Join us as we welcome our guest, middle school PE teacher and lacrosse coach, Matt Vozzolo, for a spirited chat about his unique journey from humble beginnings in a Connecticut wood cabin to his current life in sunny San Diego, revealing how his past has shaped his approach to physical education, nutrition, and leadership in schools. Matt shares his passion for lacrosse, discusses the changing trends in physical fitness, and the critical role of nutrition and sleep in connection to physical activity. We wrap up with Matt's personal advocacy for the Movember charity, highlighting its impact on men's health. Be prepared to be inspired, educated, and entertained in this exciting episode.
Contribute to Matt's Movember Fundraiser for Men's Mental Health
Join us as we welcome our guest, middle school PE teacher and lacrosse coach, Matt Vozzolo, for a spirited chat about his unique journey from humble beginnings in a Connecticut wood cabin to his current life in sunny San Diego, revealing how his past has shaped his approach to physical education, nutrition, and leadership in schools. Matt shares his passion for lacrosse, discusses the changing trends in physical fitness, and the critical role of nutrition and sleep in connection to physical activity. We wrap up with Matt's personal advocacy for the Movember charity, highlighting its impact on men's health. Be prepared to be inspired, educated, and entertained in this exciting episode.
Contribute to Matt's Movember Fundraiser for Men's Mental Health
you. You Welcome to the Superintendent's Hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, Dr Sharedda. Come on in and hang out. In this episode I sat down with Matt Fazzolo. Matt is a middle school PE teacher, lacrosse coach, fan of the November facial hair, which he talks about being part of the Movember charity event that raises money on behalf of men's health, both prostate health as well as mental health awareness. Matt and I cover a wide range of topics, from his views on physical education as part of a balanced approach to health and nutrition and activity in children's lives, his views on his emerging leadership roles. He is the co-coordinator of an extended learning opportunities program that he talks about in more depth in this episode, and much more.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as I did sitting down with Matt Fazzolo. Welcome, Matt. Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us for a little bit today. Thank you for having me. I was wondering if you could start today's conversation with a little history tour, history lesson your origin story, where you come from, what your background was like, what brings you to the present moment.
Speaker 2:Okay, I grew up on the East Coast in Connecticut In a log cabin my father had built with his friends, the youngest of four boys Like Laurie Engels Wilder style.
Speaker 2:Huh yeah, my parents were interesting hippies. You'd never be able to tell by looking at them. But my dad was more of the civil rights protest of Vietnam War type. My mother was more of the health food no medicine from the pharmacy, things like that hippie. So we had an interesting childhood with the four boys going off in the woods getting into trouble. We had ducks, chickens, rabbits, cats, had a neighbor with two giant pigs and a rottweiler and kind of all sorts of trouble over there.
Speaker 2:I spent my entire childhood in Connecticut in one of two towns until a small high school which is on the same campus as our middle and elementary school summer's high school. It's the largest graduating class ever of 140 people. Then I went to college in New Hampshire. I got a job right out of college teaching PE, lived there for about five years and just kind of outgrew that area, itching to move on and came to San Diego on a vacation for a week and during that vacation got a job interview and then got a call back and then moved out here seven weeks later and eventually got over to Einstein and now I find myself on a podcast.
Speaker 1:There you go, that's a lightning tour in two minutes. There you go. I'm curious about your upbringing, especially because it was sound like it was pretty atypical. Do you carry some of those lessons forward like kind of unconventional thinking? I mean, I'm asking from a totally selfish standpoint because I was raised in a very I have to be careful because I think my mom's going to listen to this episode. But let's just call it an atypical, unconventional setting. And what struck me was when you said your mom didn't believe in medicine from the pharmacy. I suffered from migraines as a kid and for years I thought the only remedy for migraines was like ice on your head, and I think we put heat on my feet, ice on my head and strong coffee with lemon juice in it or something, and it was like until I discovered that they made Tylenol and then it was off to the races.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's similar to that. You know you go to the dentist. There's no fluoride.
Speaker 1:But did you have novocaine?
Speaker 2:No. You didn't do novocaine at the dentist.
Speaker 1:Like a drilling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I believe we had no. Oh see, I didn't have novocaine either. I didn't even know that was a thing. Yeah, so I can line up you on the suffering department. Sorry, mom.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So yeah, it was interesting. We had a lot of different remedies for things, but it was nice. We had multiple gardens. We had a corn garden, a tomato garden and just the regular vegetable garden. It was real fun towards the end of fall when you get to break everything down and reintroduce it to the earth, which, with four boys, means you go out and have a tomato and corn fight. And the only pills or anything we were allowed to take was we took algae pills every morning and then when the bottle was finished, we filled it up with water and rinsed it out and poured that into the cat's bowl and our cat drank the algae residue of that. I have no idea. Algae, algae, like there was little green pills, yeah compressed little green algae.
Speaker 2:Did the cat live a long time? Yeah, it was a Maine Coon cat, so she was going to live forever. Anyways, I think she got to 18. But I want to say about a year or two ago someone sent me a study that algae had some negative impacts with memory and Alzheimer's or something.
Speaker 1:But now you can't remember the study. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. So yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one of the gifts of I had an upbringing where I spent a lot of time in nature as well and there are real gifts in that that we take for granted that a lot of our students now in urban areas don't have that exposure to nature Absolutely Some real, even the rhythms of the seasons, even without the tomato fights, just to know when fall's coming and what that means in the earth. And I think a lot of kids the only way they know fall's coming is it's getting a little cooler and Target is now selling Halloween like these, like plastic Halloween ghost things, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was nice to be able to be outside whenever we wanted and to have the clothing necessary to go outside whenever you wanted. We chopped raw and wood. We heated our home with a wood fireplace, so we had to. You get the cord of wood delivered, you rotate it to last year's stack, you move that one there, you have the one that goes inside. You have to chop the kindling, and my father and my second oldest brother still heat their homes with their wood stoves.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't know we had this many parallels we did as a kid too, and I think it's why I have arthritis in my hands now. Maybe not, but it's hard work right, absolutely. Yeah, good, hard work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, basic human need, and you're working to that and you know I'm grateful for that, and you know I'm grateful for that. It's definitely allowed me to, you know, be able to put my head down and just bury through any mental or physical hard work that needs to happen.
