#8: LIVE in Sacramento: Work Hard Be Kind Have Fun- Just Create More!

This is a live presentation of my “Work Hard, Be Kind, Have Fun: Just Create More” workshop at the Educating for Careers Conference in Sacramento in March of 2019.

The talk details my story of how stepping back from my job as a digital media teacher and focusing on creating for myself helped to make me a happier person AND a better teacher.  

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S1E08 | Series Episode 8

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello and welcome to the Enthusiasm Project, the only podcast that you're listening to at this moment, probably. My name is Tom, and this episode is a little bit different than a normal one. I'm really excited to share it with you. I'm actually recording this intro in a hotel room in Sacramento, and I feel like I hear some music in the background. Don't know if you can hear that or not. But what I wanted to share with you was a presentation that I actually gave earlier today, and I was really excited about it. I'm at a CTE conference, which is Career Technical Education. There are about 3,000 CTE teachers here, and I gave a presentation today called Work Hard, Be Kind, Have Fun, Just Create More. And it kind of outlined my personal story of not only bringing digital media into my personal life and and creating my own YouTube channel and stuff, but how doing that and focusing on my own thing, stepping back from my work responsibilities actually made me better at my job because it gave me a huge sense of perspective and fulfillment. And I my goal was that it would be the kick in the butt that someone might need if they're thinking about starting a thing related to digital media, and they just quite haven't yet. So this is that presentation. I wore a separate audio recorder the whole time, so the audio is not terrible. Um and I appreciate that everybody came out to to hear it and to see it. I am really, really pleased with how it went. I worked really hard on the presentation, so the visuals, there's a link in this description to a live stream of the event. Of course, the audio is not as good, but at least you can see some of the visuals. And at some point, I would love to update and give this presentation again. Heather and I are talking about having some sort of event where we can do some workshops and talks and presentations and spread all the magic of digital media. So here it is, live on SD card from Sacramento. My work hard, be kind, have fun, just create more presentation for the Educating for Careers Conference 2019. Thanks for coming all the way to the magnificent Beavis room, which is directly across from the Butthead solarium. So uh I was kind of nervous when they said it's mmm your presentation's Monday, across the street, upstairs, and I was like, cool. Uh I get the message as to what that means, but it makes me really happy that everyone spent their time coming out on Monday afternoon where I know it's super easy to go back and take a nap and all that kind of stuff. Um so I appreciate you coming out, spending your time here. The the other thing is I figured it means that if you're here, you're actually hopefully like here on purpose and maybe just wandering around, but you know, maybe you actually chose to be here because you like digital media, you're interested in digital media, or at least the idea of doing something fun and creative with digital media. There's plenty of chairs and windowsill seats you could lay down. Uh so today uh it's pretty simple. My name's Tom Buck. I guess I should introduce myself. Hi, I'm Tom. I teach and coordinate the Impact Digital Media Pathway at Indio High School. I feel like this is a little too high for me. Um, at Indio High School, which has been around for several years, and I also have a YouTube channel which you'll hear all about. And this is the presentation work hard, be kind, have fun, just create more. All the fun sounding words. So uh what I don't want to do is give you a bunch of paperwork and standards and curriculum and pass out stuff like that. So I'm basically just gonna tell you some stories today, uh, based on my experience, which are things that I thought were going to make me a worse teacher, then maybe a better teacher, then made me like I feel like, at least on the way to being a better human, which helps you be a better teacher. And it was all thanks to digital media. So I have one really simple goal for today. Well, two goals really. Um, but the main one is not even that you make something with digital media, but hopefully that you leave at least with the like the the drive to want to make a thing with digital media. Because the fact that we can all do that, we can all make a thing in 2019 is really exciting to me. So that could be a video, it could be a podcast, it could be Instagram stories, a blog, like whatever. Just making a thing with digital media to me is super exciting. And I know based on my own personal experience, if you're on that cusp of like wanting to explore something or thinking it might be worthwhile, that sometimes you just need someone to like kick you in the butt and like do it. And so maybe like I can lovingly kick you in the butt and make you do a thing today. And then if we have time, you can make all your dreams come true and live happy forever, but we won't have time for that, so we'll just skip it. The thing that I don't like about presentations, which I'm sure you can all agree, is when somebody stands up here and reads a wall of text to you off their presentation. So I don't do that except for right now when I'm gonna read a wall of text to you. Uh but it's for a very specific reason. So I was an English major originally, and my favorite author was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who's terrific. Like, hopefully, you know, if you're teachers, you should be familiar with Emerson. But you can turn to like any page in any one of his things and just find gold, and it's like it could totally go on a cat poster kind of like lines. Uh, and this is one that I share with my students at the start of every school year because I think that it's really important for students to know. So I will read it to you in case you're on the back or you're tired and you don't want to read. Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it, stamp it with your own personality, be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. And I think that that is a really key point to share with students because you can spend the first days of school telling them when to like go to the bathroom and ask for a pass and stuff, or you can just help them be enthusiastic about what you're teaching, and then those things kind of take care of themselves. Like they're not gonna throw pencils into your ceiling foam if they're just excited about what they're doing. The problem I find with a lot of presentations is a lot of people, and I've given these presentations in the past too, will give their best practices and their tools, and they're like, this is what we use, this is our structure, this is how everything works, but they kind of forget that you need somebody, the actual teacher in the classroom, to do these things. And that's really dependent on the person. Like the person can choose to acquire that, but you can't teach it. You can't like I demand my staff be enthusiastic now. Like, mmm, doesn't work. There's there's chairs up here if you guys want to see. And then the last session I saw people just lounging in the windowsills, so feel free. The uh so yeah, enthusiasm. It's important. I like it. I'm a big fan of it. I like to project my enthusiasm. