Kelly Gibson: The Real World of a Public School Teacher

31:44We cannot give summative lessons or summative assignments where the goal is simply for students to repeat back bullet points that an AI can find online anyway. Why would we ask the students to compile just that to begin with? Instead, we're going to have them use the AI as the assistants to compile that list, and then we're going to ask them questions that show comparison between those points or analysis of those points, or how do we bring evidence in, and how do we explain the evidence and how that works toward an idea. We might have them individually take a point each and fight against each other about which is the best point that the AI has come up with.

32:34And that's that higher level thinking. Instead of spending three days with a student online trying to research basic facts that anyone could look up in a heartbeat anyway, why would we give them that type of assignment? We need to stop assigning students just rote memorization or just rote looking things up. Kids need to be taught how to look things up and how to verify sources and whatnot. But once they've learned that, whatever chat GPT can give us is just meaning that we can spend more time in higher level thinking modes than we have to in simply finding a base answer. In a sense, is ChatGPT any worse of a threat that Wikipedia was a decade ago?

33:28No, in fact, I'd say it's fairly similar. It has many of the same incorrect things in it as Wikipedia did. And if we think about that for many years, if we go back to the beginning of my teaching tenure, we told kids they weren't allowed to use the internet at all, nothing on the internet, if they were going to do research, because there were too many things that were incorrect out there. And then it became, well, you can use the internet, but you only have to use verified sources. You can't use something like Wikipedia. Even now, Wikipedia is in a place where there is a lot of really good information on it, and many teachers are allowing the use of Wikipedia in certain instances.

34:11It's evolving. It's becoming better. Our kids are able to get so much more information in such a quick way. I think AI is just another piece of that puzzle. and the more informed we are and the longer I can spend with students in higher level thinking modes because they're not just for instance here's a really good example I because I'm a literature teacher one of the things I ask my students to do all the time is write essays where they come up with a thesis statement and then they have to use quotes to prove the point we spend days in class searching for quotes, searching for exactly the right quote that they want to use to prove a point.

34:53If AI can be developed to the point where they can create those quotes and find them, locate a list of quotes for my students, then my students are limiting what used to be a three or four day adventure into a 20 minute adventure. Find those quotes, decide which ones they want to use, and then start formulating their arguments. Because at least as of right now, and I'm not technologically savvy enough to know how far this can go. The ChatGPT cannot create argumentation where it links evidence to a thesis. It simply says the evidence proves the thesis. It doesn't say how it proves it. In that sense, neither can the U.S.

35:37Senate, but I digress. And we've come full circle, my friend. That's right. I used to be on the board of trustees of Wikipedia, and I know how the sausage is made. And if you ask me, Wikipedia is, I think it has the highest journalistic standards. And people think to this day that anybody can edit anything on Wikipedia. And it is absolutely not true. And then I've had discussions in the past with my kids' teachers where they told my kids, you can't cite Wikipedia because, you know, it's not a reliable journalistic source. And so I once asked the teacher, so you're telling me that my kid cannot reference Wikipedia, but Breitbart and Fox is okay.

36:26Is that what you're trying to say? And let's just say that discussion didn't go well. So I will also tell you, I'm writing a book called Remarkable Mindset And I use ChatGPT literally every day. I use it not to generate text, but I use it as a research assistant. And for that, it is utterly fantastic as a research assistant. Now, I also have MadisonGPT who checks ChatGPT because I don't trust everything. But I can honestly tell you, you know, I do things like, let's say that I want to expose a theory that it is perfectly reasonable to expect to completely change your career midstream and be successful.

37:19Okay. So I think that is part of the growth mindset and the remarkable mindset. So I asked ChatJPT, give me examples of people who change completely mid-career. And it comes up with a list of that list. I had not heard of any of these cases. And so I'll give you a real good example. So I asked Chad Chepetit that question and it says Julia Child started off working for the CIA basically as a spook. And in her mid thirties, she married somebody else at the CIA and they lived in France and that's how she came into French cuisine. And that's how Julia Child became the art of French cooking. I didn't know that.

