[00:00:00] I think a lot about charades, a game where you can't talk, so you have to act out what's going on. I think when people don't have the vocabulary to express what's going on within them or what has happened to them, I think they have to act it out. And so, developing that ability to write and to read, I think really made a big difference for me. Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing in Education Podcast. The space where Education Meets Resilience. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and in each episode we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students, leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities within modern education. Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration, we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities within our schools. Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom as we get started. [00:01:00] Welcome back to the podcast where today I'm speaking with Christopher S. Mukiibi, an educator and creator who speaks directly to the inner world of students and leaders. He speaks about confidence, discipline, and identity, with this belief that anyone can learn to become more than their circumstances, and through his teaching and digital content, he helps learners break cycles of doubt, build agency and take ownership of their growth and known for reframing education as a path towards self-trust and resilience, Christopher brings a blend of scientific clarity, emotional intelligence, and practical skills to the classroom. His videos and reels often center on the habits that shape us, the mindsets that shift us and free us, and the small intentional actions that create meaningful change. And as a high school chemistry teacher and a mentor, he encourages both students and thought leaders of the like to think independently, regulate their emotions, and develop the skills that strengthen both character and capability. At the heart of his work is a very simple [00:02:00] message: that you don't need to be perfect. You just need to be willing to make that first step towards change. So Chris's mission is here today to help students and educators build lives defined not by fear or comparison, but by clarity, by discipline, and through their own courage to grow. Chris, I'm so privileged to have you on the podcast, and thank you so much for joining us for our two part segment together, that in combination will talk about real learning, real trauma, helping us suffer less, and also the power of connection throughout our schools and communities. Welcome again to the show!. Thank you so much, Joey, for that amazing introduction. It's such a pleasure. So today is actually Chris's birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you. And we are recording towards the end of our semester here. And I have been speaking with Chris for my entire semester so far. We just met at the beginning of the term from a coast away from each other. I'm on the east, Chris is on the west, almost got that confused for a second. I don't even know where I'm half the time. And even though we're [00:03:00] a coast away, Chris and I have been in consistent communication both over email and on zoom meetings and what I love so much about knowing Chris is that he says things that educators want to say but don't know how to say or who to say it to. And Chris is there to not point the finger, but to just call it as it is and say, let's get in there and make the change. One of my colleagues, Tony Montalto, who lost his daughter, Gina, in the school shooting at Stoneman Douglas and in Parkland, he always says, change cannot happen from pointing fingers on the outside. It has to happen by going in the room. And I see Chris as somebody who is constantly in the room talking with the thought leaders, talking with the students, and making those necessary changes through conversation. And that's why Chris is someone who I find to be very special. So I'm so glad that you're with us. Thanks for being here. Of course. Thank you, man. Thank you. I love what your friend said about change is, is happening when you're on the inside. I, I believe that wholeheartedly. And I also love that you mentioned, I I [00:04:00] do it through conversation. For those that don't know, I teach high school chemistry and I believe that the world of atoms influences our world tremendously. But I think what influences our world just as much, or maybe even more so is the world of words. And so I believe what makes us different from other animals, is our communication. And so I believe that is where all the change happens. So I love that. Absolutely. You reminded me of Dr. Jamie Marich, who is a recent podcast guest, and she's also a therapist as well. She says, more than atoms, were made of stories. We're made of words. So the way that we communicate is what brings us together more than our anatomy. Absolutely. So let's start with that, Chris, as a high school chemistry educator, you've definitely worked to elevate your platform from within the classroom and beyond the classroom. And you also have your free ebook, which we will link in our show notes called The Learning Compass. Yeah. And I wanted to start by asking, within the Learning Compass, you talk about something called real learning. What is real learning and what does that look [00:05:00] like both in the classroom and out in the real world? Yeah, I think there's a couple ways to look at it. And what's funny about writing a book is so many of the ideas in the book I feel like have evolved within myself ever since publishing it. And so it's, it's as if these things are, are always evolving and I just caught it at a particular time, like a photograph. Mm-hmm. Um, but