Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm excited to bring you this video that I think is going to really make a difference in your artwork especially if you're a beginner. These are some of the basic principles of art that help us to create the illusion of depth in our painting. So I'll be giving you five easy ways to create depth in your artwork. And by the way I'm wearing the new Monet Cafe apron with the new logo design on it. I have people asking me about the apron so I like to share that it's available in the description section of each video. It has these great pockets. It's washable. It's got this adjustable strap. It's awesome. I also am wearing the Monet Cafe Earth Colors bracelet and it has the essential oil beads on it. They're little lava rocks multicolored where you can put your essential oils on them and just smell so fragrant all day with a little Monet Cafe charm. Also in the about section of this video. Okay that's enough of the commercial. Let's get started. What we're doing as artists is we are taking a three-dimensional world and representing it our own interpretations often on a two- dimensional surface. And even though we can interpret things there are certain rules that if we don't get them right it pretty quickly will be represented as poor artwork or amateurish. So with these five easy steps you're going to be having a head start on your art career already and understand these things more clearly. Here I've made five equal frames to be able to share each one of these easy methods to create depth and I'm going to label them right now. So here they are value, color, temperature, detail and size. And for each of these I want you to imagine you've been transported to this beautiful mountain scene. We're literally physically standing there and seeing how the laws of physics behave in our world. So not that these are in order of importance but I do sort of feel I talk about value all the time and this is one of the most important things that I think we can do to get that sense of depth in our artwork. So let's first talk about value with our mountain scene in mind. All right with this simplified, very simplified landscape let's talk about value. Now what I said before is value is the difference between light and dark and the rule of value is that value typically is darker in the foreground and gets lighter in the background. So it would behave, I'm just going to use some color totally void of color. This is just literally black to white. All right with this general value scale in mind things get lighter in the distance. We also need to consider what the object is that we're giving either color or value to and as a rule of thumb things that are vertical, a vertical structure like a tree, the mountains will have a darker value and things that are on a flatter plane will have a lighter value. Now the reasoning for this is kind of easy. It's because of the way the sun is shining down on things. Sun shines down on a flat plane and the light reflects whereas it doesn't shine down. It might shine down on some of the branches and the tops of the trees, but typically they're darker. So we do want to keep in mind that things that are closer, let's just talk about the trees here, the things that are closer are going to be darker in value. So let me go ahead with this tree right here and let me just apologize for my pastel. Some of these, I don't use grays a lot and some of these are still have some little ridges on them. Okay so our initial tree right here is going to be a little darker in value because it's vertical and it's closer. Now let's talk about these trees back here. They are further away. They're going to be a little lighter in value. So let's grab this gray right here. I think this is, yes okay. So because these trees are further away, now remember I did say this is easy steps so that's why I'm not doing a real complicated painting or anything. This is just for learning purposes. So that already gives you the feeling that those trees are a little further away. Now we know that the mountains are further away than the trees so I'm going to lighten them up even a little bit more and there's some, you know, there's some things that you can do with color. All this kind of comes together but I'm trying to break them down into their basic forms or their basic concepts. Now here's the last one let's get these. They're super far away. Alright now the sky is typically the lightest thing in the scene and the ground is often lighter too. So let's talk about, I'm going to leave the sky as the value of the paper. Alright so it's it's super bright because you know that's a source of sun unless it's nighttime and even night skies are typically lighter than the landscape. So let's talk about this grassy area. If for example we had some grasses growing and receding back into the distance, all of these kind of come into play right now so I'm going to try to keep it just a value but if we had some grasses the distant grasses are going to be lighter. Alright so let me even go lighter than that. This is right here okay so we've got these grasses way back here and I can't help but talk about some of these other ones but I'm not going to do it. Okay I'm just going to gently get some grasses in here. Now they're gradually going to get darker. I'm just putting some down but they're gradually going to get darker as they get closer. So let's get some here. Like I said it's hard not to talk about the other ones because you know size plays into it, detail plays into it but it's all hopefully going to come together. Alright so we've got some grasses growing up here and then like I said they gradually get darker as you get closer and often too when grasses are really tall and you're kind of an lower positioning you can actually see like down in the roots of the grasses so it gets even darker. Alright so sometimes down by the trees a little darker maybe a little shadow. So that's just in general how value creates a sense of depth. Okay let's move on to