Episode 289: Matt Karabinos

Episode 289 Balancing Technology and Human Intelligence with Matthew Karabinos

[00:00:30] Fonz: Hello everybody. And welcome to another great episode of my ed tech life. Thank you so much for joining us on this wonderful day and wherever it is that you're joining us from around the world.

Thank you as always for all of your support. We appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows. Thank you so much to our new subscribers on YouTube. We really appreciate you engaging with our content. As we are on LinkedIn. We are on Twitter slash eggs. We're on Instagram on Tik TOK. So again, thank you so much for just engaging with us.

With the wonderful content and also connecting with our amazing guests as well as I really appreciate guests reaching out to me and letting me know like, Hey, I've got a lot more followers or, I'm definitely interacting with a lot more people and that's what it's all about guys. We definitely want to amplify your voices and your work.

As well. And I am really excited about today because today I get to have just this amazing educator that I have probably been following for almost a year or so, and just getting to know him more, getting to see his growth in the education space, getting to hear his perspectives, his knowledge, his experience, and that's what we're going to do today.

We're going to definitely amplify his voice. So I would love to welcome to the show. Matt Carabino's Matt. How are you?

[00:01:49] Matt: Oh, I'm great. Fonz. Thanks for having me. I'm like, I'm giddy. I'm fanboying over here. So I'm really excited to be here today.

[00:01:56] Fonz: No, Hey, likewise. The feeling is mutual. Like I said, I reached out to you on LinkedIn and it was so cool.

And it was just like that, that gift from, stepbrothers. Like, do we just become best friends? And just this conversation prior to this real conversation was we're going to go do karate

[00:02:14] Matt: in the garage. Yeah.

[00:02:15] Fonz: Yes, exactly. So I love it. And I'm just thankful for you to be here today, because like I said, being a longtime follower and being able to interact back and forth on LinkedIn and messaging each other, I mean, we've gotten to that level of friendship and really getting to know one another and growing together in this space.

And of course, learning from each other's perspectives, which is wonderful to that fine balance. So we definitely are going to get into that also as well. but before we get into the show for all our audience members that are not familiar with your work yet, but after today they will be, can you give us a little brief introduction and what your context in the education space is?

[00:02:56] Matt: Sure. I am a sixth grade teacher. In central Pennsylvania, a very rural school district. I teach English Language Arts and Science, which is a unique combination, but that pretty much describes me as unique, so it works for me. I've been doing that in the public school for, this will be my third year in a public school, and I taught for, Five years at a private school before that.

My journey to education is a very long and convoluted one. I graduated in 2010 with my master's degree. I was one of those people who went to school right after the bachelors was done and I went straight and got a master's. I went to the University of Pittsburgh representing my pit Panthers there.

So, and then I pretty much moved all over Pennsylvania trying to find teaching jobs. But for those of us that are old enough to remember, those were rough times for teaching jobs right after the great recession. And right after, there was a big round of layoffs in the city of Pittsburgh.

So around the time of the great recession and thereafter the city of Pittsburgh, the public school system in Pittsburgh laid off over 500 teachers.

And at the time I didn't know what that meant. What that meant was, where I wanted to teach, which was where I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, all those teachers were just going to spread out and take all those jobs. I will never forget. I applied for jobs where there were 5000 applicants for two jobs.

So really, really competitive. I moved out to kind of eastern central Pennsylvania at that point. And again, instead of 5, 000, it was about 500 applicants, but still very large pool of people there. So I actually worked in the oil field for a long time. Which, is, is very big in Texas. Never actually got to go to Texas.

The closest I got was getting to go to Oklahoma for a training in the oil fields. That was as close as I got to go, but met a ton of people from Texas. So I had conversations with people from Texas like every week. So that was my life for like three years. So very outside the box, something completely unrelated to teaching.

And slowly, but surely started making my way back to teaching. I always kept teaching on the back burner, but really for that period of time, it was what could I do to pay the bills? And what could I do to, get health care? Cause I had just gotten married in 2015. So it was all about like, how are we going to survive?

So it's kind of. That's the kind of journey that I've been on. And I'm very blessed and lucky to be where I'm at now and have this teaching job that I have, I get to work with some amazing students and I get to do all this fun stuff and all the AI stuff that we're probably going to talk a lot about today.

That's just like me playing around in my free time. Like I literally spent all summer last year, just. I signed up for every single app that was available, you know Literally, I would get you know, Hey, there's a new sign up Like I am scared right now to look at my google account to see actually how much I've signed up for it is probably going to be terrified.

But that's what I did. I dove headfirst really hard. and then of course, like, listening to podcasts like yours, joining LinkedIn since I joined LinkedIn, like really, that is a. Oh, my gosh, it's a treasure trove of information. I literally go on there. It's like micro learning all the time.

And every time I go on to LinkedIn, I learned something. Even if I'm on there for like five seconds, I learned something from such amazing people that have amazing thought provoking, posts, articles. Like my sub stack now is starting to turn into what my Google account looks like. It's just like, pile after like literally the stacks.

It's not even sub stack. It's like huge stack now. So that's what is happening now. but, that's what I do. I become a little bit obsessed with things and I go at them. I've made it to the point now where. I actually have gotten to do some training. I got to do my first official training last week, which was really, really fun and exciting.

And it was the first one like it in this area where we talked about AI. And I just heard, like, literally right before I sat down here with you, my wife told me that, my wife's a lawyer, so a lawyer friend of hers told her that another school district that's not that far away from mine is adopting an AI policy or guidance.

They're, doing some sort of guidance for their school. They will be one of the first schools in this area to do it. They are also a very rural school district. So that is super exciting news to hear that it's finally starting to take hold and schools are starting to say like, okay, we need to do something about this.

So I've dipped my toes into that arena now of kind of being a person to talk about all the experiences I've had, kind of like I'm going to do here with you today and just share that knowledge that I've gained. So it's, it's really, I'm really excited for the future because I think like this next year, this upcoming school year, and then the year after that are going to be just like, It's going to be like the crazy AI rapid evolution, but it's going to be for the education realm.

I really think it's going to be like that. And I'm, I'm really excited for that. So that's my journey. Hey, like everything I do, I talk a lot, so I apologize, but that's me. I tell long winded stories, but I got to give you all the context here to. Wrap your head around.

[00:08:33] Fonz: No apologies needed, my friend.

It's wonderful to hear your story and just a little bit of your background. And of course, the oil field thing is very new to me too, as well. That's great. So that's what I love about this show. you bring in a guest and you learn something new that you never even thought of, like you said, just really outside the box from teaching, but at the same time, coming back to teaching.

And then of course. Dipping your toes and what we're going to be talking about today. So Matt, November, 2022, tell me what happened. November, 2022. I know we got into some deets right now, with you signing up with everything, but first impression, November, 2022. Let me, let me have it.

What happened here?

[00:09:11] Matt: So listen, this is going to shock you and the people who know me on LinkedIn, this will shock them as well. November, 2022. I did nothing. I said, Oh, there's this thing called chat GPT. That sounds interesting. My first initial reaction was cool. We've started Skynet.

That was my wife saying too, like, Oh, we've started Skynet. Great. And then I started to see videos, my, my friend, this was fun. I didn't even have Tik TOK at this time. Right? So I didn't have Tik TOK. I wasn't active on LinkedIn. I was a very passive social media user. My friends in a group chat, they kept sending tech talks and I literally would open and watch them in a browser.

