So the the title of the talk, if it has a title, it's really just some reflections comes from the book that Joel and I wrote together a couple years ago. It actually took us about 10 years to write. Joel is a professor at Ohio State, both a colleague and a very close friend, and a really brilliant guy. So many of the really good ideas I, if there are any, I'll say, if there are any really good ideas that I say today that you're impressed by, they probably came from him. He's a really wonderful scholar and also a really committed guy, and I always want to flag everything along the way that he was involved in all this. It wasn't just me. So my goal today is to just sort of very briefly review a little bit of the science where we're at. You all know that, but just to kind of underline it and to give you some very recent data. And then I'm going to talk quickly about the framework that Joel and I put together, and which is a sort of four-fold framework of political futures, you might say. And then I'm going to reflect this briefly, explain each of them. And then I'll move on to the critiques and perhaps some reflections on what we might know, what we might think about concerning the virus and how we might think about climate change in the world that follows the pandemic. So here we go. So this is a graph from the IPCC's report last year, the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You probably all know about it. The IPCC's report last year, they have a regular assessment reports that they released, but they released this in a special sense on its own. It's kind of a supplement last year. You probably heard about it. And people have been calling it the 1.5 degree report because it's a reflection on the actual effects of 1.5 degrees, which at the Paris meetings in 2015 was agreed to be this sort of the goal we were aiming for, the target, the overall temperature change target. And it was seen to be a kind of especially good one, you know, in the sense that much of the conversation prior to this had been that we would aim for a two degree change. But at Paris, you know, led by the, in my opinion, quite empty leadership of Justin Trudeau, the agreement came to 1.5, at least as a target. So the IPCC has done some work to tell us what that would actually look like. And this is what it would look like right here. If we want to hit 1.5 degrees, on the current trajectory, we will hit 1.5 degrees sometime between 2030 and 2052. To avoid going any higher, we'll need to drastically reduce clearly emissions on a trajectory like this, which will clearly require, I shouldn't laugh, you know, a fundamental transformation of not only our energy system, but certainly Joel and I would argue with our political economic arrangements and arguably with even perhaps the material structure of the planet, given the kinds of energy system construction and development we'll need. So this is a, you know, a daunting prospect. But we need to take it seriously, of course, because the news is not good. Again, I won't go too on and on about this. Clearly, this is stuff that you will mostly know or at least know the shape of, but this is data from ice cores, from dome C and Antarctica, which has been glaciated for millions of years and hasn't melted. And so therefore provides a really excellent sort of and consistent place to measure temperature change on the planet over the last 800,000 years. And you can see from the data up until quite recently, that's at the bottom of the slide, that clearly the temperature and concentrations of carbon dioxide have varied a great deal over time, but in a rather consistent sense, they've mostly varied between about 180 and 280 parts per million over the last 800,000 years. Now, this next slide will not surprise any of you, but this is where we're at right now as of last year. And this is where the IPC suggests we might end up at the top there at 800 at the end of the century. So a little bit about 80 years away, my children's lifetime. So this is a big deal in terms of where we're at. And it presents, obviously, and this is the origin of the book, it presents an enormous challenge for what we might think of, blandly as civilization, but certainly for the leadership of the various units of the planet to kind of confront both at their own jurisdictional level, but also clearly requires it's a global problem that requires some form of global coordination. Now, the fact that this is an enormous challenge may seem obvious, but I think we need to think hard about why it presents such an enormous challenge. The scale of the technological changes and introduction and innovation alone, of course, is daunting. Let's set that aside right now and speak more clearly about the kind of political and social structural issues that we might face. The first challenge, and I think it's perhaps amongst the biggest, if not the biggest, even bigger perhaps than technological change, is basically global inequality. This is a chart that shows the per capita emissions and wealth. You can see it's a very, very clear relationship here, which is to say something that you all already know, I'm sure, that the wealthiest people on the planet emit the most, which is also to say that the most powerful people on the planet are those who have to change their behavior and lifestyles the most. That is a big, big ask. And our previous challenges we've faced when the wealthiest have been forced to sacrifice the most have rarely gone well and rarely gone peacefully. And that's something I think we need to take really seriously. The other thing that we might sort of ask ourselves when we look at a graph like this is to say, well, of course, then this is an argument for carbon taxes, which of course it is. Everything we see today is arguably an argument for carbon taxes. And any of you who've seen Paquetti's new book will know that a big part of his plan is a progressive carbon taxes. And certainly I would endorse that and probably many of you as well. But it also must be, we all have to look at the facts. And the facts are right now that the carbon tax has been effectively meaningless, certainly in terms of changing behavior and the energy system. And tax avoidance and tax evasion are only increasing. So we're seeing a situation where not to mention taxes are falling all over the planet, which Paquetti also details quite closely. So that is to say that, sure, taxes would help a lot, but right now they're not doing anything. And partly that, of course, it's because of the fact that the most powerful and the wealthiest are also those who have the most capacity to influence that. Now, you might ask yourself, like I do all the time, because my hope is that any kind of massive transition is itself not totally disruptive, like anyone else. Much of the discussion on the sort of tech side is to say, well, can we not change the energy mix? Maybe a social or a political economic transformation of the scale we're talking about is impossible. But certainly we have our technological capacities or projected technological capacities to change the energy mix such that we can reduce the impact and perhaps even roll back the effects of emissions induced climate change. But again, if we're sort of, for lack of a term, better term being somewhat realistic, these calls for a shift in the energy mix or energy system have been fairly loud since I would say the 1970s. And the shift is really not happening. Now, we can look at a chart like this, which comes to me the energy. I can't even think of the name right now. EIA energy. Anyway, it's the global energy NGO that's sort of operated by large energy producers. I think for some reason I'm blanking on the name right now. But anyway, the point here is that we can see that since between 1971 and 2014, there's been a drastic increase in non fossil fuel energies, which is fantastic, of course. And we would only want the yellow part of that bar to grow and grow over time. But the problem that we face right now is that the only thing that matters for the climate is the size of the blue bar. The overall fossil fuel energy production is growing and continues to grow right now. It doesn't matter how much the yellow grows if the blue continues to grow as well. The key goal has to be to leave fossil fuels in the ground.  And this mix itself is not meaningful as long as the blue is growing. Now, to change this again is a radical demand. It's asking in many ways to some of the world's most powerful, wealthiest states and their most wealthy citizens to give up what has been at least until quite recently the most, some of the most valuable assets the world has ever known. The effects of the oil price change on this, I wouldn't, I'm not in a position yet to assess. I'd really like to hear what other people are thinking. I think that's a factor in where we'll be at the end of the pandemic if there is an end. That is very interesting and I'd love to hear people's thoughts on that. Another reason I think that we face such a significant challenge among many others, I'm just picking a few here, is that I would argue that there is a, perhaps I might even use the word drastic, but certainly a systematic underappreciation or underestimation of the scale of the problem ahead of us here. We are already in quite bad shape and the momentum of the system is such that even if we were to cut off emissions now, we still will have a great deal of negative impacts. And so as an example of this underestimation, I just wanted to pull up this graph. This is also from the IPC's most recent AR-5, the assessment report five and this comes from its working group two, which looks at the social and economic dimensions of the problem. And this is a chart that's put together. It sometimes gets called the burning embers diagram because it does sort of look like that. And we can see here that they've outlined what they call five reasons for concern, RFCs. And I just wanted to point your attention to reasons for concern three and reasons for concern four. In both cases, you'll see that the IPC see judges us at 1.5 degrees as being in the moderate zone, which they would also define as so-called severe, but sorry, detectable, but not severe. And this is the, the RFC three distribution of impacts is effectively what you might think of as the climate justice or the environmental justice dimensions of the distribution of the climate impacts, such that, of course, the concern would be that the vast majority of people who pay the costs both with their lives and their livelihoods for climate change are those who have had very little to do with the production of the problem itself. They are the poor, especially in the poorest parts of the world. And they are the most vulnerable, but they will pay the costs more than anyone else. And so that's the concern. And the IPCC judges that concern to be moderate. Both Joel and I, from a detailed and long-winded reading of the literature, would suggest that's a massive underestimation of the inequality of the impacts that are already existing, let alone those to come. And the second is that we're looking at 1.5 degrees of global aggregate impacts of, according to the IPC's measures, again, of a moderate degree. That seems to me totally untenable at this moment, even with the momentum, even with, again, if we caught emissions entirely, the momentum inside the system of the already existing changes we expect from past emissions would push us past any kind of moderate situation. We're looking at having to deal with drastic changes in our livelihoods, even if, again, as we stop now. And I happen to have the good fortune of having a colleague at Simon Fraser, who is one of the authors of the IPCC's scientific side of things, Kirsten Zickfeld. And she would, she laughed when I showed her these graphs. This is a, you know, a considerably milder estimation of where we're at. So with all this in mind, bad news, I apologize. Though, again, I'm betting that everyone on the call has more, has read more and more and more about this than anything I'm telling you here. But in reaction to this, Joel