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. That's the thing that's coming up later. Anyway. Ooh, oof, I can't laugh at my own jokes. That's gonna be like a really big problem. So that is a huge, that's a huge thing for me, is being enthusiastic just like that. Uh but the the other part of this that I really like is right here. Stamp it with your own personality. I think that that's really important. And if anybody in here saw Into the Spider-Verse, which I wasn't that interested in until I saw it, and then it became like my favorite movie. That movie is amazing and everybody should watch it. It's like a work of art. But not to spoil it, the whole thing is there's all these different spider people, and the main character struggles until he stops trying to be the Spider-Man that he thinks he needs to be based on the legend of Spider-Man, and he just does it his own way, and then magically, ah, successful. He's enthusiastic about it, he tries hard, he becomes successful. I absolutely love that. You can give your students all the same assignment, but if you foster an environment of enthusiasm and creativity, they will all put their own individual stamp on it. And if they have the freedom to do that, that's where really good things come out of. And that's kind of what the keynote last night talked about. It was actually really on point with a lot of things I was talking about here. So I was like, perfect, this is great. Uh so just quick things about me, real quick. I like to turn off projectors, but also on top of that, oh, there's like a beautiful picture back there and it's not showing up. Anyway, uh a few things really important. If you're a teacher, hopefully you think that literacy is important. If somebody can't read or write, they're gonna be at a severe disadvantage in the world. Like they're gonna get taken advantage of, they're gonna be at a disadvantage, things aren't gonna work out that great for them. It's pretty obvious. My big thesis statement is that in 2019, digital media literacy is just as important, which is where the keynote kind of went last night. And if a person, not even just a student, but if a human is not digital, digitally literate in 2019, they're going to be at a disadvantage. Like you can choose to not participate, you know, oh, Snapchat's not for me. That's fine, it's not for me either. But digital media is for everyone, and it's not going away, barring some apocalyptic, like horrible thing that happens. So it's a good idea to use it as a tool that it is. It's also really exciting, and that is something that kind of drives my whole purpose as a teacher. And that Emerson quote that I shared is really long and really hard to memorize. So I kind of sum it up into the three phrases for today's presentation. This has been in my syllabus for like seven years. As like student expectations, when seniors leave, I always go, like, I'm gonna give you the keys to success in life, and they're totally free. And it's just these three things. Because if you really think about it, if you work really hard, that makes you an asset to anybody or to yourself, but you can work really hard and you can be a jerk. If you think of like Steve Jobs, who is like a really great hard worker and probably not the nicest person who ever lived, you probably don't want to be that. Uh, but you can be kind, and that kind of balances it out, and that opens a lot of doors. When someone's a really hard worker and they're kind, who doesn't want that person on their team? Who doesn't want to help that person? Who doesn't want to open doors for that person? Uh but as I learned, that also means that you all often become the doormat. And if you're a people pleaser and you want to work really hard, then people step on you. So this last part here is really important. It's like the check that balances everything else or the balance of check, whatever the term is. It's the thing that makes sure everything else is working. Because if you're working hard at something, which just means you're here, your goal is there, put head down, do what you need to do to get to it, and things will be good. Um that's kind of the key of hard work. But if you're kind along the way, you're not, you know, I don't know, steve jobs in it along the way, cheating your partner out of billions of dollars and things, and you're a kind person, that's gonna be really helpful. But if you're having fun, that means that you're actually getting something out of it. I do have, I see people come in. There's a couple empty chairs, and the problem with the Beavis room is it's a tiny room. Um, but it's a good problem to have, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, uh, some quick examples. So if anyone here happened to see me talk last year, I shared a very different version of this, and I'm gonna blast through this really quickly because it's an example of work hard, be kind, have fun every day in our classroom. So, how many people in here are teachers? Wow, and how many of you have classrooms? Right. Uh so for me, when I was a little kid and I want I was so judgy of all of my teachers' classrooms, everywhere I'd be like, well, that poster is crooked, like why is that there? That says copyright 1962, that shouldn't be on the wall anymore. Like, there's there it's just what would I do in my classroom? And then I got my first classroom. Uh well actually, I have a picture of my first classroom, which hopefully will show up on the projector here. Uh this was a current class, was a classroom at my current school. So about three years ago, a little, yeah, a little more than three years ago, when I moved to Indio High School to start an arts and media entertainment pathway, I also inherited their broadcast program, which I loved because I wanted to do that every day. Uh this was the broadcast studio after I cleaned it up. Um it's crappy. Like it looks pretty standard. It everything's 15 years old. Literally, the computer that like streamed the 280p, you know, not high definition broadcast, the way we had to turn it on every morning was to lift it like eight to ten inches off the table and then drop it. And then when it dropped it, it would go like and turn on. So and the cameras took tapes and they didn't work, and it was it was terrible. The lights would kind of shock kids sometimes if they went to turn them on. So it wasn't the best. But I had experience with that. And luckily, we were moving into a really new space because our campus was being totally rebuilt. It was really old, falling down. They spent like eight years rebuilding it, which was a total construction nightmare for those of you who were a couple of people in here who were there that whole time. Uh, but part of that included a new broadcast studio, which had like a studio space and a control room, and that was great. And I was excited for that because I remember my very first classroom, which I I don't know. I remember I was really excited to get my first classroom. I'm assuming you were too, because it's a big deal. So the thing I did, I got my keys and I went to it and I opened it up and I just took a picture. And this is the oh, you can kind of see it. This is the picture I took there of my very first classroom. It's a pile of desks. And those aren't uh, these are actually just like the broken desks. They don't match, they don't go together, you can't group them up, like they're terrible. And I'm not hiding this was the other side of the room. So I had this table, which was cool. There was a projector and a TV which didn't do anything, but I didn't want to get rid of it because it was the only technology I had in the classroom other than the projector. And uh yeah, there was no teacher desk. This was an English classroom, there's no bookshelves, uh, I didn't have a chair. So that was fun. But I didn't care. I was super excited, it was my own space, whatever. Come in on the weekends, get it done for the first day of school, and make it look really pretty. There you go. It's a very nice, pretty classroom. I even got a desk, I built a podium, uh, which I've painted a bunch of times since, and I got a file cabinet that the janitor said only had a mild black widow infestation. That's completely true. Uh and it were and then I, because my desks were so crappy and terrible, I like rearranged them every two weeks so the kids like never got used to being in one spot. But it it kind of fostered this really cool environment of adaptation. I figured out all these weird things to like rebuilt an old computer that would finally work to run Keynote instead of PowerPoint, and then like these little switcher boxes to switch it over. So it was it was pretty neat. The next year, this was sort of how this school like uh I don't know what you would call it, tested teachers, is they would give them the crappy classrooms, and then if you got Brat back on for the next year, these were like outside on the outskirts of campus, you got moved in to like the permanent classrooms. And so I got moved in here, which