I was like, I'm not downloading this app. I don't need to waste any more time in my day, and again, people who know me, they're going to be like, yeah, okay, look at what you do now, so times change May, I actually went back and found this Fonz. This was great for my training. I found my very first conversation with chat in the archives, May 10th, 2023. So I didn't touch it. I didn't sign up for it. I didn't touch it until May of 2023. So that's going to shock. A lot of people is that, I did not jump in right away. I was scared. I was hesitant. I was like, what's it doing with the stuff that I say, what's it doing with the things that people put in there?

And then you hear all the, like the hallucination stories and all that stuff. And I think by that time in may, if I'm not mistaken, I think that like 3. 5 had come out and so that started to kind of change the game a little bit. may 10, 2023. found that like, it's so funny.

It's so terrible. I was like, I, it was the end of the year. It was after our state tests were over. And I didn't have enough grades in the gradebook because I'm one of those teachers that feels really bad about giving the kids a lot of work to do during test time. but we also have like a sort of unwritten rule requirement for like, you have to have X number of grades in the gradebook.

So I definitely did not meet that requirement. So I was like, Oh, no, like, we need to fix this now. What do I do? I got the kids reading silently for right now, but that is not going to last forever. Okay, let's try it. people are saying it's amazing. Let's try it. What are we learning about right now?

Okay, we're learning about prepositions. Can I have a 10 question quiz on prepositions for 6th grade students? Like, 10 seconds, I had a quiz. And I'm reading through and I'm like, I mean, this is kind of easy, but I was like, that's okay. I mean, it's okay. Well, we're going to be nice to the kids. So it's, it's grammar.

We're going to be nice. So I was like, you know what, we're not even going to print this out. I put it up on my smart board. I passed out sticky notes to all the kids. And I said, just write down the letter of your answer. And it made it even easier because it only gave them three answer choices.

it was ABC and I was like, just write ABC, whichever one you want. And I literally went through and as the kids completed it, I was like, Boom, boom, boom, done. And I was like, there we go. In the grade book. Done. Cool. That was it. But then literally the thought that happened right there.

Was it did that incredibly easily. I wonder what else it can do. And then rabbit hole just gone. I'm telling you from the end of the school year 2023. I mean, my wife will attest to this. she was like, please stop talking about AI. Like, can we have a conversation about literally anything else?

Can we talk about the weather? can we talk about concrete and how it's made? That would be better than talking about AI right now. So that was what I did all summer. I mean, literally I joined TikTok. I became more active on Instagram and Facebook. I started to see so many reels and so many TikToks that were teachers sharing AI stuff.

And here's the thing that sparked something, Fonz. When I started watching people's videos, and I started going, well, I already knew that. Or I've already done that and then I'm sitting there and I'm going, wait, why don't I just start sharing stuff that I do? Because these people are all doing the same thing and I've already done that.

This is not new to me. So then it started from there. I literally, I think it was a week or 2 ago. I had my first, like, on this day pop up in Tik TOK. So, I've been like, it's been a year. But again, that's how it started. I was amazed with what it could do in that time that it did it, how accurately it did it, and this is at the time when people were, you look back now and you go, Oh my God, that was accurate.

I mean, well, depends on the context of what you were asking it to do, but for me, it was pretty darn accurate, I was so enamored with what it could do that. I was like, I need to explore all the realms of what this can do. And so that's how that started for me. Literal rabbit hole. I literally, I'm still going down the rabbit hole now.

Like that's what I'm just, I just know a little bit more as I go down the rabbit. So that's the only difference is that I know a heck of a lot more than I did now. So that's how it all started. and like I said, I'm still on that journey. I'm still in the rabbit hole, so to speak.

[00:14:32] Fonz: There you go. I think that makes two of us, my friend. Cause also the same thing, very similar, just diving in and just learning, I'm one of those, like you said, very much like you described, it's like once I'm all in, I'm all in and in a very similar way, I had already had some experience with other apps prior to chat GPT.

There was some like called writer. And I think there was another one called Jarvis. And then of course doing a little bit of machine learning and things of that sort, but then it just blew up and I was like, Oh, okay, cool. And well, let's dive in. And then I did a research project on that. And then after that,

Things kind of changed and kind of seen very much. So like you, like listening to people learning and then, but then at the same time, I was like, well, let me read the terms of service on these things. And so on, because then of course, and we'll get into that conversation too. But, it was just something amazing where you're like, Oh my goodness, look at what this is going to do.

And of course the changes that are going to happen. And of course for educators, and we always, think about. Think, what can we do with this? Also, that's going to help enhance the learning more than anything, very similar to what you were doing, trying to get some ideas, like you said, Hey, and then all of a sudden you're seeing the potential that it has, and then you start diving in deeper.

And then of course we see, a myriad of apps that start popping up, and so on. And, now there's so many, and there's a few that have been very consistent and are continually growing and doing well,

, Now it's almost like every day there's a new app or a new platform, but there's some that have been very consistent and continuing to grow. And then there's others that are smaller that are trying to kind of gain some traction and so on and trying to kind of grow within the space.

[00:16:17] Fonz: And of course, it's all great to learn what each and every single one is doing. And because as, as As the models change and of course, you've got more updates. Now you've got all their LLMs, like we talked about, like Claude, Chad GPT, and then you've got so many others that are being released.

And so now it's just like so, so much information that we have that it's very important, like, educators like yourself that are out there that are using these tools. Testing it out and really just sharing what it is that you're doing, the potential that it has, and really just bringing those ideas to light and maybe even just questioning too, like, Hey, is this something that's really going to be useful?

Is this something that's going to withstand, through time? Or is this something that can easily just be replaced by something else? And for myself, like I said, from the very beginning, it's been always terms of service, data privacy, and just making sure that students are safe, and that's why I'm Overly cautious with student facing AI, but teacher facing AI being that you are adults and you can consent to those terms of services.

And hey, by all means, if there's something there that can help enhance some of that learning, even myself, and using it for little things like emails or, task that it can help me, complete in quicker way by all means. But it's just That student side where I'm still very cautious.

But, we'll talk a little bit about that now because I know, when I started seeing your stuff pop up and then of course you were starting to see my stuff too as well. And then of course, the content that I was sharing and I remember you reaching out to me a couple of times, and you and I just engaging in conversations.

But The thing is we were learning about this together. And that's one thing that I very much enjoyed that you would reach out to me, or I would reach out to you and say, Hey, have you thought about this? Or you'd reach out to me and say, Hey, there's this that I'm trying to do, but do you think that this is.

And it was great just engaging in that. And I think that was that moment where I was like, I think we just became really great friends. And here we are now, just engaging in each other's content and everything. So what have been some of the changes, from May 10th, 2023 to May 10th, 2024.

And up until now, what are some of the still upsides that you see? Maybe some of the things where you're a little bit more cautious about, and then some of the things where you're like, really like, man, like I'm really questioning this, or maybe struggling with, Reconciling this, so tell me a little bit about that.

[00:18:47] Matt: That's a loaded question.

 I would not like to give that question to my students. That's like a three or four part question there. That's a tough one. No. Okay. So some things that haven't really changed. So I still, I use AI almost every day. I use it for daily things.