38:02How would I have found that out in Encyclopedia Britannica? Did you look it up, though, to make sure it was true? I don't know how I would have done that without Chappie T. The thing I keep finding, though, and the reason I am actually enjoying it right now with my students, is because sometimes it will say things like that and actually be wrong. Like, you actually have to backtrack. So that's like, what a great assignment for students in school. Instead of writing 10 essays in a year, they write a few essays and then they spend time researching what chat GPT is outputting. Can you verify this?

38:37Can you find a real source to back this up? What a particular life skill that we don't teach enough of. That's why I have Madison GPT, because when I read that about Julia Child, I said, Madison, this sounds too good to be true. You've got to go check this out because I don't want to write that she worked for the CIA. and really she was cooking French food her whole life. I think it's kind of indispensable to tell you the truth. Now, do you think that 10 years from now, we're going to look back and say, remember those days when we doubted ChatGPT could help educators? What dumbasses we were. Honestly, I'm hearing it already.

39:16I, in my own building, the first thing I was hearing from many of my fellow educators, including some of my millennials who I thought would be much quicker to adapt to it. There was an initial pushback of we've got to ban this and don't let the kids touch this and it's going to ruin our work. And now I'm seeing them start learning, oh wait, no, we have to learn and change a bit, but it's actually going to be really good for the kids because it's going to push us forward. We have had those discussions of what would it have felt like had the internet not been introduced slowly like it was, not slowly rolled out and developed and grew, but had the internet as we know it, I don't know, in the last five years, we'll say, been introduced kind of one random day in December and hey, it wasn't here before and now it's here and you all have access to it.

40:07How much teachers would have panicked at that moment and how fast they would have had to pivot and change, I think that is what's happening with this new AI information is that it's so important and it's going to be something we have to deal with because it's already been born. It's not going away. So people who are in denial about this thing and saying we can't use it and students shouldn't have access to it, I understand the concern, but I don't understand any kind of historical reference where we look at something that can help us is a very obvious tool where everybody said, we don't like that let's get rid of it and just get rid of it right away so i think people have to work with it in 10 years from now i think we're gonna have figured out how to do that i'll make a bold prediction for you kelly that pretty soon texas and florida are gonna ban chat gpt absolutely yeah yeah because they tend to be reactionary to things they fear I think that's what we see in both those areas.

41:18And this is fearful. Let's just say if Ron DeSantis finds Disneyland threatening, oh my God, wait until he figures out Chad CPT. I feel like I could almost guarantee that he hasn't been on it. I mean, I don't know the man, but I truly feel like that we would have heard about it had he already tried it out. so in a serious moment here can you just give us the gist so let's say a parent is listening to this and wants to ask you this question which is walk us through how a student can most effectively use chat gpt to write a term paper so the first thing i would say is hopefully the teacher has taken into account the fact that students have access to this and therefore they have built in specific steps they have changed what a term paper looks like to reflect the chat's ability to help a student so that whatever the student produces they have to at least be in a place where they are interacting with the product that the AI is producing and having to organize it and understand what's being done.

42:42If, as long as that teacher has done that, then I would say that what I'm seeing most effective at this early stage in our use of it in schools is that, first of all, it is a great tool for coming up with ideas. We had a student who was about to write their term paper or their research paper just last quarter. And they had this really great quote that they wanted to use. That was what was inspiring them was they found this quote and it was a philosophical quote. And they really liked this philosophical quote. They couldn't figure out a topic for their research paper based on the philosophical quote.

43:18So that student's teacher put the quote into ChatGPT and asked it what would be some good term papers, good research papers based on this quote. And it generated a list of 10 fabulous ideas. It helps us get past that moment that we usually have in our heads where two months down the line, we might say, oh, now I know what I should have done that about. It gives it to you at the onset. So we're going to have better ideas. We're going to have more options for what we potentially are writing about and researching. Then I would say the next step with it, once the students able to choose what they want to do is they can use chat gpt in order to get some ideas about what the internal paragraphs might be about and what they're going to then need to go do more research on i think that's such a hard thing for so many of us is if we're researching something and it's new to us we don't know what it is we're supposed to go research so students are left with this just giant amalgam of information and they don't know what the different pieces are necessarily and chat can break that down for them.