the next one. We'll talk about color and another name for color is hue. That just means the particular color. It's red, it's blue, it's green but what I'm talking about here is the intensity of color and the way color works again with the laws of our world is colors get less intense as they recede. So as they come forward they are more intense and as they recede they are less intense. I'm just going to read right here from the color wheel. If you don't have a pocket color wheel this is a great handy very inexpensive little tool and it has so much information on it. So what I'm referring to is the intensity or chroma. Chroma is the word that has to do with the intensity of that color. The brightness or dullness of a color. To expound a bit further let's take a closer look. On the outer ring of this color wheel is the pure color or the color with the most intensity. Pure color. The next ring in is that color with some white added which is called tint. The next ring in is what's called tone. It is the hue or the color with gray added and the last one is shade which is the color with black added. So with our mission in mind to create more depth in our painting we not only want to decrease the intensity of the color but often as in the first example the value decreases as well. So often the color intensity will decrease along with the value. Here's an example that might better help you to understand. This is somewhat of a simultaneous color chroma intensity decreasing and value as well. And in this example it is occurring because white has been added to each stage. The pastels I'm using are primarily the unison 120 half stick set and they are conveniently organized in such a way as the value and color decreases in each section and also some nice neutral divisions as well. For this example I am using one color family kind of a teal color and it is simultaneously decreasing in value and color intensity or chroma. And the reason it is decreasing intensity is because white has been added which is a tint of the original color. So it is actually a quite easy way to get a monochromatic painting with one color family. Now I don't want to complicate matters but color intensity also decreases when we neutralize a color. So for this example I'll be using a similar color family and gradually getting more neutral colors as it recedes into the distance. And here's a graphic that also shows colors neutralizing as they move from left to right. And as you'll see in this next image I have decreased the saturation to show that most of these values are about the same. So even though the color is neutralizing we need to remember we do need to lighten the value as well to create the sense of distance. And that's what I'll be trying to do in this next example. I'm not only decreasing the color intensity by using a tint but I'm also neutralizing it at the same time. So basically in this example the color intensity is decreasing and I made it somewhat neutralizing in the background. And I actually ended up finding some brighter greens. I didn't have any in front of me. Higher chroma greens and added after this. I'll show you a picture of it. So to keep it simple I basically just think about the color losing its punch. Okay it's not going to be as intensified and strong. And this can happen as I showed in the example of it getting lighter in value or a tint white added to it you know and or it can also happen because of neutralizing that color which is some of the color choices that I have made here. And this is all happening because of atmospheric perspective. And that simply means there's more air in between us and objects that are very far in the distance. So it almost acts as a filter and doesn't allow us to see color as intently, intensely or value as dark. I did walk over to my workshop palette of pastels and found some greens that were a little bit more intense to add to this so you can see how the intensity is decreasing as distance increases. Next let's talk about color temperature. Now what do I mean about temperature? I'm speaking of color temperature. We're going to go back to our handy dandy pocket color wheel. And with regards to temperature think of the words fire and ice. All right with respect to warm versus cool colors. And the rule with temperature color temperature is that elements that are closer to you are typically now it does depend on the subject matter typically warmer in color temperature and things get cooler in color temperature as they recede in the distance. Now this is one thing I like to describe because it was like an aha moment for me when I was first learning more about color theory and color temperature. And I was examining the color wheel and I was trying to discover with the the relationship between what's a warm color and what's a cool color. And I realized the color wheel, this is the better way to do it, is basically you could divide it in half. Typically or in general the warmer colors are on this side and the cooler colors are on this side. Now each color can be termed a cool or a warm version of that color. Well let's take green right here for example. Let me get into the camera. For this green okay that's a pretty normal green. If we go this way on the color wheel and get a blue-green, which direction did we go? Did we go to the cool side or did we travel in the direction of the warm side? Well we traveled cooler so this is a cooler green. Now if we traveled in the direction towards the warmer side this is a warmer green. And you can do the same thing pretty much with any color. You just notice which direction did it go. Red is one that's sometimes hard for people to know. Is it a warm red or is it a cool red? Well if you look at red in general if you go this way it's getting warmer reds. If you go this way it's getting cooler reds. So just think of the direction of where things fall on the color wheel. Alright now let's get back to temperature. Temperature is going to get cooler in the distance and it is because of our atmosphere literally our air getting in the way and it changes the color to a cooler color. Like distant mountains have you ever noticed how they look blue or purple in the distance? Whereas if you see things up close if you're at a base of a mountain all the trees look green. Why is it they don't look green in the distance? It's all of that atmosphere in between us and the distance. So that's kind of the physics behind why it happens. I'm a I'm a why kind of person.  