001[Music] Hello, Principal Miller. All right, listen carefully, please. If you have extra paper, you still were doing that. Are you Look, I'm doing my best. [Music] All right, real quick. I do want to introduce you to what we're doing and why I told some of you about it, but I'm going to tell the rest of you about it. So, I'm recording us just for just for a little bit each day. Honestly, like the teaching itself is going really well. I mean, like my students really like ridiculously smart. We were learning algebraic stuff, right? um to get them ready for sixth grade. And we were talking about pattern recognition and logical reasoning. And I showed them the uh Einstein's fish riddle, which is, you know, a the apocryphal story is that Einstein, whenever anyone would come
002to him and ask him to be their academic adviser. He'd give them this riddle with like 15 questions and you'd have to logic out, you know, the answer to it. Well, I showed my students the riddle and they figured it out in less than an hour. I mean, they sat down, they got to it, they figured it out. I gave them the the assignment. I gave them the resources and they just went for it. And then like a group of four or five of them got together and said, "Hey, let's make our own riddle." Now, the presentation's a little bit rough, but the content is amazing because they give you the title here. They give you how to lay out the way that they solved the Einstein riddle. They laid out how to solve their
003riddle in a very similar way. And then they give you a list of information that you have to crunch. And they just did this all on their own. and it's following the same logical procedures that they would use when solving for variables. It's using the same pattern recognition that they would use. It's using the same skills and it's still meeting those same standards but in a in a more creative way. It also engages metacognitive skills as well. Why am I thinking the way am I thinking? Why is this laid out the way it should be out? And why am I engaging it with it with it the way I'm engaging with it? Those are the next higher level questioning that the students need to be asking themselves, you know, and teaching them to think that
004way. just opens up a lot of doors is what I'm trying to say I guess. James, tell me about your discovery. Not really exist. Why not? In what year did 1782 end? It ended between the two, right? So the thing between the two is a separate year. There's a secret year. But there's nothing to end that secret year. So be another secret year, another secret. It goes on forever. And infinity, but infinity isn't a numberion. Time doesn't exist. and they're if time doesn't exist, we can't exist. Well, hold on. Hold on. Okay, that's because Wait, James, come back. So, you've stumbled across one of the fundamental questions of uh of physics. And here's and here's the deal. I'm going to tell you something. It's not that time doesn't exist. It's that time and space are
005the same thing. It's not that time doesn't exist. is that time and space are literally the same thing. Depending on how fast you travel through space, that can lengthen or shorten how fast you experience time. Depending on how much gravity you're around, that can lengthen or shorten the amount of time you're in. To a particle of light, because it's traveling as fast as physically possible, the whole history of the universe happened in less than a second because it's going that fast. What? So, it's not that time doesn't exist. It's that time bends and shifts and moves depending on space. My history is uh you know, I taught for three years in South Korea. I teaching English to English learners and half of my class are English learners. Well, more than half. I think 12 out
006of 20 of them are English learners. So being able to give them that extra attention and, you know, see them, you know, fight through that language barrier, not just in CKLA, but in the other subjects. I mean, it's it's really it's really nice to see that the skills I developed for all that time are being put to use here. To be quite frank with you, he makes sure that we're all included in things and that's really fun cuz it um lets you make more friends in the classroom. One of my favorite things, it's just like the different minorities in the class. There's people like from all around the world and you get to learn new stuff about their culture every single day. Whenever somebody would make fun of someone, he would make sure that kid
007knew that it's not okay to do that. And he would make sure everyone felt safe and everybody knew that it's not okay to make fun of people for being different. Now, whoever joins your team is going to be treated with kindness, fairness, and respect. Even if you do not like the person, I'd say the biggest challenge for me has been, and this is my advice as well, finding a way to set the kids up to have that self-sufficiency. If you can teach them that confidence is particularly that confidence to just kind of go for it and build on their own strengths that will free up your time and that will free up their stress level. Chad, you know, I'm very very glad cuz I always tell when your dad asks you how you're doing, I
008always tell him dad always puts his full effort into it and you always do. You should be very proud of yourself. Keep going. Keep going. You're good. You know, we're all geniuses. You too. Yeah, he's a awesome teacher and he has he has changed a little bit. He's nicer now. He's just like built a relationship with us where he can talk about more stuff than school. So, it's always fun. He also is more thoughtful. Like he takes more time in lessons than previous teachers that I've had who just kind of like search a slideshow and like do it. He kind of like thinks about what we need to learn and not just what the curriculum is. He gives us free time which I think is better because it helps us like reset our brains and
009get more focused. I give my students so much time to relax, to recalibrate, to reset. Studies have shown that when you give people enough time to reset and relax, they produce a higher quality of work. If you're a new teacher, do not be afraid to just chill and let your kids chill and like give them that extra time to, you know, you know, just breathe and like center themselves cuz that that really makes a difference and it makes them way less distracted by the end of the day. For teacher appreciation week, um, I got him a coffee mug. He's very into coffee. Coffee. He drinks a so he has a jug of water and then he's an entire mug of coffee um every single morning and he he's always talking about how like I can't
010go a day without my mug of coffee. Coffee means to Mr. K a lot. It's like his family or like his son and it just keeps him going cuz we have a crazy classroom. It's a lot of questions, a lot of calling out. It's just it helps him run through the day better. And Mr. It actually has a difference when he doesn't have his coffee. He's kind of grumpy when he doesn't drink any in the morning cuz he's not very awake. I feel like I've seen him drink it less now. Like I think he was more stressed at the beginning of the year, more tired. He's still late sometimes. I guess he sleeps in, but like he's been drinking less coffee now, but I think that he definitely needs the coffee to survive every day.