44:31So I would say those are the first two steps. Then next step once a student's actually into writing the paper they can like you do vet information potentially through something like this or if they hit a writing wall. So many of us do this. We get to a point in our writing and we just don't know what the next word's going to be or what the next sentence is going to be. You can put that through a ChatGPT and it can help push you to the next place so that our students are not hitting their heads against a wall going, I just don't know what to write next. I think there's a lot of hope and a lot of use and I'm really excited to see how any of our special education teachers, they are already jumping on this and learning to use ChatGPT as an assistant for a learning needs student.

45:21So I think that is going to be a giant tool for helping students come up in the level to be able to be on a peer level. Say they're dyslexic, for instance. That's an easy, obvious one. Sometimes our kids are so dyslexic that a spell check cannot figure out what they're trying to say. So if they put a paragraph that they've been working on into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it, then they are going to get correct word choice. Something that easy to bring those kids who, through no fault of their own, are dyslexic and need that kind of help, that's an easy tool for them with no shame attached. They don't have to bring it to the teacher and say, I know I didn't spell it right, what should I do?

46:07They've got a tool to instantly assist them. I'm a fangirl at this point, if that's not clear already. Really? I know. Weird, huh? It was hard for me to pick that up. Now, what if somebody says, okay, so this dyslexic student who has to learn how to write has written this thing, sticks it in chat, GPT, chat, GPT, fixes it up. Isn't that cheating? I would say absolutely not, because usually what a student like that will have in one of their IEPs, which is an individual education plan, is the ability to use some sort of technology to help them with their spelling or to not have their spelling count against them.

46:49That's already inherent in adaptations and whatnot that we're using for those students. So now they can actually create a product that is equal to their peers. without having to have an exception made for them.

47:15So when I first encountered you in Wired Magazine, I don't know how, but somehow I got to your TikTok account. I'm sorry ahead of time. Help me wrap my head around. A high school teacher in rural Oregon is a TikTok star about teaching. Walk me through how that happened and what you do there. I can tell you how it happened, but making sense of it is still a mystery to me. So I don't know if we will make any sense of this. First of all, I wouldn't say I'm a star. I have a very lovely following of a lot of teachers, but there are people with huge platforms on TikTok, and I am not one of them. I do have far more people that seem to be interested in what I have to say than I ever imagined, which is a little bit frightening in and of itself.

48:06But I do come as, like I said, I'm a 25-year veteran teacher. I have done a lot of work in being a mentor teacher so that I can help younger teachers out of holes they've dug or not knowing which way to go next. But essentially what happened was during the pandemic, a lot of people got on TikTok. And being an old Gen Xer, I shamed all of them and said, get off that dumb thing. Why are you dancing again? Stop it. It's annoying. I would see students do these little weird hand movements. And I'd look at them and say, what are you doing? And they're like, oh, it's the new TikTok dance. So I didn't even go on the platform for quite some time.

48:50About a year and a half into the pandemic, my eldest daughter had been working on her teaching degree and she was becoming a teacher and she had just been hired to be a teacher her first year as an English teacher. And she was prepping all of her materials, getting ready for the start of school and kept calling me like almost every night saying, mom, I've got another question. What do I do about this? How do I handle this? And one night when she called me, she said, you know what, that's it. I need to figure out how to share you. Other teachers need to have someone that they can access and get this information from.

49:26And I said, well, sorry, honey, you can't give my number out to all those people. That's not going to happen. I enjoy my life. So no. And she said, have you been on TikTok? And I said, God, no. Why would I be on that? And she said, I need you to go on there and just put in teacher TikTok and watch some of the videos and tell me I'm wrong that you need to be a voice on that platform. And I said, if people need me, they can find me on Facebook or Instagram or something. And she said, no. She said, that's not where young teachers are going. Young teachers are going to TikTok to find videos that they can watch that will inspire them and help them and guide them along the way.

