Corie Julius, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Coordinator and Teacher Librarian at Albert Einstein Academies (AEA), shines a light on IB educators' mission to cultivate informed, compassionate global citizens. She shares her life's journey and how these experiences have forged her educational philosophy centered on peace, humanity, and acceptance. We discuss the merits of innovative teaching methods like looping and multi-age classrooms, and how the evolving role of libraries impacts today's education. We navigate the complexities of IB education, the significant role of California in the IB education landscape, and the unique challenges IB coordinators face. Join us for an episode filled with personal triumphs, professional growth, and the transformative power of embracing change in the world of education.
Corie Julius, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Coordinator and Teacher Librarian at Albert Einstein Academies (AEA), shines a light on IB educators' mission to cultivate informed, compassionate global citizens. She shares her life's journey and how these experiences have forged her educational philosophy centered on peace, humanity, and acceptance. We discuss the merits of innovative teaching methods like looping and multi-age classrooms, and how the evolving role of libraries impacts today's education. We navigate the complexities of IB education, the significant role of California in the IB education landscape, and the unique challenges IB coordinators face. Join us for an episode filled with personal triumphs, professional growth, and the transformative power of embracing change in the world of education.
talked about the origins of IB and even going back past 1968, when it was first founded, and that the first international school was really about promoting peace and having these questions about is there an educational system that will promote peace? And their conclusion was yes, and this idea of a shared planet, shared humanity, accepting people even if they're not like you, and teaching those concepts. And then you know, then IB comes up with their learner profile and the 10 learner attributes and that that is the core of teaching people how to be human beings so they can deal with conflict and new things like AI. So I'm a believer in IB.
Speaker 2: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 Shareda. Come on in and hang out. In this episode I was privileged to sit down with Corey Julius. Corey is currently the International Boccaloriate or IB coordinator at Albert Einstein Academies. Corey is a credentialed school librarian, former classroom teacher and general global explorer, both physically in travel and also in ideas and concepts. Our conversation touched on a wide range of topics, from her unorthodox upbringing to her international travels and adventures and her beliefs around the value of an IB education. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did sitting down with the one and only Corey Julius. Welcome, corey, good afternoon. Thanks for coming in for a little bit to hang out.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:I was wondering if you could start out by sharing your origin story, where you come from and what brings you to the present moment.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, so I grew up in a family. My mom was from Encinitas, actually, and my parents married very young. My dad was in the military, and so my youngest years were spent moving around. He worked as a nuclear submarine in a nuclear submarine, and when he got out of the service when I was seven, we moved to Oregon so he could work at a nuclear power plant there, and eventually we moved to a little two acre farm and I spent my teen years taking care of, doing chores and taking care of various ducks, a steer, a pony, cats and dogs.
Speaker 1:I'm the oldest of four kids, so that also played a part in my development. My mom didn't work until I was about 12, and when she went back to work, she actually worked as a coder, a software engineer, just fixing code, and I took care of my younger brothers and sisters. So I have a brother that's 13 months younger than me and a brother and sister that are eight years and 11 years younger, and so it was my job to take care of them while my mom was at work, something that changed my life. So part of I feel like moving around a lot. When I was little, I went to three different schools in first grade Hawaii, here in San Diego and Encinitas and then up in St Helens, oregon, and I think moving around made me a little bit of an anxious person. We talk about military families and kind of instability right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the instability in having my father away for months at a time as a small person on a submarine where you at that time in the 70s you couldn't communicate at all. There was some letter writing that happened, and occasionally we get letters, but that was it. So other than that we had no communication. So it was a relief when my father left the Navy and came home and then started working swing shift at the power plants. We never saw him really then either, because we were at school and he would be at work and sleeping when we were home. But then when I turned 16, my grandfather, who lived here, bought a 40 square mile cattle ranch in eastern Oregon and my family moved from a town of 8,000 just outside Portland Oregon to a place called Enterprise Oregon on the far eastern corner, northeastern corner of Oregon. So my father quit his job, had no farming experience, no ranching experience, neither did my grandfather really, other than owning a cow or things like that. So we moved our family, my parents moved us when I was 17 to live on this remote farm in the middle of nowhere, to learn to farm and to ranch, and I spent the middle of my junior year in high school and my senior year in high school in a school of about 100 kids, with 20 kids in my grade level. So I moved from a school of like 800 kids to a school of 100 kids in high school, and that was a huge defining moment in my life.
Speaker 1:We had lived in St Helens for over 10 years and I developed friendships from first grade through the middle of my junior year. I had a good group of friends. I had a very strong there's a very strong music program in my high school, and I played French horn, and that was all just kind of ripped away and replaced with something very, very different. It was like moving to a completely different country at the time, and it was really hard and I really hated my parents for a while. For, like the first year I did, though there were a lot of good things about living in a really tiny rural town, so I participated in things that I would not have in a larger high school. I am not a super athletic person, but I did play sports because I had to. Everyone had to play, otherwise.
Speaker 2:I couldn't feel the team.
Speaker 1:Right. So I managed to do the more individualized sports like Cross Country, and somehow managed to letter in Cross Country, even if I didn't run the whole course.
Speaker 1:It was a numbers thing, yeah it was a numbers thing, so I also. We had a very, very tiny band, so I just played. I played in community bands, I played in our school band. I ended up playing different various instruments because we needed a bass or we needed this or that. So I tried a bunch of different things and then, of course, growing up on a, we moved to a 400 acre farm and so the learning curve for my family and for us was very steep as far as trying to just get used to living in a different environment and culture and work like we worked.
Speaker 1:So there was a lot of hauling pipes and figuring out how to run cattle and do terrible things that you do to cattle to prepare them for slaughter, basically. But I did learn. I had to ride horses, I had to herd cattle, I had to help vaccinate them, I had to brand them and do a live irrigation and things like that. So I did. It was a completely different life and every teenager in a small rural place like that works, so you're working when you're not in school. I wonder if it's still that way.
Speaker 2:Do you think it's still that way?
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean especially in the summers. The kids that are in high school, they're all doing, they're all out on the farms or running a tourist working in a restaurant that's open in the summer because they're not open in the winter. There aren't really that many tourists there in the winter. Laos County is sometimes called the Swiss Alps of Oregon and it's glacier formed mountains with a marine and a beautiful lake where the Nez Perce Indians used to winter or summer actually and it's a really beautiful area that was taken over by white settlers and farmers and ranchers, but it's remote and so everyone there is working when they have a chance. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We could go a bunch of different directions from that. Thank you for sharing I'm interested in. Well, let's see. I know that Oregon today has an east-west blue-red divide. Yes, did it have that feel then, and was that a shock to your system going from urban to rural?
Speaker 1:and big to small. Yes, but my family at the time and so myself at the time were a very rural, conservative evangelical family, and so moving to eastern Oregon wasn't a hardship for them. It wasn't until I so, when I moved to that school I had started taking Spanish that high school and I had a Spanish teacher who was brand new and he had connections to Guadalajara. And he actually took us to Guadalajara and we visited a family there with four small children that he was sort of somehow supporting.