I would say that real learning comes down to understanding and remembering, but it also comes down to getting us closer to where we want to be in terms of what the vision we have is for our lives. I also believe that it's creating new behavior in similar conditions. And so I, I feel like a combination of those definitions allows people to give them tools to help create themselves into the kind of person they want to be, but also design their lives into the kind of lives that they want to experience. And hopefully a, a step beyond that is using those skills to then make the [00:06:00] lives of other people better. And so that's what I believe the purpose of learning is. I also see it as a way to, well, learning and education I would classify as pretty similar, but it, it's a way to alleviate unnecessary suffering. I think there's a lot of pain in life, and I think that pain is inevitable. Mm-hmm. But I do think that suffering can be mitigated. Now I'm not saying we can eliminate suffering by knowing things, not, not at all. But I do think that when we are suffering, it's because we do not know something, or it's because we do not understand something. And that understanding could be a new perspective. It could be a new set of ideas. It could be a new way of understanding ourselves. And so I think that learning, at least for me in my experience and the experiences of a lot of the students I've taught learning is the vehicle to suffer less and to experience more of what we desire and bring out more of the good. [00:07:00] Definitely, and it's almost like that saying knowledge is power in a way that it helps us make more informed decisions and appreciate and have more ownership with the human experience in itself. Absolutely. But sometimes the problem that we've seen within schools is that we really try to standardize non-standard people, and I said this on a couple podcasts as well as within my New HEART framework as well, that I noticed that I love teaching to a course standard. I love having goals for my class. I love being able to go in and say, by the end of this course, you'll be able to accomplish A, B, C, D, E. What I think is very toxic to educators is when you then have them teach the standards in a very standard way where everybody is literally on the same textbook page on Thursday, and you're having to have the exact same strategies for one size fits all with every student in front of you. And I think one thing that we need to see with our systems is that when it comes to learning, you don't have to be a standard person [00:08:00] or even a standard teacher or a standard learner in order to reach the standards of your course or the objectives of your course . So what systems have you found within education that are working to really succeed and support teachers and support leaders? And what are some systems within education that are really in need of an overhaul, and how do you talk about that in your public forums? Oh, that's a great question. Okay. So starting with systems that do support teachers and educators. Oh, wow. I've had so many conversations that are centered around the opposite. I would have to have to think about that a little bit. Well, something that's interesting about education that I think is really unique to this field is the kind of people that are in it . And I would add that, as part of the system that supports is the people that are in it, are naturally just so giving, so caring and so supportive. Before I decided to accept my fate as an educator, I was trying to be a medical doctor. And in the world of medicine, at least in [00:09:00] my experience, people were a lot less helpful. In caring and giving. There was a lot of competition in what I was doing, and there were times where people would not help out because they saw you as a threat or didn't want you to take their spot, so to speak. But when I moved towards education, I noticed that nearly every person I encountered was so excited to go the extra mile to help me out. And I think that this is probably not true at every campus, but I do think that you can find educators everywhere that are willing to do that. And I think that that's extremely supportive. So at the beginning of my career, I felt extremely burnt out for many different reasons. And we can go into that deeper later, but I noticed that what helped me deal with it was being connected to the people around me, the other educators around me. And what's cool is those people are naturally so giving and so caring and so wanting to be supportive that. I felt like I was able to withstand [00:10:00] more challenges as a result. And so I would say one of the biggest parts of what is supportive of the current education system is the people that are in it because they are givers and they are caring. And just like you, they're constantly thinking about how do I do what is best for everyone around me? Even if it's at the cost or detriment to myself. And maybe that's a problem in its own sense, but to have people that are willing to sacrifice to help others, I think it's incredibly underrated and it is unbelievably unique about this field. And I believe that , that's the biggest thing about it. I would also say that , just at least for educators that are dealing with students , whenever I go to work, I'm never questioning that I'm doing a good thing for people. That's not a question that I have. When I worked in medicine, there were a couple times where I wondered if what I did at work that day helped [00:11:00] people. I, but when I'm, when I'm a teacher, when I'm working with these educators, when I'm talking to these other educators, I don't have that feeling. 