You know what? It's funny. I mostly use it for like stupid, silly things. My wife and I'll have conversations and she'll be like, is that. Something that happens or I ask her because she's much smarter than I am. And I'm always like, is that like a real thing? Does that exist? Like, and she's like, I don't know.

And her go to is perplexity. So we, we like using perplexity for that because it's sites at sources. It's pretty much like, Google with AI, except. Not that I know of yet recommending glue on pizza, but not that I know of yet. I mean, it could do that, but you know, I, I use it every day and right now what I've really been trying to do the last couple of days, and I just made a LinkedIn post about this I've opened up a conversation, I think probably 15 to 20 times this summer at different points, trying to get different perspectives from different, GPTs and different, I have it act as different things of ways to change my pedagogy in my classroom, like how I deliver my lessons in my classroom.

I have to follow a curriculum at my district, but it's kind of boring. it has good content, but the recommendations for delivery of that content are not great. So I definitely wanted to try to do more like kind of project based learning style stuff. Feedback driven, I think, is what I posted on their feedback driven.

And That was from a TikTok friend. like, you talk about this interaction between people. I take chances. I will send direct messages, like on TikTok, you get up to three until the person responds. I'll send you all three. and same with LinkedIn, I'll send messages to everyone I can, and not everyone responds, but I've actually been shocked at the number of people who have responded to me.

and one of them, I'm going to shout him out. It's Mr. Rupp on TikTok. he makes really funny content. I had no idea of the kind of teacher, the level of teacher that he was. I had no idea what kind of teacher he was. then I realized in messaging with him and we shared numbers with each other. So we text each other now almost every day. he is doing something incredible in his district where he sent me a sample where the kids essentially have to prove their grade at the end of the semester.

So he does all his lessons and he gives them a thing and says, here's the standards or the, goals that we were supposed to complete. Your job is to prove it to me that you did that. So you can send me pictures of work that you annotated. You can send me like snips of like online docs that you did.

You can show me your annotations. you can write a reflection. He leaves the door open for them to pretty much like literally it's like you think you have an a, prove it to me. and then the kids self assess themselves, which is fascinating. If you look at any of the research about kids self assessing themselves, They are so much harder on themselves than we would be as teachers, which is incredible.

So, like, I'm reading through this one kid that he shared with me. He took all the, names and stuff off of it, but he just sent it to me as a plain document. And I said, This is incredible. and the kid's like, I'm going to give myself a 91 percent B. Like, I think I did really good, but I don't think I was that great.

I was like, I would have a thousand percent given that kid. Like I'm reading through, I'm like, this is incredible stuff. so the challenge for me was. He teaches a AP level rhetoric class, which I didn't know was a thing, which is super cool. AP rhetoric. so I have to figure out ways to pare that down to make sense for sixth graders.

I'm not going to expect my sixth graders to wax philosophically as to whether or not they got a grade, I can have them do kind of reflection style stuff, but the level that he's getting, I can't expect that from sixth graders. I mean, I could, if I was like really mean, but I'm not going to do that.

so that's kind of, I literally been texting with him, like, Hey, can we meet and chat? And we're setting up a meeting this week so that we can pare this down. But like, that's the kind of stuff to me that AI is super good at is giving you a different perspective on things. I love on LinkedIn following like Phil Alcock and all the work that he does with PBL, AI and PBL.

It's incredible. And, I can message Phil kind of whenever I want, but I don't want to be really annoying, but like literally, so that's kind of what I use AI for is say like, Hey, What are these different, give me some ideas on some different like based learning styles that I can use with this curriculum.

I actually created a GPT where the my teacher's manuals for the curriculum are the data set. And I don't allow internet like search or whatever. I just. Read the data set, give me answers from the data set. And it's been kind of a game changer because it's still hallucinates a little bit. However, simple, fixing prompts and it's right back on track.

So I've come up with some, ideas that I shared in the LinkedIn posts, those all came from having a conversation with chat GPT. I found a method called the TQE method, which is thoughts, questions, and epiphanies. So I found this TQE method and it pulled from a transcript of a podcast that I had never heard of. It was called the Cult of Pedagogy. but boy, what a treasure trove of information that is. the transcript was, the woman who created it, Marissa Thompson, who I found on LinkedIn, thank goodness, I wanted to give her credit for all the stuff I was posting and saying, so I'm glad I found her.

She started a whole course and stuff around using this TQE method. I tried it at the end of last year, but this is the thing. I kind of feel bad about it, but I didn't pay for her course, I got enough details from the conversation with chat GPT that I didn't have to, and I can adjust it and make it my own.

So sorry, Marissa, I probably will someday by your course, but like for right now I have what I need. So my apologies, but you're method is great. So those are the things that they come out of these. Conversations with chat GPT that I never expected them to come out of. And so that's kind of how I, where I'm at now is I want to change the way I do things in my classroom.

Where I started was, can you make me worksheets? Can you make me quizzes? Can you make me, lesson plans? Can you do all this stuff faster than I can do it? Yeah, absolutely. We can do all that. I was using a couple different apps for feedback, for initial feedback on kids papers. And as I've learned from LinkedIn, maybe it should have been the other way around.

I should have been given the, but again, like, we use these tools, we, we learn and we see what we like, what we don't like. And, Essentially, that's how I've grown. I started doing the easy stuff, doing the, as Leon Furze calls it, the bad pedagogy stuff, worksheets and quizzes and stuff like that.

Ken Shelton and D Lanier, when they were on your podcast and I know on other podcasts, D it really hit home, like the way he said it, it was like, stop using AI to do the easy stuff or stop using AI to do the stuff that we know doesn't work . and Leon says it almost the same way.

It's like, we shouldn't be using AI to do stuff. That's bad pedagogy. We should be using AI to make new pedagogies, do things that are, new and different. So that's kind of where I wanted to go now. I'm still tethered to a curriculum, so I can't like just go completely wild west and free out there yet.

Maybe someday if I, prove that I did a really good thing, maybe I'll get that, leash extended. But like, that's the kind of stuff that I'm doing now. And I'm going to be honest with you. Fonz, like we talked about this before I signed up for like literally every app there was.

I can't remember if we talked about this before or like in the recording, but I'm just going to say it again. Like there's an AI for that. Like every time that a new thing came out for like teaching or for learning assistant, like boom, I signed up, boom, jump in, sign up, beta test, whatever. But the funny thing is after using all those throughout the school year, I literally realized like.

I'm using chat GPT for 95 percent of the stuff. Sometimes I'll go back and try things in those, but like literally I've made custom GPTs that are just for me. So like they work for everything that I'm doing so much better. Then any of those because I put in the data sets. I put in the stuff that it's, that it's pulling from.

So it's more specific to me and that, you can't replicate that on some of those platforms, but they have their place. And I think that those Are an amazing place for teachers to start, especially the teachers that I just had in my training last week. Like some of them have like never even ventured in, this is going to hurt your feelings.

Some of these teachers have never used like ed tech tools, like any in their classrooms. Like it's all like pencil, paper and like handwritten stuff. Like, so when I'm here talking about AI, that's a big leap from ed tech, so. These types of programs, the I believe Sophie and others call them wrappers, these GPT wrappers, these LLM wrappers, they're a great place to start because they take all that prompting out of the game, which is kind of nice at the beginning.