Speaker 1:So you go to college and then you decide you want to be a PE teacher. Why that choice? Or did the job choose you?
Speaker 2:It was before college. I decided to be a PE teacher. Really, tell us about that. In high school I was mainly focused in business classes where the majority of my brothers were in woodshop tech, auto mechanics, things like that. I was taking entrepreneurship, accounting and in our accounting 2 class we had a field trip to an accounting firm in West Hartford, which is might be the most boring place on earth, and we walked up this building and it was just a floor of cubicles and everyone had a white shirt on, some had ties, some didn't, and it was just death to me.
Speaker 2:At first I would always want to be an accountant. I loved numbers, loved finding and dealing with the problems with accounting. And then we got a chance to talk to some of these accountants and ask them questions and none of their questions were attractive to me and got home from the field trip, went to lacrosse practice and my coach was like hey, how was that field trip? Or how was your day? And I was like I want this field trip. He said, how was it? I was like it's terrible, it was one of the worst plays on earth. And he was like well, if that doesn't really suit you, why don't you come down to the middle school next week Because he was a middle school PE teacher and he was like, check it out.
Speaker 2:He's like I think you'd be good at it, and so got the permission, went down the next week and, with our schools being on the same campus, you know you just you leave school and you walk down this little road and you go to the next one, and I played with football all day long and he had a little palm pilot and he was like I don't even have a computer, I do all my grades on the fly on a palm pile, and that was cutting edge. Yeah, this is 2004. Oh, that's cutting edge. And so ever since then it was just dead set on that, applied to schools with only PE programs and then eventually decided on New England College because that's where my grandfather graduated from. And you played sports in high school. I played ice hockey, in lacrosse.
Speaker 1:And I know you've continued lacrosse now as an adult. Yes, what draws you to that sport? It's not so common on the West Coast, although I think they're pockets of like private school teams and stuff.
Speaker 2:But just the one. The history and tradition of the sport, being a Native American sport, and just the culture that comes from that and coming from an area where there's a lot of Native American culture around lacrosse always drove me to it and it's very similar to ice hockey. You know, it's essentially just ice hockey in the air, and I started skating when I was three, joined my first team at five for hockey and then just transitioned eventually into lacrosse. It's just, it's rewarding and difficult. It's physical. There's a strong sense of, you know, ownership and belief when you do something right in it. It's just, it's fun.
Speaker 1:I love it, but I'm biased, like I said, didn't the original teams used to play across like miles and miles of just open land, just open land.
Speaker 2:Miles and miles of forest, open land, whatever was, between the two tribes. They would maybe settle disputes, have little bets, practice for a war, whatever it was, and they would have ceremonies the night before the game to decide on how many goals for the winner. And it was essentially like two main rules you can't use your hand to touch the ball and you can't injure your opponent to the point where they can't continue to play. That's a slippery slope, yeah, yeah, and you know. It transitioned Hope I'm getting this right. I think in the 1800s, where English and French settlers decided to make more concrete rules, ways to sell tickets, make money, and it evolved over years and years and years. Canadians developed box lacrosse for their hockey players to stay in shape in the off season.
Speaker 1:Like on a rink right, A dry rink.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So when the ice goes out in the summer, you have the concrete left and it's a great way for arenas to continue to make money and the players continue to stay in shape, and that's the form of box lacrosse that I continue to play now. My friends and I had started a team here called the Hartford Whalers sorry, the San Diego.
Speaker 1:Whalers oh Freudian Slip.
Speaker 2:The San Diego Whalers to honor the Hartford Whalers.
Speaker 1:Why do you think lacrosse hasn't caught on on a higher level, you know professionally? I know they're professional teams and prior to the interview we were talking about that, but it's certainly not on the level of some of your other football, basketball, baseball, soccer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say just the how long it's been around professionally and also the universities and colleges on the East Coast, especially the Northeast. Their main, usually male, sport is lacrosse. There are some of the larger ones that do have football, like Syracuse, virginia, duke, but those are also lacrosse powerhouses. Out here on the West Coast you have these amazingly large schools with these very successful, very large football teams and they are giving their scholarships to the football teams because that's where the money is Right. So there's discrepancy there. So they fill in with women's lacrosse usually. So a lot of these huge football schools have amazing women's lacrosse programs.
Speaker 2:And then you know as a youth player in San Diego there's a lot of opportunities to play lacrosse. There's plenty of clubs all around. But once you get past high school, if you're not gonna go D1, it's difficult to go across the country to go play D3 lacrosse, unless you're coming from a well-off athlete family, because you're not gonna get any scholarship or any help. And then you're dealing with the, the idea of being 3,000 miles away from one of the greatest places on earth to go freeze for the fall, winter and most of the spring, right, and that's just a hard thing for a lot of people to do. It takes, you know, a unique and special individual to be able to pull that off. I think that has a little bit to do with it, but it's getting more popular. There's two professional leagues in the United States or across the PLL and the NLL. San Diego has their own team in the NLL box across the San Diego Seals. We've taken a couple of our students to some of the games.
Speaker 1:I know you. I think you've brought some players to speak to your PE students as well.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Yeah, we've had a couple of their their big name players in here. Austin Stotz, we had Cam holding Berg, let's see before you retired the great Brodie Merrill. So there's some in the lacrosse world. Those are some pretty big names.
Speaker 1:Is there an international competition for lacrosse similar to a World Cup?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's the, the world games. They were actually in San Diego last summer. The United States and Canada has played in every gold medal game. For that and I believe since Once the hood in the shunny, which is the, the native team that's allowed to play, they've been a consistent bronze medal winner. But they're being played in the Olympics coming up in 2028 as well.