'cause I know that what I am doing is helping people. Now sometimes, you know, did, did I help the kids by giving them a pop quiz on a Wednesday? Um, I would say yes, they might say no. Um, but that inherent connection to contributing to the future, I think is extremely protective to the soul. Yeah. And I would say that those are some of the systems that help. Mm-hmm. I'm also thinking about the systems, like we said, that probably don't help. And do you have me thinking about just the amount of resistance that I face in my own classroom currently, like I would say it's only 10% that really show resistance, but it feels like so much more. 'cause there's still, in the class of 25, there has to be 21, 22 that are always on top of it doing exactly what they need to do. But those three that are not doing the job mm-hmm. It brings down the morale for the rest [00:12:00] of the class. Even at the college level, I teach a lot of freshmen composition classes and so when you're teaching freshmen, you're still transitioning them into the college mindset and out of the high school mentality. And there's a lot of days, honestly, where even I go home and I just wonder like, wow, I don't even know if the conversation I wanted to have made a difference in them today because they came in, those same three students didn't read. Don't mind the 20 who did read. I'm just focus on the few who didn't. It's like, so in my mind that part becomes the whole, so now it's like instead of three didn't read, it's like, okay, nobody read, nobody wanted to talk about the conversation in front of us. And it feels so depleting. And I have certainly had my share amount of days, even in this semester alone. It's like I am highly skeptical of the fact that I've made any difference in my classroom today until somebody approaches me and says, oh, I like that conversation today. I'm gonna go home and continue it with my family. Which they have done that several [00:13:00] times and they've said that to me. But until I get that validation, it really feels meaningless on many levels, on several occasions. Yeah. So in your own classroom, how are you also dealing with the resistance factor, which I know has been a universal issue? For all of us. Yeah, totally, man. I think you captured it really well. I mean, I still deal with that too, despite the things I say in my content about designing better classrooms and how education can help everybody. I deal with that so much. The apathy is just so thick. Yes. So many of the kids that, you know, there's always a joke that we'll never use, you know, Y equals MX plus B in real life, right? Mm-hmm. Maybe someone smart will. Um, but , it's deeper than that now. It's way more than just, oh, Mr. Mukiibi, we're not gonna use protons in the future. It's, their existence there, almost has no weight in how they see life. And that's really hard as an educator. 'cause you do feel like many days you come in and your [00:14:00] work doesn't mean anything. Mm-hmm. And I completely sympathize with you on this idea that you come in with a certain lesson, you wanna have a certain conversation and it just doesn't land. It doesn't make the difference you want it to make. But what I noticed is that, at least for me, my students will pick up on other things that have happened in the classroom or they pick up on ways that I respond to different situations and they learn so much from that. I actually posted a video yesterday about how I think success in classrooms isn't measured properly. I basically said that we should be measuring growth as opposed to measuring traditional participation. And I had a colleague comment saying, you know, well, what about having the standards in the classroom? Like we do still need to measure how competent someone is in, in chemistry, for example. And I completely agree with that. I think their grades need to reflect their competence in the class they're taking. But for me, as a human being trying to do a good thing in the world, I need to measure success as are the students in front of me growing? Are [00:15:00] they learning something that they believe will help them later? And even though I can't put that in my grade book, and maybe one day, we'll be able to assess and share those types of growth metrics. It helps me in my heart and my soul as a person to know that what I'm doing here is helping them grow, even if it wasn't in the way that I intended. Like every day in my classroom, I have a question of the day. And a quote of the day where I try to share an idea that life has taught me or an idea that I just wanna share that's adjacent to chemistry. And some days the students love it, and some days they could not care less and every day I think it's gonna change their lives. But knowing that the students are not just learning what I am explicitly teaching, they are learning because I'm teaching kids, they're watching me as an adult watching me, how I navigate the world. And I believe that they will pick up on that. And it's happened. I've watched some [00:16:00] students make decisions and think about things in a way that I saw was, I don't wanna say they were emulating me, but , they approached things in ways that I would approach things. And I'm like, I didn't teach you how to do that, but they saw it and they were learning anyway. And so I think that that's very important to keep in mind that who we are as people is influencing them, even if the content didn't stick. You know, that reminds me of , a class I took in high school. I took AP Physics mm-hmm with one of my teachers, Mr. Garcia. I love that guy. I feel like my physics teacher in high school and my chemistry teacher in high school were a fantastic mix of what I am like now. And I remember taking physics, and I'm gonna be honest, I didn't understand any