 Good afternoon. Welcome to Finding Happiness in Hard Times. My name is Ken Burtonus and I'm coming to you from Haleiva out at the North Shore. Today I think we have a topic that will interest everybody. It's teaching, specifically the joy of teaching. I think it's going to interest everybody because we're all teachers and we're all students. You can't go through life without teaching somebody something, and you can't go through life without learning something from somebody. So, we're going to be talking about that and specifically about the joy that teaching brings. And with me today is my good friend Greg McDonald who is a teacher like myself and we'll be talking about that in just a minute. Greg, welcome. Good to have you back again. Thanks. Now, Greg, you know, this has been a very difficult time not only with COVID but everything else with our economic problems and everything. And teaching has always been hard to do and not that much money involved. And yet, despite all the difficulties, teachers keep on teaching. And I think that's because they find joy in it. So, that's a good place for us to start. If you can tell us a little bit about why that joy that you get from teaching keeps you going and teaching year after year after year. Well, I think my answer is probably a little bit egotistical and selfish. But basically, I just like, I like having an audience. I should have been an actor on a stage, but I took acting in high school and kept throwing up before my part took one stage. And I thought, okay, I don't want to do that. But then later as I got older and started teaching, I thought this is cool. And then, you know, I'm a musician too, so you have an audience. And I sometimes tell people that what I like about both is that in some ways I'm doing the same thing. I'm doing something in front of a group expecting some kind of a response. In one case, I'm putting out psychological, you know, information to students. The other ones I'm putting musical information out to an audience. But in both, I'm expecting some kind of input, some kind of exchange. I just like being able to have that. I guess I'm kind of a ham. So that's why I hang in there. And I'm probably, without telling you my age, I can give you a way to figure it out. I'm about 10 years past the normal retirement age. And I don't need to be teaching. And I sometimes tell my students don't, don't tell the administration, but I would teach Amy because I have fun. And I think that's probably the simplest answer for me about the joy of teaching is I just have fun. And I think maybe I saw that with some instructors that I had. Most of them just taught. And some of them seem to be having fun and laughing like it was play for them. And that's, that's, that's what it is for me. But I also, I also think of a one Twilight Zone episode. This is another reason why I enjoy teaching that while this Twilight Zone episode told me something. After many years of teaching, you sometimes are going to ask the question, did I make any difference to anybody? Because you never see them again. And the saying is, you hope you impacted one person out of the class, you know. And in this episode of Twilight Zone, it's about a, it's about an old professor who's forced to retire and he comes back one night to clean out his room. This is the way classrooms look probably in 1930 or 40, you know, small wood and all that kind of stuff. And as he was cleaning out the ghosts of students of his who had died for one reason or another, some of them died in war, some of them died from disease, but they died from various reasons. And he, as he looked up each one, he would go, oh my gosh, I remember you. And that student would quote something that the teacher had said that he never forgot. Now this teacher was a literature teacher. So he was teaching like Shakespeare or sorrow or stuff like that. And each of those ghosts had learned something that helped them through their whole life. And I thought that that was an amazing episode. And it made me feel like, yes, whether we get any direct feedback or not, people remember stuff years later. And that's another, that's another joy of teaching, I think that somewhere along the line is a difference. Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. You know, I just saw the headlines in today's, you know, on the internet that Tina Turner had passed away. Yeah. And she was the same thing works with entertainers, musicians, everybody that has an impact on us. It may be different, but thinking about her, it was like seeing her ghost and listening to her and listening to her sing. And it brought back, well, tears to my eyes because she gave something to me. And I think the teachers like you're saying on the Twilight Zone is illustrated on Twilight Zone gives something to people. And sometimes they don't realize it. Sometimes when you're a student, it's only years later that you think, where did I get that from her? Oh, yeah, I remember it was in so and so's class. And it didn't seem, you know, powerful at the time, but it turned out to be very powerful and something that stayed with them. And, you know, I couldn't agree more with that. I'd like to talk more about how some teachers inspired you a little later. But right now I'd like to talk a little bit about the students, because one of the things I noticed about students, and I was hoping you could tell us about what you noticed was that students are different. They're in class for different motivations. Some are there because they are not sure where they're going in life. And they're just sort of following after high school and that sort of they sort of wind up in college for some reason, but they haven't found