Speaker 1:It'd be interesting to see how it, how it spreads internationally, beyond those teams. Right, you look at other sports that have. You look at 1992 NBA, the dream team and the US annihilated everybody. And now, 30 something years later, the NBA is like the United Nations. Yeah, best players are not from the US. Yeah, so yeah baseball is kind of the same way a little bit, and we'll see what happens with football.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Yeah, so with the Olympics in 2028, they're playing a new style of lacrosse. It's called sixes Six on six, and when a goal is scored, there's not a face-off afterwards, the goalie just picks the ball up and plays it. So it's quicker. You got to get down the field real quick, yeah, and they shorten the field as well. So it's a way to kind of Even the playing field in a way, so that it's not the United States and Canada just dominating, because that was what the Olympic Committee was. You know, they were afraid to just. Why have this, if it's just gonna be these two teams playing for the gold every year and then just spreading lacrosse around the world? I think by this time I think there's 50 something nations that have international lacrosse team.
Speaker 1:That's yeah. It's interesting to reflect on what, what kind of lessons I want to. In a little bit I want to get to your specifics of teaching PE and how you grew into that professionally. But what lessons do you take from Athletics, but in particular from lacrosse, that you apply to your life in general?
Speaker 2:I would say just some discipline and, you know, understanding that You're not always the leader. You know there's, there's always gonna be someone bigger, better, faster, better, whatever it may be. But also if there's a team, you know I'm not always gonna be the leader. Sometimes I may have to be the person doing the hard work and the on the side or whatever it may be. And just the humility in that and trying to, you know the exit of the ego, as you were saying before this, just being able to take yourself out of certain situations like that and put yourself in the search in certain situations when you needed, and you know, just be able to go through a physical battle that's also mentally tough, you know, allows you to build a attack certain situations with a calmness.
Speaker 1:So teaching PE Seems like it was a natural choice for you after you talked to your coach with a palm pilot. But it's not without its obstacles, right, it's. Physical education is not always embraced on school campuses as the most rigorous of academic contents. I you know, in my youth I remember a coach just rolling a half deflated kickball out there on the field and be like hey kids, don't you know, don't kill yourselves. How do you view the role of physical education within the ecosystem of a of a school and the other content areas?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm biased, but I would say it's, it's as important, if not more. It's one of the only things that's taught in a school that directly positively impacts students lives and Something that they can continuously use throughout their lives, whether it's, you know, these different sports, retouch them, different techniques, working out in our fitness center these are all things that they can use Later that day, later that week, ten years down the road. They have that experience, they have that knowledge, or at least they're aware of it. And it's, you know, with Some schools, some administrators, some districts, whatever it may be, that kind of you know don't put that importance on physical education.
Speaker 2:You know, it's unfortunate. I, fortunately, have never been at a school like that, teaching in New Hampshire at a, you know, the smallest population in the largest demographic. My principles Loved that we had PE, loved that we could go outside any time of the year, you know, snow or not, and then coming to San Diego it was different, but I always had the, the backing of our principles, always asking what we needed, what could we improve, and just to have that support. And you know An area of the world or whatever it may be, that possibly doesn't do that, some places it's. It's refreshing, it's nice.
Speaker 1:How do you combat screens? Sedentary lifestyle, video games, all the things that, a Lot of the things that didn't exist when you were a little kid and you might have had Pong or something. Actually, I had Pong. I don't know what you had, but it certainly was not as ubiquitous, right? You weren't carrying around microprocessors in their pockets. How? Do you combat that in your teaching of PE and make sure that students Work towards physical fitness and get their heads out of their screens for 45 minutes or an hour?
Speaker 2:Well it's. We have the luxury here of not allowing cell phones the only times we really have screens in PEs during our dance unit, when they need to use an iPad for their songs and looking up certain dance moves or whatever it may be. But to be able to Get into a student's head to the point where they're not in PE and they're doing something physical is, you know, our true goal. And there's plenty of programs and and things you can buy where you know you have a kid holding an iPad and they're running on the screen like that's going on. And you know that may work in a small setting, that may work at an infomercial, it may work at an elementary school level, but with a 13 year old from inner city outside in the 85 degree heat with a hoodie on, it's a little bit more difficult. You know I just try to get them to do whatever they can and to keep motivating them. You know it's.
Speaker 2:It's easy to, from a PE teacher's point of view, to look over at a kid who doesn't want to do anything. They're like, okay, well, you don't get a grade for today and just brush it off and move on to some kid who is participating. And that's never been my philosophy, it's never been how I go about things. You know, the kid that is doing something because that's the assignments, what I asked Doesn't necessarily need my direct help. The kid sitting off to the side, the one calling out in a way, and needs that more direct instruction, that more one-to-one approach, or if there's a group of them. And you know my Approach has definitely changed. You know there is definitely a a southern California Compared to New England difference in approaching students. Everything, everything, yeah, and you know it's gotten better. You know there's a more. You get more personal with them and, and you know, just kinder and and eventually they start participating. And you know there's there's little wins that need to be celebrated.
Speaker 1:You've also had a hand in, or been the spearhead on, organizing after school athletics at the, at the middle school level Sports leagues and Supervising all the coaches, really working in an athletic director role. What's your philosophy Of coaching, whether you're doing the direct coaching or you're building up coaches in their repertoire to be able to work with students.
Speaker 2:My philosophy for coaching Something that's also drastically changed. It started off as when I was coaching is hard-nosed and Bobby Knight yeah, not quite, not quite.
Speaker 1:Bobby Knight had making some comment, like his kid was on the team and the kid did something and Bobby Knight said now I know why some animals eat their young. That's an extreme example. Yeah, I know, I didn't Throwing any chairs and kids.