So that's how I've grown in my journey. I started very simple, probably like most people are going to start when they use AI and then literally seeing all the stuff that people are doing on LinkedIn. I'll never forget. I saw a post by somebody who was like, I was about to do a presentation for a group of teachers, so I had AI act like a group of teachers and it randomly assigned random personalities, and like, Again, regardless of whether it's like 100 percent accurate or not, you're getting a direction to go in that you like, you can't just find a bunch of random people and be like, Can you listen to my presentation for a minute?

And then like, ask me questions like this. You can't like, beta test a presentation. So I mean, all the teachers talking about using it as a debate partner the Socratic seminar style lessons, There's so many applications that I haven't even dipped my feet into.

So that's where I've grown, but I've also pulled back quite a bit as well. I'll share with everybody out there. Like, I think I put, I hid this in a LinkedIn post. My LinkedIn posts are kind of long. So I hid this one in there. There was actually a week last year. Where I had like a whole group of kids, they came to me as a group, cause there's power in numbers for sixth graders.

So they came to me as a group and they were like, Mr. K, can we not use any technology for a while? We feel very burnout. And I was like, Oh my God, thank you so much. I was like, thank you so much for sharing that with me. I appreciate, that A teacher dreams of kids being comfortable enough to share those sorts of things and stuff like that, but they were like, look, man, we are burnout.

Can we take a break? So for the next two weeks, we read books, we had discussions. That's where the TQE came in. we had some really great discussions. We did some really cool like classroom activities. There were no tech. again, some of those ideas came from ChatGPT. I joked on TikTok that the lessons that ChatGPT has come up with for my classroom, they have like a 95 percent success rate.

And success is determined by whether the kids liked it or not. So, right now, ChatGPT is coming up with some really fun and engaging ideas for classroom activities. That conversation with my students really made me realize that like there needs to be a better balance.

We need to have a better balance as a class, and literally, that's kind of my little classroom up. There's kind of like a microcosm. I think of society at large, we need to have better balance of how we are integrating tech and not tech in our lives, and so that's where I think it's really great that my sixth graders realize that.

hopefully more people can become like my sixth graders and like recognize, when it's time to take a break. I could talk about AI forever, so that's why I get nervous coming on podcasts, but, I'm going to stop right there.

[00:31:46] Fonz: One of the things that I do want to unpack is.

One of the things that I learned and when I was still in the classroom, and I know my current role in my district is really to help teachers feel comfortable with tech. And like you said, there are still many teachers as that have been, doing wonderful work within our district that are still not using

As much tech or they still fear the tech and not that they're any less effective than the ones that are using it, but they're just always very cautious, but they're great at their craft, that art of teaching. And I think 1 of the things that I liked that you mentioned is that for those 2 weeks that your students said, Mr K, we're burnt out with the tech.

I think oftentimes. As educators, we get so excited about a brand new tool. We go to a conference, we find out a new way of using it and immediately we want to come and we want to just shove it in our kids faces and we think that it's going to work out for them. I mean, for that presenter. For their students, it might work very well, or maybe it did work very well, but keep in mind that not every learner is the same.

Not every classroom is the same. So results may vary. And that's one of the things that I started saying in my presentations, I say, okay, guys, results may vary depending on your grade level and depending on your class makeup but here is the overall, here's how you use this. This is what this is, supposed to be used for and so on.

But. I don't know who it was that was on the podcast or where I heard it, but I think some great sound advice was let the students lead with tech because oftentimes as a teacher, we're the ones that want to, I want to use this platform and this platform, and I want to app smash this because, It makes it easier for me. It makes things, like it's going to grade this, or I think it's going to engage you the way it should. And we don't talk to our customers, our students, and maybe for them, they're like, miss, can we just write an essay or how about, can I just screen record?

Just something for you or do a presentation and get like an authentic learning artifact from them. So one of the things that you did mention that I love and we're going to talk about this, as far as, some of that human intelligence movement teachers talking about that. But one of the things I loved is that your friend or Mr.

Rupp talking about ungrading. And you're absolutely right. Students can be very hard on themselves. And I'm going to tell you this right now too, at a doctoral level course, one semester, our professor was like, we're going to do ungrading this semester for this course, you're going to have three assignments and very much like Mr.

Rub said, okay. You're going to make a submission, but you will have to prove to me why you're giving yourself that grade and you're going to have to show me evidence based on what your submission is and you're going to have to prove your grade. I tell you what, that was one of my hardest courses because I mean it very easily.

You can just say, okay, 20 out of 20, I get 100 and so on. No, we were here like battling. I was like, Oh my gosh. Like I can't give myself a 20 because there's room for growth. and we're working with a partner here. So you and your partner are working the whole semester and you have to reflect with each other.

And then you have to write a reflection of each other's work and then write a reflection to justify how you guys came together to prove your work. And that grade and it just blew my mind. And I was like, this is amazing because now it's the balls on our court. And like the, this time for those two weeks for your students, the balls on their court where, Hey, let's go ahead and show some of that learning.

Let's let me prove to you what I've learned. And I think oftentimes we miss out on just those little things. I'm not saying that there aren't tools that can help enhance that, but I think it's just getting that. Authentic voice. And very much so like I love doing this podcast, amplifying their voice, getting to hear their thought process and really just think like what's going on in their head as you're reading this story, as they're answering these questions on theme, what do they think about the main characters and getting into those great deep dive conversations.

I think that's something that's great. And allowing for discourse and, oh my goodness, like for sure.

[00:36:10] Matt: Like you talking about that there, like, first of all, you've kind of talked me out of like any sort of doctoral level programs for a hot minute, so I could better understand myself. I better get a better understanding of myself before I go into any of those programs, but man, I would, Oh, I do not envy you for that position.

And they're trying to, I can, the mental like workload that that takes, right. Like you said, and I can imagine that if I did this to sixth graders, like I have, I can see them now from my class last year, I can see like five kids. I think they're all boys. I can see like five kids going, Oh, I got a hundred percent.

And then I go, well, why, why did you get a hundred percent? Cause I did all my work and I was like, but was it good work? I mean, it was good, but like, can we go, like, this is what I'm imagining for, for some of them, but like this year I really wanted to do things different. I think I remember hearing from somebody, maybe it was on Tik TOK from someone like Dan Lauer, who does a history for humans on Tik TOK, but he, you don't really figure out your teaching style and it would tell you're about, like seven.

Ish years in like, you have to really be in it for a while to kind of figure out. And like, that's what I, this year for me, I'm like, I figured out what I like. I figured out what I want to do. And the discussion, at the end of the year, last year, I was kind of beta testing it in my room, that whole TQE discussion.

Here's the thing, Fonz, this was the crazy part for the kids, right? When we, so. We read something. First of all, the kids are responsible for reading it. So at this time, we were reading a novel, so they had to read our chapter, or finish reading our chapter, because we started it in class. So they had to finish it overnight, so they were responsible for doing a reading.

Very easy to tell who didn't do the reading the next day, because you're not participating, you're not taking notes, you're not, like, It's very easy to tell who didn't read. But in the conversation, when we got to the whole group part of the conversation, the kids weren't allowed to raise their hands.

So that's what I told them. I said, you're not allowed to raise your hands. So we talked a lot before we got into the discussion of like, in real life. When two people are having a conversation, especially if you're sitting around a big conference table and it's like your job and that's what you do, no one's raising hands.