and I, in about 2008 or 2009, got together and started to think about, you know, what, what are the, what does the world look like in the face of these challenges? How do, how, how could we even imagine even just the two of us, but clearly talking to lots of other people, how could we even imagine confronting this problem? What would the futures look like as a way of managing this in some way at all? And then the second question that we wanted to ask, which I think we need to ask is what if we don't? What if we, what if we aren't up to the task? What, what, what if emissions, what if concentrations hit 800 to 1000 at the end of the century? What does the world look like? What does the, and what does the world look like? Not so much environmentally or ecologically. We were concerned with what does the world look like politically? What politics is produced by a world that is on fire? And if we can avoid that, what politics will produce a world that doesn't light on fire? And so these are our two questions. Taking the 1.5 degrees seriously. If we're to achieve a 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and 99 percent reduction by 2050, which is the IPCC's recommendation, one might say, then how would we do so? What political process can make that happen? What, what possibly could make that happen? And let alone not making it happen, but what could make it happen in a, in a manner that we consider just? And then secondly, as I said, if we do not achieve this and climate change reaches some threshold that which is globally impossible to ignore, which is a, I think already here in much of the world and certainly coming where we live, then what are the likely political outcomes? What, what processes or strategies will emerge in that world? These are the two sort of motivating questions. And after a lot of discussion and this, you know, this summary will mean you never have to read the book probably, but we developed what seems, I think, probably like a somewhat simplistic approach, a kind of heuristic. But I think it, at least for us, it helped us think about the sort of possibilities that in a broad set of trajectories that may be ahead of us, at least as a way of framing the problem. So the first thing we said to ourselves is, and we're not the only ones saying this, of course, many of you are probably saying it and certainly many, many other authors are saying this. And this is the question of the relationship between a world undergoing rapid and accelerating climate change and capitalism, the existing, you know, dominant mode of economic organization. Many people, both the defenders of capitalism and its greatest critics, you know, argue that climate change poses a threat to the very functioning of that way of organizing our economic lives. And I think that that's sort of undeniable whether or not capitalism can survive it. That's not a question I'm in the position to answer. But I do think that the capacity of global capitalism to persist in its existing form without radical transformation in the face of climate change is a question that we have to ask. And part of that question, of course, has to be asked purely because of the geopolitical conditions under which we're facing this problem with the, some would say rise or perhaps even, you know, imminent hegemony of China, which is capitalist in some ways, but then in fundamentally important ways, of course, not quite capitalist, at least as the sort of standard theory would take it. So in this four two by two table, we have a capitalist and non capitalist sort of future trajectory. And I'll try and explain why we've been so heavy handed there beyond just the heuristics of it all. And then the second axis, you might say, is this the question of planetary sovereignty, which is only to put a name to the problem that thousands of people have identified, which is the fact that the problem is global. Global coordination is essential to facing it. Individual responses have thus far proven either futile and the ecology of the planet would suggest that that's quite a reasonable expectation. But also that the there is a need in the order in the very possibility of stabilizing a social order, whether or not it's in a world on fire or a world that's cooling will require a kind of planetary organization. Now we use the term sovereignty, but we could be if sovereignty makes you think of a monarch, then, then scale that back a little bit and just think about some form of enforceable global order that could be an agreement, coordination, but it would have the capacity to impose and enforce rules around energy systems or emissions, that kind of thing, a sovereign in that sense on the climate front. And if you divide the world up as we did in this four by four table, for the uses of thinking about the future, we came up with four systems, you might say, or four trajectories, let's say for the future, looking at the world as it as it warms up. And these are all I should step back a second here and say, so many of you have heard the term, heard the phrase climate change is the greatest collective action problem the world has ever known. The most famous phrasing of it is by Nicholas Stern in the Stern Report. But many people have said something like it suggests, of course, that the problem facing us is the individualized, not just at the personal level, but also at the nation state level, sense of the experience of the problem, the lack of global coordination and the lack of a framework within which the collective action problem as famously framed by Olson in 1970, the collective action problem might be solved by some realization of a collective interest that trumps for unfortunate term to use, sorry, a collective interest that might dominate individual responses. And so we could think of each of these as even though I would argue that they don't necessarily think of themselves this way, except for climate leviathan, we could think of these as answers to the collective action problem going forward. And if we did think of that, and I'll explain why in a couple seconds, we might say that I would say that climate leviathan is a poor answer to that question. Climate behemoth is no answer to that question. Climate Mao is a bad answer to that question, which leaves us with climate X as potentially an answer to the question. And Joel and I have left that box largely empty because it's in Coate and information. So let me explain a little bit about each of these. Then I'll reflect briefly on some connections, perhaps, to the to the virus. And then I'd love to hear what people are thinking and having to say. So this is, I'm sure most of you are familiar, but but if you're not, this is the cover from Hobbes's 1651 book, Leviathan, which was written, as most of you probably know, in the midst of the English Civil War. And it was an argument for a supreme power, not necessarily because Hobbes was a monarchist, though he was. But it was an argument that the collective action problem, we might say, could only be solved by having everyone submit to one power. And that one power, Hobbes said, would allow the the ongoing reproduction of civil society. And we might even think of it as a modern economy. Insofar as it abandoned the political or the political questions of rule to the one power. And that would prevent what Hobbes was most afraid of, which was civil conflict. So the social order's persistence depended, and the world around him seemed to suggest this. The social order's persistence depended upon all submitting and obeying one power, in whom would be vested the capacity to force obedience, but the obedience would be bought with the promise of peace. This was the world that Hobbes was proposing. And you can see here that his vision, insofar as the drawing captures it, really was intended to to describe the way in which the sovereign was an individual, a mortal god, he called him, but also was composed of the submission of the others. So you can see that his body is made up of hundreds of people looking toward him, all facing toward him in their own interests. And we, without in any way meaning to take all of Hobbes's messages, called the Book Climate Leviathan, because we see the dominant response, the one we we think is unfolding or beginning to unfold right now, perhaps in the form of the COP meetings that we see in Paris at any rate, as an attempt to kind of build or to or as a sign of a kind of emergent force toward which something like a Leviathan like power in the climate realm might come to be. And we actually would argue that there's a significant proportion, especially of sort of educated, concerned, and reasonably well off folks in the Western Europe and North America, who are really invested in this idea that the council of parties will come up with an idea that does impose in some senses a not quite Leviathan like, but certainly a regime, a carbon regime on the planet that will save us. And so you may remember the desperation that seemed to disseminate through what Americans would call the liberal community, you know, around the time of Copenhagen. When people are really hoping that the world would come together and make up some rules about how we could live in a way that would help us. And we see the desire for this as being very much a kind of caught up in the political moment. The reason that it has to confront, you know, the planetary problem, of course, is again the collective action problem, you might say. Climate change clearly puts pressure on the lack of a global rulemaking or enforcement mechanism. And also, it relies to some extent, as perhaps we might expect, on a division that Hobbes made fundamental to this situation, which is the division between political society, which is the realm of the rulers, and civil society, where individuals enjoy some freedom on the premise that the rule makers will be free to make the rules as they see. And this is clearly, you know, sort of imposable, we might think of on a global carbon regime. One of the problems, and I'll get to this in a second, is that I would say one of the sort of fundamental problems is that we get ourselves in a situation here in which the collective action problem is understood to be an incentive problem, effectively. So in other words, this mode of organization, which is dedicated to the persistence of the existing order, we might say, existing liberal capitalist societies. If that is to persist, then the collective action problem is understood effectively as an incentive problem, which is to say that it kind of denies, not even kind of, it does deny, in many ways, the very possibility of a solidarity in the interests of a self-interested obedience, one might say. And the possibilities of that are limited, I would argue, insofar as the problem ahead requires more than just a better directed self-interest. As an example of how this thinking is going, I pulled up this, this is kind of drawn from, though it's not a direct clip, but it's drawn from Edna Hofer and Stern's 2010 document toward a global green recovery recommendations for immediate G20 action, which they wrote and published and was widely circulated amongst the G20 folks in 2010 and 2011. And what it describes in many ways, I would argue, and this is one way in which there's some very strong parallels, I believe, with how we're thinking about how to deal with the post-pandemic condition. What it does effectively is it looks at the problem in what Joel and I would say is a vaguely green Keynesian mode. It understands the state's sort of options at this point as being of two-fold effectively. One would be to step into the economy, take over not the whole thing, but certain industries or sectors or whatever, straighten things out, and remove private actors from the field, at least temporarily, to allow for the solution to the collective action problem. And we can see here that in some ways this is what's unfolding in a kind of punctuated Keynesianism, is that the state might step in, do the work that it can do, and then in phase two it slowly steps back by providing the private sector