Speaker 1:It was just a very interesting situation, but that changed my life to go to Guadalajara as an 18-year-old and spend a couple weeks with this family that was just barely surviving in an apartment compound and that made me want to continue to learn Spanish. And when I went to college, I was looking for a university that had an exchange program with Mexico. I didn't want to go to Spain, I want to go to Mexico. I ended up at Willamette University, a small private liberal arts college in Salem, oregon, and they at the time I thought they had a program to Guadalajara, but they canceled it the year that I showed up there. I also had a music scholarship and so I worked, I managed the community orchestra and played French horn while I was there. But then, my second semester this is the other big life-changing moment that really changed my life and my worldview and my perspective was I had a friend in my Spanish class that said hey, this is our freshman year, I'm going to go live in Puebla, mexico, and go to the University of America's for a semester.
Speaker 1:Do you want to come? And I said yes, and so I had to disenroll. I had to enroll through a community college in New York called Broom Community College and went to University of America's in Puebla that next summer. And that just blew my mind, opened my mind. I lived a pretty sheltered life until that point and just living in Mexico. I ended up staying the whole year. I came home for a winter break and then I went back and I just fell in love. And I fell in love many different ways. One of them I did date my grandma professor who was 10 years older than I was, and he didn't tell me he was 10 years older. I found out after we visited his twin sister's house that he was 10 years older Was he very youthful looking.
Speaker 1:He was very youthful looking, and he had been. He was getting his master's degree in teaching Spanish and so he taught Spanish for the school, for all the international students, and I lived in the dorms at the University with all of the other students, and dormitory life in 19, early 1990s in Mexico is very different than college dormitory life even back then. So we had a guard and we all the girls were separated into a compound and all the boys were across campus and you had to check in and out and if you were too late from curfew they would call your parents. So what you would end up doing is just staying out all night so that you didn't get a phone call home. So that happened several times.
Speaker 1:But they actually did call my parents in the United States to tell them that I was out past curfew a couple times, which was pretty hilarious because my parents were like, yeah, she's 19 years old and she's gonna stay out past 11. So, anyway, so that it was a very interesting experience. And then I had this person that I was dating. That was my teacher. So I learned Spanish pretty well from that experience and I made friends from all over the world and at that time, noriega was. That was going on in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like 1989-90 right yeah so remember just being horrified after learning the you know I was learning the Mexican perspective on on American history, basically so and colonial history from a Mexican academic perspective which was very different than what I was learning in the United States I had been exposed to.
Speaker 1:So hearing about our troops invading a country and playing rock music to annoy someone Until he finally came out right yeah and I just remember being really shocked by that, after, after the other invasions that I had heard about and you know, in the taking of, you know their perspective, we took half their country.
Speaker 2:And your dad was in the military.
Speaker 1:And my dad had been in the military. So it was very it was just there was a lot to think about. And I came home a very different person politically, religiously, culturally than my family, and so that really that really changed things and I realized I loved Spanish, I loved Mexico, I loved working in that and I originally thought I was gonna, you know, work in an embassy or something. That's what I was going to college for. I wanted to do political science and then I took my first econ class and decided I didn't want to take political science anymore.
Speaker 2:So I did macroeconomics and microeconomics. Yeah, I was like no.
Speaker 1:So I majored in in Spanish and then I got close to a minor in just like English language, english literature. So that really changed me. And then the year after college I Well, the other thing I did that really changed was the last few years of college. I worked as a national forest firefighter in my rural county.
Speaker 2:Like a smoke jumper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually I was helitech trained. I didn't jump out of helicopters, but I was trained to land them in wild land and I did a couple times do that for helicopters. It's kind of silly because the pilot knows what he's doing, but you're supposed to stand out there and wave your arms a certain way.
Speaker 1:What I did. I was piloted into, flown into a couple different fires with fire crews and worked fire and lived out in a no electricity cabin 50 miles out of town in the middle of the woods with a pumper engine and rode around all day either fighting fire or cutting down trees or painting stuff. So that was another big job. It was probably the hardest thing I've ever done, besides teaching, because it's just so physical and looking at me now, you wouldn't believe that I'd be walking through a forest with a chainsaw A chainsaw.
Speaker 1:But I did do that, so that also just was hard work. And then after college, my first job was to be a migrant tutor with Migra Education, which is a federally funded program for schools with families who are migrant families. So whether they're working in fisheries or in the fields and in the Willamette Valley at the time and still today, there we have many migrant workers, mostly from Mexico.
Speaker 2:Set apples.
Speaker 1:It's everything, it's berries it's grass, it's onions, it's flowers, apples yeah, just produce. And so there's a lot of farming in the Willamette Valley. There's really good soil, there's vineyards.
Speaker 1:You may have come across a bottle of wine from there. So the first school I worked in was 100% below the poverty line. It's called Highland Elementary in the Salem-Kaiser School District and I would work with migrant students. At first I did a summer camp with them and that was really great. And then I started working in the school and I fell in love with that and I've always loved children. I've always just from being an older child and working in our you know always helping with Sunday school or babysitting or working I've just loved children. So I really enjoyed that job and the director at the time said you need to go back and get your teaching degree and I did not want to be a teacher or a nurse because those were the only two jobs that women, as I was growing up, that I was exposed to that women had and I wanted to do something different.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to just be in a stereotypical job. But I said, okay, I do really like this. Even though it's a stereotypical job, I really like doing this. I'm going to do it. So I got my master's of arts in teaching the next year and then started teaching in 94, 95, a third and fourth grade class at the same school where I had been a migrant tutor. So I knew the staff, I knew the kids. I felt really lucky.
Speaker 1:We were coming out of a dual immersion seven-year grant so we were transitioning from a dual language model in the classroom in English Spanish dual language model for the school, from English Spanish to what you would say like a late exiting program, where you start with a lot more Spanish in the lower grades and then you would exit out as you got older. So I used a lot of Spanish and I loved disconnecting with those kids and the families. So then I taught for six years there, had my first child and then my husband was a software engineer at the time and he quit and became an instructional assistant because he saw what I was doing in the schools and quit his job for a year and decided after a year of volunteering and working in schools he wanted to be a teacher. So he went back to school and taught fourth and fifth grade for five years and then I was a reading specialist for a couple years, part time, and second I taught third and fourth. I also did a link.
Speaker 1:The other thing I did that was interesting was I link. I am oh no, I can't remember the name. It's when you continue with the kids you loop, you loop. So I taught third, fourth grade, then I taught fourth, fifth grade, then I taught fifth grade, then I jumped down to second grade and did second and second, third grade again, and then I became a reading specialist part time for a couple years while my kids were little. Then my husband decided to get his doctorate and we moved here to San Diego after that. So then I was home with three kids and not working for a few years. Then, ironically, I didn't want to go back in the classroom because I was afraid of the technology and the advancements that had happened between 2002 and 2007, more or less that was really. The internet really became a big- Like Web 2.0 kind of-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, became a big player in the classroom. When I left, we were still barely had email.
Speaker 2:Dial up.
Speaker 1:It was dial up. We had a few people in our school that were exploring and it would take 15, 20 minutes to load something, so it was really hard to use in the classroom. My husband was getting his doctorate in educational technology so I was like I don't think I can do this. Then I started thinking about what I did want to do and I decided I wanted to be a librarian and I started exploring that and thought I would be an academic librarian and call. I thought I was done with K-12.