50:09And she said, you need to be there. And so, of course, I said, okay, I love you, honey. Bye-bye. And I didn't think about it at all for weeks. And so she started sending me teacher TikTok videos. And that was the beginning of me realizing that there was a time and place. There were a lot of teachers out there that I might be able to help a little bit. And because I believe in public education so much, and I see how much teachers are sincerely hurting right now, and that we have so many teachers leaving in droves for very good reasons from our profession, I thought, who knows, maybe I can help a little.

50:47So I started making some. And before I knew it, that little turd of a daughter of mine proved herself correct. I was getting direct messages from young teachers saying, thank God you're here. I have questions. Can you make a video about this? Or thank you for being here. You still love teaching. And I didn't know somebody who's been in teaching that long could still love this profession. I needed to know that was possible. And so that's where it kind of began. And I guess now we're here. I'm talking to Guy Kawasaki. So your fault. But now give us your tips for TikTok.

51:30I think if you look at my page, you'll know that I am completely tipless. because I'll have some videos that are viewed by 800 people. I will have other videos that I have a video that went up a couple weeks ago that's almost 900 ,000 views, something like that. What? Yeah. So it's hit or miss with me. I do not try to formulate anything for TikTok. I simply speak from the heart. If I have a lesson plan that goes really well that I'm like, wow, I should share this. that afternoon I kind of unregulated get on TikTok and make a video and throw it out there into the universe to see how it goes other times I'm just feeling something really heartfelt or I've talked to a co-worker who's struggling and I think okay that advice I just gave that co-worker is something maybe other people need to hear so I'll put that out there some days I'm just feeling overwhelmed or really excited.

52:30And I will put that out there. There is very little rhyme or reason to what I'm doing other than just trying to be the most authentic version of myself. And what I love is all of my students have found my TikTok now, especially with the article in the magazine. And because of that, what I'm hearing more than anything is students say, oh yeah, you're exactly like you are on TikTok. You are. That's you. You in the classroom, it's exactly who you are. So there is rhyme and reason. Yeah, just be yourself. Now, aren't you concerned that the government in China is tracking you now and knows what you're doing and all that and that politicians want to protect your privacy and ban TikTok?

53:16That was a setup question, sir. we know anybody who's spent any time on social media knows that whatever china might be tracking on my tiktoks about teaching kids first of all is not some sort of big secret and that if they want my private information and what i'm potentially looking at as other tiktoks they could get that from any other social media i think it's a silly argument i do appreciate the fact that people are thinking about how we can protect ourselves online because I think that's a valuable argument but I think it needs to be a much wider scope and look at all of our social media and all of the interactions that happen there and I don't think any of it should be locked down but just have some security shored up on it so I guess long story there to get to know I'm not worried about China getting information about my lesson plan on how to use verbs correctly in a sentence.

54:19Now that we've got climate change under control and racism and mass shootings, I think now we can address TikTok as an existential threat to American society. I didn't know we had all those other things fixed. Can I get the podcast where you explain that part? That's on the Joe Rogan podcast. Oh, I'll check that out. Okay. Up next on Remarkable People. I have just been inundated with humans who are in a space in their life, in their teen years, where they are constantly checking for where the boundaries are. And they're constantly checking for if the adults in their world are really paying attention to them.

55:05And so they will lie to adults just to see if anybody's paying attention. Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world. They provide practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, text 831-609-0628 to get notified of each new episode. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. I have two more questions for you. Question number one is, and I can make a very intelligent guest about your answer, but give me the Kelly Gibson unbridled, be yourself opinion about standardized testing.

55:57Well, my mother would tell you never to ask for anything unbridled from Kelly Gibson. That would be the first thing you should know. but I am absolutely horrified by standardized testing. I think it's the worst thing that America has done to ourselves. I understand the need for some sort of accountability. I don't have a problem with being held accountable for what I'm doing in my classroom to make sure that I am not only ethically teaching my students but that they are actually learning something from me and to modify what I do based on some sort of a result on a test. But standardized testing makes absolutely no sense.

56:39I have not found a standardized student, and therefore I don't understand how I'm supposed to standardized test this unknown entity. I also am astounded by how much classroom time is now spent in schools across our country testing our students. They have test burnout to the nth degree. In our small school that does not have the super high demand stuff, we have upwards of four weeks, almost a full month of class time that is used to do standardized testing. That's insane. The kids are only in school for nine months out of the year. A ninth of our time is spent doing tests that we are not the ones to develop, that it's being thrown down to us by the states and these organizations.