with incentives, allowing for subsidization, the movement of median term measures to provide the private sector with better incentives, this kind of thing. So it's a kind of punctuated Keynesianism that we might see, I think, and almost certainly we'll see as a suggestion for how we deal with the post-COVID world. And this is all, in some senses, caught up in the frame of market failure. So the state can produce collective action problems solution via solving or remediating market failure here, and information problems. So this is all part of what we understand to be the climate leviathan strategy. Oops, sorry. This is effectively the simplest way to make sense of what we call climate math, which you may remember is in the bottom left corner, it's the trajectory we describe as both invested in some form of planetary sovereignty or coordination, but a non-capitalist sense, in a non-capitalist sense. And insofar as it's non-capitalist, I really want to flag here, and Joel and I do a lot of work in the book to try to make this clear, that we are not, climate math is not a code for climate China, nor is it a code for climate Xi Jinping. This is actually meant to point toward the sort of radical Maoist tradition that has never gone away in East Asia. And so insofar as that's true, nothing like climate Mao currently exists. But we do think it's possible. And it's possible precisely because of this. This is a map of people with livelihoods at risk from severe climate change. And you can see that Asia is just balloons relative to the rest of the planet. And we would argue that this combination, a sort of combustible set of relatively increasingly fragile livelihoods, much of which are based in rural quasi-peasant conditions, puts that mixed with a sort of agrarian political radical tradition that drove both Mao and also the Maoists in Nepal and North India and other parts of East and Southeast Asia, mean that there's a political culture that makes it quite possible that the response in the medium term to climate devastation will be a political radicalism that perhaps takes a Maoist form or at least is inspired by Mao. Now, whether that'll happen, of course, we may be totally wrong, but we do see the seeds of this there. And it's not necessarily the Chinese Communist Party that is the best indicator of that right now. Climate X, sorry, I forgot about climate behemoth. Climate behemoth, so when we wrote the book, it was during the Obama years. And for us, climate behemoth was sort of instantiated by Sarah Palin and the drill baby drill nationalist, often quite racist framing that claimed both that any kind of non-national sovereignty was illegitimate, but also that for the most part climate change was a hoax imposed by other powers or some global conspiracy. We never could have imagined the form that it is taken now. I think we thought Palin was about as bad as it could get. We were clearly wrong about that. The extent to which Trump has kind of enacted the worst version of what we thought behemoth would be is, you know, one might argue that we were sort of prescient. I don't think Joe and I were prescient. We were as astounded as the rest of the world in some senses, not so much by the election of Trump as by the way in which this has been normalized. But at any rate, behemoth is meant to mark an order that refuses international coordination of any sort of any kind of imposed or enforced rules. And but a but a complete and utter dedication to the maintenance of the current capitalist order. That's the up top right corner. And then the final bottom right is what we call Climate X, which we see as a sort of inchoate but unfolding or emergent refusal of the other three orders. We don't know where that will take us. This is from India in January. We we we don't know where this will take us. It could take us really emancipatory places, local responses, plethora of movements and and energy system structure restructuring in that is locally specific and historically and culturally meaningful, coordinated as need be at different scales, or it could of course take very, very different forms. It's unclear. But it also seems to be in many ways a logical response to what thus far are the glaring failures or terrifying prospects of the other ones. This is why what I meant when I said Leviathan is a poor answer. Behemoth is no answer. Mao is a bad answer. This is an answer. It's unclear what this will mean. But but but it is very clearly a response, I would argue, to to Leviathan's plans to control this from the elite sphere, to incentivize, to provide, to to administer this in this kind of non-disruptive but also non-distributionally equalizing process. Because if we return, say, to this question here, when we look at the Global Green Recovery, the question behind it that never gets asked is who does this? Who does the improving? Who does the upgrading? Who does the incentivizing? Who does the providing? One might argue that individual states are doing this, but individual states to solve the collective action problem require a coordinated and enforceable mechanism that would take a Leviathan-like form. So we need to think about what's behind all that. We don't know at present. And I would argue that that at least thus far nothing adequate has arisen. Okay, I'm pretty much done. So just to give you a flavor of some of the critiques, a couple, a couple that really have mattered to us. The first is that I have a great, I have a significant number of colleagues caught up in the Green New Deal movement in an effort to kind of, you know, work that out, figure that out. And I have an enormous amount of sympathy for it. And their critique of our proposal is that we can't abandon the state entirely, or at least we can't lose hope in the state entirely at this moment because the state is all we have. Progressives, liberals, however you want to think about it. Our only hope for addressing this problem is the state, and we need to embrace it as the power that however limited it is, is at least, you know, gives us some purchase on things. And that's a very important point. I still am very concerned that at least the last 20 years would suggest that that's not going to get us anywhere near where we need to go. The IPCC has made that very clear where we need to go. And I think the state is in the way in a lot of ways right now. But the question, of course, is what I would propose to put in its place. And I don't have a good answer for that. The second, of course, and it's predictable, but also very sound, has been voiced by many, but most recently in a conversation Joel had with Bob Cohane, many of you will probably know him, but a very prominent and senior political scientist. And his concern, he endorsed our diagnosis of climate leviathan 100% and then said, the political feasibility of X is zero. And that is of course, you know, a judgment, one that I think is not necessarily to be taken as truth. But it does. But the idea that it's unfeasible clearly needs to be taken seriously, because if people believe it's unfeasible, then the movements that might produce the adequate response to climate change won't emerge because people won't believe they're possible. And that might, as I say, be quite a reasonable reaction. So finally, just a couple of reflections on what we might learn from this from about the virus. And I anticipate that I have nothing more innovative to say than any of you. So I'll be very interested to hear what you have to say. This is just my reflections. But I do think that, you know, one of the defining features of where we are in dealing with the pandemic is the extraordinary uncertainty that persists. Nothing innovative to say that at this moment. But it is to say, I think therefore, that those who claim they know where we're headed at this moment are wrong to say that they can know. I think things are still coming together. And there are a great deal of forces, like those Rob identified earlier, actually, that are what we might think of as dilemmas, their contradictory or they have sort of complicated possibilities, some of which we might be very excited about and others of which we have great concern about. So for example, the national introversion we've seen right now has often been framed as something good, you know, people are taking care of their own or nations are doing their best, or not their best in some cases, to take care of their own people to deal with their problems internally, to build up some self-sufficiency, to shorten supply chains, to figure out a way to kind of manage this so that we're more crisis prepared as we're moving forward, which would clearly be supposedly a good thing for climate change. But that national introversion obviously also has a very dark side in not only a nativist kind of fear of the other and the creation of an enormous part of a country that can be unwelcome, but also the idea that just like climate change, the pandemic is a structurally global problem, and individual responses will, even for those who are fortunate enough to figure something out, leave a great deal of the world at risk, a great deal of the world without resources, at a great deal of risk. And I think that that's a very real fear with the pandemic. In fact, one of my main concerns is that once the wealthiest part of the world is out of this, we forget about the fact that it will still be probably rampaging through Africa, Latin America, and Asia. And we will, for us, the problem will be over. And I think that will be both a humanitarian but also an ethical disaster and political disaster. I think the other thing that we have to think about when we try to compare this to climate change, some people have told me it's a dress rehearsal for, is that I think that the timeline, the temporality of this crisis is very, very different, and it produces a whole set of both emergency measures and political reactions that are very different than from climate change. And it also actually makes room for a role for science that thus far, climate change has not been able to impose itself via the tax system or various other kinds of energy transition mechanisms. So the timeline of the pandemic puts it in a kind of qualitatively different mode. I also think Rob is right that the outcome of this is going to be very bad for the climate movement. I think the climate will get and totally understandably get pushed down the priority list the long way. And I also think that at least at the beginning of the crisis, the environmental movement did itself no favors by arguing that if we can do this for climate, we can do this. If we can do this for the virus, we can do this for climate. Insofar as we're comparing the reactions and the necessary responses between the virus and climate, I think that is a disastrous move strategically insofar as this process has been entirely joyless and devastating for hundreds of millions of people. And to promise them that this is what we have to do to deal with climate is not at all going to bring people on board for that process. And finally, I would just say that to reiterate something I said just a couple of minutes ago, I think that perhaps the most important lesson we can learn right now is to be sharp eyed and wary more than imagining that there are specific lessons, the approach to the pandemic can teach us about how we might deal with climate change. I think that in particular, the way in which many of our political economic structures have been built around sort of fairly rigid decision rules, if you might think of it as sort of an inflation targeting central bank large across political economic regulation, I think those things will crumble. I think that responses have to be more temporally and geographically specific. I think our economics needs to try to make sense of where we're at in any one moment as opposed to some long run promise. And I think that because I think that the world of the long run promise has been pretty much entirely legitimized by this promise, by the virus, and climate change will require a similar kind of alertness, let's say.