011We're just very crazy. I will definitely admit that. Like I wouldn't say that we're the normal kind of class in today's climate with, you know, education and everything. You always hear, "Oh, you know, parents this, parents that." Dude, my parents rock. Like, you know, uh they man, they they go out of their way. They help provide, you know, snacks for the classroom for snack time. When we had our our Halloween party, some came in and helped us out. They're always talking to me on Parent Square. I mean genuinely, you know, I I feel very lucky and just frankly blessed to have such engaged and like thoughtful parents. So that's been the biggest surprise. The rough thing for me is honestly just like keeping up with all the emails, keeping up the communication with administration. To
012be perfectly honest, I actually struggle very much with that. Um so so for me it's also been a growing period. So, it's it's really nice to see like to take inspiration from my students like, "Oh, you're if you can if you at the age of 10 can fight through a language barrier and do well in a subject that you were convinced you couldn't do, then I can at least answer some gosh darn emails." I think at the beginning, he really let us like go crazy. he like didn't have a lot of rules, but now he's really like he's grown to know us. So, he definitely um has like become more strict, but in a way that we all know isn't being like mean or anything. So, he's just instead of being super open, he's still
013open and fun, but he does it with like rules, which I think is a lot better cuz I didn't really learn when everyone was talking. He's been a understanding for me when I don't understand a concept. So he helped me learn the things that I needed to learn. Let's say if I missed a day uh when we were doing fractions, so I didn't know what the concept was, he would take me aside personally and say and teach me the whole lesson. In long division, that was bad. But now I'm better because Mr. K, he he helped me. He gave me like worksheets and now now I'm better at all long division. Okay, gentlemen, we're not playing. All I can say about the support is that it's been nothing short of outstanding. As an example, I
014taught English for years and now this year I have to make math menus. I talked to the math lead here, uh, Miss Foster, and she came in, she walked me through, she co-taught with me, she helped me organize the lessons. I mean, boom, boom, boom. It's kind of weird how nice everyone is and how how much support there is. So yeah, um the support systems are are pretty pretty out of this world. He gave us a lot of strategies like I know during the math so I really I was like oh I don't know how to do this but then I thought back to the past during math and I really I like thought about what he had taught us and I wrote it all down on paper and I felt a lot more prepared
015when I like was thinking back onto math over the past year. It made me feel like really happy because I like really knew what I was doing. And I feel like in the past I had really rushed through all of my work. But his strategies like the the way he's taught us, they've really like just helped me not rush and like stop, take a deep breath, and do my work. When it comes to inclassroom stuff, I feel more than adequately supplied. The one area, it's not even negative, it's just a, you know, a little bit more information on that is the more nuts andbolt side of things. So like you know put how to engage with front line or how to engage with my access you know uh going to use a link in the
016you know district made lesson pacing calendar and then I don't have access to the link because I'm a first year teacher. You know what I mean? But as far as the dayto-day everything's good. As far as the students, um, my biggest goal for them is, for example, I'm reading this text and I'm getting this information from this text. Why am I getting this information from this text? Why is my understanding of this text different from my friend's understanding? Why is the way that I go about logicing out these variables different than the way my friend might do it? Why am I more of a visual learner versus where my friend's more of a kinesthetic learner? I never hit record. Okay, let's try this again. All right, we're making roller coasters. 3 2 What about us?
017So, yeah, we've been learning about potential and kinetic energy. To be honest with you, this roller coaster thing, despite looking complicated, has been some of the most hands-off teaching I've done, which to me is amazing because it lets them, you know, explore their own ability to uh solve problems. Now, I've helped a little bit, a tiny little bit, but it's been like 99% them. Go. I wouldn't say he has a tighter grip on us, but I think he he's more experienced than he was at the start. Like even if you don't know if he's going crazy, um like he knows what he's doing and it's going to help you learn more. So don't question it. Trust the process. Sometimes you're like, "Oh my gosh, what is he teaching us?" But then when he's done teaching,
018you're like, "Oh, okay. That actually makes a lot of sense." mistakes. I've definitely questioned his teaching skills, but in the end, I've definitely seen how this actually helps us learn. I don't know about any other people in any fifth grade classroom, but I feel like we have the most fun cuz all these other classrooms are quiet. Now, Arya, if you want to wash your hands, just go wash them off in the You know, it's like Shakespeare said, be true to yourself. You know, teaching them to be true to themselves and to know who they are. That's that's my biggest goal. Helping them develop skills to know themselves, to understand how they think, and to understand where they're coming from and to communicate it. Very good job.