Speaker 2:With coaching it's a lot like teaching, it's just a higher energy and a higher frequency. You teach kids to have a direct responsibility for what they're doing. The luxury of coaching team sports is you hold the whole team accountable for an individual's actions. That will grind people into becoming more part of a team, following into the system and having that approach, then a lot of coaches meetings before and after practice. But my overall philosophy is you're not necessarily coaching and teaching to win. That is the benefit, but you're really showing these in my case, young men how to survive in the real world, how to take responsibility for their actions, how to take criticisms, how to be in a leadership role, how to listen to a peer who's in a leadership role. These are all valuable things that they can go on to working anywhere, doing anything that are going to fall into place.
Speaker 2:Then, in my role here as an athletic coordinator, being able to put Annie and all of our employees in a position to coach children I really try to look within our organization to find coaches. It doesn't matter who you are. If you want to coach, I can help you get in the right spot Then giving them space and grace to grow, but also being there for any of their questions, for their guidance, helping them along with little things, because I have, at this point, 13 years of coaching experience, compared to someone who maybe has a couple months, but there's still 20 years my elder I can help them out in these certain situations. Then, also being proactive with interactions that's going to happen with families, putting things in place, putting practices in place, putting policies and documents in place where you can hold people accountable for their actions and what they're doing. I guess right now, as an athletic coordinator, it's trying and hoping to be proactive.
Speaker 1:It's interesting in going to little league fields or gyms now a lot of them have signs there that say something along the lines of you're the parent, your job is to support the kids. We have coaches who coach the kids. Let them do their job, you do your job, kind of thing. Has that been a challenge Making sure that everyone knows their role, because you always see the bad examples right on YouTube. Parents is absolutely either berating their own kid, berating some other kid, or berating the rafts or the umps.
Speaker 2:Luckily from our families. No, I haven't gotten a chance to really see that. There have been some interactions, some incidences. I would say the highest of the worst would be just a father who knew our soccer coach and was just giving some advice at half time in a way. Then you have some family members who want to complain to me about our league's referees, which is something I don't have any control over and you know-.
Speaker 1:It's always the poor refs. Yeah, like in like $14 an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's their sixth game of the day and they just came from running some schools PE program all day long and you know they don't see that, they don't understand that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you know, there's small situations here and there that I've had to deal with, and even with other schools, parents, and with that again it's just practicing empathy, giving them an ear, and, you know, usually people just talk their way out of it. They just want to be heard, they want to feel like they're saying their piece to the right person. And you give them that and usually they calm down and they move on. And because in the grand scheme of things here it's kids playing sports, it's not life or death.
Speaker 1:Yeah, probably the odds of any of them playing into the professional level or slim to none. Yeah, right, despite the dreams of parents and some kids.
Speaker 1:I'd imagine it's been transformative for some students who come from families and family backgrounds where there weren't a lot of, there wasn't a lot of participation in formal athletics and sometimes there's not even sports fans at home. Like, have you ever run into cases where kids are I don't know, you're coaching them in something, or some one of your coaches is coaching them in volleyball or flag football and they've never even watched a professional game of that sport as the coach or the? Yeah, I mean, it's like like you're coaching teams of kids who don't even they're not even fans of the sport outside of school.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, we definitely have had a lot of kids sign up for basketball volleyball in particular that had no idea how the game really works. You know scoring rules. Remember when we started our basketball program, I was our girls basketball coach for the first three weeks or so and so I just turned it into box lacrosse and lacrosse drills with basketballs and you know we hustled and we learned to dribble and you know basic shooting techniques and we would have little scrimmages and I'd be telling the girls like, oh, you have, you know that. You know you can't stand on that line like that you're out of bounds, and like they'd pass to someone who was standing out of bounds. And they're like, well, we don't know, and it's eye-opening that you know you sign up for something and you're just like, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to go and learn on the fly, which is great, but it is something I've never experienced outside of here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember as a kid, you know, back in the era when you played every sport, depending on what season, it was right on the East Coast, and you know we were always just well, back then there was only one NBA game a week on TV on Sundays, and we would just watch and you would record it on VHS so you could see the moves and then you'd go out in the backyard and just practice them and practice them. I think kids are so overexposed to everything. Now, right, the last thing they're going to do is watch an athletic event. I think.
Speaker 2:Especially with that like in mindset, you know, like, oh, I'm going to watch this one player and try to replicate that move and get better at that one thing, whereas they are overexposed and so distracted at times.
Speaker 1:The at Albert Einstein academies you know we have the IB program is fundamental to everything we do. Talk to us a little bit about how your journey has been in relation to the IB and the context of physical education, because there are probably people who think like, okay, learning these skills or throwing or kicking or running, those are just, those are athletic skills. They don't really need a philosophy and a paradigm and a framework around them. How do you view that in the context of the IB?
Speaker 2:Coming out to California and getting tossed into the IB, I was a little lost at first because of all the written assessment and just how much of it we were doing. And since then and through my tenure here, we've kind of refined that and I've said this multiple times to our coworkers like if I worked somewhere else. I think I would still use the same principles and cycle with IB. You know, having and making sure kids know and understand certain techniques, skills, rules, whatever it may be, having them planning, having them reflect on their plan and then having them reflect on their performance, like these are all things everyone should be going through and everyone should be doing in their daily lives and jobs, whatever it may be. You know you should be reflecting, you should be planning, you should be setting goals and then creating specific plans to achieve those goals. You know you should be, you should understand, you know the factual, debatable, conceptual knowledge of whatever you're doing. So with that I've gotten in.
Speaker 2:I just would hope in the next couple of years to be more purposeful and more I guess you could say literate with IB. You know there's we had that from the Grand Canary Islands when they had that exchange I forget the individual's name, who came here. He was just super impressive with how knowledgeable and literate he was with speaking about IB and in his classrooms. It was daunting. But to be able to just access ATL skills and whatever it may be, statements of inquiry and all this stuff, like right, just like boom, boom, boom boom was impressive. But when, in terms of physical education in your daily life, you know the essentials and the basics of IB are, I think you know we would make you into a well-rounded human being.