Speaker 2:Like a research reference for a college.
Speaker 1:Yeah, an academic librarian. So I started that program in 2007, found out about Einstein. My kids were going to Longfellow at the time and about the same time that I started that, I was in that program for a semester, thought I was going for an academic librarian. And then three people, including this person Some people will know that listen from our school Joe Hartman was actually. He was a teacher here and he was the tech guy for Einstein and he was taking a class for my husband, so he had heard from my husband. I was in library school and they needed a librarian at Albert Einstein.
Speaker 2:That's the history. I knew, you knew each other, but I didn't realize that.
Speaker 1:And then there was another family that worked. They're both professors at SDSU and their son, max. I think Max or Noel, it was Noel's parents.
Speaker 2:He's probably 30 years old right now.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, knew my husband and knew about that and also mentioned it to him. So one day and then Michelle at that time, her son was going to school here another connection here, another parent and they all the same day said you know, you should apply for this, you're a teacher already. And I was do I really want to go back to K-12? And I was, like, I do really love kids and so I decided to apply. And then I got hired here at Einstein. So that's how I came to Einstein. I feel like I've been talking a lot. It's great.
Speaker 2:It's great because it spares people having to listen to me talk. So I was reflecting when you were talking about going to Mexico in the early 90s, right or the-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was 89, 90. 89, 90, right.
Speaker 2:So we're talking the days when, to call home, you had a McColloch call probably.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, hundreds of dollars.
Speaker 2:Hundreds of dollars, and so you'd talk to your family once a month or whatever right, and for them Mexico may have seemed like a million miles away, right, just completely, very little frame of reference for what you were experiencing, and I think there's a real gift in that that kids today and not only kids, anybody today traveling doesn't really have right Because we can FaceTime at all times and be in contact at all times.
Speaker 2:It doesn't cost anything and it takes away something, I think from the experience, because you don't really feel like you are truly on your own and having to kind of fend for yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right. Unless your phone battery dies, use your past phone and then you're all stressed out that you need to charge your phone. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think about even you staying out all night, like that's kind of harder to do nowadays really. You know someone's texting you or FaceTiming you. I heard from the college where are you? Kind of thing. I think there's a real gift in that. I remember in the early 90s when I lived in Central America and I would call once a month Sunday night. We figured out that was a time when it was cheapest with a calling card and I'd call and it was a five minute conversation. That was it. Yeah, okay, you safe. Yeah, everything good, Okay, okay, okay, bye, and like $42, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there were a couple. I felt horrible, there were a couple hundred dollar calls.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Within that year, there were some things I need to talk to with my mother and it was hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting and I think it says something about who you are, that you chose to kind of such a kind of divergent place to go right In terms of studying abroad, something very, very different from Northeastern Oregon. Before we get into the teaching career. That's really interesting to me, but before we get into that, I want to go back to what it's like to go to a tiny school. So, full disclosure I attended a very small school in New York and I think my graduating high school class was like under 30 kids.
Speaker 1:So similar.
Speaker 2:Similar and I'm working my way through Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath and he talks about the fact that there's actually very little unanimity in the research around class size in school. So we've taken it as gospel in education that small class sizes it means better. Like private schools will tout that they have 20 to one ratio and that's why you should spend 50 grand to send your kid there. So you know, when they change the law in California sometime in the late mid to late 90s there was a class size reduction in K3 and 20 to one. So that's become the thing and anytime you get past that people start to equate that with being less effective. But Gladwell has some interesting research around the negative things that happen when you get too small.
Speaker 2:Did you experience any of that. You know because I certainly did in my education where you're in such a small pond that once you have a reputation you just can't shake it, but that's you forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, especially a school of 100 kids. So when I moved there and a lot of those kids, probably similar to your school, had gone to school together since kindergarten first grade. So they all knew each other, they all, you know their parents had probably also, you know, had been friends or even more back and forth. You know, like small town. Small towns are wild so people think they're kind of out in the middle of nowhere and then nothing's going on there.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot going on there. There's a lot and it's like compacted right, yeah. It's like take all the, the, the atoms and jam them together, yeah, and a lot of people are related. Yes, so everyone knows everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everybody knows what's going on, and I mean the newspaper reports when people visit the county.
Speaker 2:So at that time anyway, who's going on a date with everybody they know before you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so it's like that and for me the problem moving to a small school like that was I had a really good group of friends at my other school and you know, 200 kids per grade level, that was about the size of school and I feel like that's a very ideal size actually, like that's what our school is probably going to be about.
Speaker 1:There's enough. It's small enough you can know everyone or know, be familiar with everybody, but it's large enough that there's some variety and you can. You can move around a little bit and you can find a few people at least who are like you. Yeah, so you can find a friendship group. And with a group that is that small, you know you mess up one or two times or you do something dumb people don't forget and there's no one to to restart your, you know your time with. And so that definitely affected me and I had.
Speaker 1:I made friends in a grade, the kids that were a grade above me as seniors, and then they left and then I, then my next group of friends were a freshman, because I couldn't there weren't kids like me in my grade level, and that's not necessarily bad to have friends in different age groups, but I really missed having a community of friends that cared about similar things that I cared about, and that that was hard and I I never did develop especially close friends with that group of. I keep in contact with some of them, but it's it's not the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we idealized this kind of small setting and white picket fence and everybody walking to school, their lunch pail and everything. But it can have a downside.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can have a downside as we look back as adults now on our, on our youth.
Speaker 1:And, honestly, the resources aren't there either. You know, you only get there's one teacher that teaches history, and they're bad. You don't learn how to write an essay, you know, and that that happened, I mean they're, you know. So there's not the quality and the, and then the variety of resources as well, Isn't there?
Speaker 2:It's interesting that you eventually went into a setting as a professional where you were looping. I did part of my masters. My master's thesis was on on looping. This was like at the dawn of the internet, so I don't think my my literature review.
Speaker 2:I don't think it was totally thorough, but anyway they gave me the degree, but it was interesting. The findings were interesting. Right Is that if you had a really effective teacher and then you and you could build these amazing relationships with kids and families over multiple years, right, one, two, three. But if it was ineffective you get double and triple the bad stuff.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and so we always gave. When we started doing that, we gave families choice to stay or to go. We tried to do that, but at that time we had such a high transition like 50% of our kids would leave every year. It was insane, and sometimes they'd come back because they were following a migrant circuit and so, or you would have siblings, you know like they leave and then a year later you'd have the sibling. So at least you could establish some kind of relationship with the family and with the kids and I think in that situation it really was helpful and beneficial, and that the idea of hitting the ground running in the beginning of the year. Kids know you, they know the routines.
Speaker 2:It's so interesting that we imagine if, as professionals, every year you had a different job, Not because you wanted to, but because that's how the system was set up and you knew it was kind of in the same industry, but you were reporting to a different supervisor and you weren't really sure what their style was gonna be, or really even what the expectations of the job were gonna be. And you're we're people with fully formed brains, supposedly Imagine. I mean. So when I think about that, I think about the inherent stress we have built into a system if we're not careful for kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like the stress if you ask kids what they're most anxious about the start of the school year. It's not the content, it's how am I gonna find the bathroom? Are my teachers gonna know who I am? Are they gonna know that I like to sit in the front row or not? It's all that relearning the human stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think kids multi-age.