of it. I did not get it. I kind of got it, but not really. But I remember really enjoying Mr. Garcia's class, not because he was teaching physics, but because of how he was as a human being. The guy would constantly make jokes. He would [00:17:00] trust us with autonomy. He would have these crazy business ideas he would come up with all the time. And he would share them with us. And I remember thinking like, this is so insane. This guy is a physics teacher. Like, what's he doing? Talking about making a prom dress rental company. Um, but, but those, those types of lessons stuck with me. And what's funny now is me as a teacher, I have a morning cup of coffee, in my second period class, just like Mr. Garcia did. Uh, that's actually, I'm just realizing that, and I also will randomly share these like, entrepreneurial ideas I have with my students. So I do feel like even though Mr. Garcia didn't explicitly teach me those things, there were a lot of implicit lessons there. And I think that it's very easy for educators to not count that because it's hard to measure. We assume the value is zero. But I think that that's just, it's just hard to perceive kind of like different waves on the electromagnetic spectrum. It's, it's beyond our visible field, but it is there, it is real and it has influence. Shout out to Mr. Garcia and all of [00:18:00] our wonderful teachers. Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh man. My teachers in high school were amazing. Like, now that I'm in the game, I'm like, gosh, I was surrounded by incredible people growing up and it's, it's great to know that when we teach now, like I've had students say to us, probably you too. Like, oh, I wish that you had yourself as a high school teacher. It's like, well, we did. In different forms. Like we're just the combination of the best of the best of that, and that's who we give over to them. Yeah, that's so true. Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah, I, I have goosebumps as you're sharing that 'cause of a couple things that I was just thinking about over breakfast and I'm like, I kind of wanna talk about this, but only if it fits and I think it fits. So a few things just came to mind when it came to just talking about the way that students care about our subjects. I know that the amount of apathy that exists even in my class is this. I had a colleague who teaches at a local community college, say to me over lunch last week that the amount of apathy that exists in literature classes is also very high because students no longer see the [00:19:00] value of reading, forget about writing. They no longer see the value of reading because they have audio books. They can have AI do like a vocal talk back for them. Menus have pictures in them, so if they were to go to order food, they can just point to the picture and even the value of literacy is on an extreme decline because students don't see the need to be a part of a literate society. So as an English teacher, it's like when students are not reading because they don't see value, it began way back then with not caring about Y equals MX + B or X equals negative B plus or minus square root, B square minus four, IC all over two A. That was then now only because my teacher had a song that we had to sing to Pop Goes the Weasel Now it comes down to students don't want to read because that is now the equivalent of the slope formula. They just don't see value. They don't think they'll need to be able to read when they grow up because there will be workarounds, quote unquote. Yeah, which is really [00:20:00] petrifying when I'm walking in with Elie Wiesel's, Auschwitz memoir. Oh, and they don't know how to read it. They can't read it, and I can't sit there and have a discussion about historical trauma because they have no idea what was going on in the book to begin with. Mm-hmm. That's hard. And then when I play Schindler's List, it's supposed to compliment the text. Now it's just traumatizing them because they have no idea why I'm showing that to begin with. Yeah. And the whole floor falls beneath the building. So I, I've learned to be a lot more strategic and explain a lot more about what I'm trying to do and what the intentions are and why they should form meaning out of that. I think about some of my own favorite educators as well in high school. And I, I've never shared the story on a podcast. I've shared a couple of them, but I hadn't shared this one. the reason why I haven't shared is because I honestly try not to think about it all that often, but I'm, I wanna, I want you to be the first person I share publicly with. What I have shared in the past was how my first year of teaching was what I called to be like my rock bottom [00:21:00] in education, where I came home every day. I was a mess. I would just sit in my room and cry myself to sleep. I would take a long nap, wake up at 10:00 PM grade until three in the morning. I'd have parents writing me back at three in the morning and we would be responding to each other's emails in the middle of the night. And I somehow try and go in and do it all over the next day. When I was a student though, I had almost an equivalent circumstance in my senior year where it was spring semester, senior year, I had looked back and I thought, wow, I have spent my whole, I guess you wanna call it a childhood, I don't know, but my whole childhood working to be a separatist. I made a very conscious and wholehearted attempt to not be friends with nearly anybody except for a very, very few handful of people. One of those people who died by suicide just before his 21st birthday in 2018. And I've talked about that on my podcast a lot. [00:22:00] He died three months before I started to become an educator. 