Alright so let's just talk about temperature in general. In this example I am going to be cooling off the greens in the grasses as they go into the distance. I'm just getting some dark values in. Now that you know about values being darker in the foreground and I put a warmer green on top of that tree right there and because it's in the foreground. So as the things increase in the distance those distant trees notice how they are cooler. They're a more of a bluer color. I'm kind of over emphasizing this right now. I made the mountains blue. I also neutralized the color in the distance which gives the illusion of distance. Once again this is all an illusion. Those things really aren't far away. They're right there on your paper. So the next thing I'll be doing is doing the same thing with the grasses. And now since you've already seen the first two steps you'll see how they are actually coming into play as well. We've got a more brilliant green in the foreground. It is warm and it is going to be a darker green. Now let's talk about temperature. I just cooled off that green a little bit as I went a little bit further into the distance. Now I was having a little trouble finding some of the pastels. I did not prepare as well as I should have. That one's probably a little too brilliant in color but it's cooler. That's a cooler greenish blue. Now I'll stay with a little bit of a cool green but a lighter value in the distance. So I've gradually that one blue was probably a little bit too brilliant. But I'm gradually cooling off the distant areas especially mountains tend to do that very obviously. And often I'll use purple sometimes for mountains even though purple is warmer than blue. But you can break out your artistic license every so often. But in general your color temperatures are going there's some purple right there are going to get cooler as they recede into the distance. Now keep in mind these things happen along with other elements in your painting even flowers. I was trying to find a really warm bright red. There's one. That's a that's a little warmer. But your reds if you have some red flowers or pink flowers or whatever in the foreground they're going to cool off a bit in temperature. Now that I showed you the color wheel. Yes there's such a thing as cool reds. See that that's a much cooler red. It's also lighter in value. So now we're referring back to step one. It's not as bold or intense as in color. That's referring to step two. So we've got three things going now. We've got value decreasing. We've got color intensity decreasing and perhaps neutralizing and we have temperature going gradually from warm to cool. Now let's talk about detail and I know this one might be pretty self explanatory kind of like the size one too. We kind of learned this when we're young. But I'm actually surprised at myself when I was first beginning to paint and take it more seriously as I am with beginning artists that I see do the same thing. There's many times that I see an artist who will perhaps be following a photograph and create too much detail in the distance. And the reason photographs do that is because often it has an automatic exposure or setting to where it is capturing detail all over. It's got an aperture setting that's forcing it to do that. So once again just like with the temperature and with the color and with the value we can push these things further than a photograph and create a more artistic and I believe beautiful painting. I'm speeding this one up once again because the detail concept you know I said they were going to be easy. This one and the size one are probably the easiest and so not only do things get less detailed in the background they get a little out of focus you know if you want to think of it that way like when you have if you're familiar with photography the aperture setting you could set it to a certain way where it has that neat effect where things in the foreground are very clear and things in the background are just fuzzy. Well that fuzziness increases as distance increases. So often the most detail you're going to see is in the foreground almost always and like the leaves on the trees you won't see any leaves on those distant trees there but you may see I'm not a big person on painting individual leaves anyway but you'll see a bit more detail in foreground trees. Now I'm moving on to the next one which is size and once again size is one of the easiest of these five steps. So I'm speeding it up I'm actually had to get on the opposite side of the easel and to kind of accentuate it I actually recently did a video on how to accurately render roads according to perspective but keep in mind that size also has to do with perspective you know things like roads and other elements in your painting they're going to follow the basic rule that size decreases as distance increases but perspective is another lesson. Once again check out the video I did on how to correctly render roads in your artwork that one was really a lot of fun. So this last one became kind of like a free-for-all or just kind of throwing all of the elements in at the same time it's a little messy though but I do have some cooler elements in the foreground now why would that happen you see that purple in the foreground and a little bit of teal well that's something that we can use to give an impression of shadows and you know often in deep foreground grasses there are more shadowy areas and in the shadows things are cooler and on the shadow sides of the grass on a road or at the base of a tree wherever the sun's not