. Uh, and we really needed each other's help because it was a lot of work. But it was so great. And some of my favorite conversations were myself and one other teacher and a student, and the three of us having a conversation and seeing what's possible when you team up with somebody in that setting. Um I it's just so many people I look back and say, that was a huge bonding experience. And we're still good friends. And I've done this with each of you too at certain points, sitting down with a kid who's suffering or who's curious about something, and coming out on the other side and saying, Hey, now I'm a better friend with you because of that. Because now we share that moment. Yeah. Um and then it makes those weekends where we're, you know, sitting around singing songs or watching a movie or whatever we're doing a lot more meaningful because we don't just do leisure together, we do something hard together. Yeah. Um, it was a good mini preparation for marriage, in a way. I always say I had a lot of work husbands and they were all they were all great. They were more like brothers, uh, but they like and and sisters, there were a lot of women too. But yeah, when you do something hard with somebody, you become much closer than if you're just then you're just hanging out with them in in comfortable situations.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:06

So and then those become the best stories that you tell and you enjoy telling them over and over, and then you start your own podcast and you tell the stories of podcasts. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:16

What a good idea. You should you should try that all the time. We'll do we'll figure something out. Let me know when you do. Okay. I'll I will I would even show up and talk to you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:24

Well, we should close with a poem from City Knave. Please. If you don't mind choosing one of them.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:30

Yeah, I'll choose one that's a tiny bit longer than the one I read. Um and I'll try to choose one that fits our conversation, I think, because a lot of them do. Um let's see. We've talked a lot about students, so I will read Pupils, um, which is a chiasm. So the first stanza and the second stanza have the same lines, but in reverse order. Uh, and you can hear it if you listen. Um The Tunnel with Light at both ends, the joy of and the fear of looking into it honestly, and saying just what you mean. A sometimes shuttered window, yawning, often in the dark, tightening in brightness, a circle, a space, the soul of a face, a student. A student, the soul of a face, a circle, a space, often in the dark, tightening in brightness, a sometimes shuttered window, yawning and saying just what you mean, looking into it honestly, the joy of and the fear of the tunnel with light at both ends.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:47

Oh, it's good. Thank you, Betsy. Thank you too. Thank you for being on the podcast. Really appreciate it. Of course. It's always good to talk to both of you. Brian, you want to close us out? I think we just did. Did we? Yeah. Okay. We're not going to do an official this was.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:02

Well, that's it for today, folks. Uh just for a time. No, but seriously, Betsy, I mean, it is always such a blessing uh having a conversation with you. I'm glad that other people are getting an opportunity to see you and the profundity of uh your thoughts, and now that that work is being put onto the page, people have the opportunity to absorb that wisdom into themselves. Um, so this has been another great episode of the Furrows Podcast. We'll catch you guys next time.