uh was the special ed PE room for my English classes and earbook. Uh it was also not a classroom, it's like a meeting space, it's in between a bunch of classrooms, and in an age where like keep your doors shut because everything is dangerous all the time. There are 11 doors that go in and out of this classroom. So people will just suddenly be in it, which is great. Uh but worked really hard, came in over summer, and then transformed it into a very pretty, nice, functional classroom with like projector and technology, and things are working great. Uh so it was like it felt like a huge step up from the first one. And then uh a digital media teacher was leaving the digital media program on campus and got asked to take over that classroom. And at this point, I suspected that the principal was just making me redecorate the entire school. And so I took over this room, which is a much bigger, nicer room. Uh, but the teacher I replaced was a complete hoarder. And this was after I cleaned it up. So there's technology, which is good. There's a ton of cabinets. I had cleaned all of the food and bugs out of the carpet because I went to the thrift store, bought a vacuum, vacuumed the whole thing up. Um, every cabinet in there, there's tons of cabinet space, was packed with stuff. And this room, there's a storage room here that literally, front to back, floor to ceiling, like comically piled like the desks in the first classroom with stuff. It took 14 hours one Saturday to just pull everything out of there. It sucked. It was gross. And ever and like the stuff that would be in these cabinets would be like newspaper, newspaper, used utensils, $2,000 camera lens, old emails that were printed. And so you couldn't just like clear everything out. You had to go through like everything. It took the most most part of a school year. The walls were really destroyed. So I was coming in on a lot of Saturdays and just painting. They were like this weird smoker yellow color. And like they were chipped and they had holes in them, and it was it was awful. We had no screen, so I just painted a screen onto the wall to kind of like try to make it a little bit nicer. And so eventually we took it from that to like a nice, very functional digital media classroom, which was awesome and super usable. And uh, and since I've left that classroom, has become even nicer and more functional. Uh so long story long, when I found this, I was like, cool, another opportunity to do stuff, and knowing we were gonna get a new space. And luckily, with the CTE incentive grant, uh, was able to get new equipment, so no more tape cameras, computers that worked, they don't crash if you try to like show a picture in your news broadcast. Because we we stream our broadcasts live every day, so it's like it has to kind of work. But there were no frills in the room, it's just a black square, and that is it, or cube, I guess. And the students and I were looking at TV shows that we liked and like what their sets looked like, and we're like, oh, they're so pretty. Like the desks are such a centerpiece, and everything is bright and colorful, and and we should do that too. So we did, we tried. Um, we put desks, and I put this thing on the back wall that had these LED lights on the other side, so they like glow, so the students would be like anchoring, and then behind them in just this black abyss, would be like a glowing bar of crooked wood. Uh it worked. It it worked, but that summer, I was like, no, we're gonna fix this. So the first day of summer vacation went to Home Depot. Well, actually did a lot of research trips to Home Depot. First day of summer vacation, though, uh, installed a laminate wood floor into this room. I can tell you how many laminate wood floors I've installed in my life. One, it was that one. And I don't know how to do it, but I went on YouTube and said how to install laminate wood floor. I just put shh. That's irrelevant. Because I put soundproofing foam and then just tape, and it you don't even see that anymore. No one knows that that's there. So if you hire flooring people in your house, check their work, because they're probably covering it up like I did. Uh but anyway, that was just going to Home Depot, finding the cheapest stuff I could find, figuring out how to make it work, and then I this was summer of 2017. Spent basically the whole summer, we live in the desert, so it's also insanely hot, trying to collect materials, figured out, did put that soundproofing to cover up the ugly etching on my floor, uh, make it all work, try to get it to come together. It's sort of like bag borrowing and stealing and getting stuff to work, and eventually we ended up with a nice TV show set. Which looks great. And we've been using it for two school years now. It's awesome, it looks terrific on camera. You can change all the lights, you can change all the theming. Um, so just to kind of go from there to there. I also changed out all the studio lights. They put in these awful, like, super hot tungsten lights that burned at like 200 and something degrees and melted kids. And so put in some LED lights that don't do that and take less power and don't start fires. Uh kids really liked it. They took ownership of it over the holidays, they decorated it, make it all pretty, trying to be like really inclusive with the menorah and the whole deal. Um and they they do a lot of fun stuff. This was this was a couple months ago. Our power went out, and the lights came back on, but none of the other stuff, like our computers or networks to stream or whatever. So we just used my phone and they like cut out all the graphics for the broadcast. So instead of our like swooshy things, they were like and like holding stuff in front. And a kid, we have like a logo that spins in the corner of the screen, and she put like a little cutout on a pencil and was like following it around and like twisting it. It was amazing, and like that is stupid, and it looked dumb. But the creativity, the collaboration, all that stuff, all that fun space, and then the seniors wanted to take like a family portrait this year, so there's like the seniors in the broadcast class. But my point is that was a really good example of something that was a lot of hard work, um, but it was a lot of fun, and the kindness is you know, like it's something for our school, it's something for our students to be proud of, to show off. They take care of it, they like mop the floor and sweep the floor and dust everything. Like they're on like cleaning crews. It was a really good example of that kind of thing, and I think all of us do versions of that all the time. Um, so real quick, I want to talk to you about impact, just so you know the rest of my program. It's the Institute of Media Production, Arts and Creative Technology. I made it up. Uh at Indio High School, which is it's a four-year arts media entertainment pathway. All courses are used to approve, there's 225 students, that's basically what the pathway structure looks like. So it's it's a pretty decent, it's a good pathway. I like it, I'm proud of it. So our ninth graders start here in an exploratory course, then we pool a bunch of 10th graders, and then from there they kind of select into 11th and 12th grade year. And this is where a lot of presentations that I have given and I've been to sort of go. And they're very neat and very packaged, and the pathway looks really neat, and here's all the answers, and you just need this, and how do you approve your courses? Which, by the way, if you go to IHSimpact.org, the website, I'll put up At the end, all the course descriptions are there if you want to. But it's easy to make everything look so perfect, and like the presenters have all the answers, and that we're just like these perfect people. By the way, I forgot to mention at the end of last school year I was selected as our district's teacher of the year, high school teacher of the year, which was a big honor. Yeah, yeah, yes. Applaud me. Yes. It was a big honor for me because there's a lot of high schools and a lot of teachers, and that was a big deal, and it showed me that digital media was valued. So this all looks really perfect, which is why right now I want to tell you how it depends who you talk to, but how I either almost quit my job or got fired last year. Uh which is what? Which is why in May this