Speaker 1:So you said you've been. Well, you've been coaching for 13 years. Right, you've been anyway. You've been teaching kids for over decade. Have you seen a change in physical fitness overall in one direction or another?
Speaker 2:Yes, so the majority of my time has been here and I would say that kids are a little bit more. They're less active, you know. They're less maybe motivated and the interest in physical activity isn't necessarily as high, although you know we have students who don't participate during, or sometimes don't participate in, pe, but then play sports at our school, and I'm just always very confused on that and you know like I have a hard time understanding that because of who I am. You know I would go out of my way to go to PE class in high school. I remember my senior year I had study halls bookended on my PE class, so in certain days I would not go to study hall, just go to PE for three straight periods and then studied it in colleges and played college lacrosse. You know like I love it, but you know kids have had students who they're like well, I have a game later today, so I really don't want to play this game. Savin' it up, yeah, saving your energy, because that's a thing you can do.
Speaker 1:That it's yeah, it's an interesting reflection on. You know societal trends right, and I know you also can't look at physical activity and athletics in isolation. There's the whole life, the holistic view. Do you talk about nutrition? You talk about sleep. Do you talk about those sorts of things in connection to physical activity and PE?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's more of during our planning time in the fitness center or, you know, fitness planning. We usually have these fitness plans and goals before the large breaks before Thanksgiving, winter and spring, just so they can practice doing these things as we're leading up to the breaks and then as they're on their breaks. We also, you know, talk about what you're putting in your body and what you'll see me not eating or eating on campus. You know I'm not going to be walking around eating a bag of chips, maybe on the weekend, sure, but I'm not going to walk around the school doing that, and I think that's an important image to give to kids. You know I'm not going to ask them to do anything I won't do while playing some of the games with them.
Speaker 2:Yesterday I ran the Pacers with all of our classes and I challenged them to beat me Right. You know it's going to be embarrassing when an old man with a mustache is doing more Pacers than you. He's got more air resistance than you do. But it would be, I think, a little bit more beneficial if we get into more of like a concrete nutrition class, going to like what these foods really are and what they really do to your body and you know, kind of on a side note, I've always joked around about this, like I'm interested to see what Takis do to kids' esophaguses and their throats in the next 10 years. That's right, like, if there's, and like the lining of their stomachs, and there's kids that eat Takis every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what is that doing to them?
Speaker 1:And the whole conversation around serving size portions. Right long Arizona iced tea. You know you might get two or three servings in a can. So when you look on there and it says it's got it's still even one serving as ridiculous the high percentage of your daily allocation of sugar. But multiply that by three. You know there's a lot of deceptive practices around labeling to that our kids just fall right into. It's a tricky conversation the food, the diet, nutrition conversation.
Speaker 1:I remember when I first started as middle school principal the campus had a Coke machine on it or whatever. It was run by Coca-Cola that had their family of drinks and so I got rid of it but replaced it with a healthy quote-unquote, I mean healthier vending machine. And the biggest opponents were staff, because we had staff who that was there, that was their thing every day to go get their sodas, get the chip. So we replaced it with fruit juice, which I know has a lot of sugar, marginally more, you know, marginally better for you perhaps than coke and like chips that were baked, baked chips and kind of off-brand stuff. And we ended up having to get rid of the machine entirely because students were saving their meal, their lunch food, lunch, their lunch money and going buying food from the vending machines as opposed to buying the regular lunch.
Speaker 1:So it was just interesting to look at, like the role of snacks and treats and rewards. I think as humans we haven't overcome the hunter, hunter-gatherer impulse to just if the trees full of plums, like 10,000 years ago, you ate all the plums because you didn't know when you were gonna find the tree that a tree with plums on it again, yeah, and it's hard to get past that. Especially overlay that with with adolescents and other things. That's a tricky thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've had an interesting, I guess, viewpoint with some of the things we we offer in schools and you know I joke around with our cafe staff and our admin about this. I personally want to get rid of milk in schools. I know in California they've gotten rid of chocolate milk and they're chained. They change the sugar level. That will eventually come into play here, but the milk that's in school now there's 14 grams of sugar in that little carton and we used to have our milk machine open, unlocked during the day so kids could go get a milk. And right, we're working out in the fitness center riding our exercise bikes and kids like can I go to milk? I'm like, well, that like that's gross.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna like that, you're, you're breathing heavy, it's hot in here, that's how cheese is made yeah, yeah, and you know like we're not baby cows, you know we're not babies either said like so I, I know, with all of the FDA requirements and the contracts that are way above my head in pay grade, that we can't get rid of it, but maybe one day, as I'm getting older and getting up there, figure out a way to get water in schools, where it's that's easily accessible. Where it seems to be one of the hardest things for kids to have access to there are water fountains. We did have water ball Phillips stations, but they're just there. Came became issues with them. They leaked.
Speaker 1:You know all this other this, that and the other, but just if we got rid of milk cartons, replaced them with water cartons so I'm gonna go on there on the record saying that if this is a hill that you want to fight for, you have a hundred percent of my support and whatever that means I well, thank you. I don't know if I have it in my tank in the seventh inning, two out, seventh inning of my career, but the interesting journey around food. Even at Albert Einstein academies not everybody knows this we actually used to have a wellness policy driven by some health conscious parents this is probably 14, 15 years ago health conscious parents. It wasn't board approved because the board was just kind of emerging at the time, but it was a de facto living document and it guided you know how to celebrate students birthdays in classes and snacks and what people could bring from home.
Speaker 1:All of those pieces and and that document has just slid away into. It's a little bit like an animal house. I don't know if you've seen that movie, but one of the classics of all time where they're on double secret probation and they don't even know they're on probation. We have a. We have a well, a wellness policy that I don't know where it is.