Speaker 1:The fact that it's a multi-age and I have come to believe that that is a really effective way and can be a really effective way to group students. And so it is nice to have a larger span actually, because you even though, even if you have the same kids in your class, the same age, you're gonna have this huge spectrum and when you have a larger age spectrum there's just more kids kind of at each touch point on the spectrum and so and that's how our families are You're in a multi. If you're in with siblings, you're in a multi-age community, and I think it's a little. There's definitely benefits to being in a multi-age environment in a learning environment.
Speaker 2:It's one of the hangovers from the. It's a Prussian army way of organizing things, and the British Empire too. I keep it organized. And then industrial revolution. You need to keep things uniform because they work more efficiently that way. I mean, if you told me I could only hang out with people who are within 12 months of age of myself that's kind of. I don't wanna hang out with people like me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's one of the things I think we miss from being on two campuses, even though we're really close and I'm really grateful we have the vans now and so hopefully that more of that peer interaction with even both on both campuses. Can eighth graders do something for sixth graders? Can sixth graders come back and visit the second graders and just building those? I know they do. There's a larger age range at the elementary school so they can do that more easily.
Speaker 2:But and I think it also kind of feeds into this idea that I'm a teacher of blank grade. That's what I do. No one's credential says you're credentialed to teach fourth grade, that's it right. But over time, your mental credit, yours, the editorial, you, your mental credential eventually becomes I'm a fourth grade teacher. I teach kids who are like nine to 10, that's what I do.
Speaker 2:And I think over time it's perhaps not the best for a community that should be looking constantly forward and back and up the age range and down, to see where we come from and where we're going. I mean, you and I have spent half an hour talking about where you come from, and I find it fascinating, and hopefully you do too, because it flowed really easily for you, right. But now we're gonna talk about start looking in the future. But I think it'll be so hard if I said, corey, we're only gonna talk about what you're doing today. That's it, you know. So these are interesting things. So I had my magic wand, which I don't, but if I had it I would design a school system with a lot more looping in it, intentionally done, I've seen it. My daughter attended a Waldo school for many years, as did I, and I've seen it work really well and I've seen it be disastrous, but I've also seen it be disastrous in a non-looping setting, right, but then you just go. I just gotta survive this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't know if that's a healthy thing. And then actually I know that's not a healthy thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's interesting. So you talked about being interested in library. At first you thought it was gonna be at the university level. Then you come to Einstein. Share with us your journey as a credential librarian, especially in the context of the fact that library science and the realities of being a school librarian have changed dramatically in the last, let's say, two decades. And who knows where we're going in the future. Like, how do you view that? We'll get back to the IB coordinator piece that you do, but how do you view libraries anymore? When I talked to, for example, the folks who manage massive multimillion dollar construction projects for a big school district, san Diego Unified, and they tell me we don't even design libraries anymore. Our buildings don't even have libraries in them anymore. They have, we call them, common gathering spaces, almost like an Apple store where people can come together and share ideas. And sure, there'll be Wi-Fi, because there's Wi-Fi everywhere. So how do you view your credential area and today and into the future?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, when I did decide to do the Master of Library Information Science and then do it to be a teacher librarian you have to have a multi-subject teaching credential and then you don't have to have a Master's in Library Information Science but you do this tract, a teacher librarian tract. But I did the Master's in Library Information Science and then got the credential. So a teacher librarian in California is basically double-credentialed and with the option of having a Master's or not. When I started that I knew that libraries were dying in California and it has been the case since then that I mean. So there's a couple things. One California is the bottom of the 48 states in how many teacher librarians or librarians there are per person or in the state. So we have the lowest number of librarians out of the entire country. I would say that's the same with. I'm not sure if it's exactly the same, but it's like counselors and nurses and other things that are disappearing from schools art teachers, music teachers.
Speaker 2:So part one part of this. What are the things behind?
Speaker 1:that. Well, the California School Library Association believes, and I agree with them, that it has something to do with prop. So prop 13,. It was before my time 13.
Speaker 1:Where sales tax at that time or property taxes. Sorry, at that time California had the number one education system in the world. I think that could be arguably said, and I'm not saying we should have kept property taxes to the level that they were, but it did and continues to do a number. And then I think our country in general doesn't value children or education. So, yes, we spend multimillion dollars on buildings and we do have somewhat of a living wage for teachers and we were very fortunate at the school that we attend to be well-funded and well-resourced. But many schools across the country and across California have crumbling infrastructure, lack of resources, lack of staff, so part of it's just the beast of our education system. I think how do we?
Speaker 2:this is gonna be a self-serving question for me how do we share that sentiment in a way that doesn't sound like, hey, look at us, pat me on the back, but in a way where staff and families and students understand the fortunate situation in the world? And the fortunate situation in which we find ourselves at Albert Einstein Academy is because human nature is such that it compares, but it compares always in ways that are striving and seeking to have what we don't have. It doesn't often compare analytically, so people are very, very seldom gonna do the analysis that you just did right, which I'm sure the library association is also done right. That's library and association.
Speaker 2:that's part of their, that's why, that's what organizations do industry organizations and guilds, et cetera but the average person doesn't do that. They're in a classroom if they're a teacher or they're a parent, and they go oh, there's 30 kids in here, oh, I would. So-and-so goes to this private school when they're 20, or oh, you know, we, there's no, I need another set of books. We never have anything, and so it's refreshing to hear that perspective. But how does how do we get that out there in a community, so that then we can really focus on the legitimate areas of need that we don't have?
Speaker 1:David, that's a really tough question. I mean, the only one of the reasons I have that perspective is from visiting other schools and also having taught in other schools even though it's been a while and watching the disparity in different schools. So, for example, when I was teaching in the mid-90s, my husband started teaching in Lake Austin, westland Wilsonville. West Westland Wilsonville school district, which is closer to Portland and very much an upper. It's kind of where the tech tech families live.
Speaker 1:So I mean this is a silly comparison, but he would come home with Lennox China at Christmas and $50 gift certificates. In the 90s. My kids would go to the back of the room and empty the pencil sharpener because they didn't have access to anything steel construction paper from the cupboard and glue and make me a Merry Christmas card with pencil shavings as glitter and that and that is what I would get, and not that I wanted anything, but we would come home and I'd be.
Speaker 1:I loved those little because they met so much right, and his were handed off by parents who were we still have some of those little Lennox candy bowls. So there's a real difference there and yeah, I mean. So I think being able to see that and experience it makes you realize, and then being whether you have kids in schools and you see those schools as well, like you can see if they're well run or not, especially if you have an education background and you go to a school and the principal is not effective, the teachers aren't effective, so I don't really know how to do it for families and people who haven't had other experiences with schools.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would just like to do it with staff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I guess trying to get people out there to see what it's really like in other schools and do school visits would be a way to do it. I mean, every time I do one I'm through WASC or through IB, or it's just like I'm really grateful for. I was really grateful for the community I had at my first school, at Highland Elementary. We had a very strong teaching community and I feel that we have that community as well here, despite no school's perfect. But we have something really unique at our school and I feel really grateful that I'm in a place like that where you have colleagues you can talk to and rely on and share things with, and that the norm is supposed to be collaboration and cooperation and communication and that those are actually stated norms and not just something that's assumed or not even expected.