57:26It doesn't work. We know it doesn't work. If you look at education systems in places that are thriving like Finland, that is one of the first things someone in the Finnish education system would say is get rid of those stupid tests. And they have said that. So if not standardized testing, then what should society or American society measure? I think that's why we have standardized testing is I don't know that anyone's come up with a good answer to that. And I think that until we have a good answer to that, we will continue to see the standardized tests. Not because we have to have something like that, but because we have, as a society, allowed people to undermine the education system while simultaneously underfunding it to such an extent that there's no trust left in our education.

58:18There's no trust left with our teachers. Because I've had students and I've got siblings and I'm actually next year going to teach my first second generation student, I have trust from previous students and from the community. And I don't think they would ever look up my standardized test scores to make sure I was doing my job right. But I feel like that was true when I was a young person. People just trusted teachers. They knew they'd gone to school for years. They were in this job for the right reasons. there was a level of trust that we no longer have in our country. So we've got that dual issue.

58:55We don't trust education. We don't trust teachers, in part because of political agendas and the underfunding that has created gaps in our education system that definitely need to be addressed. I'm hoping that somebody's putting some money into what we can do other than standardized tests and some sort of think tank out there because quite honestly, I am far too busy taking care of all of the hundreds of kids I'm responsible for every day to be the one to come up with something like that. And my guess is most teachers feel the same way. Your answer did not shock me at all. Okay, I lied. I really have two more questions.

59:35What was going to be my last question is, what's your opinion of going to college these days? Is it still crucial? Is it still the entry point to the American dream? Should everybody be trying to go to college or is that passé and old school thinking? I would say that absolutely not. It is no longer the only entryway. I think that we know from the millennials experience at this point in college that so many of them went and they did their due diligence and they got their degrees and they walked out into the world and became baristas because they didn't have the practice. They didn't have the experience to get into the job that they had just spent four to who knows how many years practicing in a school setting and paying for and actually getting a degree in.

1:00:31Simultaneously, I think some jobs still definitely need that college education. And I think college education is a wonderful thing. I learned what I wanted to be while I was in college. I didn't want to be a teacher when I left high school. So had there been a system where I could just go into some sort of trade school to become a high school teacher, I wouldn't have done it because I wouldn't have known that's what I wanted to do. So I think that there is still a lot of good for college education, but I'm already seeing in a practical way in schools at this point, so many people, so many teachers are echoing the sentiments of our society right now, which is it shouldn't be the default for everyone.

1:01:13It is expensive. It is not always going to produce the results that you're looking for. It can be extremely important and valuable for many institutions or many job careers and goals. But for so many people, if the goal is simply to go have a good life and do something that is going to produce a reasonable paycheck and allow them to live the lives they want to live. There are a lot of jobs out there, especially as all of the boomers have started retiring and now Gen X is readily approaching their heels that people can go into without it being a collegiate education experience. And yet, with your personal example, if you had not gone to college, you would not be where you are.

1:02:02So how does one know in the senior of high school, college or no college? I think it takes to some extent a real easy question being asked. Are you somebody who enjoys learning? Do you want to go explore thought or is it time for you to go explore hands-on experience? That's it, something that simple. Are you somebody who wants to go push yourself and see what it is to move yourself forward scholastically? Is that something you feel successful at? Or do you want to go out and start working or start an internship or whatnot and decide whether that's where you want to go? I also see gap years at this point really being so much more acceptable for young people.

1:02:50I have gone from being a teacher who used to tell my students, like at the end of the year, I have seniors that I teach, And I used to tell all of my students, if you are thinking about going to college at all, you will not take your first year off. You go directly into college. It's a horrible idea to take a year off. To now I say, if you have any hesitations about doing college, please take a year off. Take that time and really decide if this is what you want to do. I think the playing field has changed. The landscape of all of this has changed. and educators out there are having to pivot and realize what's really in front of them.