I've seen it referenced on your website. What does Parsons TKO mean by engagement architecture? We get asked this question a lot. You'll see engagement architecture all over our website and the work we do with our clients. We think about this as our philosophy of how organizations should reach their audiences, the tools and tactics and how they conduct their business to effectively conduct outreach. I like to think of it as the building blocks of audience outreach because it includes your entire stack of marketing technology, the outreach systems and platforms that integrate with them, but also the people, processes and workflows that support those, as well as the goals and strategies you have for reaching your audiences. You might think this sounds like your digital ecosystem, but it is more than that because it includes offline channels like events, it includes the people and processes that work with them, and so we find digital ecosystem to be a little bit limiting of a term. One of the reasons we like this framework is that it helps expose and break down organizational silos you might have and be facing in your role if you have teams like development or communications or membership management that own different tools, platforms, different pieces of your audience, and this common philosophy and framework helps you orient around common goals and outreach strategies.


I'm your host, Winston Welch, and I'm delighted you're joining us today, where every other week we explore a variety of topics, organizations, events, and the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own and not connected with any organization I might be affiliated with. Welcome me today in the studio is Buffy Cushman-Pates, school leader of Seeks, the school for examining essential questions of sustainability. That's unethical. But with that, I would like to welcome you to the show today, Buffy. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, you know, it's an interesting school. I have actually met students who have gone to Seeks. One of them was actually my neighbor across the street, and his mother was a very interesting lady. And she wanted to enroll her child in a different type of school. And so we were talking, and then I realized, oh, wait a minute, I've heard about this school before. So tell us what is Seeks? Well, it's a public charter middle school, and there's a lot of pieces to that. It's a public school, it's a charter school, and it's a middle school, which is to say we serve students in sixth through eighth grade. Any student who wants to go, really, and if we have more students interested than we have space available, we have to hold a lottery. You have to hold a lottery. You have to hold a lottery. You have to know admissions criteria, know tuition, we are a public school in that sense. So you don't obviously, for those of us who may not be familiar with it, what is a charter school? Yeah, it's a really good question. So for what it's worth, there's a Think Tech episode on me speaking about what a charter school is. Okay. For what it's worth. But basically a charter school is a public school of choice is the way I like to think about it. So students have to still take the standardized tests and are ultimately driven by common course standards. We accept all students, there's no admissions criteria, in those ways it's a public school. A charter school means that you have the freedom and flexibility to choose the curriculum. So even though we're still driven by common core standards and our students still take the state tests, everything that happens in the middle is really up to us. So that's why parents might choose our school because they like, for example, our schedule, how we spend our time in our day, or our project-based approach, or our community-based approach. You can really have a focus in your school and ours is examining essential questions of sustainability. It's a big picture. Examining essential questions of sustainability. So those are three big words that have variable meanings, especially in an environment now where even the EPA is, you know, gutting sort of science-based understanding. And so how does that factor into what you all do? Do you teach science by, or do you teach sustainability? How do you approach what is sustainability and what's essential? I'm going to say what, like, teaching is kind of, people have an impression of teaching as adults or people sharing content, saying like, I have this content, let me give this content to you. And then instead, our approach is investigations and examination. So it's content, content, content. Let's look at it. Let's evaluate multiple perspectives. Let's think about how these things are all systemically, like, interact with each other and we really want to give students exposure to a whole wide range of experiences and perspectives and let them try and understand how it all works together. Of course, we try and guide them, but we're not a school where we're brainwashing or trying to put a particular, like, way of thinking in students. We're really trying to help them examine things that are so essential questions or things that really matter, you know? What are the things that really matter? There is actually, it is an educational term also, essential questions. Okay. And that means it can be approached through lots of different lenses. You can approach it through lots of different subject areas. You can examine it again and again and get different answers every time. So these are things that define an essential question and sort of edge you speak and that's how we approach it too. So some examples of essential questions of sustainability. One right now is how can we learn from our past to better prepare for our future? Very simply, how do we care for our au plois? And then the third one that our students are examining right now is what does it take to feed our community? So you can see how, like, robust these are and you can approach them from lots of different ways. Yeah. I can see a sixth grader looking at how do we feed our community. So you're looking at all kinds of things from growing our own food to importing food to what happens if there's a hurricane that wipes out the porch. And helping them understand how all these things are so related to each other and how we have these dependencies and how we need to sort of build our own understanding of how food systems work. Our students have grown an amazing amount of food on our campus this year and their goal at their project that they're all working towards at the end of the year in this group is to put on a dinner for 200 people where they have produced all of the food themselves. As far as to create a field from what used to be a dirt parking lot and like enrich the soil, grow corn and beans and squash and that corn has now been harvested and dried and turned into cornmeal that they're turning into tortillas. It blows my mind. That's awesome. It's really amazing. I believe the student you know is actually in that group. Okay. So and these these students then do you find it's the students actually say, you know, I really am not excited about going to school and then they go to their parents and say, is there something else or is it the parents or choosing our school? Yeah. How do they find out about it? Word of mouth is typically how students find out about it and parents I would say I would I think more than half of the students are going to our school because their parents want to go to school but ultimately it's parents that are you know it's age appropriate that parents of 10 and 11 year olds which is when you know this decision is being made about middle school it's age appropriate that parents are looking for schools of choice for their kids at that point and parents have a sense of what they want for their for their kid. People choose our school for all kinds of reasons. Some people choose it because it's a smaller school. You know most middle schools are on the order of four to eight hundred students and our school has a hundred and eighty students. We don't necessarily have small classes but we have small school so that makes for a nice community feel. Some people choose it because of the sustainability. Some people choose it because it's project based. Some people choose it because it's convenient. We're in Kaimuki. We're on the campus of Kaimuki High School. Yeah we share. We share with Kaimuki High School. Yeah. What is their enrollment just by comparison? I think there are about seven, a little over seven hundred this year, between seven hundred and seven fifty. It's a big campus though. There's room for all of us. It is a big campus. It's a huge campus. And so obviously yours is a middle school right now and what are the plans for the future or are you happy just to say at a middle school? Our vision is to grow into a sixth or twelfth grade school but it's all a matter of facilities, dependency and so what's topic for another time. Okay. And so you said a hundred and eighty students. So you've got about, is it equally divided between the grades? Yeah. Seventh and eighth, about sixty students per grade level. That's our model. Yeah. So how does one go about starting a charter school? Can I start a charter school that wants to focus on painting and drawing? You could try. Okay. Yeah. I mean it's an incredibly rigorous application process through the Hawaii State Public Charter Commission and they have an application cycle that opens up every year. It's about a, I think the application cycle is about six months and then you get approved or not approved. It's pretty hard to get approved. Pretty hard to get approved. Oh yeah. How long did it take you from conception to actually opening your doors for students? Less time than it should have. Ultimately they have actually changed the process in the time since we did it. For us it was we were approved in December and we opened our doors in August of the following year. Which is Greece lightning speed or anything? It was crazy, crazy quick, but they've changed the process since then to not an 18 month window between when you're approved and when you open. And we didn't have to do it that fast. We wanted to do it that fast. We had the idea. We were ready to do it. We were able to pull all the pieces together including facilities is the biggest challenge. Yeah. Facilities because charter schools are not provided a facility unless they're a conversion charter. But most charter schools are a startup which means they originate with an idea and that idea gets approved. And then they have to go find the facility. And so do you end up paying like rent to come to this door? We did. We paid rent for the first four years of our school. And now that we're coexisting, we're in an MOU relationship with the DOE right now for our small part of the Kamaki High School campus. So your funding is primarily through? Our funding is directly through per pupil. So we get funding directly from the state of Hawaii. Well, from the state of Hawaii to the public charter school commission. And then they give it to each of the charter schools based on their enrollment. And so we have to tell them our enrollment predictions in advance. We get around 7,300 per student to run our school. We pay for our curriculum, all of our teachers, our facility and all the things that it takes to run a school, all the operations. Wow. Yeah. It's a lot. It's not quite enough. Facilities makes a really big difference because if you end up spending a lot of money on rent, then that makes a really big dent in your overall school budget. And then things like school lunch and that kind of thing. And then do you use the same facilities for lunch and things like that at the Kamaki High School? Right now we