Speaker 2:So where does AI fit into? And, by the way, there's a question that my daughter told me not to ask because she says she's getting sick of hearing AI questions.
Speaker 2:But, this is so relevant to research, to library science, to libraries, to even the nature of knowing. You know, I've got an episode coming up Actually, it may already air by the time. This one airs by Dr Mitra, who I interviewed. He's a very well-known TED Talk presenter and a $1 million TED Talk prize and is the whole-in-the-wall experiment guy from India, right where they put a computer in a wall left. It had internet access and a mouse and that was it.
Speaker 2:In a really poor part of town in Delhi and didn't give any instructions. And they came back in a couple of weeks and the kids were like, first of all, they were speaking to him in English and they were not English speakers and they asked him if they could get more RAM for the computer. So it was like hey, kids can teach themselves. So that was pre-smartphone era, right, like it was like 99, 2000. So where does artificial intelligence fit into this whole picture for you?
Speaker 1:Well, from a library lens and a teaching lens, it's a tool that humans have created that I would consider it an advancement. I mean I don't know if it's an advancement like nuclear energy. Is an advancement like how powerful or dangerous it could be? Various advancements have been considered dangerous all through the centuries. So including books and continuing. Today, books continue to be very scary things for some people.
Speaker 2:It is interesting. I don't mean to interrupt your train, but even you brought up nuclear, right, so talk about a charged topic, right? And when you count up the number of people who've died in nuclear disasters, it's not even a rounding error compared to the number of people who've died from fossil fuel related and burning coal for centuries. But anyway, interesting right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I consider my approach to learning about AI is it's a tool that has a great, great potential and that we need to, that could support students' creative and critical thinking. That's my hope. That it enhances communication between folks and cultures and I think that students need to learn how to use it, understand it and also be aware of. If there are powerful negative choices we can make with AI, what those are and be aware of them and just for example, and being aware of bias in the system, which we're trying to become aware of in all of our systems not just AI, I mean that's why AI is bias.
Speaker 1:We have all this other bias we have to worry about and think about. So it's just kind of an addition to that. And then just listening to your other podcast about, for example, curepod is it CurePod?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was reading an article recently about there's a lot of really interesting apps out there to support teachers in their day-to-day classroom management and assessment, et cetera, and just trying to keep track of all the things that you have to keep track of in education. So I think there's great potential and I feel like we're just at the beginning of figuring it out and it will probably change things a lot in the next 20 years, and I'm not sure how, but I'm ready to learn alongside the kids.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating to me because the question about where common sense comes in, that's based in gut instinct, which machines don't have, or fear or hate, or love or enthusiasm. There's this story about Elon Musk, where he was gung-ho with robots like gung-ho and we know the little we know or the lot we know about Elon Musk. When he gets gung-ho, it goes all the way for good or bad. And so he had these factories and they're making these Teslas and they're churning them out and they keep seeing this one flaw over and over and over on a car. And he's like what is going on with this? Like we have this production going, we're not meeting it and the thing's coming out.
Speaker 2:It was like a hinge on a door that was crooked or something and you could just reach over and fix it with your hand. And they're like but Mr Musk gets the robots. He's like well, fix the robot. And they're like we can't, we don't know how to. He's like take the damn robots out. And he starts going to all his factories and removing this one robot. So that turned back into a person who was the hinge person. And I think about that in the context of AI as well. I was at a presentation at a conference where I met the author of the AI classroom who's been on this show and she was talking about. Everyone always asks her how can I get AI detectors in my classroom?
Speaker 2:So to detect writing right, like errors, and she said there's no way you can do that right and a lot of them are false positives anyway, and you're just going to be chasing your tail. But why don't you Ask kids to write something using AI at home and then bring it in and then have them edit it right there in the classroom or have them talk about it with their peers? That's a common sense like, okay, gut feeling, like I know this kid and so, like you could, knowing me, if I present this paper to you on quantum physics, you're gonna know right away that I didn't write it. Just ask me two questions.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm I.
Speaker 2:Have no idea. Well, you know it brings the in some ways it brings the human element even closer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that reminds me of that.
Speaker 1:The third kind of part about AI is learning how to, how to attribute it or just cite it or to reference it if you're going to use it, how are you using it and how do we accept that use? And we still haven't figured that completely out, how we're going to accept that usage of it. But I think, you know, I think that would be a valid, just like any sort of you know database or whatever you. Also the user has to ask the right questions to get the right answers, and so that sophistication or level of you might make them that we, you know, admire people for the level of Just like we kind of look at who people cite in their try, in their thesis, in their doctoral thesis and things like who who's being cited, how are you citing, or the specific level of sophistication of the knowledge you're pulling from AI Models.
Speaker 2:I think could be really interesting as well and a point to think about and critique students on my daughter's college has an interesting policy on Citing which humans help you with your written work, and and I don't. This wasn't even a thing when I was in college a million years ago, but we also never would have thought about asking our parents to help us with college work. Nice, even the thought that my parents would call the college about anything other than just paying the bill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, was like I Think I would disown them before they could like, that's just not a very different things are very different. You know, college kids ask their parents to appeal grades on their behalf.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's that's off limits for my daughter, but every to heat to each his or her own. But when I think about that's a common sense thing like Grinnell College has this policy if you ask someone for feedback on your essay unadult cite them Mm-hmm. And I think that's fair. I'm at some level of academic capacity and if my daughter's sharing her papers with me and asking for input, I Hope I'm at least as valuable as reading an article about something and what you cite, so you should cite me right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, and and I think maybe we'll get to a place in Tk12 where we're also bringing that into the conversation. Right, I talked to dr Fisher from San Diego State a number of months ago and he said something really interesting.
Speaker 2:I asked him about the value of homework, what the research Indicates about homework, and so I Don't remember what the effect sizes were, but suffice it to say that the levels at which the effect sizes were the smallest Were at the youngest grades. Yes, for obvious reasons, parents are doing homework for kids and it never shows up Officially anywhere. But the tough part about that is that the more privileged you are, the more time there are you have with people who are gonna do your homework for you. Yeah, to put it bluntly, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's just interesting like that level of transparency around, like who's doing what and like. Why are we even assigning this thing, and is it even that necessary? Yes, I always remember it used to be a thing the fourth grade Mission project.
Speaker 2:Yeah it was like a thing forever. And then I started notice that at Michaels, the fourth grade mission projects, packets or kids started to show up because Michaels is, they're smart. They're like, hey, wait a second. People were coming in and asking us for balsa wood and like little wooden crosses forever Like what a? Hey, let's start to sell the packets. You know it's an interesting thing, like does what we assign even really matter? Right yeah what's the what's the value of knowing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Dr Mitra wrote an article called Something like Is knowing the end of knowing, or something like that, and he got criticized because people claim that he he said that knowledge was dead and that was not what he said, but he was trying to have a thought-provoking Title around this question of what really is knowing. Like, I Remember my childhood phone number, but I don't remember my brother's cell phone number.