1:03:28And we have the experience of watching our kids and what they've gone on to do. I will also say that of all my students that have gone to college, the ones who it wasn't going to work for bailed out pretty quickly. And the ones who, even if they didn't know what they wanted to do and stayed with it, have gone on to have successful lives, I think because of that old adage of, it's something that you have to get through and you learn how to be a successful person by taking those classes and taking those tests and doing that hard work. And you learn how to conquer whatever it is you're looking at trying to do.

1:04:07It's like that's what the training ground has become in college is learning how to be tough mentally. Listen, this is kind of a dumb question, but... I'm a high school teacher. Honestly. I've heard those before. Okay. I'm not bullshitting you are truly a remarkable person okay really really I mean you know Madison and I we we reject about five to ten people per day who wants to be on this podcast okay so trust me when I tell you we can recognize a remarkable person when we encounter her so this is i just i lay it out there if you look back how did you become remarkable what what did it take how did we get to this point i i don't honestly know that i can agree with the assessment that i am remarkable so i appreciate that very much i am just a high school teacher in a small town who lives a very happy life and has a really happy family And I would say that if I have been allowed to excel in what I do and how I think, it has been because I've been embraced by the people around me as a positive force in their lives and thus been encouraged to continue to be my kind of obnoxious self and continue to push boundaries and ask questions again and again.

1:05:44why are we doing this thing? What are we doing it for? How does it help us? At the end of the day, my life's purpose has seemingly from early on always been, I want to make the world a little bit better place. I want to make my students' lives work better than they would have had I not been able to be there and put time and energy into them. So when something comes along like chat GPT, I want to see it as the tool that it is. I don't want to be the older teacher that goes, oh, I can't handle this. It's new and it's bad. I want to look for the possibilities. I've seen too many good things in this life come from looking for the positives, which trust me right now in education continues to be a daily challenge because things are rough in the land of education right now on so many fronts.

1:06:36But to move forward and to do our best in this lifetime, I feel like we have to look for what we can do better. And we have to look for what works and what the positives are. I can thank my mom and my daughters primarily for pushing me in that direction. And my students, definitely my students. Absolutely. Always my students. I'm going to ask you this question with the caveat that you absolutely feel free to say no with no hesitation, no harm, no foul, no negativity. OK, when I ask you this question, I'm writing a book called Remarkable Mindset, and it has three sections, which is growth, which is based on the work of Carol Dweck.

1:07:27Grit, which is based on, well, Angela Duckworth, but also grit in general. And finally, grace, which is basically how to be a good person, because I think those are the three components of Remarkable People, grit, growth and grace. So in my mind, I'm writing for young people who are trying to find their footing in life. In a perfect world, parents, boomers would read this book and say, I got to give this to my kids. Because this will really help them. These are things I've been trying to tell them, but they don't listen to me. This is a book that puts it all together. It's like the elements of style for life.

1:08:14I like that. Okay. I'm telling you all this to tell you, and it's only 130 pages because I don't think millennials and college students and high school students want to read War and Peace on how to be successful and remarkable. Okay. I'm giving you this whole preamble. So I would like to know if you will read a draft of this book and tell me what you think. Because if there's anybody qualified to know what they need to read, in the 200 guests we've had, it's you. A, I would be honored to be able to read that. B, I love the message of it. And C, it would have to happen during the summer if that's what I have.

1:09:03Almost zero time during the school year. So it would have to be a timing thing. And if that lines up with a summertime read for me, that I could do that, then I would be absolutely honored to do that. Hold your horses. A few days after this interview, I called Kelly because I thought of more stuff to ask her. That's what's next.

1:09:31in our first interview you said a very interesting thing about how as a high school teacher you have had 19 years of practice detecting bullshit i don't know why i didn't ask that in real time but how do you detect bullshit oh goodness i had been thinking only about the new question that you had sent me. So my brain is not in that space right now. I feel like, for me, what it comes down to is I trust my instincts more than anything else. But I have to listen to my very first instinct and not let my individual desire for an answer or for what I want to be being said, get in the way of what I actually hear being said.