was a surprise, because it's not how I expected the school year to end. I didn't expect to be a teacher at the end of last school year. Uh and I think that it's important to sort of dig into hey, everything kind of messes up a lot, and things can go really bad, and that's where the the whole philosophy comes into play. So this looks really neat on a screen. In real life, it is not how it works because last school year, well, in addition to the pathway, I do have that broadcast class, which is over here. We have an eight-period day, it's a ton of classes to teach. Um then we had a lot of freshmen. And according to the way that our administration decided to do things, it was hey, freshmen like computers, let's put them in your class. So there goes your prep, whether or not you want to give it up, you're gonna get a second freshman class. Oh, but most of them are total delinquents. So don't trust them with computers or cameras or any of that new stuff that you have. And I've worked with freshmen every year, but in digital media labs, it's really important they select to be there. You can't reach every kid. When the classroom can physically hold 35 kids and you have 47, problems happen where they're just literally ripping stuff off the walls and like destroying all the brand new things. Kind of a nightmare. But whatever, I'll make it work. I learned to adapt. I could do that. Uh, and then about seven weeks into the school year, things are going great. And this timing is 100% accurate. My advanced digital media class, my senior class, those kids have been in the program for a couple of years or great. Oh my god, there was one day I was watching this class, and it looked like the cheesiest promo video for a CTE program you've ever seen. Because literally, like, there were kids like pointing at computer screens, saying please and thank you, walking around, like setting up equipment, putting stuff away, cleaning things, making stuff, doing like little stop motion animation. I was like, oh my god, like this is working. And then one of our administrators walked in and said, Um, I'm here to watch your class while you go to the office. This was not my idea. I was like, oh, this is gonna be fun. And so I went to the office and they told me that the district had mandated, I don't I don't understand how this works, but uh there was no money, we needed to save money. I feel like that's a common story, and so they were told to collapse classes and get rid of classes. They had bought out my prep period. So it made sense. Gave me an extra class, get rid of it. Okay, fine. But that's really hard because there's like a lot of freshmen, you gotta like put them places. You know what's easier? To just take the seniors and just take them out of the program and don't even give them another class. Just send them home unscheduled, or make them an office TA, they can stare out the window for 90 minutes. Uh so that's when I asked to resign. Because oh my thingy fell down, and nobody told me. Yeah. I just like it's a cool dangling microphone. This is like the most comically puffy microphone ever. But anyway, um, that was a real bummer of a day because what I told them in that meeting, and that was that was where I was just like, all right, there was no like questioning, it wasn't let's make this work, it was this is what's happening. And then also, at almost that exact same moment, our school mandated our site goal is that every CTE program has more students graduate. I was like, you know what's really hard to achieve is when you're cutting off our senior class and you're telling us more kids need to graduate, it's literally impossible. So I was mad and I wanted to leave, which if you break your contract and leave, you lose your teaching credential. So don't. But when you say you want to resign, your administration will go, well, we need to look for somebody else to hire because this person isn't gonna be here anymore. So that was a fun situation in which to find myself. And as I told them at that meeting, the reason I wanted to resign wasn't because they made me mad, it was because they didn't, they clearly, the district had been infused with CTE funding from the grant. They needed to use it or lose it, and they weren't prepared to effectively sustain their programs. And I told them that you guys aren't ready to have a successful CTE program or pathways because this is not what you do in that situation. And it was frustrating, and I had put so much time and effort into everything. That was right after I'd rebuilt the studio and all that kind of crazy stuff. So what I realized this is an aerial view of our campus, it is beautiful. If you ever get the chance to visit lovely Indio, California for Coachella or Stagecoach, we're right next to there. Um this is the bottom corner floor of that building, is where my classroom is, and just for funsies, that's my car. Uh you notice my car is in the front spot because even when I am a half hour late to work, I'm still the first car there, which is something that we like to brag about, is all the extra time and effort. But that was exactly the problem was that I was either here or here on my way to here. Like that was where I lived all the time. And and I put everything I had into it. So when they take away this part of the program, it wasn't, oh, we have budget cuts, we're having struggles. It was like an attack on what I had built and what I had put together and what I like put my my identity was like put into to being this CTE teacher. And they just it was just so callously like mouse click, class gone, moving on. I was like, this is terrible. Uh so I'm gonna step back, is what I decided. When I'm here, I will be here 110%. But when I am not here, as soon as I go poop, I forget this exists. That was kind of my thing, which I was like, and that's that's fine. That's survival mode. I will be there to do the best I possibly can, but no more. No more of all the crazy extra stuff. I specifically booked a trip for the next summer, a non-refundable trip to Iceland, so that I couldn't take on another project because I know that I'm the type of person to take on other projects. I just stopped, you know, nights, weekends, nope. Like your work will fill whatever time you give it. So if you if you're gonna work 10-hour days, you're gonna have 10 hours of work. If you're gonna work eight hour days, you're gonna work weekends. You're never done. It's never gonna be done. So I just said, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna go explore other things in my life. I'm going to create something that I want to create because uh I made something for someone else and they don't care about it because they just broke it. So, what do I want to do? And I had all these ideas that I'd always put on the shelf. And there's a lot of times, literally on the way to this conference some years, where I would go, this summer I should do this. Oh, but I'm busy this summer. Maybe next summer I could do that. And then you're literally planning a year and a half in advance to do something you want to do because all this other stuff you don't want to do is getting in the way. And that didn't make sense to me. So something that I had wanted to do for a long time was to start a YouTube channel because I really liked making stuff, but I didn't really get a chance. And you know, I didn't get a chance outside of work. I was so tired of work-related things, I want to just do my own stuff and share my own thing, and I would be in charge of it. And so that's what I did. Um and I actually made the channel the summer I was building the broadcast studio, but I just sort of sporadically like uploaded a few videos. But I was like, if I'm not putting this effort into school, I'm gonna put it into something that I make. So I made the channel and I called it the Enthusiasm Project. So tying it back to the beginning. Uh, because that which was another idea. Literally, I had an idea for this to be a blog in 2010 because there were blogs in 2010, and I waited until 2017 to actually do my stupid idea, which is frustrating. And I think a lot of people are in that position. There's so many things to build and try and explore, but it's next summer, it's next week, it's maybe spring break, and you put it on the shelf. Uh, fun fact too, I also met my girlfriend through YouTube.