do. Yeah. That's one of the really advantageous things about this partnership is that we were able to access some things that we hadn't previously been able to access, including a school lunch program, including athletic facilities that just fields. We're just able to play on the fields, which we'd like to play. Absolutely. And how many teachers do you have at the school now? We have about 15 full-time teachers from two English, two math, two science, two social studies, three arts, three arts teachers, arts and electives teachers, and then three special educators. Okay. So you do have special educators? Absolutely. Yes. And that's part of what it means to be a public school. So we accept all students. Our specific model for special education is full inclusion. So it's students whose IEPs, this is really technical speak here, but whose IEPs can be met in the general education environment with support. IEP is an individualized education plan. Okay. And you mentioned the Common Core. I think that probably people my age, they don't know what the Common Core is. What is the Common Core? Common Core is a set of standards that describe what students should know and be able to do. It's as simple as that, although it kind of gets a little bit of a reputation as though there's a curriculum to go with it or something like that. But ultimately Common Core is a set of standards that a lot of states, I think 35 or 40 states have adopted that say in English and these grades, your goals should be that students should be able to, for example, make a claim and support it with evidence. And math, it's that they should be able to make a quantitative claim and support it with quantitative evidence. Those kinds of standards. Does it mean that students should be able to figure out, for example, Algebra or Geometry by a set of certain grades? Yes. Yeah. Those are included in there. And is that what we hear about taking the test or teaching to the test? And we hear that thrown around. Yeah, you do. And so the test and the standards are not the same thing. The test is ideally the test tests on the standards. It doesn't always. But, you know, you can get some information about how the tests work and, you know, if they're multiple choice. The tests have changed a lot over the last five years. I don't want to say I'm an advocate for testing for a lots of testing. I'm not. It's just part of our reality. And we think of it as our students doing well in our standardized test is one measure of many measures of our students. It's not the ultimate one. Ultimately, our measure is we're trying to create students who are stewards of planet Earth and healthy, effective citizens of the world. Sounds very lofty goal. It does sound lofty goal, but it's what we need. It is exactly what we need. So you say that again, that you will create, your goal is to create. Our students are stewards of planet Earth. Stewards of planet Earth. And healthy, effective citizens of the world. Yes. And I think really an important part of that, healthy is happy. Especially in the middle school years. Healthiness, like being healthy involves also being happy. At least not hating school. Thinking that school is some place that you want to go on a daily basis, because you're getting something from it, and your life that you're living right now is worth something, not just preparation for your long-term future. What an amazing environment these kids get to be in and learn in. And just a totally different way of looking at education and learning. Because it's really about putting the emphasis on the learner. Yes. And letting her or him decide the best way to learn and working inside of the IEP for that. And do you teach some of the courses yourself, or are you just busy administering? I wish. And how old is the school at this point? The school is in its fifth year. This is its fifth year right now. We're finishing. 2017, 2018, school year is our fifth year. We opened in 2013. Okay. Well, we're going to take a very quick break, but I am talking today with Buffy Cushman-Pates, who is the school leader of CEEX, the school for examining essential questions of sustainability. And we are on Think Tech Live Network Streaming Series. We'll be back in just a moment.  At Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at 1. See you there. Hi. My name is Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review, coming to you from Honolulu, Hawaii right here in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Asian Review is the oldest of the 35 or so shows broadcast by Think Tech Hawaii. We've been in production since 2009. Our goal is to provide you, the viewer, with information, breaking information about events in Asia, Asia being anything, from Hawaii west to Pakistan, from the Russian Far East, south to Australia and New Zealand. We hope to see you every Monday afternoon at 5 p.m. But did you have a baby? We're back and we're live. I'm Winston Welch and we are live. This is out and about on Think Tech Live Streaming Network Series talking with Buffy Cushman-Pates, the school leader of CEEX, the school for examining essential questions of sustainability. So we have a very interesting charter school here that you started five years ago. You got 180 kids. It's grade six through eight. Right. You got about 15 teachers and have a very interesting approach to learning. You receive money from me, from the taxpayers, right? Yes, that's right. And it sounds like just not enough to really do what you need to do, but you make do with what you've got. And do you have other additional sources of funding? You have fundraisers. We do fundraising, yes. We do fundraising. We do grant writing. And those things help a lot, especially in terms of sort of visioning for the future or building a new project and new programs and systems. When you were looking at developing this school, what were your models? Is there some curriculum on the mainland or maybe in Finland or somewhere else? Yeah, there's good stuff happening all over the place, for sure. I did a year where I was something called an Einstein fellow. I got a really, in Washington, D.C., got exposure to a lot of different best practices in teaching, good teachers, and then national programs that were happening, also school programs in the D.C. area. The following year I spent a year in graduate school, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Again, lots of exposure visiting schools and kind of seeing who's doing what and just picked the pieces I loved and tried to put them all together into one school model. How long ago did you have this vision of starting a school like this? I mean, it's hard to know when a dream begins. I think I've been thinking about starting a school for 10 or 12 years, but I didn't really have the confidence or feel like I had the collection of pieces I needed, which is why I went to that school leadership program to try and make sure they had as much as I possibly could. You could never know everything, by all means. And what was your background right before you started the school? I was a teacher. Yes. This all was born from my passion for teaching, my passion for helping kids learn and be a part of the world in meaningful ways. It sounds like the school has that. So we have a sample of the weekly schedule that a student might look at here. So tell us what we're looking at here. What is this schedule? Sure. I'll talk you through it. So first, our teachers come a little earlier than our students, but you'll notice our student school day doesn't start till 8.30, which is a little later than most because we know a lot about teenage sleep patterns. Research tells us that teenagers don't wake up until later in the day. Yes. So we actually made this based on the idea of our school being both a middle and a high school someday. And we start with physical activity. So for the younger ones, it gives them a chance to sort of get their oogies out when they need to run around first thing in the day. And the older students, it allows them to wake up. We start with physical activity. We have advisory groups, which is small groups of students and teachers who really have just like a family approach every day. They greet each other. They do a sharing. And then they play together. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, their physical activity is something that's consistent for the quarter. They might choose to do yoga or gardening or soccer or ultimate frisbee. And those are physical activities where we have community volunteers come in and help lead those so that our teachers can co-participate with our students and everyone gets to be a learner together during that time. That's awesome. So you've got the students and the teachers taking yoga class together. Oh yeah. Yoga is popular. This year, we've had to have two yoga courses per... Tuesday, Thursday period. Or Tuesday, Thursday period. Yeah. Gardening is there's also a stream cleanup one happening this quarter. So the physical activity options change by the quarter and by who we have access to in terms of community volunteers. We have a lot of parents that come in and help. So I was going to ask you about volunteers. Yeah. So let's throw that in there right now. Sure. So you've got probably normal parents coming in to help with their kids. But you might have some yoga teachers or maybe something else, some gardeners coming in. Yes. And we have both of those things happening right now. But yeah, those are welcome. We also, you know, we have slacklining as an option this year. I don't even know what that is. Like imagine a low balancing thing. I think it's only a foot off the ground. It's not very high, but it's surprisingly difficult. Oh, yeah. Slacklining. Yes. So you've got your approach, I can just see to physical education is very different rather than everybody has to go out and pretend to catch the baseball or whatever that does not suit them. And so we don't, we even don't call it physical education. We call it physical activity. The purpose of it is just to wake your brain up. Open doors, doing physical things, engaging different parts of your brain. That's the purpose of it is to engage your brain differently because then you've got blood flowing through your brain that really there's research that tells us about this. There is a running group. You know, there's the opportunity there's football, there's things for the different kinds of students and they get to choose. That's so great. So and, you know, when you're talking about questions sustainability, you've got, you've got a river that flows right into your brain when you're picking up trash and, Debrea, you're learning a lesson like, how does this stuff get in here? I'm sure they take it right back to the classroom. Speaking of that, how aware are your kids of stuff that's going on in the news? Are they? A lot. They're very, well, I think so, but can I, can I finish telling you about our schedule because I only got so far and it kind of helps answer your questions. Okay, so we did, we did some physical activity. We start with physical activity. We start with things that students are learning in other schools. They have every student as a math class, an English class, a social studies, a science. All of our students also have an arts class and all of our students have an elective option. So electives might range from language lab to, I think we call it school tools, you know, more like a study hall to attitude of gratitude is one of our classes where students, it's a visual arts approach. It's a hands on visual arts approach where they're trying to make things that express gratitude. Anyway, electives are cool. Arts classes are cool. We're both performing arts and visual arts. But our more standard traditional subjects, English, math, science, social studies, those are also really quite rigorous based on common core standards again. And our teachers are really passionate about those subjects. That's what I look for first and foremost in hiring teachers. People that are really passionate about their subject. You asked me what I did before. I was a, middle school math and high school science teacher and there is honestly not much I like more in the world better than helping students learn math, especially middle school students. And I really think that math is incredibly useful and powerful and I want to hire other people that feel that way about their subjects. Okay. So take a math class. How might you, how might the Sikh school approach differently then? We do investigations.  