1:10:26So if I want somebody to really like a gift I've given them, for instance, but the first sound I hear from them is, oh, you know, thanks for this. This is really great. And there's something in the timor of the way they say it or my gut check reaction to the way they say it, that maybe that is not something they really like. And I have to go with, no, this is bullshit. They don't necessarily really like it. I don't know if that's something that I have developed because I've been a teacher for so long. I have just been inundated with humans who are in a space in their life, in their teen years, where they are constantly checking for where the boundaries are.

1:11:10And they're constantly checking for if the adults in their world are really paying attention to them. and so they will lie to adults just to see if anybody's paying attention. I have seen that on numerous occasions just are you really listening to me and they will lie openly to your face not because they need to lie or even want to lie they just need to know they're actually being listened to and that's one of the ways they use to check. So I think after 25 years of teaching I have learned to truly listen to what somebody's telling me. And I think if we are truly in an open way, listening to what information somebody's giving us, it is usually fairly easy to detect whether or not that's truthful or real or sounds like it has legitimacy to it.

1:11:59Yeah, but what if somebody's listening to this and says, you know, Kelly, I don't have 20 years to perfect this game. What do I do tomorrow? My best offering would be to take that moment and really look at what's motivating a person at any given point in time. If you are talking to somebody, what is it that they want or need from a situation? And if they want or need something that would potentially be easier for them to get by lying to you or by bullshitting you, then you need to take that into account and recognize that that is potentially part of what's going on. But I think so often, if you simply are being open yourself and being honest in a situation, and you are open to somebody else's truth, and you don't plan to shame them for that truth or punish them necessarily for it, that they will be truthful with you, They will not bullshit you.

1:13:03If, however, they have something on the line that they can get by bullshitting you, then you need to put the defense system up and start listening a little bit more carefully. Probably starting off by saying over the course of a school year that my third grandmother has died is not going to fly, right? Exactly. That was four grandmothers in one year, by the way, that story. The kid lost four grandmothers in one year, which, you know, okay. That is possible. Families seem to have a different memory. It is, which is why I didn't call him out on it until his family was with me. And I simply told him I was so sorry for their loss, at which point in time consequences started for the child.

1:13:50Because they had not actually lost four grandmothers. Now, you mentioned something very interesting to me, which is in many circumstances, when someone bullshits you, you can walk away. You can refuse to do business. You can tell them off. You can do a lot of things. But in your case, you can't exactly fire a student. You have to deal with this. So how do you deal with someone who's bullshitting you in a place where you just can't sweep it under the carpet or you can't just walk away from it? You've got to deal with it. For me, what that looks like is that I will basically call, especially when it's a student, because that's usually the situation I'm in.

1:14:37I will simply tell them what I think the truth is or that I think that the BS is happening. and then I will open it up to a discussion about how we can move forward or be checking in with them about what has happened that has pushed them into a corner that caused them to do this lying or bullshitting. But the idea for me is that especially with students who are trying to navigate themselves in a high school situation into an adult world, that they understand that I hear their bullshit, but that I still believe in them and that I'm not going to discount them or write them off as liars and that's it.

1:15:16That's the end of my believing in them. I think that a lot of good can come from very honest discussions with people who truly care about us, especially when we can call them out on their BS and then still have solid, loving, caring relationships where we move forward. I think it gives them the opportunity to recognize that truth is way more powerful than the bullshit. And when they are able to hold on to that, I think we get a better world out of it. Oh, the gospel according to Kelly. Anyway, and my last question, this is one scenario where you're dealing with the bullshit of a student. But I have to say in the last year or so, if there is a population of people that has to deal with bullshit externally, it is teachers, right?

1:16:11Right. Politicians and school boards and I don't know, a few parents are trying to tell you what to teach, how to teach, which books should be in the library, which books shouldn't be in the library. You know, what part of American history happened or didn't happen? What can damage what words, what pronouns, what everything? And at least from the outside looking in, I think a teacher today has to deal with so much bullshit. So how do you deal with all that bullshit coming down upon you? Well, I don't actually get too much. I do see it in the news. I do hear about it in other communities. But I think that for the most part, anybody who's experiencing kind of a systematic like we are level of being attacked, for the most part, focusing on what you have control over.