Speaker 2:Now I don't remember my mom's cell phone number now I don't remember my mom's cell phone number now. Do I need to? I don't know. Right, a lot of our kids can't tell time on an analog clock either, because at the downfall of civilization, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Still California standard.
Speaker 2:Right, which is interesting, right argue. I mean, yeah, right, cursive, cursive. Right yeah, so there's a lot of this stuff and I think it's gonna force some of those conversations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you know how to access the information, then why do you need to start in your, in your brain? And Einstein did say, or supposedly said all you need to know is where the library is.
Speaker 2:That's right, and supposedly there are all these stories about him going to the the post office and not knowing. You know people asking him things like his, his address and stuff. He just didn't know it. He's like why don't need, why do I need to know that someone has my address written down? You? Know, so it's an interesting, an interesting point in time where we find ourselves.
Speaker 2:I want to shift a little bit and Shift move towards the IB okay, the international Baccalaureate and you've you've for some years now Been the coordinator across our organization for international Baccalaureate. What brought you, what led you to that, and how does that Connect with your origin story and some of the through themes in your life?
Speaker 1:Well. So my exposure to the international Baccalaureate program was through being hired as the librarian here and I think at the time the elementary school had just been authorized for the international Baccalaureate and they needed one of the Matters to be addressed was the parents had started a library. Ib requires that you have a library. They have a very interesting policy about what a library is and how it, how it can be, and it's very flexible and it's, you know, a place where there's collaboration and a safe space for students and a third space and can be a, gonna say, safe space and a the materials and resources that they can conduct inquiry and complete projects and collaborate and however that happens at your school. So it doesn't have to look like a traditional library, but at the time parents had started a traditional library at the beginning of our charter school, which was a, I was told was a shelf next to the principal's desk that had a shared it was a shared bookshelf.
Speaker 1:And Then we moved to the, the school where we are now the elementary school, and there was a big library space. And then they were authorized and so I was originally hired half time for that position, which has now grown into, basically grew into two two full-time positions and two library aids, basically. So that's, that's another part. That's amazing to me to have Alba Einstein Like we are the only school in San Diego Elementary middle school that has credential librarians in our county. I mean that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So that's something that's saying something about the value that we have for those, for you know, finding information and join reading and the the information literacy. So I feel you know we're pretty good and we're following best practices really when a lot of our state is not. So I for now, I feel really, really proud of that. I don't know how long we can sustain it, but I Don't. I don't think it's a bad idea, so I'm glad that that's happening, but anyway. So I've always kind of been it's.
Speaker 1:I love the classroom, but I also like a bigger picture, and so being a IB librarian helped me to really you have to Caretake for all grade levels and you're looking for resources for all the grade levels and you're meeting all of the students and all of the teachers and Keeping track of what you know, what's going on with the curriculum, and Be a support for all of those things.
Speaker 1:And so, as I continue to, you know, become a full-time position and then have an assistant and also start working with technology after our technology Person left. I kind of took over that piece too and that's could be part of the library, this library media specialist, and I grew interested in that. So I just I just kept expanding my, my interests and and caretaking of of all these things and and I, as I learned about I be and went to the for my first training and just learned about what it was and to have this global perspective. And Recently we had our California International schools fall form here and the director of development for North America came and talked about the origins of IB and even going back past 1968 when it was first founded, and that the first international school was really about promoting peace and having these questions about is there an educational system that will promote peace? And this was like in the 1920s, so you know, right after World War one and.
Speaker 1:Europe was. This was in Geneva, and it's just very what you just, you know, massive problems. And how is there a way that we can? We can teach, educate, use education to promote peace. Is that really possible? And their conclusion was yes.
Speaker 1:And this idea of a shared planet, shared humanity, a Great you know, accepting people even if they're not like you and Teaching those those concepts and then coming up, you know, then IB comes up with their learner profile and the 10 learner attributes and that that is the core of Teaching people how to be human beings so they could deal with conflict and new things like AI, and and so I, I, you know, I'm a, I'm a believer in IB.
Speaker 1:So when the when the chance came along to To move from the library to to being our coordinator left, and I was really concerned about Maintaining our, our IB, the level of our Development and in our philosophy and our framework of IB, I I volunteered to To say hey, I want to take on. We just finished our evaluation and we had some matters to be addressed with the IB organization, so I wanted to support and making sure that we had follow-through for that and that is, and and then our middle school principal Generously allowed me the chance to do that and I I just was real and it's really excited about it, because being an IB coordinator is about Is about supporting good teaching and learning in a school, and that's what I want to do.
Speaker 2:So the cynics will say that IB has had growth in the United States primarily as a tool to convince middle-class white families to stay in urban districts. That's been one of the kind of knocks right. There's also criticisms about is this part of a one-world government or not? I'm not gonna go down the tinfoil hat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please don't do that.
Speaker 2:The tinfoil hat hole right, I don't wanna give them any space, but what I'm getting at is high-minded ideals, 10 IB learner profile attributes, unit information on walls, time to collaborate, all these different things. But Monday morning, 29 kids, four who should be there, who are chronically absent, a whole host of what we know in urban education and urban education to be perhaps the most challenging issues, which are related to poverty. I had a mentor in a graduate class some years ago. Say tongue-in-cheek and please hopefully no one misquotes me on this, but isn't it interesting that all the smartest kids in California live within half a mile of the Pacific Ocean? We have a really segregated system by socioeconomics and the challenges that urban schools face or sometimes feel insurmountable. How does an IB coordinator lead in that context?
Speaker 1:Well, by believing that that type of education is good for everybody and so good teaching is. Everyone deserves good instruction and a well-developed environment to learn in everybody. And so what started out as a philosophy for teaching children of diplomats, families who were gonna take that knowledge, they really truly believed in those kids being sent off to other places and making a difference in the world and they obviously they were sort of elite and they had the power and they could do that. So they did take these at the very, very beginning.
Speaker 1:But just like I mean I believe, for example, people talk about gate programs and things I believe that instruction is for everybody, not just for gate kids, and IB is for everybody and there has been some studies done any philosophy, not just IB, but that embraces the whole child and wants to support the whole child and challenge that child to be the best person and human being they can be, that is worth teaching to anybody. And we often have not given people who deserve that education the opportunity to do that. And I honestly don't care how many white families stay or go. I just wanna teach the kids that are in front of me and be with those kids and help them be the best people that they can be Right now. We learned at this conference that California schools are the third largest country, a third largest grouping of IB schools.
Speaker 2:In the world, right In the world.
Speaker 1:Behind the United States and Canada. Yet the IB organization itself, the head of the directors none of them are from the United States. We're fighting to change that right now, because we need to have a voice in the room.
Speaker 2:When are you running for that job?
Speaker 1:Not today. I got work to do here.