90 days before I ran my first class, and, which had a detrimental impact on the way that I worked. But during that time, during that senior year, I thought, wow, I have chosen to be a separatist. I still, to this day. And now that I look back and like, okay, I, yeah, it's good that I never went to a party. 'cause I probably would've called the police and called out people for doing whatever they were choosing to do. 'cause that's the kind of person I was. I was an intense, an intense judger. If somebody had tattoos or a swore did this or did that, I would find reasons like almost like mechanisms to not be friends with that person. And that's how I chose to be alone. And I would go home every night and I would write my screenplays that I actually started to film in college, and I would make these mock lesson plans that I would teach to my stuffed animals. That happened to be the blueprints to the syllabi I use now. Oh wow. In 2025. So it's like I was actually being way more productive than I [00:23:00] ever thought I was back at that time, 13 years ago. But come that, senior year in the spring, I just all of a sudden stopped and I was like, this is not good. These choices were not the best. It could have been different and I don't know how to change it. Mm-hmm. And it was the middle of April, I remember it was April 19th. It was a Friday. And however, I was continuing to share that ongoing with my academic parents on campus. My academic father, the social studies teacher, Dr. Mendelson, and my academic mother, the chemistry teacher, Ms. Hoyumpa, the two of them found each other on campus and they said, we're really worried about Joey today. He is not in a good place upstairs, based upon how he's talking about his transition to college. And they sent me downstairs. My parents were there and they said, we gotta keep an eye on you for a little bit. [00:24:00] And that experience just reminded me, 'cause I didn't think that I was having troubles. Yeah. Until in hindsight when I looked at what I was sharing with them and how they interpreted it, I could validate their concern with how I was seeing my own transition, and I ended up doing well. It took me a while until maybe the following year, my whole freshman fall was very, very rocky. But it took me until maybe a year later to really come out of that gray area. And I realized back then, like what they were thinking could be some of the worst case scenarios based upon how I was managing that transition at that time. And because of that, as a first year teacher, I ended up, again, fast forward now to my darkest point as a teacher, where I sacrificed myself by making their same decisions. When I saw students in crises, I would walk them down to the counselor, I'd walk them down to the principal, [00:25:00] and I'd say, I'm sensing A, B, C because I've been through DE, F, and I'm worried about X, Y, and Z. And instead of being met with compassion and assistance, I was met with resistance and told to resign because of me being that first year squeaky wheel. Nobody ever stops to say he knows what he's talking about, because not only has he lived this from himself, he's also from Parkland. He's seen violence. He's seen tragedy. I was met with resistance as the outsider and they would say like, who do you think you are to be doing this for our students? Yeah. And I was just thinking about this this morning over breakfast. 'cause I, you know, I'm the kind of person, like I'll be sitting there tying my shoes and I'm, I'm still thinking about that first year of teaching, like one of the greatest losses I've ever had. I was just thinking this morning like, could it have gone any differently where I did not have to sacrifice myself to save the lives of the students? I thought I did and I realized probably not, probably not, because that's how I [00:26:00] was brought up. I was only making the same decisions that my own teachers had done in the past. I was brought up innately based upon their decisions. I was modeling them. Which leads me to think, would those teachers have done well if they were at my school. They actually said no because I called them the day that it had happened. The day I was asked to resign, my chemistry teacher, my academic mother, she's like, okay, is this a good time to say, I told you so you should be running, not walking, but running. I told you so when you were in 10th grade to not do that job. But I think about that a lot in terms of what we do and the decisions that we make based upon the teachers that have raised us. So within your first year of teaching Yeah. What would you say were some of the trials and errors that you experienced as well based upon experiences that you learned from high school or decisions that students are now making because of what you've done? Yeah. Tell us a little bit more if you're comfortable about that opening year in that time of your life. Yeah. That time of my life was, um, similar to you. I would say it's like my rock [00:27:00] bottom , part of my career. It was, it was really, really tough. Especially going into it, you know, you think you're gonna go help help students and , I had this really huge story in my head about how I shouldn't be a teacher, I shouldn't be an educator, because it wasn't a good use of my talents. But, um, after getting over that, that lie I was telling myself , I was excited to help students see that education can be this transformative, protective asset , against suffering. And you could use it to build the life you want. I was so excited to share this message with, with students, and when I got to actually working in a classroom, I was confronted with completely other things. First off, it was the first year after COVID was my first year