unknown 30:19

Aww.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Aww, which has worked way better than any dating app ever could. So the YouTube algorithm is way better than whatever else. And that story was during that summer, where I was building the broadcast studio, on like the few like evenings that I wasn't at school, I wanted to buy an electric skateboard, and I was looking up skateboard reviews, and there was this one review that was kind of cool from this girl that lived in Long Beach, and then it recommended her next video where she was talking about I want to be like, or I quit my job to start a digital media literacy like campaign, a movement to educate and empower people to utilize digital media to achieve meaningful goals. I'm live streaming that, so hopefully she's watching it. Um but also she was supposed to be here today to like co-present to me because we met and I was like, oh, my whole thing's work hard, we kind of have fun. And she was like, Mine's just create more, and I was like, let's go together, like it's a whole thing. Uh so I actually ended up sending her an email, which is not something I do. I don't just hit up chicks on YouTube like all day. It's actually something I never do. Uh but I sent her an email because I was like, our we need new advisory partners for our thing, and like she had this whole movement, and we live out in the desert where everyone's 400 years old, and I was like, hey, you're in the double digits of age, so this is good. And she was on board, but she didn't believe that a program like mine could even exist. And she worked at this super fancy private school out in the LA area. She came out, she was blown away, like she wanted to help be an advisory partner, and then we collaborated on a few digital media like projects, and then we fell in love and then moved in together, and it's been happily ever after ever since. So I like the YouTube algorithm because it did that. But uh the bigger thing is this is the question I get a lot because if you talk to a kid and you go, I want to start a YouTube channel, they go, Well, yeah, of course. Like, duh. If you talk to an adult, they say this because YouTube is full of nine-year-olds and cat videos and pranks and terrible, awful comments, and things like that, which it is. But it also has a billion active users, so it's hard to generalize anything with a with a group that big. Um, it's the largest, second largest search engine on the internet behind Google. Uh, it's it's more massive than most of us realize. Almost 500 hours of content is uploaded to the site every minute of every day, which is nuts. And they somehow, when you type it in, you can find the thing you're looking for sometimes. It's crazy. So, why I wanted to do it was one, I needed something that I owned. After that terrible experience where they like broke my program, I was like, I'm gonna make something that I own that nobody else is in charge of. I also wanted to, after making like all the videos that I would make, I had this imposter syndrome where my students would go, like, Mr. Buck, what are you working on? I'd be like, ooh, I help you on your projects. So I make like 400 projects a year when really I made like one video and it was a school district going, like, we need a technology promo. And then I make this very vanilla thing about like our district uses technology in innovative ways in every classroom. And eh, um, I wanted to like figure out could I do something that actually like had my personality, my stamp on it. Uh and could and it also just kind of sounded fun. Like, hey, it seemed neat. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and I was like, man, I wish I could do that. Uh it's totally free. Like, you can sign up at any time. Most of us already have a Gmail account. There you go, you're done. So I can firmly say that doing this was one of the best things I've ever done in my entire life. Easy top five, probably top three. Um, just in terms of personal growth, experience, benefits, the people I've been able to meet from it, both like who create stuff, both who don't, the opportunities that it's ended up bringing to my program have been incredible. So I'm gonna share a quick clip just to kind of just to make sure that you understand there's more than cat videos on YouTube and like, which I know people do, but the the reason I go to people that people go to YouTube is two main things, to either learn or to be entertained. That's really what the platform is. And sometimes it's a little bit of both. I try to like sort of straddle that thing. So the trip to Iceland that I told you about, I went last summer, it was amazing, the whole point was photo video. Uh so I made a super long video about it. I snipped it down to just like a couple minute segment, just to kind of like show you a little bit. It has nothing to do with my school. This is not my classroom YouTube channel. It's not like you're in my class, go to Mr. Buck's YouTube channel and you'll learn all about digital media. This is just my thing that's out in the world separately, and that's what I think is really important. It's great to have classroom things, but if you're out there doing your own thing, I think that's huge. So here's part of my Iceland video. Okay, so there's a little snippet of it. Um there's 150 other videos of varying quality. They're not all epic trips around the world. Sometimes the one I made the other day was how to fix a crack in your windshield. So they vary. Uh, but the point is that I'm excited about what they're about. Uh but what I learned, the most important thing I learned, was my classroom where I spent all of my time. The reason that I freaked out and wanted to quit my job when they did this thing to my program was because I was so like I could not see the forest for the trees. I was just so in it that that was such an attack. Whereas in reality, uh the administrator who made that decision, it was her first year as an administrator and her first time doing master schedule, and she was told to reduce class sizes, and somebody at some point said, just find the class that are smallest, get rid of them, and that's what she did. It wasn't an attack on me, which also meant that when I emailed her and just said, Hey, can we talk about this so it doesn't happen again next year? She was like, Yeah, sure. And she's like, Oh my gosh, like I don't want to do that again. What can we do to solve this problem? And it turns out it wasn't anything malicious. It was still a dumbass idea, but um, at least it wasn't malicious, and at least we could kind of like move on beyond that. Because in doing those other things and like focusing on my own thing, what it allowed me to do was zoom out from this place where I spend all of my time, and it allowed me to make room for other things in my world. So by stepping back, it ended up opening up so many more things that I wanted to have time for. And if you have work and you have family and you have all these obligations, it can feel like that's not possible. But it's really important to be able to do those things that you wouldn't. I mean, some stuff is unrelated. Like I got really into airbrushing. That has nothing to do with digital media, but I'll make videos about it. I made a video about airbrushing a 3D printed water tower. Why? I don't know, because it seemed really cool and it looks super neat on camera, and it's really, really fun. And one thing too, just fun fact, your students tend to Google you. And so even though I would never promote my YouTube channel to my students, not that it's inappropriate, but it's just like it's just unethical, I feel like, um, they're gonna Google you at some point, and it's really cool that instead of nothing, uh, they find something. And if they find that clip from Iceland, if if some student is watching their teacher's video about like, oh my gosh, like trying to take a picture in Iceland, or like my teacher like 3D prints HO scale water towers on the weekend. Um, but I guarantee you there's the sweetest montage ever made of a 3D printed water tower in that video. On the internet, it's the best one, I guarantee it. But what happens is focusing on all those other things gives you this sense of perspective, which is really important. And so what ended up happening was I stepped back, got this sense of perspective, felt that I was gonna be like doing less of a job as a teacher, and then it made me a better teacher because I wasn't so every decision, everything was so important, and this scheduling changed, and that class needed to be approved, and oh my god, this meeting and that thing. None of that was the case. It was just like I was less stressed at work. Students pick up on that. So students want to be around a teacher who's having fun with what they're doing. I was so much more relieved because I had this creative outlet to work on, which was like, it was fantastic. And then I started adding, asking myself this question because I did this whole thing to avoid work, but because we're teachers, everything comes back into your classroom at some point or another. And I started doing this. YouTube had been amazing for me, and then I started asking myself, who is it that's influencing our students? Uh, because it's everybody, it's their parents and their peers and whatever. But when they say goodnight, or hopefully they say goodnight to their parents any of the night, but when it the day is done and they go into their bedroom, the the last people that they see are right in front of their faces and literally in their ears a lot of the time. And sometimes it's friends, but a lot of time it's just some, it's whoever, it's whoever it is on YouTube because that's what they're watching. And that leads into the question of well, what do they want to become? And if they're in a CTE program, they usually have a better handle on that question. Uh, because I hope that's the kind of the point. Um, but not necessarily, not every kid in my program is gonna be like a movie director. In fact, virtually none of them will, but they'll all be digitally literate and successful. Not every student in a health academy is gonna be a doctor, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be in the health academy. Uh what happens though, I found this survey, this research. 