shining you know it makes sense typically you're going to get a cooler temperature rather than a warmer temperature so that's why sometimes you can see cooler temperatures in the foreground once again keep all this in context with what you are actually painting what your subject matter is you know obviously blue flowers are cool but you can have them in the foreground too here are all of the examples of the five easy steps to create more depth in your artwork once again they're not masterpieces this was just on newsprint paper but it was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoyed it I hope this lesson was beneficial to you in using five ways to create depth in your artwork and if you haven't subscribed already I would love for you to and if you'd like to become a patron I have a little more instruction on the patreon page many people support me on patreon just for the support of this channel to keep free videos coming but I also give extra content instruction we have homework over the weekend this is one of their homework assignments so be blessed and as always happy painting


Well, thank you. I mean I'm impressed. Mike, if I have the timing right, we've been going at this for about nine and a quarter hours. At least I've been able to get outside and breathe some fresh air. Some of you, I suspect, have still not seen daylight for a while. And yet the discussion has been rigorous and robust till the end, so I very much appreciate that. At the same time, I realize the hour is late and people probably need to get to airports and train stations and so forth or hotels or dinner plans. And so I really am going to only make about one minute of remarks. First of all, to just first of all, thank you again. It's clearly been a very productive day. There's been a lot of notes taken. We, besides program directors writing lots of things down, putting summary slides together, we have program analysts behind me taking copious notes. And all those bits and pieces will be synthesized into a workshop report, as Lucia just said. Next steps are probably going to be lots of internal discussions, taking a careful look at what we write down summarized and also what we're going to, I'm sure, hear from additional conversations we'll be having with various of you. And certainly we always get feedback after these workshops from folks when as they're going home, they think of things and you shouldn't be shy. Please email us and share any thoughts. We'll certainly be discussing this extensively internally and I know we'll be discussing this with our council come probably at the February meeting and probably beyond. So those are sort of the next steps. Trust me, your time has been well spent. You have given us lots of important ideas and in some cases specific thoughts about what we should be doing next and we will be synthesizing all that and moving forward. So with that, I will once again echo a huge thanks on behalf of the whole institute for your contributions and also wish you safe travels to get home. Bye bye.


Hello, everybody. So for the record, JT is way too complicated. I learned that about 25 years ago. So you can pronounce my name once, scratch it, and then it's just JT. So basically I've been in Symphony for three years, and I really want to talk not so much about technical account management or engineering, but much more about developer relationships. Because the key to our developer relationships world is, like, and why client is we face off to client. Our customers basically, they're the developers. And the developer community basically is we need to evangelize our APIs, understand how to train developers and grow our community. Because if you look at Symphony, just very quickly, just, oh, sorry, wrong direction. Quickly by the numbers, if you think of Symphony, so we have 500,000 active users every day. We have 170 million messages that we send every month. But what's more important is we have, like, 2,400 bots in production just running. They do about 10% of our volume in terms of messages, but that's growing all the time. But the key figure is we have 1,700 developers today. How do we support them? How do we grow them? And that's the key. So we have two ways to grow. We have developer programs, and that's one thing. We have a booth outside where we have some key people, where they do trainings, activities, hackathons, you name it. But what's more important is, as we've grown, is we need to listen to the community. And the only way for us to listen to the community is we need to contribute to the community. So we've re-engaged Open Source, we were in, we were out, now we're in. And what's very important is, since September, if you look at our program, is we've, first of all, the first thing was our Java BDK. So in September, we decided to contribute our Java BDK. In the summer, over the summer, we created a Python JDK. So more importantly, that's for full stack developers.  So yes, you can build it, it takes minutes to build a bot, you can do this, but you've got to do a lot of work, and Symphony's all about workflows. We keep on talking about workflows, but how can we make workflows in an easy way? So that's our second contribution, we just did it. So we've just built out our workflow developer kit. So this allows basically, not the developer, but a workflow developer, to have a simple way to say, I'd like to build a workflow, for instance. I'd like to have a bot that opens a window, sends a message to this person. If the person doesn't answer, send it to another person and vice versa. But in very simple ways, you can build workflows. And this basically just lowers the barriers of entry of Symphony. So the reason why you're putting it open source is we know that the community is going to want to look at this and say, this is limiting. I want to add this function, I want to do this. So that's really the key to doing this. And the final thing, so now I can build bots, I could build workflows. What's missing in Symphony? Well, it's all about interoperability. It's about being open. So for a while, our focus as we're growing as a company, was we need to make our platform stable. In fact, that's where you hear about that was doing more support, so more managing accounts. And now that we have a solid foundation, how do we connect with everybody else? So how does everybody else connect to us? And this is more for our partners or internal applications. How does Symphony be part of an application or interact with an application? And this is everything about FDC3. And that is the key to what we're doing right now. Like it's, we have to be open, we have to listen, we have to contribute, and we need to allow other people to contribute. So understanding how do we support this? So on the Symphony side, we have resources. So we already have four developer certification tracks, where people can just go online. It's free.  