Speaker 1:I could probably go on my Google Drive and pull it up from you know 2007 and Google Drive the first Google Drive, and so it's interesting right is is if it doesn't have champions, because that that push to focus on healthy food is such a you know, eating is such a personal experience. So our biggest opponents were actually staff, including some administration, some no longer here, who would say I wouldn't feed that bleepity bleep to my kids. My kids wouldn't eat that. I'm like. Well, they would eat it after a while if you didn't give them the other stuff, the fast food. They would eventually eat the other stuff. And so you know, I had that experience the other day.
Speaker 1:I won't say which campus it was on, but I'm I'm looking in the the mailroom and there's palates of penguinos which are like I'm gonna call them Twinkies that are popular in Mexico, that are filled with something red I'm not gonna call it fruit, because it's just a red-colored thing and kids love them, right, and they're there, and so I come taking it back and I started to ask questions. Oh well, we're selling those in the student store and they're to help these students, or that. I get that. I get that you don't want to have a student run store where no one buys anything, but it was just a decision that was made without anybody even thinking, and like we instinctively know not to sell chocolate cigarettes because we have this very obvious line of thinking to be like let's not promote smoking, but of equal damage to society and perhaps in going into the future, will be a greater damage as people continue, thankfully, to stop smoking will be will be obesity, yeah, and so I've wrestled with that. You know I only again have so much, so many areas that I can put my focus on, but we and that's gonna sound like a cop-out on this podcast, but that's kind of how a little bit how this goes.
Speaker 1:But there were years when we had parents who were real activists. They've got really active around what's being served in cafeteria. I don't want my kids to have pizza in the morning, and now it seems to have just gone away, particularly after COVID right, it's just so there. And every student gets a free lunch in California now, whether their parents qualify for free and reduced lunch or not. So that's another another factor in this. So, yeah, it's. And then then there's the added pieces right of, like vendors coming outside of campus is wheeling little carts and selling things on the street, and then students are lining up there or they go to the 99 cents towards an endless I'm endless churn of distractions mm-hmm, yeah, those that all come in a in a city setting they do and to try to build those habits.
Speaker 1:You know I was raised with organic food and my mom would. I think I've said this before on the podcast, but if my mom had been born 30 years later, she would have been a billionaire because she basically had whole foods. In our living room it was a co-op of organic food and the neighbors would come and you'd buy into this whole sale and they'd come and put things in small bags and they would take it and it was our living room was the storage place. I was eating, like whole grain bulgur wheat and whole grain bread with almond butter and honey and stuff. All I wanted was a wonder bread with that peanut butter and jelly, the swirled one. But now as an adult, when I can eat whatever I want, I don't eat that. Yeah. So those habits, you know that makes up for the fact that I went to the dentist with no novocaine, the fact that I was able to have good eating habits, I think it sustained me.
Speaker 2:Now yeah, and there's also a little bit of that, that pain situation when you're having your tooth filled and you're like, well, good reminder as, stay away from that, from the brush my teeth. That's right today.
Speaker 1:That's right yeah yeah, the lunch menu thing is. It's somewhat of a cop out that we all do to say that the law just requires it. Yeah, there are. There are guidelines from the federal government about content of food etc and protein. But there are innovative places and I think one of the hopeful prospects in the future is our high school is going to have a full culinary wing to it and with a full-scale instructional kitchen. It's awesome, and so that has a lot of possibility for partnering with a third-party vendor. Bring in some outside experts and perhaps start a cottage industry of replacing some of the food that the kids are eating it, whether snacks or part of the lunch program with something we make out of locally sourced ingredients. That's great. Yeah, I think it's, and I once you taste it. If you're eating an egg out of the backyard which I know you did as a kid you were probably shocked when you ate an egg like from Denny's or something like this yeah, they're different colors and everything yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I know in our conversations, matt, that you are now kind of segwaying into more formal leadership in your in your job. You are currently a co-coordinator of the ELOP extended learning opportunity program. Can you explain you know what that is and what the process has been like and what you've learned about leadership from from your time in that role?
Speaker 2:sure. So the expanded learning opportunities program is through all California schools that have unduplicated students, and unduplicated student is three categories. There's fostered, homeless youth, english language learners and free and reduced lunch. They called unduplicated because you can't count a student twice in any of the categories, or three times, and each school gets funding depending on how many unduplicated students they have enrolled and that money is for before and after school programs and it's an extension of the school day, as in the. It's a continuation of learning. But it's not like math. Again, it's not English class or Spanish or German class. Again, it's some other opportunity, some enrichment opportunity for them to do. Each school day has to be a minimum of nine hours, so if it's, you have a seven-hour school day, you have two hours after school or you can do an hour before, an hour after. However you want to, you know, cut the pie.
Speaker 2:And with that, you know, with my job, working along with Rebecca Gullin, working along with Rebecca Gullin's at the elementary school, we've built out some of the program here at the middle school and created our own program at the elementary school and it's been, it's a challenge, it's also been very rewarding, you know. I've gotten to chance to sit in on meetings, have a voice, be a part of certain situations, being, you know, in charge of a huge budget on top of our our normal daily activities and normal daily responsibilities. Like I said, though, it's been very rewarding and challenging at the same time. You know, to be able to transition, at 315, to more of a coordinator role. You know, being in charge of certain things, being able to answer questions, being able to make decisions, being able to collaborate with other people.
Speaker 2:It's, it's been fun and it's definitely something that I think accelerated my interest in administration more. And yeah, it's, you know, I said it's just, it's, it's been fun but challenging. You know I go all day long of dealing with and teaching and having fun with middle schoolers to then Handling adults, and it's, it's quite the change in some ways, and in some ways it's not.
Speaker 1:I'm not touching that one. I know what you mean it's. I've often commented that the elop coordinator or similar roles are really like being a principal of a school. You're you're dealing with. You're dealing with all the same elements. You've got get students, you've got other adults, you've got parents. You've got budgets, you've got shifting conditions. You've got Got to deal with social media, what people say and don't say about you. You know you have all the elements, so it's a really good proving ground for Administration slash leadership and I know you're you're getting ready to go into a credentialing program. I think this will really serve you, hopefully really well in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, I agree, and you know, with the compliments and criticisms, you know that we get. It's nice to not have my face and my voice in any of our social medias.