In our class, we try and, in our classes, we do investigations to help students understand why you do something. And so they build their own understanding usually through manipulatives and through sorting things out. Lots of group work, lots of projects and then in a way kind of develop the algorithms themselves, test it and then they practice it. And so it's really understanding of the reasons behind the math based on a real-world context. So it's not, you know, back when we did math, it was, here's how you do it, here's a bunch of easy problems that get harder, and then here's some word problems, right? We approach it starting with the word problem, you might say, whereas here's the real-world application. Let's use this to help us understand why and how and then practice that. Would you say that when the kids are in a math class, for example, and we check it out and take it home and like you said, we start with easy things. I always said, see Dick and Jane, see spots, see Dick and Jane run and then suddenly you're reading like theses in your graduate school and you think, we were tricked at the beginning, but if you learn from the beginning, this is how you're going to use it. It's very useful. Do the kids learn from each other more? Do they learn from the teacher more? Do they learn from themselves more? Or is it just about all of the above on, you know, so for in math, for example, the teacher is a content expert and sometimes you just need to say, how do I do this? Help me with that. Well, in our EQS block, which we haven't gotten to really, but the end of the day project based block, that is everyone co-learning. Nobody knows all the stuff there is to know about sustainability. So they're learning from each other as much as they are from anyone else. Tell us about the EQS blocks because you've got four of them in a week. That's right. Four of the five are examining essential questions of sustainability. So the end of the day students, 60 students, five teachers all working together to examine an essential question of sustainability. I gave you some examples at the beginning of the program, but they examine for a whole year in the beginning it's students kind of getting exposure to the various content disciplines and how you might apply those things in a project so there's like a mini math project, second phase we call it, so the rest of first semester teachers have designed a project related to the essential question of sustainability that all the students work through together and in that project they incorporate English, math, science, history and arts because they have all those teacher content experts working together to help design it and then in third and second semester phase three we call it which is what our students are now they've already done a project they've learned a lot of content related to the essential question of sustainability so now our students are designing their own projects so for example one of the how do we care for Ahupua'a what they did for their project that the teachers led them through is that all of the students work together to create a coffee table book based on the humans of New York so they interviewed lots of people wait this is actually how do we learn from the past every student did a humans of New York style interview with someone in our Kaimuki area and then they presented those at our exhibitions of learning so all EQS's end with exhibitions of learning and now students are building off of what they learned from all of those interviews and all those community members and they're designing their own projects it sounds like a really interesting way for students to become engaged interested with a lot of support from other like-minded students really supportive learning environment for teachers in a real world environment where they can come out and bring in whatever's outside in and sounds like just a fantastic learning environment where do we go to find more information on this Seeks.org you can learn a lot about us at Seeks.org SEQS.org we do have our students have public exhibitions at the end of each semester so that's a great idea and when would that be I believe coming up on May 7th May 7th okay so it'll be on our website Seeks.org SEQS so well as always we this goes by so fast we couldn't cover nearly enough of what I wanted to talk about as always but I really appreciate you coming down at least giving us a basic idea of what Seeks is and so people can go out to Seeks.org to find out some more information about the school we are out of time and have to wrap it up I am Winston Welton this is out and about on Think Tech Live streaming network series and it has been our delight to talk with Buffy Cushman-Pates school leader of Seeks the school for examining essential questions of sustainability found at SeeksSEQS.org thank you for tuning in we welcome your feedback thanks to our broadcast engineer Ian Davidson our technical producer Ray Sangelang our floor manager Robert McLean and our intern floor manager Brianna Vives and to Jay Fidel our executive producer who puts it all together I'll see you here every other Monday at 3pm for more on Out and About Think Tech Hawaii Aloha everyone


So we got this question from our buddy Josiah and he says I've been trying to have a wild lucid lucid dream awake in juiced lucid dream But I can't seem to get it. Do you have any tips or tricks for the routine to use before you? attempt to awaken juice lucid dream and this is a great question because this is a Technique which I probably wouldn't recommend to beginners and there's a very good reason for that When you first start lucid dreaming You tend to be concerned with the results and you tend to sort of put pressure on yourself and think I have to lose a dream tonight I have to get this This technique right before I go to sleep Otherwise something bad will happen, you know that you put pressure on yourself Whereas when you're first starting out, it's important to get the groundwork done and to do the reality checks every day and do your dream diaries and Lay the foundation if you will before trying to do a technique an induction technique which May or may not work on any given night So I think instead of trying to have a waking juice lucid dream I'm I would suggest that instead you Don't try and lucid dream on any one particular night Because then you're gonna be again You're gonna be putting that pressure on yourself to have a lucid dream tonight when you probably won't Ironically you won't because you're putting the pressure on yourself So what I would suggest to do is just do your reality text every day Maybe every hour or so keep your dream diary going every morning right Whatever you can remember of your normal dreams or your lucid dreams if whatever the case may be and Then when you've done that for a few weeks Then maybe look at a technique And a technique I would probably suggest is a wake-back-to-bed technique which I'll briefly describe it for you now But there are other videos showing you how to do this basically you set your alarm for two hours before when you would normally wake up in the morning So if you would normally wake up at eight you will set your alarm for six Wake up at this time turn your alarm off look around you do a reality check, you know we've talked about this in other videos and then Just go back to sleep But as you're going back to sleep keep your mind awake So it's almost like you're doing waking juice lucid dream But because you're doing it at that time in the morning Near your REM sleep your rapid eye movement a lucid dream is much more likely So you can either try that now and you may have some success with that or you can Lay the foundation and just keep practicing without any pressure to have a lucid dream in any one particular night So I hope this answers your question Josiah if you have any questions, please send them into the YouTube channel Or you can go to my website house of lucid calm. There's an email sign up form on the very first page Sign up there and then you can email me through that. Thank you for watching


The Johnson Central Golden Eagles are gearing up for another spectacular season as after they advance to the state football finals for the first time ever in school history. The Eagles return multiple starters as they look for experience to help lead them this season as we go in the huddle. In the Huddle is brought to you by A-plus Rintles. We'll be remembered for as long as there's a Johnson Central High School. You guys have done something that nobody else in school history has done. No one else has done. Last season Johnson Central made it to Bowling Green for the first time ever for the Class 4A State Football Championship, but after falling to Southworn 36-6, it left the Golden Eagles wanting more as they look to make another run for Bowling Green this season. Amado is kind of stay hungry and stay humble. That's kind of how we're telling our kids, you know, last year was the greatest season overall in the history of our school, but you know, we really like to take that one step and bring another state championship to the mountains. Really you can't expect anything less than, you know, last year we made it there and got the experience and, you know, kind of got the jitters out and this year you can't expect any less but to win it, I mean, runner-ups really not acceptable anymore now that we're there. I mean, it's a state championship, you know, we had to improve on last year and last year we made it to the state championship game, we came up short. This should be one winner thing, that's the only improvement we can make and we want to do it. The Golden Eagles have much more than winning a state football championship on their mind. They also have the memory of former teammate Luke Cottle who passed away tragically just a few short months ago. The freshman quarterback was in line to lead the Eagles this season, but instead the Eagles will lead the way for him as they look to win for Luke.  Luke Cottle, we're going to try to play this season for him. The thing about him is, you know, it makes our team just work harder and play a lot harder. Luke Cottle, he's one of my best friends. We hung out every weekend pretty much, you know, his sister's still my good friend. We hang out all the time still, but we'll miss Luke, you know, he's, he's just a great kid in January.  He made us laugh. Kept us loose. I just, this was for him as well. Hey, it's not just for the community. He, we need to do this for him as well. Reporting in Johnson County for EKV Sports, I'm Mikaela Colley. The Golden Eagles open up the season with three home games out of the gate. First up next Friday, August 26th, Johnson Center will host the number one pre-season ranked capital West Virginia. And then on September 2nd they will host Lexington Catholic and wrapping up the first of their three home games, South Charleston, West Virginia. For a full look at all of our in the huddle previews, you can tune to EKBTV.com.