You're junior, you're senior, you can do it. As of today with three open source repositories and growing, we have a dedicated engineering team, more than one in fact, but it's really dedicated to our, I'm going to say our BDKs or SDKs, and we have one dedicated developer relationships team. So we have the engineering arm on one side and on the other side, we have the outreach, the people that are outside, which are the experts to build things on top of our platform. And since we've pretty much rolled this out as of September 2020, we had more than 1400 commits to the open repository, which shows that it's working and continuing. So the question now is more around, what do we want to do next? And the next thing is, next step is, well, there's one thing that everybody's been asking for. In fact, I was asking for a long time ago, is can we have a .NET BDK? So that's going to be the next contribution. Can we have a UI toolkit? So that's the next. And then continuing afterwards is, which is kind of the key things, you build workflows, but workflows, and if you talk about this person, it's not a developer, it's all about examples. So can I have a gallery that's an open source, where I can download a workflow and tweak it, do some changes, and then everybody can contribute, because very often we're not talking about complicated workflows around the enterprise workflow systems. We're talking about workflows within the symphony application. This, it opens the windows, it does that. It connects potentially to financial data, but it's like having a gallery is going to help everybody just start contributing and be more efficient.  I'm 80% there. And finally, here's one of the key things we're really looking at in terms of developer outreach is we're never going to stop. Whereas though, as we built our .NET BDK, we're going to have a certification at .NET. We're going to do more developer days, more hackathons. And the goal is really to have the community, first of all, work amongst each other, and just ensuring that people know how to use our tools. And that's pretty all it's about. It's about listening and outreach so we can evangelize the platform. So two things for today, because I don't want to steal the thunder. There's a person called Ovia Pupone who really had, and there was Young Chin as well. They're on our booth outside of Symphony booth. And what really is, if you want to know, if people like Raspberry Pi, it's funny. It's like I was impressed. On one side, you've got this huge server.  And so they just wanted to prove out that their Symphony workflow in the full stack is basically running for our .NET BDK on this little stack. And here's a little demo of here's how you do a workflow. And then at four o'clock, which is, he blew my socks out the first time he showed it to me, Ovia will be doing a full demo of here's our WDK and here's how it works. That's all. And for anything else, you know, just, well, people can reach out to me, of course, but if just go to developers.symphony.com and it just shows out the whole journey.  That's all. Thank you so much. I know. It's great to be here. I know it's nice being here with you. I met him like four years ago when this was starting. Yeah. Things that were a little smaller back then. I know. And you changed a couple of hats since then. I have. It's great to have you here. Thank you, JD. So folks, that brings us to our final panel for this morning, of course. You know, I would say last but not least. So you've heard it from financial institutions. You've heard it from technology vendors. You've heard it from, you know, financial technology vendors. The next panel is going to be something again that I've mentioned before is very strategic to us and really relates to our, to the potential we think exists in open source and deliver value, you know, in the regulatory world. And so without further ado, I want to introduce our two speakers, Joanne Barefoot. I'm really delighted to have her here. She's the CEO and founder of AIR, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation. They've been an amazing partner in our open RECTAG initiative, helping us really translate, you know, our open source language towards regulators and much more than that. She is the co-founder of Hummingbird RECTAG. She is the host of a podcast show Barefoot Innovation. She is a noted advocate of regulation innovation. Joanne is a senior fellow emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School for Business and Government. Joining Joanne is a good friend, someone that actually was at our launch event a few years ago. That's what I first met him. And since then he's been a great supporter of the foundation. Sultan Maggi was named Chief Innovation Officer for the FDIC in February 2021. I know he's one of us. It's a geek like me. Sultan served as an advisor to the US Treasury, the Group of Seven, the G7, the Office of the Controller of the Currency, the OCC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, in the area of cyber security, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. I'm looking forward to this panel. So please welcome on stage Joanne and Sultan.