So let's say I start talking and then you start talking, we have to look at each other and we have to figure out whose turn is it to talk, okay? And then if I say, no, you go ahead and you start talking. I asked everyone else in the room at this time. I said, who talks next?

They were like, Oh, well, you talk next because you were going to go. And I said, okay, so you understand how this works, right? We got down into that conversation. And let me tell you, I mean, kids started talking over each other and they were like, no, it's okay. You go ahead. And I was like, politeness. We got some politeness coming out of here.

I love it. But like, Little things like that. And I really think it shifted our classroom. Like, and it literally, I thought to myself, boy, this would have been nice if I could have done this all year. That would have been awesome. Wish I would have learned about that sooner. Just giving the kids that extra skill, right?

That extra skill of like, how do I have a conversation in a large group setting? Cause there were like 20 kids at a time in my room. So how do I have this conversation with 20 kids when I have something to say? How do I handle that? So that's like an added bonus skill that they got out of that and, referencing the human intelligence movement.

That's what it's about is those human skills and that is a human skill right there. Communication and learning how to talk in a group setting like that. And even on this podcast, right? Like yeah. When I'm talking, you'll start talking. Maybe my screen goes crazy and I freeze like I did like nine times already, but it's like, whose turn is it to talk?

we eventually just figure it out and then, we keep the conversation going, but that's like a super important skill that these kids are going to need to have no matter what job they enter into, so that, that to me, that whole discussion based thing, I think, If we could just literally squeeze that in.

So right now, as I have it planned out, that is going to be in my room two days a week, two days a week, we're going to have this discussion style, huge lesson. And I have it all based on her ideas. If a kid doesn't want to participate in the conversation, they have to annotate the conversation. So they have to take, their, what they thought was most important that came out of that conversation.

Questions, thoughts, and epiphanies from the conversation that happened. So they sit in the circle with everybody. But they sit there and they just have their notes going.

And they turn them in, Fonz, these notes that they gave me were better than any paper that they wrote throughout the whole year! And I literally was like, that was my aha moment. Why do I have to have them write a paper like these notes? If they said those notes or just handed me those notes, if you put them together with paragraphs and punctuation, now it's a perfect paper.

Like, and that's where my mind was like, we need to do this more often. Need to get away from all this stuff. And this is where I struggle because. My kids, still at the end of the year, have to take a test. So I have to teach them how to write. I'd feel terrible if I went all year and didn't teach them how to write.

That would be not fair. I give an A, you could do a podcast, you can do a video, you can, record your voice, you can annotate, you can do this. But if I never actually have them write, they're going to be lost when it comes to that text dependent analysis question, the dreaded TDA question, so, like, I still have to do that stuff.

And that is the part of the human intelligence movement that I like, is trying to change it so I don't have to do that. Right? That's kind of the conversation that I believe we're trying to steer forward, which is, to change the way we view these things in education so that teachers don't have to do things.

So the teachers can look at their room in their class and say, This is what's best for my class. This is what's best for each kid in my class and not like, well, I have to teach them how to write, otherwise they're going to fail this part of the test. And that looks bad on me, which again, a whole nother kid.

We will not go down that road, but that's the pressure that is here is like, you have probably thousands of teachers, maybe tens of thousands of teachers like me who want to change the game. But they can't because they are hamstrung. And I know there are districts because I heard about them when I graduated college.

I know there are districts that do not let you do anything outside of their given curriculum. You have to say exactly what's on it. Everything's scripted, everything's done, and you have to do it exactly as it says. And that to me, I mean, that hurts my heart. I'm so glad I was never in that situation.

I got very lucky that I was never in that situation. With any teaching that I had to do, but that hurts my heart because when you go to college to be a teacher, you are so excited about putting your spin on things and then you come out and someone's like, no, you're going to have to teach exactly what it says right here.

And that's like soul crushing. So, that's where I hope. That we gain some major traction with the human intelligence movement, because I would love to see that change in education where we actually give teachers some autonomy here and how far they can go. And there's the other end of the spectrum too.

There are teachers, the first school that I did my student teaching at, there was no curriculums, teachers were like, Let's go, and I was very lucky because my two mentor teachers, they had been teaching for 10 years at that point, and they had been to different states. So one taught in Arizona and one taught in Maryland.

But here they are teaching in Pittsburgh now, and they have 10 years of experience. Both of them have 10 years of experience and they're again, that seven year period, they figured out exactly what they had to do. Their rooms. Like it blew my mind. I was so lucky. I was so lucky that I got to be with those two.

They, they really showed me that, like, you can do this. It is possible. And they made their whole curriculums. They didn't follow no textbooks. Can you imagine a life with no textbooks? That would be phenomenal. I actually get to teach novels all year. I get to teach poetry that isn't already preselected.

I get to select poetry that I like to read. That maybe I know my students like to read, you know what I mean? So like maybe read some Kwame Alexander books because I know my kids love basketball in my area. Like that's the thing, right? When you know, your kids being able to have that freedom to, to get to do that, it gives them to buy in more like, I don't understand why we haven't figured this out yet.

It's so frustrating because it's like, if we can get stuff that the kids like. and get it on their level. Those kids are going to buy in so hard that the education system would not know what hit it. They'd have all these kids doing phenomenally well all year because we got them to buy in and now with AI creating resources, creating things is so much easier now, right?

 If you ask any AI, like what are the benefits of AI and education every single time I've done it, the number one thing that comes up is.

personalized, instruction, personalized learning, personalized, blah. So if I have a kid who comes in and says like, hey, like, I just found out that breakdancing was a sport in the Olympics, like, what's up with breakdancing? Ooh can you give me like a really cool story for sixth graders about how cool breakdancing is and like how it became an Olympic sport, and then if you didn't have time to read it, in fact, check it, you can turn that into the activity for your kids.

Say, Hey, here's a story about how it came about. I need you to make sure that it's accurate. Can you do that for me? Like, There you go. So now the kids are going to read the story about break dancing, or let's say one kid wants to know about break dancing. One kid wants to know about, Steph Curry, because he's now like famous again.

And, and, and so I could like create all these things in seconds. And again, You can, instead of playing the game of having to sit there and fact check and prove it, you can have your kids do it for you. You can turn that into the work. And then what are you doing again? You're now weaving in those digital literacy skills into the lesson as well.

Fact checking information, how, how, like, I don't, to me, computer class shouldn't be just like computers. It should be like digital literacy should be a major component of that. I shared this I think this was in a post or something related to your previous guest, Michael talking about how much students use social media. And it was astounding to me to find out that I had, there were kids in my school that were in like third and fourth grade that have TikTok accounts.

And it was like, yikes, you're like eight or nine years old. And you're like, How first of all, impressive that you could even like maneuver everything. Second of all, scary, like, super scary, and I had parents in the past tell me like, well, I can't control what gets put on YouTube.

And that scared the heck out of me because I'm like, I mean, but you can control what is put out to your kids device. Did you were you aware of that? And they were like, no, I didn't know you could do that. I was like, oh yeah. And then I like, literally was like, here's how you do that, but it's like, like, these are the things.