1,000 students between the ages of six and 17. Of that, 75% said they wanted a career in online video. Not like Hollywood filmmaking, but online video specifically. Which is funny when Steven Spielberg is going to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and saying that Netflix doesn't deserve to be at the Academy Wars because those aren't real movies. It's it's kind of an example of old media not understanding new media, digging its heels in, and trying to maintain the status quo, which like history has proven doesn't work. Like it's not gonna favor them. So I look forward to the Netflix Oscar-winning movie at some point. But of that 75%, 50% of them said they specifically wanted to be a YouTuber. And as I've learned, anyone with a five-year-old, the first thing they will say is, if you say you have a YouTube channel, they would say my five-year-old wants to be a YouTuber. Cool, I'm just like your five-year-old. And there's power to that because is that a realistic goal? Kinda depends. If what they're saying is I want to be rich and famous and make YouTube videos for my job, no. In fact, strongly urge them not to do that or seek that out. If what they're saying is I like sharing and communicating and being interested in stuff, ooh, that's a really powerful thing to leverage and to turn into something. And is that an achievable goal? Well, yeah, it's free. Like anyone can do it. All you need is internet access and a camera. Most people have a device in their pocket, most students have access to something that has both of those at all times. That is all that you need to get started. If they don't have access to it, they definitely do and their parents aren't looking. So it's it's a very realistic thing and it's not going away. So rather than telling students to put it away and get out of it, it's it's a good idea to like leverage what they want and use it for a valuable thing. But more importantly than students, because we can talk about our students all day long. I was a digital media teacher who didn't make a video for six years. That was a problem. Um I like being the video, the digital media teacher that did 30 videos in 30 days. So one of my students says, Hey, you give us six weeks on this documentary, we don't have time. I have this much sympathy for them because it's plenty of time. You should have whatever, six times seven math. You should have a lot of documentaries done at that point in time. So it's easy for me because I'm digital media, but anything being shared is really, really important. And when I was in college, one of my favorite professors, it was again English program, so people talked like this. He said, it's very important that you engage in the discourse of your pedagogy. And he said it a lot, which is a very fancy English major way of saying, practice what you preach, like continue the discussion of the field that you're in. One of my best friends at our school is an English teacher, and he's a really great English teacher, I believe, because he also writes constantly. He's writing articles, he's writing short stories and novels, and he's constantly being published, and most of them are way too profane for students to ever read. Uh, but it definitely makes him a way better English teacher than someone who like got their degree 25 years ago and just looks at the Pearson text every year. No and just it's bad. So um this is a really powerful thing for teachers to do. It doesn't mean that if you're a math teacher, you need to make videos about math, but maybe you have a perspective that's interesting. In fact, I guarantee you have a perspective that's worth sharing. And bringing it a step further, once you start exploring these things, you start to notice stuff. So YouTube is like the number one thing for teens and kids, and well, it's it's one of the biggest websites in the world. So how do you leverage that? And I I have always struggled. If you're in a CTE program, maybe you have two with integrated projects. I don't maybe everyone has solved it, but we always tried to do it's math and English and history and CTE thing all in one, and it was like, I at one point, I'm not lying, in my old program, uh some students were adding up the perimeter, whatever, the like how the outline of Hitler, like how many inches, that's I guess it's whatever it is, around per the how many the area of the metric volume of Hitler? Like, I don't know. And I was like, this isn't probably a useful skill to have for any reason whatsoever. So I'm making my YouTube video, I guess this is typing my YouTube videos, that's not how I make them. But I'm making and uploading my YouTube videos, and what I'm noticing, when you go to upload a YouTube video, the making the video part is step one. Then there's like an hour long process to do it well. Uh which this is my airbrush, my water tower video is a real thing. Um, which includes a lot of stuff. So after doing this for a year, for my junior and for my intermediate advanced students, some of them having a YouTube channel is now a graded assignment in the class. It can be private, so they don't have to share it outside of the class. But the reason for That is, it's a really neat way to do integrated projects that I never would have thought of beforehand because they have to make a video, and even if like I have digital media students, so it should be a good video, but even if it's not, at least it's like straight as the person's talking to the camera, and the lighting's fine, it's not like your drunk dog filmed you standing next to an air conditioning unit like at midnight. Like, you know, a little bit of production quality can go a long ways. Uh the video needs to have a purpose of some kind for a specific audience. Audience and purpose. Those things are things that I've heard of before in other classes that seem really, really important. Uh, I have a student that makes, he calls them no nonsense tutorials for like really complicated computer, not complicated, it's like gaming stuff on computers, like how to do ROMs and emulators and how to reskin games and do all this stuff. And he talks really fast, and they're like three minutes long. He's like, you go to this website, you download this, and it has these nice screenshots, and then you click this and you open this and you do this here, but for the sake of this video, we're gonna do this. And I don't understand what he's talking about. I could if I really tried, but his audience will. So his audience isn't everybody, but he knows who his audience is, and he's creating content for that audience. Um, you also have to create a thumbnail. The number one thing that's gonna get people to click on your video is a very pretty thumbnail. It's not just the YouTube picks the generic ones. This is my hand holding a deburring tool. Nobody's gonna click on that. But people are gonna click on a really pretty thing that has like the water tower where it looks like a real water tower, but what? Spoiler alert, it's not crazy. I'm gonna click on that video. Like, that's a mini graphic design project that's built in. I made a video when I just started out that was it was fine. It was about how to do titles on Procreate on the iPad. The video sat there for like six months and barely got a hundred views, and then one day I just decided to change the thumbnail and then it got 20,000 views. And it just I did nothing else, nothing changed. So hugely important to understand your audience in that way. Search engine optimization, title and tags. You can't just upload a video of your cat and call it my cat. No one's gonna click on it or find it. Like how to 3D print an airbrush, a realistic scale water tower. Anybody searches for any of those terms, what's gonna pop up? That video. And people might not search for that specifically. People will search for 3D printing, people will search for airbrushing. YouTube has a massive scale modeling community, spearheaded by a dude in New Zealand, which is just insane. Um, but that actually is very, very searchable. But figuring that out takes a lot of skill and being able to analyze a lot of data. Doing your description, you have 5,000 characters. If you give your students an assignment to write 5,000, not words, but characters, they will hate you. I try to get them to write 10 sentences sometimes, and it's like, can we just do six? Are you kidding me? No, it's 10 sentences. Like it's not that hard. But if it's something they're interested in, they can easily write, here's