What's going on everybody today is June 12 2019 and it looks like we might be getting a signal here on the cues Just trying to be patient here Waiting for that signal. We're looking at the bottom right hand corner Chart here waiting for a signal Let's see what happens guys. There's that signal then we were waiting for let's wait for a bit here until the candle Gets closer to closing to make sure that that signal does stick As you can see that signal did not stick. It's a good thing that we were patient This is a very good example of just being patient guys waiting for our tray to come to us Wow, I'm so glad that I was patient enough to wait to see if that signal stuck or not as you can see It did not stick and it actually went the opposite direction My indicator is not wrong most of the time Alrighty guys, that was very weird I traded Facebook puts out on a whim here. I made a little bit of money off of one Option, let me show you the trade Here and that was that was intense I bought one at 280 and then I sold it at 308 I don't know what's going on here with Facebook. They're proud. They're trading a lot higher. I can tell you that Yeah, 330 by 355 the 175 puts that was That was intense that was very very intense, but I did get in that move really quick Made a little bit of money. We're good Wow, check that out guys. I went out I had to run some errands today and check that out on Facebook That big red red candle and then it kept going down a little bit. I could have squeezed out quite You know, but gosh it got up to 350. I believe I don't know exactly how high those options those put options got to but Basically on a technical standpoint It just rebounded and then it went sideways. So I'm happy overall with today's trade I made exactly 10% What's up, everybody? It's Giovanni from the options trading channel. I made a very quick sort of I wouldn't necessarily Say abnormal trade, but it's pretty cool that I placed a really quick trade on Facebook I apologize for not actually Being vocal about that to that trade literally I was kind of just Recording and I saw it pop up and I just went ahead and I thought I had my mic Working, but obviously Wasn't on it was on mute, but at the very least I did show you that trade and you guys it's wild guys Kind of going off topic here, but it's absolutely wild There are people out there that are scamming everybody. I don't want to you know You know say any names, but they're scamming everybody. They're they're offering, you know tutorials or they're offering This service like a day trading service learn how to day trade for several hundred dollars and They all they do is show you a screenshot.  I'm so flustered by just how many scam artists there are out there in this industry But hey, that's okay. It's sort of one of those things where I just I'm so against that. I'm trying to come combat that I guess but anyways guys. Thank you so much for watching my video I'm so sorry that I just didn't walk you through that trade, but I promise you I did place that trade and also Yesterday when I was watching the markets I got a signal right at the open on I think the cues and spy right at the open on the first five minute candlestick and I was watching it and Oh, behold, it just went the other direction completely. So I Need to get better at Understanding and sticking to my rules and my guns on not trading that first five minute candlestick I've been saying it for quite some time. Also, I've been getting a lot of requests on You know how to show a video to make a video on how what my exit strategy is that's gonna come up Hopefully by the weekend. I'll make a video on exactly what I do to exit a good trade and a bad trade guys and Also, I've been getting a lot of questions by email about my strategy and and you know, how much is it good for? How much profit can I make in this and that and there's no real answer to that again I'll make a video in the future Detailing more about my strategy and what my goals are for it, but also at a thousand subscribers I'm gonna go ahead and give out that strategy. Anyways, absolutely free here on this channel I just I want to help people that is why I'm making my channel That's that's the whole purpose to this is I want to help people trade and make money This is what I'm most passionate about and I hope that that conveys through my Trading and my YouTube channel and my videos guys So thank you again If you haven't already hit that subscribe button down below like and share my videos Comment below what you think about my trading style about this video about anything I want to hear from my subscribers guys. Thank you so much and I'll see you here on the next trade


Hello everyone and welcome. I'm James Mulan. I am talking one-on-one with Lynette Martin, who is a candidate for school committee. And we've got lots of ground to cover, so we'll get right into it. Lynette, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Wanted to address, since we last spoke to you at the debate, it's been a busy time for you, I'm sure, in that, among other things, a mailing one out into most people's, or maybe every household in Arlington, that has elicited a certain response because people were concerned about the impression that you gave in that mailing. So I want to give you an opportunity just to talk about that and what you have learned and how you're moving forward. Absolutely. So I sent out a mailing, and my first mailing as a first-time candidate, and I messed up. The return address label said time-sensitive materials, absentee ballot information available, and I neglected to put my name, I just had my home address. It was an oversight, and I really wanted to make sure that everybody knew about the absentee ballot expanded opportunities, which it says on my mailer expanded absentee ballot information, please go to the website for more information. And the timing was unfortunate because