I think if a lot of parents don't know and a lot of teachers take for granted, is that, these kids are, they're tech native. They've been doing this for a while, but that doesn't mean they have the skills ingrained. I mean, I think back to my kids love hearing this story too. Like I tell them that I was, I was one of the first users ever.

Oh, Facebook. when Facebook came out and they're like, Oh, Facebook's for old people, like literally that's the kids jargon that Facebook is for old people. So, if you're still on Facebook we're old people. just know that. But when I heard that, I was like, ouch.

But then I was like, well, that was almost 20 years ago. So yeah, I guess we are pretty old, but if someone looked at my Facebook from 10 years ago, please don't, by the way, but that's not the person who I am. I can't imagine having that technology, that ability to do things when I was like eight, nine, 10 years old, my wife and I say all the time that We can't imagine growing up and having social media even from the bullying perspective, this is where it gets, real and serious, my wife was bullied really bad in middle school.

it affected her for a very long time. she said if I had to deal with this all the time, on social media, like it wasn't just at school and I didn't have a place to escape to, I don't know, and that's the scary part where, last year we had to have a lot of serious conversations in my classroom.

And, and that. That's hard. I, I'm this big, fun, goofy guy and stuff like that. But my whole mantra to my students is like, I get it. I'm an understanding person. I'm an empathetic person. I'm here to listen to you, if you want, like, I'm not going to force you to tell me anything, but I'm here if you want, and some kids did open up last year and social media was at the heart.

Of so many of these issues and it's terrible because, we don't have control over it you can lead a horse to water, so we can put all the stuff out there that we want. For parents and students and kids, all the research, all the videos, everything, but it's pervasive.

And so I think that in our curriculums, that digital literacy, how to protect yourself online, how to search for things online and being careful what you put online is super important. And at an earlier age that people would probably want it to be third, fourth, fifth grade, you need to start showing them exactly what this means because That's where these kids are starting to use these social media apps.

And so that's kind of my whole thing there is that digital literacy should be built into everything. if making a story about AI and having the kids fact check it helps them with digital literacy, then awesome bonus, there's an idea for a lesson, there you go, go take it.

[00:51:35] Fonz: the

[00:51:37] Matt: wonder of AI is you could just hit regenerate and it'll just keep going. It'll just keep making different stories every single time. So you can print out 30 different stories. I heard that as a lesson too. Have AI make, 30 essays, have them write 30 essays on your topic and then give the kids the rubric and have the kids grade all those essays and reverse engineer it.

Right. So there are ways around it. And that's what I was hoping to kind of spread to teachers. Is that, you don't have to be afraid of AI. You can like lean into it in some really creative ways. And you can even go as far as people like Mike Kentz on LinkedIn and let them go with chatbots and then grade their conversations with chatbots.

I mean that I think he teaches high school students, so he's in a little bit different situation. But again, that kind of outside the box thinking is maybe a way to deal with it. But then you get into like. You talk about regularly your terms of service, your privacy policies, and you get lost in that much pretty easily.

Yeah, man.

[00:52:42] Fonz: And that's a lot to take in. But, even like Jason Guglia also, I remember when he first started using it, he was doing the same thing that you're saying right now. He would give them a bot and a prompt and then he would grade them on the chat, and what it is that they're doing the output.

So again, of course, they're in higher ed, doing college courses and so on. But like you said, it's, it's a learning process for a lot of us. And my, my message has always been, it's just like, just be cautious, and obviously we see a lot of things on the news now that are kind of coming out.

And, and again, I know that this technology can be used for good. And I know that once It gets to that point where, things are in place, safety, guardrails and so on that are guaranteed that you won't have any fabrications or hallucinations and things of this sort that are going to be useful, then by all means, I think it's something that is useful.

But like you said, the digital literacy component. Very important. And it ties into digital citizenship, which again, knowing how to chat properly is the same way as knowing what to use your phone for, what it is that you're going to post, what it is that you're going to share, because all of that will come back to you at some point in time.

And for a guy like me, I always talk to my friends. I was like, And I'm so glad that we had flip phones. I didn't have cameras at the time, nobody walked around with Polaroids and nobody walked around with film anymore. And I think we were in a nice space where now, now you're it's like, Oh no, no, no.

We were definitely going to be being. Acting cordial. We're going to be polite. We don't want to get into any hot messes because everything gets out there. But like you said, for our students nowadays, it's very important that we do talk to them. And my big thing too Matt is always being transparent with parents as well.

Letting them know what this technology is, what it involves. And of course the terms of service, and, and I think that's a huge message too, that I like to share. Not only share it with teachers or your superintendents, but you got to get the parents involved too, to understand this a little bit more.

And, I know for them just to keep them informed is something that could be very huge and understanding terms of service, of course, understanding what the data can or cannot be used for, if it's going to be safe and so on. So definitely a lot of things there, but man, I, like I said, I really loved Kind of like it, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but it's almost like watching you, like, kind of like we're growing up together in this space.

And it's been so great to see where we're at, through this. And that's why I was like, this is the best part of not only doing the podcast, but just connecting on social media and, and really understanding and having cordial conversations where there may be some things where, We may not agree on, but then there's some things that we do agree on, but we're completely cordial and, again, just a great evidence of, Chris Nessie had Tom Mulaney on the show.

Now I have you on the show and it's just great to see that balance and conversations and just to say like, Hey, you can be this way. You can be this way, but. Somewhere along the middle, we both agree on certain things. And I love that. And so it's been great getting to know you and just really hanging out with you and just hearing your story and really your passion just coming through brother.

I love it. So

[00:56:08] Matt: That's me, man. I mean, this is my second podcast. So you're the second victim here, but, I think people are going to be like, okay, instead of allotting an hour for this guy, we might need to do like two hours for this guy because holy crap.

He likes to talk.

[00:56:21] Fonz: And it's great, my friend. It's great. Don't ever change, man. Just keep that heart and that enthusiasm and just that passion that you have, because we really need educators like yourself in those classrooms and just really helping our students and enhance their learning and just being very creative and giving them.

Opportunities to share their learning in ways that they feel comfortable with and being very creative with the learning process to as well. And, I think those students, the more that they do, they're with you and learning together, not only them from you, but you from them. Definitely just makes each other better.

And that's wonderful. So I'm really excited. So thank you, my friend. I really appreciate you being here, spending some time with me today. And it's been an honor to, like I said, just being a long time follower of your stuff and just being able to really communicate and really connect has been just something amazing throughout this year.

And Just wonderful, man. So thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast today. But before we wrap up, we always love to end the show with the last three questions. So here we go. Hopefully you're ready. So as we know, you kind of mentioned it a little bit. You mentioned you're teaching kryptonite, but maybe you have a different one for this answer, because you knew that I was going to ask this one and I love it.

So in the current state of education, what would you say is your current edu kryptonite?

[00:57:41] Matt: My current edu kryptonite, I kind of tried to figure out like 15 different ways to say this today. I did not ask AI to help me phrase this or come up with this. So this is all me here going off, off, off the cup. The fact that in so many districts right now in this country and around the world, but, but especially in this country, I think it's more prevalent in this country.

There are so many districts. That don't have guidance or don't have policies and that is their excuse for ignoring AI. So that is the thing that kind of worries me about some of these schools that literally they're, they're, what they say is, well, there's no policy, there's no guidelines in my state, so I don't want to touch it.