teaching, and so the kids were just afraid to be in the same room. They also forgot, and, and I think this was true for the adults too, that we all kind of forgot how to act around other people and how to be in public settings. And [00:28:00] that contributed a lot to the chaos and unpredictability of that first year. Now, I came in as a teaching intern. I'm not sure how it works, over there on the East Coast, but over here if you have a math or science degree, I have my degree in chemical engineering. You can come in and teach a math or science class, uh, as long as you are enrolled in a teacher credential program. Mm-hmm. Uh, during that same year. And so that's what I was doing. And so I didn't have a student teaching year. I was a math tutor for many years before that, with a lot of experience. And I have worked in classrooms before, not as like an official capacity as a teacher, but this was my first time as teacher on record, which is very different than every other role I ever had. So all of that chaos combined with trying to learn this extremely dynamic and quite frankly, unstructured, job, while dealing with, at the time a lot of family issues. I was not in a good place with my family, unfortunately. And so , that caused a lot of internal struggles for me. And I became a [00:29:00] father that year. My first daughter was born. Two months or three months into the school year. And I was not able to take any time off because I wasn't an employee of the district long enough to receive those benefits. And so I was just working through that entire crazy sleepless time with all of the other chaos around me , while also trying to figure out all these things. And so I, I became really disheartened because I, I knew that I wasn't able to make that, like we talked about before, you have these lessons that you have in mind where you think you're gonna make these certain kinds of differences. All of that had to take a backseat or at least, so I thought. And so I was very discouraged. And then on top of that, I was encountering students that were dealing with ridiculous amounts of trauma. Mm-hmm. Um, I mean, we just came out of the pandemic. I can't tell you how many students I had who've lost parents, who've lost siblings, who've lost grandparents, who have been displaced from their homes, who had to enter foster [00:30:00] care. It was just so tragic to witness. Now, by the end of the year, I made incredible connections with those students. I would say even to this day that that first year of students I had, I was more connected to them than I think I've ever been to any group of students. And, and I don't mean that as, as a, as a no. You never forget your first year. Yeah. That first year was genuinely so different, uh, in, in, in a great way. Despite all the challenges in a great way, like a lot of those students learned a lot from me. At least that's what they told me. And, and I learned so much from them. But dealing with all those challenges, I really had to learn how to make my time efficient. I had to learn how to think in systems. I had to learn about emotional regulation and psychology and behavior all at the same time. And, and luckily, I, I already understood chemistry very well, so I didn't have to worry about refreshing on my content material. I know sometimes that's an issue with some first year teachers, but I didn't have to worry about that. And, naively I thought that that would make the job [00:31:00] easy. Not at all. I had to learn so many other things. But the biggest thing I noticed with those kids is, a lot of them tagged me as the adult, they felt safest with on campus, which I so deeply appreciate and recognize the privilege of that. But I also think it's because I dealt with a fair bit of my own trauma myself. I had a relatively turbulent upbringing. And before I was in college I had a pretty unique time with dealing with betrayal and identity and understanding people. And I discovered that the biggest thing that will protect me against PTSD or any other mental health issues that I may experience is understanding and developing my own relationship with words and vocabulary and writing and literacy and increasing my sophistication philosophically, because if I could wrap my head around the events that have occurred in my life, [00:32:00] if I could give words to what has happened, I noticed that the past, let's go of me and until I can put words to those experiences, I am gripped completely. And so discovering that allowed me to navigate through my own mental health challenges and my own trauma. And I think that allowed me to give space to students, to talk to me, to. And I wanna be clear, I didn't cross any lines. I wasn't trying to be a mental health expert, but I do think that my experiences allowed me to give them space to feel understood, to feel safe, and to also develop their own philosophical sophistication, develop their own vocabulary to capture their own experiences. There were many, many times I encouraged the students to write about the experiences that they were struggling with. And every single time they were willing to do it, they got better. And they didn't just get better from like not feeling sad anymore, they were able to then take those experiences [00:33:00] and catalyze them to do more later or to make a bigger difference for other people. And so, to all the students or anyone listening that, is connecting reading to some pointless activity or something that's too slow to be relevant, I think it is how we experience the world. You know, I think a lot about charades, a game where you can't talk, so you have to act out what's going on. I think when people don't have the vocabulary to express what's going on within them or what has happened to them, I think they have to act it out. And I think that that's just part of our nature. And so, developing that ability to write and to read, I think really made a big difference for me. And that's part of what got me to start writing is because I saw the value of the writing and the reading and the vocabulary and, and seeing the world of words for what it was that I wanted to capture it for myself.