it was right before the town had decided to send out postcards, but I did not know that when the mailing was created, it was created before that. So it's particularly upsetting to me because my campaign is really built on a foundation of transparency and communication. I'm definitely all about that, and I think that can be seen in my actions. I have, for years before even this campaign started, been out on social media, listservs, posting school committee meeting notes, advising people of important meetings, and stuff like that. So I put phone calls into the town manager, into some of the select board members and candidates apologizing, and we learn from mistakes, and I'm happy to take the lessons learned about remembering to sort of slow down, to go back to the people I'm collaborating with, and bring those lessons to my tenure on the school committee. Okay, thank you. And just to be 100% clear, what you're saying is really there's, because some folks have expressed concern that this, that you had to know what you were doing in a sense, but what you're saying is really, you really didn't, and it was a result. It was a total oversight. There had been a million eyes on the contents of that mailing, we had all reviewed it. And then I got a last minute call from the mailhouse being like, what do you want to put on the envelope? And, you know, I have a business background, I was like, I want to make sure that people see this absentee voting information, I'm very concerned about the disenfranchisement of voters. So I put that on there, but clearly, you know, it was a mistake. And I think my past actions, people who know the work that I've done, know that all I want is to make sure that everybody has a voice. And so it was absolutely an oversight, not like a premeditated anything. Yeah, so. Okay, and very quickly, one other thing that we want to just clarify before moving on to some other issues. And that is, there's been a small controversy, I would say coming out of the debate, because of numbers that you had cited within the debate, and then Mr. Schlickman in particular's reaction to those in which he has alleged that your numbers that you were using were either patently false, or at least inaccurate. What is your response to that? Yes, I find that whole thing sort of sad name disappointing. All of the numbers that I stated in the debate are direct from the Massachusetts State Department of Education, the desi website, the same website that Mr. Schlickman sends people to. I put a response letter where I link directly to all of the numbers. There was one slight misstatement when I was replying to something that someone said, so not part of my notes or anything, where I stated that our Asian students at the high school were disciplined at a rate five times that of our white students. Actually, that year it was 5% of Asian students, but our Asian students were in fact disciplined at 2.6 times the rate of our white students. And so I've corrected that in that article. But regardless of that, the data that the state has provided us is compelling. And I think that it should not be ignored. And again, I feel it's important that we talk about these inconvenient numbers. We bring these conversations to the foreground. And I feel that arguing over whether or not they're statistically significant just does more damage. The numbers are significant. Our special needs students who make up 16% of the student population make up 47% of our suspensions. Our high need students make up 61% of our suspensions. And regardless of the number of Asian students in the compiling, our students of color make up 30% of our student population, but 42% of our suspensions. So there is an overall pattern here that I think is important to look at and to talk about solutions. So I'm interested in talking about solutions and just bringing the conversation to the table. The school district or any specific teachers or administrators or school committee members, I'm not doing that at all. I'm just saying, hey, this is the data out there. I think we should look at the data. And hey, here are a whole list of ideas for solutions I have that I want to look at during my tenure on the school committee. So that's what that's about. Okay. And you stated quite clearly in the debate that the search for a new superintendent was either the primary or a very important motivation for you to run. So tell us a little bit more about what role you see for yourself. Should you be elected in that search, what is it that you are going to be bringing to that search that other people wouldn't, Thanks. I'm really glad that you brought that up in this discussion. I really believe that the hiring of the superintendent is like the most important thing that we're going to be doing this coming year. The new superintendent is going to set the course for APS, the vision, what we're looking to do for the next decade or more. And I'm committed to a few things. I want to make sure we find a superintendent who is very much about transparency and communication. Just last night, there had been a town forum for APS where we talked to elementary school parents and caregivers about what's been happening with distance learning. And today on social media, there's a lot of parents who are disappointed with the response feel like there's still, you know, the format, there's still not enough communication happening. And I had hosted a listening session for parents several weeks ago because there seemed to be a real need for parents to talk. It was an amazing experience. You know, parents talked about what was working for them and what was not working for them. And I really think we need to tap into these experiences because ultimately the biggest stakeholder in all of this is our children and families really understand that. I also want to make sure that we look for somebody who is ideally has some experience dealing with