Speaker 1:So that I chill that, my tens of thousands of fans, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll just, I just won't follow back. You know, I don't, I don't get to that read any of that stuff and I don't see it any bit. I don't. I'll honestly not even aware of it, you still on my space.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's out there so but yeah, it's. It's definitely a whole new avenue. You know, dealing with parents one-on-one about issues or or compliments they have about the program, questions they have about how to get in, who's allowed in, you know, being able to present to the board. I thought that was gonna be one of the biggest challenges before I did it and then Afterwards was, you know, I had just built up this Psyche in my head and it was super easy. They were very receptive and nice individuals and I don't know what I was thinking was gonna be, but yeah, it's huge learning experience.
Speaker 1:It's and it's gonna continue right because the elop monies are around for the foreseeable future. And it's one of those interesting cases where a Politician in this case new some, governor, new some and the legislature gets behind something and puts billions of dollars into it over multiple years and and I think I'm assuming best intentions if it could really transform communities, but the Boots on the ground implementation of it. It's one thing when the legislators are cutting this deal in November, before the session closes, a whole different deal. Right, what it looks like on the ground absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know you can throw money at a problem but it's still there. You gotta find ways to actually solve that problem. Or if you can throw money at a situation, and you still got to be able to handle it and and figure it out. You know we had kids who didn't feel like they belong to school or didn't feel like they had a home at school and Maybe their test scores were low after COVID. And this is a way to have kids stay longer in school, to have kids have ownership of what they're doing after school, more of a sense of belonging, a sense of pride, and I think that's what we really try to offer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, between both campuses is it's not just like an after-school program. We want, you know, these kids to have a say in what they're doing and how they're doing it. And you know there are these guidelines we need to follow and you know I'd hope that all schools in California are following their, all are following them there. They're nice, nicely written guidelines that you know Could result in a very positive impact with, you know, schools of any nature.
Speaker 1:The only bad thing about it is the, the acronym. I've heard so many people call it elope. Oh yeah, let's not give the Elo P, he lowP, not give kids.
Speaker 2:That that idea? No, it's, it's. I. We're the only school that I've heard called elop elop, and I don't like any of the other. No.
Speaker 1:I, none of them are good, but but yeah, what would the 30-something year old Matt tell his 18 year, 18 year old self, who didn't yet know, or at least was maybe knew that he wanted to be a PE teacher but hadn't gone to college and you know what lessons has? Has Half a life taught you about leadership, about About the world.
Speaker 2:Interesting. The our long-term sub had asked us this yesterday, but he had phrased it a little bit more of a Funnier question. I'll answer that part after on see yours. First I Would say the 18 year old me who didn't decide to go to college and went down some other path, that you know all those difficult decisions you know you were faced with and you're gonna be faced with. You know, go the harder route. You know when you're afraid of something it's because there's there's something there to be achieved and there's. You know, some things throughout my childhood and young adolescents that I didn't do, because you know it might have been afraid, might have been, you know, insecure. And you know when I decided to kind of take those leaps of faith, when I decided to kind of go ahead and attack the situation or even just attempt the situation, things ended up working out. So just tell myself to you know, go towards the more difficult stuff. You know it's gonna pay off in the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a I'm not sure who said it, but saying that you know, hard now, easy life, leader later. Easy now, hard, life later. Yeah, you know, and that JFK quote about we didn't go to the moon because it was easy, we went because it was hard, mm-hmm. So it's that process. It's probably some Parallels to what you see in the cross to right very demanding sport, like you know, fit both endurance, speed, strength, everything right, and it's like gotta keep it, keep going. Yeah, you give up the first time you get Smacked with a stick. You know that's not a great recipe for life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, when the ball moves around and the defense rotates and it's your time to dodge and you just pass the ball up, you know you haven't taken the opportunity and you've allowed the other team to reset into a defense. If any of you folk follow that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did me, but yeah, the, as you like, peer into the future. What do you see yourself in 10 years in relation to school leadership Doesn't mean you got to be leading a school, but educational leadership. So right now you're starting a credential program in the next couple months and and you've got this elop experience the coaching, athletic coordination. Where would you like to be in 10 years? It with all that.
Speaker 2:Man, 10 years, 45, I Would like to still have my hair. I Would like to be I won't take that personally. I Would say in assistant principal, at least by that point and In a spot where you know becoming a principal is is within sight. This isn't something I want to rush, but it's also Not something I want to set Long-term, far away goals to right. You know I want to kind of keep my vision narrowed. You know, right now it's Just do well, in the credentialing program, see how that goes, see how the experiences I have with practicum's, shadowing, things like that, where you know I've seen what it's like here, that's the only real place I've really experienced in Southern California, right? So if, like you know, I get to see what it's like at a 3,000 person high school, right, you know I went to college with a thousand people, you know I have no idea, you went to high school with like 300.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I don't know what a what 3,000 kids in a building feels like, I don't know what those vibrations feel like, but yeah, I would say at least to a vice principal, and you know I'm a fairly loyal human being. You know I wouldn't say like blindly loyal and I wouldn't say you know dumbly loyal or stupidly loyal, but you know there's something to say about, you know, building something somewhere and going up through that ladder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, the grass is always greener, as they say. But you know when you leave and you turn out it was just re-painted and that's dirt.
Speaker 1:There's a very vulgar comment about the grass being greener. I heard the other day, and I'll try to do it in keeping with it the grass is always greener where it's watered with bull doo doo.
Speaker 2:Keeping a few geese yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the only yeah, yeah, but to your point.
Speaker 2:right yeah, and anyone can leave, and it takes certain types of people, and you know, to stay and to build and to have ownership and thrive in a certain area.