this, here's the link to this other thing, here's the whatever, here's my description with all like the gear that I use in this video or whatever. Very, very specific writing for very specific audiences. Then revising as necessary. So they put up their video, nobody's watching it, or somebody they notice like, man, all my videos are nine minutes long, but people only watch them for two minutes and 45 seconds. Well, let's look at your videos. What are you doing at two minutes and 45 seconds that's causing people to lose interest? And maybe there's a trend there, like taking data, interpreting it, revising based on that's like really good skills to be able to have. Not to be just a professional YouTuber, but in the world. Like if they own a business and something's not working, being able to look at the data, analyze it, and adjust accordingly is gonna be huge. So I have found YouTube to be like the best example of integrated projects, not just in the video the kids make, but in trying to actually share those, um, whether it's you know it theoretically on like an unlisted channel or for real. And a lot of students do it for real already. Some of your kids probably have like giant YouTube channels. I found out one of my freshmen has the giant, like, how many is something like I don't know, thousands and thousands of subscribers for for things where it does like NFL montage videos. And he never mentioned it, and it's January, and I'm like, you're in digital media, why don't you tell me that you're doing like you could be working on stuff like this here. Um but when you're you when you're making a YouTube video, when you're sharing your story on YouTube, what you're asking from your audience, in addition to like, comment, and subscribe, and hit the bell and all those things, what you're asking from your audience is their time, which is everybody's most valuable resource. And that was the whole point in me wanting to start a channel in the first place, was it was this thing I wanted to do, it had been on the back burner, and I like I look young and youthful, but like I'm in my like mid-30s, like it's not getting younger. Like at some point I'm gonna get sick, at some point I'm gonna not be able to do these things anymore. And that's sad. Like, I like you only have the one shot, you might as well use it in a valuable way. And so what you're asking people for is their time. And what I thought, my YouTube channel, I had one video that went viral and it screwed up all of my statistics because now everything else looks really tiny and insignificant, and it's I'm happy for that, but it's also kind of frustrating. But anyway, for me, with a relatively small YouTube channel, uh it's still in the last year and a half is 1.6 million minutes of watch time of people's time that they have spent on my videos, which I didn't realize till yesterday when I looked that up. Uh, and to sound like a song from Rent, that's 27,000 hours. I didn't put it to the melody, but uh that's over 1100 days, which is more than three solid years of people staring at my dumb face, telling them stuff. Why would anyone want to do that? That's crazy. Like I know I'm making it, but I get a thrill out of making the thing. They're actually choose three years of time. And I'm just a high school teacher that is just doing something for fun on the time, on the side. So here's what I found out. This is really important. Uh, this PR firm was like, man, companies have really bad PR happening right now. How can we make them more credible? Who do people find credible? Turns out the most credible people in the world are people like you. Everybody wants to be someone like them, which is why all these giant companies that have no government officials are the least credible people, followed by boards of directors, CEOs, I guess just an employee. Um so these organizations that would give their left arm to have that kind of credibility, that's where they're going, these influencer campaigns, because they could spend a ton of money on billboards and commercials, or they could just pay someone on Instagram to be like, this bag is really cool, and then you're like, oh crap, I like that person, that bag's awesome, I'm gonna buy that bag. It's way more effective and way cheaper. Um, but what this means is that in terms of credibility, people rate someone like themselves as credible as an academic expert and as a technical expert, which is crazy. And you kind of see that could be a bad thing too. It's sort of why when you're like, I have these facts over here, and someone's like, my friend said you're wrong, and you're like, oh, but no. So um the bigger thing though is when you ask the question, like, well, okay, I want to do a thing, one, I should jump here. Well, I should walk over here. Yesterday, our keynote speaker said it when he was talking about memes for like an hour, he talked about it, wasn't that the memes were good, but it was the act of people going from doing nothing to making something that was huge. And I was thinking about that, and I was like, that's kind of like the Big Bang. Like, it was a big deal, obviously, like the planets were made. I like that that happened. But the bigger deal was that there was the Big Bang in the first place. There was nothing, there was this huge disruption, this huge leap, and then there was something. And that could turn into other things. And it's getting to that point, which is really, really tough. So if you're trying to make something and share something, the number of subscribers and minutes and followers and whatever's really don't matter. The act of going from nothing to something is massive. And I can tell you that I thought I was good at digital media and I thought I was pretty skilled. But the skills I've built over the year and a half of having a YouTube channel made me a way better digital media teacher. Like you think you're a good editor, and then you edit 150 videos really quickly, and you become a way better editor and a way better cinematographer, and you know how to manage your time, and you know how to, you know, when you check your stuff out to your students and you go, like, you're gonna have an issue with this. Here's how to overcome that issue. You know when they're trying to cram like their assignments in with all these other stresses, you're like, ah, I have a workflow that's gonna help you with that. Like it really becomes much, much better. But more importantly, if you're thinking, if you wanted to grow an audience, why would anyone ever listen to you? Well, as a CTE teacher, guess what you're all three of? You are a person like you. I'm a guy like me. You're an academic expert, and you're a technical expert. You are the most credible person in the world. So it doesn't matter what you're talking about, you know how to talk about it clearly. I don't know, is anyone in here familiar with Epic Meal Time, the YouTube channel where the Canadians make a bunch of big bacon things? It's not as popular now as it used to be. They'd make like, here's a 28-layer pizza, and we're gonna cut it in half and fill it with bacon, and they're all gonna eat it. And somehow they're still alive. Um, but it was it was like the first extreme eating YouTube channel. The main dude from that was a history teacher. He didn't talk about history at all when he was clogging his arteries, but it definitely made him uh a more engaging speaker because he was a teacher. It made him more able to convey information clearly, it made him better able to understand an audience. So, like the fact that you're a teacher doesn't mean you have to talk about your subject matter and whatever it is, but you have something of value to share. Even if you're like, I don't have a specific audience, I'm a 47-year-old mother of two, and I just want to make a video about my weekend shopping trip. Cool. Guess who your audience is? Other like women, other mothers, other middle-aged people looking to manage their time, someone who wants to see someone like them, and then you're like, hmm, I have this theory about child rearing that's really important, and they're gonna go like you're a person like me, and you have this theory, I trust you. So you have you don't necessarily even realize the pull or the power that you have, and it's a lot, it's huge. Why should your influence end inside your classroom? As a CTE teacher, you are massively influential. Why does it have to be the, you know, however many students you have every year? Why is that where your influence ends? Why can't it go for the entire world? Like, I don't promote my YouTube channel to my students, but if a student searches, hey, I want to make 360 video and they look up how to make 360 video, and one of my videos pops up, I'm totally cool with them watching that because it's how I would want to teach them, but it's also like helping anyone in the world who wants to learn how to use that weird software to make that weird thing. It's huge to be able to share that kind of stuff. That's just what I'm interested in. But if I were interested in, I have friends, um, they they both work at nonprofits. One of them just became a CEO, and the other, he's kind of like Chandler from Friends. I have a vague idea of what he does, but it's important and I don't know exactly what it is. But it's at a nonprofit firm in the Los Angeles area, and uh both of them started a YouTube channel several years