disparity gaps in their prior school districts and someone who's data driven and also who is proactive and wants to look at solutions sort of like enrollment, you know, what what distance learning is going to do for the future next year, you know, really is proactive at looking at solutions in the future. You know, no matter how difficult that might be sort of having a grasp with that. And I also bring a lot of hiring experience to this. I've hired teachers before. I've worked as an executive, the director of education. I'm sorry, I've worked as a director for an educational nonprofit. And so I've hired executives in educational nonprofit sector. And I also want to bring sort of that diversity lens, make sure that we're hiring without with the minimum amount amount of biases as possible. You know, one of the other thing, well, not one of the biggest thing that we're all dealing with. And that we will be dealing with in the fall and beyond is of course, coming out of to whatever whatever that means. And what the effects of that are likely to be. Obviously, you can't have any answers. I'm wondering what in your mind are both the biggest challenges that we are likely to face. And are there opportunities there? Are there things that we may have learned coming out of the pandemic that we can employ to our benefit? Yeah, that's a great question. So there are obviously so many challenges. And I don't envy the job ahead of our current superintendent of our town leadership. I can see everybody is, you know, doing their best and nobody has the answers. Not only do we need to wait for certain things from the state, but, you know, we need to we don't know where this is going. So one of the biggest challenges is going to be to figure out how to incorporate families that might be able to return to the school system with those that won't be able to return at the same time. Because ultimately, when we do return, there will be families who have immunocompromised family members that can't directly go back. And so how do we incorporate them into the classroom and provide equity for both sets of kids? But the learning piece of this is that, you know, these equity issues have always existed. There are just more of them now, you know, not only do we have to deal with equity issues for our economically disadvantaged families, our non native English speaker families, families that have special needs students with specific needs that we may or may not be able to do remotely, but also there's like a whole new set of people that like have access issues. You have essential workers, you have families dealing with COVID and COVID and their family. So something that, you know, this does is it brings us forward for addressing the needs of people that have not been able to access meetings before like there have been people in our community with disability issues that prevent them from attending a select board meeting. So I hope that some of this we will bring forward to accommodate those folks and be able to bring them into the decision making that's happening in our town, better hear their voices. I want to make sure that we look at every decision we make on the school committee and say, okay, so whose voices are not represented here? Who hasn't been invited to the table? Because it's not enough to say like, oh, anyone is welcome here. You need to make sure that people know that they have access to this and that their voices are wanted and respected and valued. You know, in the three minutes or so less than that, I guess remaining for us. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about things beyond a vision beyond the fall and the immediate issues we have in front of us and specifically what changes that you would like to see happen within the school system to create a an engaging and relevant 21st century education for our students. Absolutely. So I think that all of this ties into making sure that we address the disparity gaps, but it's not just about the student needs that we're not meeting or high needs students. There's all sorts of students who I hear from parents with gifted children. One thing that I think is very exciting is that we were just recently selected among 12 different school districts to be part of a consortium called the Maple Consortium. I always forget what Maple specifically stands for. It's the Massachusetts Personalized Learning EdTech Consortium, and they're working on improving personalized instruction for our special needs students. And so I think personalized instruction instruction is really key. I'd like to see what we can do with that for all of our students to provide more personalized level of instructions meeting our students where they're excited about learning in the best way to reach them and sort of moving forward with individualized motivations. So I think that's one one excellent thing that I'd like to see what we do with that. And is that something that you can see as scalable to, you know, be able to provide that kind of experience across, you know, across the board in a sense for the students in our public schools? I mean I am not an expert in curriculum, so I would like refer to the curriculum leaders on that, but certainly from my teaching experience, I think that there are tools and techniques where we can look at how we can personally engage and excite all of our students. Every child has their own individual needs and the more we can tap into those, the better, the more excited they're going to be about learning and the more successful that they will be in their future and that we will be as a school overall. I suspected this was going to go by quickly and it has. And so we want to thank you for your time. Thank you. I have been speaking with Lynette Martin, who is a candidate for school committee here in 2020 in Arlington. I'm James Melan, this is ACMI. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.