And some of them even go so far as to say, like, I don't even want you talking about AI. Like, don't use the words AI. If you create something with AI, don't let the kids know it was created with AI. So there are some places that are like that.

And that really worries me because my opinion is that if we can demystify it. Earlier for students, then it doesn't become the major issue that most teachers are worried about now, which is cheating, right? They're going to use AI to write everything.

Well, what it's going to take away their ability to think it's going to take away their ability to do things. And we're old enough to know, like, we remember those conversations or we heard about those conversations about the calculator. We were in those conversations. When the internet happened, like waiting for dial up, someone posted a video that had a dial up sound and it was like PTSD.

Like trying to listen to that all over again. And kids nowadays are like, is that an alarm on TV? Is that like an emergency alarm? And it's like, no, we're just waiting for the internet to load. And they're like, what? But that is what scares me is that there are so many schools that.

Aren't having the conversations like maybe they're okay with teachers using it or maybe not. and maybe they're not okay with students using it. That's cool. But like, have the conversations, like there are so many lessons out there in so many different places where the kids don't need to go on and chat with a chat bot, the kids don't need to use it.

You can just have the conversations. And I think that if more teachers. That are, inclined and know a little bit more about AI can kind of say that to their admins and say, look Like we don't have to throw AI in their faces, but we should definitely have the conversations about it because whether we like it or not, like we talked about social media earlier Snapchat, they have Q chat and that apparently is a terrible, like, I don't, I forget what underneath that, but like, Terrible from what I heard and meta on Instagram.

Like you can just chat with meta. I'll never forget when I saw that pop up, I had an essay that was assigned to my kids and I was like, I put in all the parameters and I put in everything. I was like, can you write this? This is an Instagram. I'm in Instagram. And I'm like, can you write an essay for me?

Here's the parameters. And it was like perfect. It was beautiful. Some of the details were wrong. But like, if a kid wrote that, I'd be like, Hey, where was that in the book? And, but still, I was like, that's from Instagram. It was able to write an essay from Instagram. Like, what the heck? Like, so like, we need to have these conversations and let kids know what, what it's good at, what it's not good at.

And I think the more we had conversations with them early on about like, You want to represent you. You don't want a machine representing you. So, and I posed the question in May of 2023 to my students. I said, would you rather if you had a choice to go to two doctors? Would you rather go to the doctor who did all of his work with AI, or would you rather go to the doctor who did all of his work on his own now at the time?

That was very simplified, but that's, I said, what would you rather like literally every single kid was, I want to go to the doctor who did his own work because he's going to know the stuff and then we got to talk and well, what's wrong with the other doctor? They're like, well, he like wasn't learning it.

Like it was writing, it was doing the work for him. So he never got a chance to learn it. I said, can you please just. Bottle that up and just keep that with you. Keep that thought with you as you move through this life. Just keep that thought with you because that's the thought right there. He didn't learn anything because he had to do all the work for him.

So I was like, just bottle that up and keep it with you. And then just give that to teachers and kids take that with you. So having the conversations, that's my kryptonite. I wish that every single school in the world was having conversations starting in like, third, fourth, fifth grade, just conversations again, not using chatbots, I'm not promoting using chatbots that early, but just talking about it, what it is, what's machine learning.

You could go as basic as you want. You could have AI help you make it as basic as you want. I mean, like literally there's, so. that's my edgy kryptonite. And I'm so glad because like, the first thing that hooked me on your show is you mentioned Superman and kryptonite, I am obsessed with Superman.

Like I'm not going to waste the time right now, but my drum set actually, wait, here, I will waste the time. You can edit this part out until I get it.

So I have a drum set behind me. And that drum set, in order to make the bass drum sound good, you have to put a pillow inside of it. Well, this is my pillow that's inside of it, okay? So, this was given to me, like, so long ago, but that is what dampens the sound of my bass drum, and it's been in there? Well, he's probably been in there for about 20 years now, so But anyway, I'm obsessed with Superman.

It is like all over my room. My kids are like, gee, what superhero do you like? I'm like, well, I don't know. It's kind of hard to figure out. But so that, like this question, I was so excited for that question because like, I'm obsessed with Superman. So I was like, this guy is referencing Superman and a question.

I'm all about this. I'm in, I'm going to listen to every episode that he comes out with now.

[01:04:19] Fonz: I love it. Well, that was a great answer. I agree with you. Conversations are data conversations for feedback, conversations for growth, for learning, and just for enhancing the overall knowledge of, teachers, students and everybody in a district.

I agree with you. We definitely need to communicate a lot better. And I think oftentimes it's just there's so much information so much like, which one do you choose and which one is the best? And I think it's just reconciling all of that and putting that together. But I think it all starts. with the school district.

Okay. What are our goals? Let's talk about those things and just have those conversations, something simple, and just get started there. All right. I'm so

[01:04:56] Matt: glad you said that because that's it. I mean, have that conversation. Why do you want AI?

Like start from there and build. And when you have, if you're lucky enough to have someone in your district, like you or I. Oh my gosh, the treasure trove of information that you could pull from the two of us. And what a great resource that would be. Intent Wink Wink. Hopefully someone from my district my area, Intent Wink Wink.

[01:05:21] Fonz: question number two. I know we had changed it up for a couple of episodes, but of course I love to make sure that my guests are comfortable and if they have a special request, we'll definitely bring it back. So now we're bringing it back.

To the OG question. So if you could have a billboard with anything on it, what would it be? And why I was prepared.

[01:05:48] Matt: I got to move in screen here.

[01:05:49] Fonz: Be curious, not judgmental. Nice.

[01:05:54] Matt: So I attribute that quote correctly to the show Ted lasso, because I learned in Ted lasso, he references and says that that is a quote by Walt Whitman.

I have found that that is not true. So now I just quote Ted lasso. And just say that Ted Lasso said it to me, that message literally applies to every aspect of life. If you walked into every single situation, conversation, no matter what, and you walked in with a sense of curiosity, and you removed judgment, I can't tell you the immense power that that would have.

If we could get that in everybody, I mean, the world would be such a better place. We've been so conditioned to judge things, this is good, this is bad, this is, ugly, this is pretty, this is beautiful. And you learn as you grow up, like all of those words are relative to you and they're all subjective to you.

Everybody views different things as good and bad. Everybody views different things as beautiful and ugly. If you literally just ask the questions of the other person, Hey, why do you do that? And you don't do it with judgment. The kids know, I mean, come on sixth graders. They know. Why you do it that way? That that's judgment. Okay. And I will literally, I look at a kid that judgment, all judgment right there. That was judgment. You can't do that. I'm really curious why you do it that way. And I tell the kids, I said, even if you're being sarcastic, that sounds a lot better than the judgy way, but again I won't get in, but we've had some serious conversations start in my class because of curiosity. Because some kids don't understand the choices that other kids make, but again, approaching it from a place of curiosity. And we're this group of kids right now, this gen alpha, they're such a unique group of kids because they're like, the data's out there, they're more accepting and more open than like pretty much any generation before.

And so if we can get this message out to all of them, like by the time they're where we are, imagine how much better the world's going to be. When you've already had those conversations in middle school and high school. So now when you're an adult, you're like, whatever. Like I knew about that for like a long time.