Speaker 2:You know, not necessarily talking about myself, but there are other people that we work with who have been here a very long time and have done amazing things with building this organization, and there's people that have come in around the same time I have and have stayed, and there's a sense of ownership and a sense of community behind that. And when we all have the same mindset making student based and student first decisions you know we can start to go in the correct direction or go in a direction where we can build. Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:That's uh there's something to be said for endurance and longevity, and uh, culture that has people think a year or two and one job is too, too long and they got to go somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I haven't done anything like well. When I moved out here I worked at the global visions Academy. Yeah, but I had asked them to give me a contract for the following school year because I had just moved here and they're like, oh, we don't do that for anyone, we'll give you an interview at the end of the school year and we'll decide then. But you can interview other places. Yeah, the very next day I interviewed here and Barb had me sign a letter saying I would my intent to work here. And then at the end of that school year they offered me a position and I told them where I was going and they were pleased. They were happy that, you know, I'd come out here to kind of get them out of a bind and you know they knew you really well and you know I had a great time there and having a great time here.
Speaker 1:Um, you've been very generous with your time and I just have a couple more questions. But what's with the mustache? I mean, not not you know that I'm criticizing your mustache. I'm actually fairly envious of the the ability to grow facial hair, but you are committed to to advocacy every November. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm a part of Movember. I've done this since, I want to say, my junior year in college. It's a charity at every November you grow a mustache and it's a conversation starter to get people to talk about this charity, which is all about men's mental health awareness, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, um, and in my family in particular, there's been, you know, colon cancer, prostate cancer, mental health issues, and you know the stigma that is followed around with mental health issues with men, yep, and I've talked about that and I've gone through some pretty heavy ups and downs in my life, um, which you know we're evened out through therapy and things. And you know, a lot of men of any age aren't really taught or shown how to talk about their feelings, emotions or whatever it may be, and I wasn't either.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was no saint and had a lot of misconceptions, had a lot of uh, philosophies that you know weren't true, and then you know, it took a while for me to kind of really understand those things. I worked at a camp for mentally and physically disabled adults and that kind of even out my thinking about life and different experiences in college and a lot of just reading and and being able to go out and find growth, and that changed that. But, like I said, there's a lot of, there's a fair amount. A lot of people don't go through that and they aren't. They're not shown that way or they don't, aren't interested or they don't know that it's there. So that's really why I got involved in it, um, and you know, I don't know how many billions of dollars they've raised for these, these certain causes, um, but it's, it's fun to grow a mustache. It gives me an excuse to have one for a month, a year, um, and since being out here, I've, I've, at the end of each November, I give our students four options and they vote on those options, and that's what I'll do to my mustache for a week, and the first year I had to bleach it in diet pink and it was embarrassing enough. Um, the only pink diet this I don't even know what makeup store or beauty store this was that I was lost walking around and was fetish pink, um, and so I had to dye my mustache this bright neon pink.
Speaker 2:And, uh, since then we've, uh, we've done zebra stripe. I did a really impressive rainbow, and by I mean my fiancee dies in for me, I don't, I couldn't do this. Um, let's say, you saw zebra rainbow. Uh, I shaved half off once last year we did um Christmas colors was red green. Red green that was. You know, it's right around the holiday, so people kind of love that. I bleached it once, um, and I kept it for an extra week over a vacation because we're we're in Vegas coaching all across tournament. That was a pretty big hit, um, but the year I had to shave half of it off was it's something I'm never going to do it again. Um, there was one night and I purposely, like, waited until the evening to go grocery shopping and I was walking into Vaughns and they have security guards at grocery stores in California, apparently and this woman she's a security guard fell on the ground laughing at me and I I've never felt so just like the heat on my skin. I was walking in there and it it was tough.
Speaker 1:So that's the half.
Speaker 2:mustache is not on the option no it will never, ever be on the option. And kids I don't ask kids for suggestions every year and they'll be like, well, shave half off and then shave the other eyebrow.
Speaker 2:I'm like I'm not like my eyebrows not going to grow back, like my mustache is like it might not grow back. It might not grow back, yeah, um, so this year there's we don't have them all nailed down yet, but a lot of the options have been from kids or the suggestions from kids have been purples and greens, a lot of rainbow. I had a suggestion of doing Einstein colors yellow in the middle and then red and blue. Pretty cool Yellow is a hard thing to die. Yeah, so I'll have to.
Speaker 2:I'll have to hit Hulk Hogan up on Instagram and wonder how he got his facial hair that color.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, all all humor aside, it's commendable that you, that you focus on male issues and, as you say, especially when we're not conditioned to even talk about them, mental health or health. Otherwise, that tends to be get pretty sensitive pretty quickly, right, depending on what type of disease, et cetera, we're talking about. I'm going to link in the show notes to you at the charity so we'll make sure that folks can find that. Um, I have one last question for you. So you have the privilege of creating a billboard for the five freeway. Cars are going to go by at 65, 70 miles an hour. Drivers only have a second or two or three to read this thing. What does Matt's billboard say that expresses your view on life or your career or anything that's important to you that you think people should know as we wrap up today's podcast.
Speaker 1:A billboard that expresses something that you would like people to know, whether either know about you or that you think society would benefit from, from thinking about.
Speaker 2:You're cared about or you're loved. Something simple that doesn't need to be long. But yeah, I'm just trying to think like that's great. You know, middle of the night someone's driving on the highway had a tough day, or just zoning out and just look up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great place to wrap for today and it ties into your previous talk about supporting charity and um, and also your work with students. It's been a real privilege, uh, matt, to have you on and I appreciate you sharing um from one East coaster to another. I appreciate sharing Because we sit out here on the on the West coast and um, um, our, our fellow people on the East coast are freezing right now and we're not. But, uh, it's been a great time and thank you for coming on. We'll have to do this again soon.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much Thank you for listening to the superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS 1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchial for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.