[00:34:00] And it's, it's made a huge difference for me. And I say this as someone who was afraid of reading, like afraid of it when I was a kid, my mom used to take me to the library. We'd get like a giant laundry basket and, and fill it up with books. And I would read all the time. And then there was a point, I wanna say like fifth or sixth grade where I, I, I had to start taking these reading tests. The school would give you a book and then you would take a literacy test on it and. I wouldn't read the test, I would just skim through it and I would just answer random questions. And I did poorly on the test 'cause I was like nine years old. I didn't understand what I was doing. And so I ended up scoring reading levels way below my grade level. And because of that, the teachers said I was not allowed to read any book above the grade level that I scored at. And so in sixth grade, they forced me to only read first grade books even though I was interested in reading much higher level books. Uh, and because of that punitive, I guess, experience, I just tied reading with, with punishment and repression completely. [00:35:00] And over time, naturally I got worse at reading and I got worse at expressing myself with language. And because of that, I think the negative experiences I had in my life had a tighter grip on me. And so once I realized that after I graduated college, I started reading more and writing more, and it made a massive difference. I believe I was able to conquer my PTSD. I believe I was able to deal with my trauma, but I also think I've been able to give informal guidance to those who are also struggling too. , A colleague of mine said to me that whenever I start to name drop in my podcast to not edit that out. So , I'm gonna name drop and I'm gonna do it because I want people to know who are tuning in that I am a connector. Chris, when we sign off Today I'm gonna send you an introduction to Dr. Susan B. Newman, who was President Bush's No Child, Left Behind, assistant secretary from the year 2001. Right before we signed on for breakfast, I was editing my conversation with her from October. And dude, I'm so excited to see that everything that you are talking about is [00:36:00] her passion. She's all about the state of literacy in America. How we have students reading in laundromats because there are students or children are not at the museums on the weekend. They're in laundromats with their parents. So that's where we need to have literacy present. We need to build a community where the children are. The community has to go to the children. So that's where literacy needs to take place and it needs to be done in a way that makes them fall in love with reading. Kids don't not like to read. They just are reading the wrong things. Wow. And we treat it as punishment. I talk about how when we use iReady in the classroom and it marks it wrong. Now reading is punishment, reading is standard, it's to reach a standard and that really perpetuates this culture of illiteracy that we're seeing today. And Susan talks all about that. It's fresh because before I signed on an hour ago, I was editing in the trenches of her, her conversation, and she's somebody that I want to connect you with. So I will leave that completely here in this podcast as well so people know that I'm a connector and I cannot wait to put you two in touch. [00:37:00] You'll have so much to share with each other. Thank you. And, and for anyone listening, Joey's connections are the greatest connections you could ever experience. Every person I've ever been introduced by from Joey has been some of the greatest conversations I've had in my life. And that is not an understatement. And I, and I talk to a lot of people, I talk a lot, I have a lot of conversations. It's true. You are, you are a master at connecting people. Thank you. so I started this burnout study, in parts to launch my education business, but also to solve a problem that I was dealing with. I went off to explore this idea of burnout with teachers and why it's happening and the biggest thing that I noticed, from just talking to a lot of people is that you could really, really manage it by feeling connected to other people. I spend most of my time, when I'm at work, with the students in my own room. And so I didn't realize how disconnected I [00:38:00] felt from other people. And I always thought that the solution was to do less work, take on less and rest more. But when I was doing the study, my calendar was packed. I was interviewing all the time. And I was not feeling the burnout that I thought. That I was experiencing before. And I was wondering why that was the case because I was, I was taking more on, I was working harder. I had less time to quote unquote rest. and so I was like, why am I not feeling as exhausted and tired and purposeless as I did before? And in having those conversations and reflecting on my experiences, I realized that I was just feeling more connected to other people. And it changed everything man. It changed everything. Remember to tune in. You won't wanna miss it. Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review [00:39:00] wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and Facebook. Remember, together we can transform our scars into stars and education, one conversation at a time.