out the path that they're going to take. Some students have got a pretty good idea of the path. But they're not that much interested in what I'm teaching so much is the credit I'm giving them for the class, because it's going to give them a diploma. And wherever they're going to wind up, they're going to need a diploma. So they're the diploma seekers. And then finally, there are the students who think they've got an idea of maybe going into direction of the subject that I'm teaching. And so they want to learn as much as they can about it. And specifically, they want to learn how to be good at that. So three real different types of students. And I found it always a challenge to be able to satisfy or to help all three different kinds. So I was going to ask you your thoughts on that and how you managed to reach a lot of different students who wind up in your class. I never divided them the same way you just did in three categories. I could only think of two. And the two were those that want to take it punched and those that are seeking some kind of degree or knowledge. But it was fun to think of the third type as well. Anyway, I ran into that here teaching in Hawaii, especially in community college, because there are so many different ethnicities here. There are students from foreign countries here. And a lot of them were probably like me when I went to community college, which was to get my ticket punched. No, it wasn't even that I went to college because that's what my friends were doing. And I wanted to hang out with them. So that's even another of their why. Okay. Anyway, when I started realizing that as an instructor that holy smoke, you know, I've got some great students in here first to talk. And they, you know, they could practically quote the text back and other ones who are having trouble staying awake, right? And it bugged me for a while. But I think the quick answer to that so that I don't default to rambling is I decided that I would always teach to the highest level and not try to teach to all the levels of, you know, that you mentioned, the ones, you know, or maybe lower, maybe you don't have as much motivation and so forth. And the reason is this. I want to teach at the highest level because I want to put out, I just want to raise the bar. It's like the Olympics, you know, when guys are practicing for the high jump, they don't put the jump low so that they can make it. They put the, they put the bar higher knowing that most of the time during practice, they're going to knock it down, but it makes them try harder. So they got further, they got more. And something about that struck with me that I'm always going to teach to the highest level. Now, that's going to create a problem for some students that can't possibly reach that level. And so I tell them in my orientation that this is the way it's going to be. I'm going to be teaching to the highest level. And if you find that you can't make it, let me know as soon as possible. And I'll try to work out something for you that would be helpful. But as far as being in class, I'm always going to be talking to the highest level. So I offer those that aren't going to do very well, an alternative to work with me. Sadly, they never take me up on the alternative, which tells me they're not that motivated anyway. And then I joke with the students who are really smart. And after the first quiz we take in a second or third week, just so they can kind of see how the quizzes are, I tease the A students. And I say, if you've got an A on the quiz, you don't belong in this class. You belong in a class that's more difficult, meaning one that will push you because you're already easily getting A's. But I tease in that way. I don't see it with some kind of grimace or threat. I just tease, if it's that easy, you should consider a more difficult section. So that's my answer to you. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I think it's not quite that simple. I mean, I know Greg pretty well. And we've been together for, and talking about this subject for many years, and he does things like those Twilight Zone episodes. He'll illustrate what he's saying. He doesn't just talk or do the old style professor at the Blackboard who writes at the Blackboard, and you only seen their back for the whole class, which drove me crazy from those type of teachers that I dealt with. Greg's out there talking to everybody and making it personal and illustrating it with things like the Twilight Zone or other clips from other movies or art or music. And I think Greg really is an example of a teacher who performs. And performers grab your attention. And I think that that's certainly a strength in teaching. I think that if more teachers performed, we would reach a lot more students. But unfortunately, like I said earlier, teaching is a hard job, and it's a lot of work. And a lot of people just think, well, the teachers just show up and talk to the students. And they don't even consider the amount of time and preparation for doing what you need to do, which is pretty phenomenal. One thing I wanted to talk about before the program gets too short, because we only got a half an hour, is the one thing I found really interesting about teaching is that why you teach you learn. And so I wanted to ask you, Greg, about that, how you felt about if you felt similar to the way I did. Because every time I teach a class, I learn from that. I learned something new in teaching it. And in fact, the first time I taught a class, they said in college, they said, well, we need you to teach this. And I said, well, I've never taught that before, but I'd like to give it a try. I had it as a student, and I learned a lot about it. I think