ago where they just eat food in front of the camera. And that sounds insane. And I thought it was, but it's really charming. And it turns out there's a whole culture of mukbong videos, and your students definitely know about them for sure. And it's where people just eat in front of cameras, and sometimes it gets really weird, and like this shouldn't be on YouTube, it should be on a different website. Um, but theirs is very, very charming and very, very friendly, and they just talk about like these crab legs are really good, and like, look at this is how we marinated a steak or whatever. Uh, and their channel blew up and is like huge. Like, uh, it makes me jealous. But anyway, um, what they said though is it didn't make them better eaters. It definitely made them better public speakers, it made them more comfortable in front of crowds, it made them more easily able to communicate with clients and donors. It also made them really good at creating marketing materials for their nonprofits where they need to get donations and they need to get sponsors and stuff like that. So, this goofy thing they did off the side that was unrelated to their job made them better at their job. The goofy thing that I did off to the side by engaging in the discourse of my pedagogy made me better at my job. And I think that that was a really important lesson to learn. So that was where I went from like thinking I was gonna lose my job and change my profession to being given an award and like all these letters from a senator and stuff, which was pretty nifty too. So I want to shift it up because she was supposed to be here and she's adorable, and I wish that she were here. Um so imagine that I am a much cuter uh Asian girl, and and this is what I'm this is where I want to give her credit because when we initially, well, for a lot of things, but when we initially met, I had uploaded a few videos haphazardly, and I really wanted to do more. I had people I was watching on YouTube and I was like, God, that's so cool. I wish I could do that, but I'd be embarrassed. I don't want to film myself, I don't want to edit myself. I don't want people to know I do that. Like, I want my friends to know that like I go and like film myself talking and put it up, like, who am I to be that important? Like staring at a computer screen, editing my own face. That's the most narcissistic thing I ever heard of. Like, I'm not gonna do that. And then she was like, This is crazy. Like, you're not sharing, you're she's the one who showed me that chart of who's the most credible. Um, and she's like, You're not sharing any of this with anyone. Uh, you need to do it. So she was the one who kicked me in the butt to do that thing, which I really, really needed. And that is what she does professionally. This sounds like a sales pitch, but it's not, there's no product. Um, her company is called Share Spark Media, it's great. But what I wanted to share with you is if you have the spark, the idea of something to create, uh I couldn't do it because I was too busy with this conference right now, but she's in the middle of this thing called the 10 day tackle, which is again, it's not a product, it's just a helpful like thing. Like there's no way a sales pitch. Um, there's that's our friends that do the eating. Um but it's if you go and you do the hashtag, because YouTube has hashtags now and you search for 10 day tackle, there's more videos than you can go through. Everybody's on day nine. It was this group of people, she just sort of sent it out over social media and she was like, look, if you want to make something and you want to do your time, um, pick a goal. Maybe it's decluttering your house in 10 days, eating healthy for 10 days, talking about what you're thankful of for 10 days, like achieving some goal and you just document it for 10 days. All of these videos have been made in the last now nine days, which was insane to me. Oh, really? Oh yeah, she she had one on there. And this was just this was from yesterday, so there's actually more. Um but it blew my mind. I was like, you you just put out a call and like all these people signed up and then are supporting each other and building the sense of community. And all of this was made in the last week, like that that blew my mind. So they're about to end their thing right now, but there's a website she started because she's smart, and it's called 10daytackle.com where people can sign up, and then the next group just goes, There's no product, there's no sales thing, it's just like she's really helpful, so she sends out emails every day. They're like, hey, it's day two, maybe try a tutorial, maybe try this today. Like, just to sometimes you need that person. And luckily, I had direct access via email and like phone and stuff. Um, but she's kind of the best at that. So I just wanted to share that resource since she couldn't be here to do it. Again, there's no no product I feel like a skeezy salesperson, but I just it's good, she's really good. Everybody here is really great, and like the sense of community is so it's so great to realize that you're not alone in something. So when you do that, why would you want to do that? Was kind of the answer. The outcome that you come from, the outcome that you get from it. In your job, it makes you better at your job, which I didn't expect. I did it as a way to like escape my job. Um, these are just sort of pictures that were all taken with my phone. I could recreate this pic this scene on any day of the week, as I'm sure a lot of people could in their in their dig in their CTE classes. Um hopefully you are sharing those things. But the point is when you have all this stuff that you're excited about and you share it with all these kids, they get really excited about stuff and they're doing cool stuff all the time. And you it should be any day of the week. Like when I the cheesy video moment of my senior class from last year, which unfortunately, like that was a crappy situation, but that same circumstance is happening again this year, right now, with this year's seniors, and luckily they're still in a class that exists. And all of these cheesy buzzwords are cheesy buzzwords until they're not, until your power goes out and your students have to collaborate to do weird cutout things to achieve a goal, until they're not going to let each other fail, until they're really excited about it, until they're doing more work than you are. There's booths at fairs and things that we run where like I'm not behind the booth talking to people, they are. Um, you know, there's live streaming events, I'm not touching any of that equipment. They are like they're doing more work than me because they have that like power of enthusiasm that was ignited in them. But it's it's all about the kids, except that it's not because you can't help them unless you help yourself. So if you make room for all that stuff in your own life, then that's what I don't somehow ended up being the arts commissioner for our town. I don't know what that is, but I was like, government seems terrible right now. I feel like rather than going on the internet and complain, if I get involved in local government, maybe like maybe I could actually do something instead of just sending out an angry comment on Reddit or whatever. So it gives you a lot of perspective. It lets you kind of see, you don't even know where you're gonna end up. Airbrushing is not something I would have gotten into, but now it's huge. 3D printing wasn't something I expected to get into, and when I did, I was like, I'll keep this at home. And it was about two and a half months until there was a 3D printer in my room, and kids were 3D printing skeletons for their stop motion projects. Like it all just ties together, and you're limiting yourself if you stay in those walls of your classroom and everything is there, and you're not giving yourself the chance to create something outside of it. And with digital media in 2019, oh, this is gonna be perfect. There's no reason not to work hard, be kind, have fun, and just create more. Yay. Thank you, thank you. Um if you wanted to know more about Heather, because she's uh much more charming than I am, uh, there is the website, and there's also her YouTube channel, which is great. I highly recommend it, especially because uh the need for female creators is pretty massive. Uh there's a ton of students who want to and then they dive off as they get older. So female voices are really the minority on all of these platforms, and those are perspectives that are really, really important. So thanks for coming out on Monday. I'm here for any questions and stuff because no one's using the Beavis room after me. So there we go. And there you go, that's the whole presentation. So thank you for listening to that. I hope you got something out of it. Maybe it was the kick in the butt that you needed to start a thing and make a thing. And I think that it's really important that we utilize all of these pretty awesome tools that we have. So thank you so much for listening. If you want to reach out or connect, uh, I'm at Sodar and Tom on Twitter and Instagram, and of course, the YouTube channel, the Enthusiasm Project. I'd love to hear from you, love to hear what you think. If you got any questions, let me know. Otherwise, thanks for watching. I'll talk at you next week. See you later. Hear you later. You'll hear me later. Bye.