Hi, guys. Thank you. So hi, I'm McKaylin. My background is in particle astrophysics, and so I am mostly self-taught. As far as Python goes, I did both of my these Cs, these i, and C++. But starting off in undergrad, I did a lot of analyzing my data and visualizing my data in Python. Just really fell in love with Python. And then after my master's or second master's, I decided to start teaching. So I'm the founder of AstroTutors. I know the yes is confusing. There's only one of me. But yeah, so I started off by realizing that there's a lot of companies that want to teach young children, a lot of parents who want their young children to start teaching. And I sort of realized that a lot of pedagogical materials is a bit too much. It's a bit over their head. And I wanted to figure out a way to teach them. So I ended up writing my own curriculum and sort of discovering a few things along the way. So as far as it when it comes to what works, there were some things that really concerned me about the attitude as far as how we should teach children when we should start teaching them. One of the things that I got was that we should start as early as possible because it's like learning a language. We're going to talk about that. How is it like learning a language? How is it not like learning a language? Other marketing aimed at convincing parents to put their kids into coding classes ASAP, even though it might be inappropriate for them at that time. Then something I like to call parental-induced Dunning-Kruger effect. I get a lot of students who show up. And because they've gone through some tutorials online, they think they know Python already and they're like eight years old. And it's like, OK, let's go back and see if you know what a wild loop is, stuff like that.  It affects how coachable they really are. They're more closed-minded. They don't want to start with the basics, and it's very difficult to teach them from there. Parents who really want to believe that their kid actually learned anything, and they really want their kids to be doing these super advanced things that they're not ready for. So the parent gets annoyed with me when I go back to the basics. They're like, oh, that's too easy for them. Why are you wasting their time, stuff like that. And then just children, generally the same children, that parent leaves the room. And all of a sudden they're like, I don't understand. And that's the worst thing because they've not been saying, I don't get it when they really needed to be. So it's really important to me to create a really understanding environment, and when parents ask me to work with their kids, I'm very honest about my approach. And sometimes they'll say, they're just not ready, and that's OK, which makes me less money, and I do enjoy eating, but ethics. Then there's just a necessary screen time.  Just get outside.  By the way, I've given this talk twice now. The jokes are all the same if you've seen me before. So let's start with what doesn't work, because positivity, right? So forcing kids into coding classes, they are not interested in. They show up, they don't participate, they don't absorb anything. It's not helping anyone. Pushing kids to do projects, and also they might just get a really bad taste. In their mouth, they'll say, this is boring, and I don't get it. Coding is hard, and not for me. That's not helpful. So you want to wait until they're excited. Pushing kids to do projects they just simply aren't ready for. People get really overzealous about the sort of things that they think their kid can do. They follow tutorials online, and they assume they totally understood what they did. It's really doubtful. And then just a linear path that assumes they'll remember literally anything. So it's really important to be OK with repetition, to put in cheap tests to see if they can really do something on their own, if they can explain it back to you. A lot of people in a lot of boot camps and camps that I've seen that work with kids, they just sort of zoom through the whole curriculum, and then it's like, oh, we did that last week, though we're not going over that again. So it's really important to keep bringing it up again. And then just removing the play from learning. So I think it's really one of the biggest challenges for me is finding ways to present new things in ways that really engages them and is fun and is interesting. Because the last thing we want is this sort of situation where we have kids and the parents send them to me and say, all right, my kids eight years old, it's about time they get a job. Make them a software engineer. It's just not going to work out. So the big problem is that we're fixated on teaching children to code, but I'd argue we're asking most of them to run before they can walk. I get a lot of kids who can hardly read and their parents really want them to code. So literacy is really important. Mathematical background. Do you know what a variable is in math? That's really helpful for us. Typing skills. A lot of my kids, they come to me, they can get the concepts, but they're so frustrated because they don't know where a colon is. And it just takes them so long to type what they want to type. So I put them on home keys and doing practice, like typing exercises and everything. And then creating inquisitive minds who aren't afraid to not know something. A lot of times they've done some tutorials, they come in and the expectation from the parent is generally, oh, they understood what we did and they should already know how to do that. And I just want to create students who are excited when they don't know something and it's an opportunity to ask questions, it's an opportunity to learn new things. And then just being able to work with others. So if you're sure you can do everything by yourself, then it's really tricky when you have to go out into the workforce. So now we're wondering how do children learn? How can we actually create a curriculum that is actually beneficial to them? And I have to say it's okay to start with observing. This is how babies learn, this is how people learn. And it's okay to spoon feed them. So I remember when I was doing my masters, I asked a question to my professor and I just wanted to know something basic, something fundamental to help me understand a larger concept. And he said, yeah, I don't just give people the answer like that. And it really put me off because I didn't understand something and I think that if you can sort of give people some hints and some information, they will learn, eventually they have to be able to do it on their own, but it's great to have some examples. So what I like to say is I like to keep frustration less than or equal to their frustration tolerance. Frustration tolerance usually changes with the person's age. So the older you get, the more developed your prefrontal cortex is, the more you're able to do more frustrating things and spend longer time with harder problems. And this is also why I think it's really great to work with neurodivergent students who sometimes really struggle with frustration tolerance. This can be a really big issue and so we find longer and longer and longer, they're able to sit with a problem and debug it. So it's really interesting and seeing how it maybe helps them. Not that I'm making any claims, but I think that they enjoy it at least and find it helpful. So I really think that observing should be the first part. I do a lot of examples the first day and I just ask them questions. What do you think will happen if I do this? What do you think will happen if I do this? And then they sort of get the idea and they get really excited and they start typing it out themselves to doing mimicry. I do this, you do this. I do this, you do this. And they start learning that way as well. And then they start to explore. So they start asking the questions. Well, what happens if you do this? What happens if you make that for loop run 100 times? They're always obsessed with 100 times, 1000 times. They really wanna see that. But random play is absolutely essential. I like to, if you guys have Netflix, there's a series called Babies and there's actually this person who studies. He has these really creepy baby bots and one of them he gives a lot of instructions and restrictions to. And the other group, he lets them just randomly play and the group of baby bots that randomly play with the toy learn how to actually effectively play with the toy a lot quicker. And he was talking, it's really interesting about how children learn and how that sort of juxtaposes that. So I thought that was really interesting. But just letting them ask why and what if a million times? If you don't have the patience for that, by the way, probably don't try teaching your kids yourself because I sit there all day answering the same questions over and over again, but I'm just really good at repetition. It's okay. But doing things that stimulate their senses and you might be wondering what can we do that can really stimulate their senses? Because there's no smells or tastes or anything. And I have some ideas later. But one of the things that I do use is turtle. I think turtle is a great pedagogical tool. It's also just a great tool for children to play around and make their own codes and really have a lot of fun. So here I like to explain the concept of a for loop with actually showing a turtle doing an action over and over again for each of these different colors. It changes color, moves forward 100 and then turns left. We generally start with a square and they are always really fascinated by this. So I asked them to add in more colors, change the degrees that it's turning, how far forward is it going and they play around with it and actually visually see how the for loop works and this is really fun. But feeling safe, encouraged and having adults who are excited about what they're learning is absolutely essential. So what about adult learners? Just take a bit of a tangent. I also get a lot of people who really wanna switch what field they're in. They come to me, they say I'm a historian and I want to learn how to be a data analyst. So what's really helpful is that they actually like math. So a lot of them, they've read something online being like you don't have to know math to learn programming but if you wanna be a data analyst you should probably like math. But otherwise, I pretty much use a similar system for teaching adults coming in from a non-technical background but they do seem to learn a bit faster. It's more of a curve. So depending on age, if you're at a certain age where perhaps computer literacy wasn't really something you grew up with then it can be really challenging. But yeah, so a lot of adult materials are just far too frustrating up front which is why I've sort of just scaled back and I'm like well this worked really well with the kids and I tried it out on the adults. They get through it a lot quicker but they tell me they're like oh I did this boot camp and I didn't get any of it and the way this explains it it just makes so much more sense. We just like I call it sort of a gentle introduction to programming. And I also take a bit more guidance from their professional goals, of course. One of the things I forgot to mention as far as frustration tolerance, I do this with the adults, I also do this with the kids. When we first start out I noticed that a lot of curriculums say here's how we set up your system on your computer and download Python and install Python and everything. I put that till after we get through the curriculum at least once because we sort of do it in a spiral and I just start with Google full lab and we just get coding the first day because if your first hour of programming is I can't get like Jupyter Notebook to work then they get really put off so that's sort of my method and I do that with the adults as well. So then we get to this question because I said in the first slide, parents come to me and they're really worried, they're like oh my six year old needs to start learning Python because it's like a language. But is it really? And the short answer is no, but yeah. There are some similarities. So syntax, grammar, syntax is like grammar and then communicating what you want to do, so communication in general, learning important vocabulary of Python of course and then of course you have different levels of fluency. So I'm fluent in French but maybe at like a B2 level it's not gonna be as easy for me to communicate what I want to do in French as a C2 native speaker and it's very similar in Python how long have you been coding in Python and what can you do and how comfortable are you with it? And then of course the learning mindset required, I think that being a language learner makes you a better learner in general. So mistakes are a part of the process doing embarrassing things in your second language is going to happen, making an infinite loop is going to happen in Python, it's all right. But the differences are stark. So pruning is something that we really worry about when we start to learn a language.  