I know a lot about it. And I found that once I started teaching it, I didn't know very much. And as I taught it, I learned so much more. And it got embedded more. It became part of me, rather than something that's just sort of up here running around with all the other facts that I learned in college. But it really sort of internalized. And so I was wondering how you felt about the fact that it's a lifelong learning experience to teach others. I don't know. Is that what you found? Well, what you said, yes, I would agree with what you said. But when I was thinking about the topic about how I learned from them, I fell across a slightly different going to a different direction. One of the things that I fell across several years ago, to get them more motivated was and to get kickstart to class is that in every class, the first thing we did was break into small groups of about four. And the written assignment for the week was always, what did you think feel like or not didn't like about the information, your assigned information, which is usually a text? Okay. And at first, I had to explain to them that your opinion isn't regurgitating a fact. Like in the beginning, they might say something, they might do a paper, they might give their opinion, and it would be like, well, Freud said there was three parts of the personality and then they would define that. And I say that's not your opinion. I want to know what your opinion is. So I had found that more and more I drive students to what's your opinion, because I want them to think about it. I don't want them to get the idea that I'm looking for a correct answer. I tell them, I'm not looking for a correct answer. I'm looking for some, you may never remember some of these topics. But the more you can exercise, what do you think and feel or question about what we're doing, that will serve you the rest of your life. So I pushed that group. Now, the group I later found this is, this is an answer to your question, how do I learn something back? That was obviously designed for them. But then I decided, you know what I'm going to do? After the group is over, these are speed groups, I only give them like five or 10 minutes to do that. And so they have to think short and quick. I have each group tell me, what did your group tend to talk about? And then I would write that on the board. You know, group one focused on this, group two focused on this, group three focused on this. And then I said to them, because I'm asking you what you were interested in, I can now tailor my lecture to your input. In other words, they were teaching me what they want me to teach them by asking the questions. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I do a variation of that. That's interesting, because what I do, especially when I'm teaching psych 100 is I ask them to take the topic that we're doing, because every class has a different topic that we're covering. Psych 100, you have to cover a lot of territory. And I asked them to write a half a page about how that impacted their life or how they related to their life. For instance, if you take your example of Freud, three parts of the personality, the the ego and the super ego, I asked them to think about something in their life where their ego was dominant, or their id was dominant, or their super ego was at play. And write a write a half a page about that. And then I had, I would pick students by random, every class to share something. So all the students had to be prepared, because they might be the ones that were picked three or four out of the class, and they would share with the other people. And so that gave the other students a look at something different than other people thought of those three parts of Freud's personality. And it also gave that information to me, like you're talking about. So that interaction, I think, is so important between teacher and student. And I certainly appreciate your example of that. Because, and like I said, we all teach slightly differently, but we're all trying to reach, reach out and make this meaningful to the students. Let's go back to the thing I talked about earlier, that I said we return to the fact that we often are inspired ourselves when we are students by teachers. And I was going to ask you, if there was a particular teacher or professor that inspired you along the way, and then how they inspired you to get sort of more at that level of how we motivate students. I can think of a couple. I guess the first one that comes to mind is in graduate school, one of the classes that I took was psychodrama, which was a combination of Gestalt therapy and drama, psychodrama. And the instructor was actually clinically in major depression. He struggled with it all his life. But you know, as well as I do, with the diagnostic categories, people aren't just there and never come out of it. It's more like they go in and out. So they have times in their life when the symptoms are not so overwhelming, and other times when they're disabled. And this guy, he was so interesting that one time he had trouble opening the door to the classroom and he asked me to give him a hand. So I went into a make believe with him. I said, well, that that's handles really a person and we have to talk to it. And he laughed, he laughed, he was depressed, he laughed, right? And we had this conversation about opening the door as if it was a person. And I thought, this is an interesting instructor that he can get away with that kind of sort of playfulness, because when you're just improvising, you can embarrass yourself when you're improvising, because you don't know what's coming next. And later I found out that he was so depressed, sometimes he had to take