Speaker 1:But so to me that means and we also have the majority of our schools in the US and in California are public and charter schools. Very few of those are private, so other countries tend to be private schools, independent schools that are IB, but here in the US. So we're this big presence in the room and we are proving that these elements work. This type of framework and philosophy works with all students and not just the families of wealthy elite kids. This is a philosophy and framework to use with all students and I 1,000% believe that and I believe it's all the good things about teaching, that you believe in student success, that you envision that they can do things and you help them and support them to do those things, and that's your job.
Speaker 2:So being a coordinator is an interesting job.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, because you buy the very term. You pull disparate pieces together. You're kind of the assembler of the jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, many times, not all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are even there. Sometimes they're turned the wrong way around, sometimes they're from a different puzzle and sometimes there are other puzzle putter together or who think that they should be putting together that puzzle or taking pieces away.
Speaker 2:So what is one of the biggest? What's the biggest challenges? What is the biggest challenge you faced as an IB coordinator, either practically on the job or philosophically. My asterisk to that is I find much of the IB generated literature and vernacular incredibly dense and for someone like myself who struggles with maintaining focus as I think a lot of our students do and waiting through dense content, that's not enticing in a narrative form. It's totally challenging. I put myself in the place of someone who's not as educated formally as I am, although they may be much more intelligent. Like they're out, they're just out. So then it becomes what this person up on the hill is talking about the 10 learner attributes, and they're like whatever. Let me just what's my kid's grade? What's your biggest struggle?
Speaker 1:Well, so the one. There's kind of a couple of struggles, but one would be taking that kind of esoteric philosophy. You know, global language that is that way because it's trying to embrace the entire world.
Speaker 1:Like every that every culture, every country can, in their own way, take this and make it their own.
Speaker 1:And so the struggle is to not get wrapped up in that language and the complexity of what they're talking about and try to pull the pieces that really work for your community and make them relatable.
Speaker 1:And I don't wanna say simple in a bad way, but just simplify things and connect them, make those connections to what people are familiar with. So, for example, we just did responsive classroom review yesterday in elementary school. The philosophy and principles for responsive classroom, which all of our teachers get trained in, is aligned with IB philosophy, so, but it is presented in a much more engaging way and just kind of very simplified. You know how do we speak to students that embraces the whole student and that provides empathy for students, and so they're already familiar with that and that you know. So they may not even know that they're. You know people may not know that they're doing the IB thing, but they, you know we have these other best practices that are completely relatable in the United States and they don't have responsive classroom in China or wherever, but they do have something similar that fits into this umbrella of creating global citizens. Yeah, I'm gonna say it, and they're not nationalists, but people who care about humans across the world.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you said that last bit about global versus nationalism or nationalistic. That's one reason I think in some parts of the country IB is much less welcomed. Right, I don't wanna call out the names of different places, but you could probably do a heat map of the United States and align that with political affiliations and start to form kind of a picture.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't wanna get super political, but the poundings of IB with this international school. Coming out of World War I, nationalism was a large was blamed and I think rightfully so for many, many of our problems in our world, and so they're taking a firm stance against nationalism and wanting it to be. We're global, where everything we do affects everybody else. We need to know how, why and consider that.
Speaker 2:So you talk about the scores of IB schools in California that we'd be country number three if we were a country. What makes Einstein unique, like there was a time? When you read our mission and vision, it says we're the first authorized IB elementary and middle in California.
Speaker 1:Can we please revise our mission?
Speaker 2:So when you look around, even just here, where we sit today in San Diego, there are IB schools all over the place. What makes us different?
Speaker 1:Well. So I don't subscribe to the fact that one school is better, like there's a best school.
Speaker 2:Which is why I said different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we are different in the way that all schools are different, in that we have our own origin story. That makes us very unique and I think when you're looking for a school for your students, you're looking for a best fit. And so we, our community, we have our German. For us, we're unique because we do provide a German language component, which is very rare in San Diego and California and I mean truthfully in the country. So, if that's something that interests you, but just in general, just learning the language. So, yes, other schools do learn languages.
Speaker 1:We right now teach a different language than most schools do, and then we are a K-8 school, we're a continuum or one LEA, and right now, I mean we continue to learn and grow and change. But this idea of being able to have a continuum from TK to 12th grade, I think that's very appealing, could be very appealing to people, and that you are in, you're steeped in this international baccalaureate framework. So this idea of being a global citizen and thinking about sustainability and peace and innovation, you know like those are things that we are thinking about at our school, and so I'm not gonna say there's not another school out there that does those things, but I do think we have a special place here where those things happen and that we can say happen here.
Speaker 2:So I could go a whole different bunch of directions on IB. I think I'll ask you this question. So I parachute into a classroom I don't know what school it is, but it happens to be a long time IB authorized school. And let's just for argument's sake say that the teacher in this classroom is fully trained in multiple levels of IB and buys into philosophically and as a practitioner, into everything you've just described so wonderfully about IB. How do I, as the parachuter, know, how can I tell that it's an IB school?
Speaker 1:Or should.
Speaker 2:I even be able to tell.
Speaker 1:Well, it depends on if you know anything about IB and notice.
Speaker 2:So let's say I don't know anything for this thought experiment.
Speaker 1:So I would say you can walk into a classroom and feel you know. If you don't know anything about IB, I feel I try to tell teachers. Sometimes there's an IB nirvana that we're trying to get to. We're all on this journey to become better teachers and understand and just be better, and so if you ever got there or got, close to there which you'll never get there, but I feel like you walk into that classroom and there is a feeling of purpose.
Speaker 1:There is a level of engagement. Students are engaged. They're interacting with each other. There's evidence of their work.
Speaker 2:What's the teacher doing?
Speaker 1:The teacher is moving around, asking questions, listening, providing resources, helping with conflict, supporting kids and solving their problems, but you may not actually be able to see the teacher when you first walk in, because the teacher might be somewhere.
Speaker 1:They're not at the front of the classroom, they're not sitting at their desk. They are moving around and engaged and trying to talk to as many kids as they can and check in with them and answer questions. And if they are at the front of the classroom, they're modeling something they want the kids to be doing and it's an activity where they do need to pull the class together. But the classroom is busy and you can tell that kids feel they have a sense of purpose for being there, and I think that is hard to achieve right now, the way post COVID and even pre it's. Teaching is a hard job, but you can always get better. So that's what I would like to see when I walk into a classroom and the teacher is busy and they're helping kids. Kids are talking to each other, they're working on something they're interested in, they're making connections to their lives and to other people.
Speaker 2:We're gonna bottle that. What you just said, that's gonna go on a poster. I appreciate that and I appreciate also the fact that it's aspirational. I was just having a conversation with someone who expressed that a number of staff members felt like the trainings that they're being asked to do somehow are implied criticisms that they're already doing so much and why do they have to do this other training? And so that's one way to look at it. That's kind of a limited deficit viewpoint. It's natural, especially when you're tired or whatever. But the other side of it is it's aspirational.
Speaker 2:Like I played a lot of sports. I was really good at doing layups with my right hand, but it's not that productive if I keep going to practice and only practicing right-handed layups, and so the good coaches I had were like, hey, we're gonna, I'm gonna keep forcing you left, because every time you go left someone strips the ball from you, and I could either look at that as not effective as a basketball player, my skills aren't good or I have the opportunity to learn going left so I can be a more balanced player.