So learning another language as a very young child, growing up in a bilingual household is really helpful in that sense. The phonemes being the sounds that you make in a different language that you generally can't hear once you've pruned them. It doesn't just compute with you. Reading code also does activate the general purpose brain network, I'm no specialist in this, but essentially that is not the language processing center, the brain is what you need to know from this. So this multiple demand network is involved in complex cognitive tasks, such as things like crossword puzzles, math problems, anything really difficult is activated by this network and it's not activated with language. Coding and reading code actually activate other centers, not activated by math problems though, so that's really interesting. It's sort of its own thing. We don't have a code center of our brain yet, but maybe thousands of years from now we'll evolve to do that, but it is genuinely its own sort of thing in the brain activating a specific set of areas. But once learned, programming doesn't really seem to rely on the language regions, which is really interesting and unique. Oh no, stop that. So what about while learning? Language learning aptitude tests have a stronger correlation than math with gaining proficiency, but essentially if you can read really well, you can read a textbook, you can read some articles and pick up on stuff, so the study linked here, if you're interested, did show that the biggest indicator of an aptitude to learn how to code was actually if a student scored high on a language aptitude test. Interestingly enough, I think a lot of physics graduate departments are starting to lean more on the reading test in the graduate records examinations than the math test itself, because it seems that students who score higher in the verbal section tended to finish their PhDs at a higher rate, so that was really interesting. So being very literate and good at language does seem to help us learn to code, but how we teach languages effectively may guide how we should teach programming, so integrate it into every day-to-day life, involve play, move away from rote memorization. Anybody who speaks a language that is maybe dying out who has to deal with a lot of efforts in the school to sort of keep it alive, they tend to go for this rote memorization technique and students tend to hate that language, so it's not very helpful, so this is also an issue in the language learning community. How do we make languages exciting and keep kids interested? Raising your kid in a bilingual environment may create better programmers as well. Bilingual students tend to have higher language learning aptitude, better focus, increased cognitive flexibility, so they can code switch, go back and forth between their two languages, and it's correlated with mathematical ability as well, so that's very interesting. So on the same sort of line of thought, should we teach kids to code only in the English language? And living in France, I've realized most of the programs that teach people to code are in English, and so it creates this extra layer of difficulty that the concepts, the curriculum, they aren't explained in French, and that's just really, really difficult for them, so it seems that if we had more pedagogical materials in other languages, we'd have more accessibility, and then also it leads this question in this sort of English-centric environment, is it really the best language to be discussing programming in? Would we benefit from diversifying how we can sort of discuss things in different languages and everything, and I'm really interested, if somebody speaks a different language, how they would talk about a programming concept. Could code switching help describe concepts in more thorough ways? So overall, the exact wording you use makes a huge difference, and this sort of language that you're working in affecting how you think, when I started learning French, I was like, yeah, yeah, whatever, when I started learning a language that was very different from my own native language, I realized how truly impactful this is, so an example would be with meetability. This gives my students a lot of trouble understanding that something can be one thing, and then later it can change. It's really difficult for them. They seem to be confused, like, what is declaration, what's a variable even? So they'll just think equal is like to do something in the code, not to declare a variable, and then you can reference that later. And then they'll think, oh, it's a word, so I should put quotation marks around it, no, no. So it's really confusing. There's a lot of different mistakes that I see over and over. These are two that I see every single day. So it takes a lot of different ways of explaining it for students to really understand what's going on, but meetability is actually built into the structure of certain languages much, much better than it is in English. So I like to use the example of Irish, which is one of my other languages that I'm learning. In Irish, you don't say I am sorry. So in English, we literally say I am sorry, which is like you are sorry-ness itself, which is actually very bizarre, but we just infer being native English speakers what we actually mean. In Irish, you say, ta bron orm, sad is on me, technically is sad on me, but you use on me, meaning I am not always sad, it is on me now, it might be off me later. And ta, which is one of the two ways to say is, so is mishe m'kelin, my name is m'kelin, I am m'kelin, but ta shifur, it's cold outside because it could be cold later. That's a massive simplification, but you can see just how flexible certain languages are that English doesn't quite have. Now I'm not saying it's an ideal language to code in because they have no words for yes or no. It depends on the context of the question, but you can see it's really important that we learn to talk about languages in ways that people who speak a different language understand, code.org, for instance, has a lot of curricula translated and I'm working on translating my curriculum as well. Actually, Leila who is here is helping me do it in French right now. So what can you do at home? All right, I'm almost done. What can you do at home? You could provide puzzles, use real life situations to explain things. So you're making some cupcakes, maybe you say, while I have a batter in this bowl, I can keep filling this cupcake tin or while I have batter in this bowl, I keep filling this cupcake tin or for each sort of space in the cupcake tin, I wanna put this much batter in it over and over. And then I like to say, allow students to follow their own interests. So do things that stimulate their brain, it doesn't have to be programming. I think that people should sort of, let students come to it when they're ready. So music, languages, art, science, math are all great for development, it doesn't have to be coding. So when are they ready? When they show genuine interest, when they actually want to. When they start asking a lot of what if questions and try things if you show them simple code. When they're ready to work on their typing or are already okay at typing. So math background really helps. And I say like nine years old is all right. I will go sort of as low as eight. I really dislike it when I contract with other companies and they stick a six year old in my class. But I prefer over the age of 10. And I also use a spiral method if you're wondering about my curriculum, I'm sorry. So we use a lot of demos, ask a lot of what if questions, do a lot of guided many projects. And then we review and essentially we get through the curricula about three times but each time it's quite a bit harder. And this is how we go through it. So we focus on logic, problem solving, self motivation, developing confidence and being able to find the answers, good commenting, I once got a code that said this should be self-explanatory and that was the only comment. That does not happen in my class. So readable code with cynical variable names. And these are some of the examples that we do. So we make some code cake, we make a random story, choose your own adventure game is my favorite and then we have a turtle racing game that we play with a random module. So thank you. Thank you very much. So if you have any question, kindly move to the microphone and should gladly answer. Thank you. Hey, great talk. Thank you. I've been teaching my daughter to culture six years old. Picking up in quite well, but suppose it's a different situation being my kid understand a bit better than perhaps you might your students. I was just wondering like when it comes like frequency of teaching young children, what do you think is probably best there? Like, you know, every week or every day? Like ideally do it every day but you don't want to take away from other activities, so. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a lot like if you put your kid in music lessons, how often would you practice piano or something? My mom's a piano teacher and so I grew up from the age of three learning piano. And you know, short bursts hopefully almost daily, like six days a week, I think is a lot better than sitting them down for, you know, an hour once a week for sure. I do get students who come to me only once a week for an hour and they do much better if we do two hours spread over the week in two to three sessions. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Thanks. Let's say I want to teach a small group of children from the start and it's a voluntary group. Should I allow the parents to be present? Yeah, that's a really good question. Last time I gave this talk it was like 30 minutes and then like five minutes for questions. So I had to like zoom through this. So thank you for asking that. People who they're programmers themselves, now this really depends, but I've noticed that the kids whose parents are software engineers will sort of sit there and start being sort of, I don't know if that's what they should be doing, which is so unhelpful to me because the kid starts questioning even doing the problem, much less thinking about the problem. But my students who do the best in the individual ones definitely have a parent who is super excited to be learning alongside them or is super excited for the kid to be learning and saying, oh, isn't that cool? Oh, well, what if you, and they're really engaged as well. It's lovely if that's sort of your attitude as well if you want to sit in, but if you're, it just depends on the parent. If you're more of a control freak, go get a coffee, it's all right. Did that answer your question? So how do we think about the scratch versus Python? So children start from the scratch, that is another language. Oh, scratch, you know, I've had a few students come in with scratch and they seem to really enjoy it and they start a bit younger with that and I think it's great. I can't really speak to learning scratch, but I definitely think that it's a great pedagogical tool. Thank you for your talk. At one point I think you mentioned that you also teach adults. I teach what? Adults. Yeah, adults. Grownups. Adults, yeah. Yeah. I have a bit of a... Yeah, so I wanted to ask about that. I also teach students at a university who have no technical background and what I kind of struggle with is teaching them algorithmic thinking. So not the language itself, but the way of thinking as a programmer. So I'm just wondering do you have any tips or tricks in this regard? Yeah.  I'll tell you the truth. I also teach GMAT, which has a critical reasoning section where they sort of have to do something like is that flawed thinking or would that actually sort of get to where you want to go, if you will? And it is one of the hardest things to teach somebody because so much of it is, are they an analytical, logical thinker? And it really helps if that's sort of where they're coming from. But as many real-world examples as you can possibly, I go until they tell me, okay, I get it, stop. So here's an example. All right, so here's another example. Here's another example. And when they look at me with that glazed-over look of, yeah, we get it, and then we're done. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


We have a life purpose They told me that I had the breast cancer after my mammograms are coming back healthy So you didn't do any kind of self-exam or anything like that that gave you any idea. What did you have any pain? No, it's none of that. No, nothing. It was just you just had a feeling


Nasdaq is going into custody or crypto custody launched by the end of the second quarter So you're looking at around June of this year and when I first saw this I'm like great You know, this is fantastic, but I just want to make make this very clear This is just custody. They're not gonna allow any trading that I know of it's not gonna be listed anywhere It's just about custody service. But again, once you start with custody service, what's the inevitable next step? I think you know what that is You