1:17:07I have control over my classroom. I have control over who I vote for. I have some level of a good relationship with both my admin and our school board. And those are the things I can focus on to protect the world that I live in. I can't go fix the D.C. politicians kind of rhetoric and talking points and their need to throw us under the bus in order to get more votes or whatnot. So I'm not going to waste much time with that. But if I am being really honest in my purpose in the classroom, and that purpose aligns with the idea of simply helping my students become better able to handle problems, better able to use critical thinking skills, and I can explain that and be open about that with parents, then most other things can get managed.

1:18:03I am like other teachers. We do not have agendas. no matter what the politicians are trying to say, other than to help our students who we truly care about, go live successful lives. And I think when we sit in our own truth regarding that, we don't really spend a lot of time worrying about somebody deciding that we are the problem with America. And yeah, I'd say a big part of it is really just focusing on what I do have control over and who is willing to hear my truth and speaking that to the people, to those people so that they know where I'm coming from. Okay. Kelly, like what happens if Monday morning, the Oregon legislature decides that critical race theory is not to be taught in our high schools anymore and no more pictures of Michelangelo's David.

1:18:58Now this is coming right into your classroom and library. Now what? First of all, critical race theory isn't being taught. That's an easy one. They can't ban what's not happening. So that's an easy one. I think that, again, that's then moving into my building. So my first line would be to start from the people who know me. If I had, say, a book that we read together in class that they wanted to ban at the state level, I would start by going to my admin. And if I was really passionate about wanting to read that book, I would want the admin to sit down with me and explain to me, you know, from the perspective of that position, why somebody felt this was threatening and who I could talk to about making that be less threatening.

1:19:46I feel like when we react strongly to somebody else's over-the-top knee-jerk political rhetoric where they're being ostentatious in their ideologies and just being ridiculous, if we react in kind, then we're never going to get anywhere. We're going to prove to them that they were right in being ridiculous because we're acting ridiculous. So I think when we're dealing with BS on that level, we just have to sit in our truth and act like the grownups in the room, which I see a lot of educators doing right now. I see so many educators going to school boards and spending the time to really talk them through the difference between what they're being told is a political crisis versus the reality of what's happening in our classrooms.

1:20:35Unfortunately, I think the news tends to only pick up on the most dramatic of those situations rather than the day-to-day, calm, logical conversations that are happening. well this is good news in a sense what you're saying to me is guy you're only reading msnbc and cnn and they're highlighting the handful of cases that are like this the principal who got asked to resign because of the michelangelo sculpture but in reality guy that's like Like one principal out of, I don't know, 250 ,000 principals in the United States. So don't think it's all like that. Well, I would say it's not all like that, but I would say that it has a lot more to do with the state that you're living in.

1:21:25And I think that in some of the states in our country right now, that is coming like it is far more on the backside of that. When you live in states that are very supportive of education, then you have less of a concern about that. You also have the difference between states that have unions versus non-union states. And that allows us some level of sense of like, we need to do what's right. And we have backup as long as we are being ethical in what we are doing. We have somebody who's going to get our back on that. But non-union states don't have that. So I think I am extremely privileged to be allowed to work in a state that is much more supportive of education.

1:22:06and I don't have that direct experience with the chaos that I think is very real going on for many teachers in our country. Anyway, I think it's pretty obvious that I loved interviewing Kelly. It's so apparent that she's great at what she does, and she loves what she does. She is the very definition of ikigai. I hope you all had a Kelly Gibson in your life. I did. His name was Harold Keebles at Iolani School in Honolulu, Hawaii. He too was an English teacher. Kelly's experience as an educator and her passion for integrating technology into the classroom and her love of students, they are all so inspiring.

1:22:54I hope you agree that teachers like Kelly are heroes and they deserve our gratitude and a pay raise. my gratitude to Jeff C Peg Fitzpatrick Shannon Hernandez Louise Magana Alexis Nishimura and of course Madison Nismer Madison and I are writing Remarkable Mindset together until next time mahalo and aloha

1:23:28this is Remarkable People