Speaker 1:I had heard that sentiment too and I was a little shocked, because my own approach to PD when I am in a PD is I'm either learning something new or it's reinforcing, like, oh, I already do that. And then I feel better about myself because I'm like, oh, I am doing that, oh, but I forgot that detail about it. I can polish it.
Speaker 2:I can make it better, and learning is a spiral.
Speaker 1:And it's a spiral, and so if we do have staff that feel that way, I don't know if it's our tone in the, so maybe I need to adjust tone when I'm doing PD or something. But it's meant to be providing tools and also some reassurance, like, yeah, oh, I already use this language with kids and I'm gonna keep doing it because it validates what I'm doing. So it's either validation or a chance to learn something new and try it.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting view on the difference between opportunity in the workplace and mandates, and I don't know if we're ever gonna completely solve that for everybody, because it's a highly personal interaction that people have that comes out of their own personal lives as well. That's pretty deep. You've been very generous with your time. I have one last question, but before I get there, I have this musing about IB and I'm gonna put it in like an IB type of question to you, one of my. And obviously I believe wholeheartedly in the IB, otherwise I wouldn't have been involved in this work for 17 plus years at Einstein.
Speaker 2:But one of the things I sometimes think about is the danger of echo chambers. We see echo chambers in social media. It learns your browsing habits and so you like to watch YouTube shorts about cats? You're just gonna keep getting more cat stuff. If you like to watch it about rhinoceroses, you're gonna see rhino stuff, right, and our national discourse is pretty much that way. Right, you're either a MSNBC, cnn or you're a Fox News, breitbart or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:So how do we avoid that type of echo chamber phenomena when you talk about the IB?
Speaker 2:And so, more specifically, is there a place for really conservative political and religious viewpoints within an IB community, for example, and how would an IB community handle so?
Speaker 2:For example, we have elections coming up in about a year and I remember the last election cycle or two election cycles ago, a lot of hubbub around elections on campus. And how should dumping for politicians look and mock elections in classrooms and what teachers say in the classroom and real public bents to the left, for example I'll just say it really pronounced bents to the left among staff, whereas I know privately not everybody is gonna have the same political views. That that would be in my mind, that's an echo chamber. But the ones who were perhaps less far to the left just stayed quiet, right, because they saw that it's just a numbers game, right, and I think kids do the same. Whether a kid decides to come out as gay or whatever, the situation is right. If the ground isn't fertile enough and supportive, how do we inculcate an environment through the framework of the IB that is, as you say, embraces everybody and allows everybody to maximize their potential as individuals? That's a massive question, right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I guess I would say that one thing that's hard to do in an IB school is to just throw in, or should be. I mean, you're trying to attach to relevant things that are going on into the world, trying to make connections with that, but also you're doing it in a very thoughtful way. So in IB, we do have these key concepts and related concepts that we're talking about, like form and function, for example, and we also have global context, identities and relationships, or technology and space and time, where we are in space and time. And so, technically, as an educator in IB, you're making connections between these global contexts, these for worldview perspectives, whether it's sustainability or identities or art and culture, and these concepts. And so if you are addressing elections or if you are addressing other controversial topics, it enables you to do that because you have this framework where you can discuss it through this lens.
Speaker 1:And then you are also trying to promote the learner profile. So part of that is being caring and balanced and open-minded and inquirers, and so I do think it takes an expert educator to be able to do those things and to do them well, and when we're not all experts yet, teachers are in different spaces where they are, and so things sometimes are messier than they should be. But that is the goal is to be able to take on any topic and be able to address it in a peaceful manner and hear different sides to us to something, but also back it up with reasoning and legitimate information sources, and that's also part of learning. It's making sure that your information is coming from a place that's real.
Speaker 2:It's a worthy goal, we'll never 100% get there. We have many opportunities, many of them before we get to the 2024 elections. There's really not a national topic that is out there that isn't ripe for this type of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it can be as simple as a teacher asking kids if they're going home to listen to one of the debates, for example, who's a good communicator? What does it mean to be a good communicator? And okay, let's set us a list of criteria for that. Go home and listen to the debate, come back and tell me who was the better communicator based on the criteria that we set Just based on that criteria, not on who your favorite is.
Speaker 2:We're gonna bottle that up right there too, because you nailed it, Okay. Last question I'm ready.
Speaker 1:I think I know what the last question is. I mean, I've listened to a bunch of your podcasts. Let's see if it's the right one.
Speaker 2:What would the? Now you're gonna try to switch it up 50-something year old Corey Julius Tell her 18 year old self.
Speaker 1:Okay, this works for this. This could be a good answer for this question too.
Speaker 2:What has half a life taught you that you wish you could share with your 18 or 16 or whatever young self? That may also be of value to our educational community. See, I switched it up. I was not gonna ask you the billboard question.
Speaker 1:I was ready for the billboard question you know this is not a pinata party, okay. I like the billboard question. I have thought about it for weeks.
Speaker 2:Okay, maybe you can build it in.
Speaker 1:I can build it in. I'll say two things.
Speaker 2:Just tell me the billboard after. After this, you can just tell me the billboard. That's what we're going. It'll be very quick.
Speaker 1:Perfect, perfect. So I guess my 50 year old self would tell my younger self to actually be more forgiving of yourself and be proud of the things that you can do. And yeah, not worry so much. I think those are. I mean, if you're talking personally, those are the things that I would say to myself, and then I think that leads into the billboard which you've been praying for for weeks.
Speaker 1:Which I've been praying for weeks. I had all these different things I was gonna say and then I realized I actually have it hanging in my office. I actually have two sayings.
Speaker 2:Don't tell me they rub laugh no no, I do not like that one.
Speaker 1:It's the Arthur Ashe quote, which is start where you are, use what you have, do what you can, and that would have calmed down my 18 year old self as well, and I use that all the time for myself.
Speaker 2:Start where you are.
Speaker 1:Use what you have.
Speaker 2:Do what you can. Do what you can. It's apropos for farming too.
Speaker 1:It's apropos for everything, including trying to be an overwhelmed first year IB teacher or a student who's missed three weeks of school, I feel like. And he didn't know much about Arthur Ashe because I don't know much about sports, but I started reading about him and he was an amazing person.
Speaker 1:And then I do actually have another quote that I have hanging, that I went to Spain for the first time two years ago and went to see La Familia Sagrada and Anthony Gaudi, and he had a quote in Spanish. But it is first the love and then the technique. And to remember that love and passion about why, why you're here If you're in education, it should be because you love children and you love being with them and then the technique will follow, and it is very important. But you cannot build an amazing cathedral without knowing your stuff But-.
Speaker 2:You also can't build it without love.
Speaker 1:You cannot build it without love. And that's the first piece, and then the technique after.
Speaker 2:I think that's a perfect place to end. I don't wanna mess with that. I have nothing more to say. So thank you so much, Corey, for your generosity of time and for putting up with my probing questions. We'll have to do this again sometime soon.
Speaker 1:This was much more enjoyable than I thought it would be.
Speaker 2:See, I'm really not that scary. So thank you so much, Corey. Thank you for listening to the Superintendents Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. 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.