Like you're, you're weird that you don't know that, like where, so like just approaching every conversation, every interaction with curiosity, like, Even this one, I was like, I know exactly how he runs his shows. I listened to like, 50 of them by now. So I know exactly how he does this, but like, I'm still nervous.

I'm still curious what he's going to ask me. I'm still curious how this is going to go, but like, just approach it with that curiosity. And then, and you end up, you yourself personally end up feeling better at the end of it because it takes so much energy and so much effort to judge, and like, you and I grew up in, in the, in, well, I don't know how old you are.

I can't imagine you're that far away from me, but like in college and beyond college, Facebook turned to this just. cesspool of vitriol back and forth. And then as we get older too, you throw in the things that become more real as you get older, you throw in politics, you throw in religion, you throw in all these things that become more real as you get older.

real life situations. And then all of a sudden these things start to hit a little harder and you're like, Oh my God. And then. You come back to the realization like we talked earlier, kids are on TikTok, like, in the middle of these things happening, in the middle of that cesspool, the kids are there, just kind of rolling around the outside, seeing what's going on.

And so I think if this message was more widespread, It's in my LinkedIn profile. it's like, I literally live by this. It's all over my classroom. I have like three different posters in my classroom. I wear this t shirt on dress down days. It's also my school's colors. So it's like perfect. sometimes the principal does not notice that it is not a school shirt because it's school colors.

So, it's great though, but like the message there, and so that's a billboard, put that on a billboard in every town in the world and Watch the world be a better place.

[01:10:23] Fonz: Awesome, man. That's great. I love it. All right. And then the last question, Matt is, if you can try out a job for a day, what job would you love to try out?

[01:10:35] Matt: Oh my gosh. Well, it's the, Job I almost had, being a famous rock star. I'm a drummer. I love to drum. I've been drumming since I was like 12 years old. I'm self taught. I played, ACDC's Back in Black was my first song that I played ever. I mean, it's like the easiest song on the drums ever, so it was a good place to start.

And I graduated from that, and I played Enter Sandman. And that like Metallica totally just, when I started listening to Metallica, I was like, Oh my God, I would love to do that. I would love to be in a rock band, like a heavier rock band like that. And I had that opportunity. I was in Pittsburgh. We made it on the radio in Pittsburgh.

Good luck. If you can find us, we were called river city conspiracy. I think they're still out there on Facebook somewhere buried in Facebook, but we were out there. and we had a song cause they had a really cool program in Pittsburgh, where if you were new band, they would play your song, promote your stuff.

and the one DJ really liked us. So we were all set to release like an album and we had recorded two or three songs for the album already. So we were like getting there and we had radio play. Because this DJ liked us. and then I moved from Pittsburgh.

I moved out to, East central Pennsylvania, and it was now a four hour drive to go practice. And that became a pain in the butt and it just fizzled out from there. , I still play the drums. I just posted a that, I pulled a clip of me. Jamming out, one day and it was so important, the message of that TikTok was like, Find time to do the stuff that you like. And I'm really lucky in the summer, I get to do that a little more often.

My son goes to daycare, so he's out during the day, my wife's at work. So like, I only play when no one's at home, I don't need to torture the rest of the family, but like, so that's where. Find time to do this stuff that you really like. And I still love just rocking out. My neighbors are like, Hey, sound pretty good.

I thought about the old neighbors in the neighborhood and they're like, man, I said, my windows were closed. They were closed. I do my best to try to be quiet, but you know, they're like, Oh no, I love it. I think it's great. And I'm like, Do you know, but you know, Hey, I'll take it as a compliment, so that that's a hundred percent.

I would love to just try that out for a day. I don't think I would like the whole traveling thing, like, especially with a young toddler now, but like before him, I would have been like, Or maybe when he's a little older, I'd be all on board for that. So I do remember from an earlier podcast that you are musically inclined yourself.

[01:13:04] Fonz: Yes, definitely. I play drums, self taught. I play saxophone, a little bit of guitar and some bass

[01:13:12] Matt: So, Next episode, you have like Andrew Davies on and then we start to like, put together a band and we get rolling here.

[01:13:21] Fonz: Maybe we'll do like one of those zoom sessions like back, like everybody did like during the COVID days, like zoom jam out session, that'd be amazing. That'd be wonderful for sure. I mean, Matt, thank you so much for joining me today, man. I really appreciate this conversation. And like I said, I'm just so thankful.

this is what I love about the podcast and like for every guest that comes in and just really get to be themselves, get to share their heart, get to share their passion. And like I always say in the beginning, for my audience members that aren't aware of your work yet, or haven't connected with you yet, this is it.

this is who Matt is guys. he's passionate educator. Just reach out to him at any time. And he's always going to be there to answer. And he's just an awesome guy to have on your side and just to learn from and just bounce ideas off of. So make sure that you connect with on LinkedIn, make sure you connect with on Tik TOK also as well.

and then, just let me know how that goes. Cause I'm always curious. Cause I mean, I love his stuff. I'm always looking at it and I know he sees my stuff, just a bunch of clips, but it's great that we can both come together today and just have just really just a wholehearted conversation, I loved it. And I love came to know more about you, my friend. It's it's amazing.

[01:14:34] Matt: no, I appreciate this opportunity. Like I said, other people out there are probably gonna be like, well, let's block off two hours for this guy. Hopefully it's worth it. That's it. That's the big thing is like, I hope, I got to share some ideas that I haven't even really put out there on like TikTok or LinkedIn yet.

So this is, some of the things I'm doing in my room and some of the ideas that I have, like, I haven't even put those out there really yet. So, I'd love to hear like, I had someone messaged me today, someone, I have no idea who they are, but, Hey, I did almost the exact same thing in my room two years ago.

And here's where I'm at now. Would you like want to hear like, Oh my God, yes. I want to hear what you did. Like competency based learning, I think is what I was like, please throw it at me. Cause like I, like we talked about earlier, LinkedIn, LinkedIn is a place for micro learning.

Every time I go on there, I'm learning something. So, please share your ideas with me. Cause like. I think we've all realized by now, like the teaching profession, we're just a bunch of borrowers. We literally just like, borrow off of each other. And we, we're essentially kind of like engineers too, because I'll borrow an idea from this person and this person.

Then I'm like, oh, well, if I can, and then I put it together and I create something crazy out of that. Right. So that's the more we share, I think the more that's where the best parts of teaching come in is the more we share with each other and learn from each other. I'm one probably like yourself.

I never want to stop learning, except I might not go to grad school now because like, or get a doctorate because of what you said, that kind of scares me, but you know, we'll see. But like, that's to me, that's the important part. And I'm so glad that I got this opportunity to share and, I just can't wait to see all the connections, reach out, I answer as best I can.

I got a toddler, so my life is kind of hectic. I only have like a week. Left before school starts. So jam it all in this week. Let's go.

[01:16:26] Fonz: Awesome. I love it, my friend. I appreciate you so much. And again, thank you so much just for spending some time with me, man. I really love it. And for all our audience members, thank you so much for tuning in.

And thank you so much just for all of your support as always, guys, you know that we do this for you because we want to bring you some amazing conversations and we want to definitely amplify educator voices, community voices. Professional voices, teacher voices, all kinds of voices, guys, because we want to add all of this great content and ideas into our education space so that we can all continue to grow.

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Great. So guys, thank you. And as always, my friends until next time, don't forget, stay techie.