a week or two off. And when he knew he was going into depression, he would give us all postcards with his address on it. And he would say, when I call the school and say I'm depressed and can't teach, write something nice on there and mail it to me. And so he would get all his different classes, he'd probably get 60 or 70 different postcards that made him feel better. I thought, a teacher can do that. Now, I wouldn't want to do that. But the idea for me is I could do that on a different way with students. I could give them postcards and say, okay, write something, it's already prepaid, I'm going to have to pay for the price of the postcard. That's okay, I'll do that. And then we'll throw them in a hopper and we'll see what everybody said. Anyway, so I guess the point here is from that instructor, I really learned how far you can be playful and or out of the ordinary and get away with it. And there's other examples too, but I'm going to be stopped there if I tend to go on too long. That's a great example. And one of the things that I tried was very similar to that. I was teaching a, it was a class on actually social psychology and how the different groups interact together. And my students came from all different kinds of backgrounds and lived in all sorts of different places. So I had them go out and take pictures with their cameras. And if they didn't have a camera, I arranged for the school to loan them a camera and come back with 10 pictures, 10 pictures that talk to them about their surrounding that illustrated the influences that they had by their surroundings. And it was a great thing. And it got students so geared up to thinking about it, not just reading about it and reflecting data in that, but actually participating and doing their own research. Anytime that I can inspire creativity like you're talking about and your students, I think that's an incredible plus to getting across your point. So that was a great example. Thank you. I'm going to rip off what you just said. That's a good idea. I'm going to use it this next semester. Photographing. That's cool. Yeah. And of course I did it a long time ago. This was when I first started teaching graduate students. And I can't even, you know, maybe 30 years ago. So nowadays you can put it on, you know, Zoom like we are, you know, or any type of technology and share it just instantly instead of any hard copies of it. So yeah, you'll have to tell me about that and tell me how it turns out. Yeah. Another connection to that could be a different day if we do another one. But the impact of your visual surround, your architectural world that you walk around in, how does that affect you? That's an interesting topic. We can't go there now because it's not about teaching. But that fascinates me, that topic. It's like, how much beauty do you actually see when you walk wherever you live, your neighborhood? Is there any or is it all just big square buildings? How does that affect? I'd like to do that. Yeah. And even square buildings can be beautiful, depending upon the type of day and what's happening in them. There's so many things that you can take a look at it. And that, of course, step tails into my major thesis here is that finding happiness in hard times. And we're certainly in hard times. Okay. Finding those that happiness certainly works. Let's take that because we're running a little short now. Let's take that sort of toward the end because I wanted to talk about the fact that teaching is always changing. It's always evolving. So the teaching that we started off doing many years ago, we've changed the way we do things and teaching itself has changed. So I was wondering your opinions on how teaching is going to change in the next 10 or 20 years. What's going to happen to education? A lot of people are asking that. How do we educate people more? Because if the latest data is anything, we're not doing so well from the student scores in a number of areas. So how can we change for the better? How might we change? Plus, the thing I'm most interested in is not only how it's going to change in reality, but how you would hope it would change, what you would like to see in the future for teaching. You've just given me a Zen paradox. I don't have a good look of what's coming for teaching. Sorry. I think that's just about the joy of teaching. But I see AI as eventually getting rid of teachers and it will be able to teach way better than we can in terms of facts. I really believe that. I think way back when Skinner was starting, he got a classroom full of simple computers and every time they took a test and got the right answer, they got a little phrase or a toy or a candy or something like that. And it was really obvious how that would manipulate learning not to learn anything, but to try to get the right answer for the goodie. And I think once AI gets in and we're gone, here's the only nice thing I can say. I'm sorry. The only nice thing I can say is I do think that students will probably learn more information because the AI can direct it like fine tune it to the most int level of learning. But I don't define education as learning. I define the ultimate goal is wisdom. And without interaction with people, because you're going to wind up being with people and learning how hard it is to talk about opinions that maybe people don't agree with. And the growth, the growth that happens when you have to go through all the struggle, that's where the wisdom comes in. And so the best thing I can say is I think scores would improve and I think wisdom would not. I know that's not leaving on a happy note, but that's my perception. Well, I'm much more an optimist than Greg. I know you are. So I would change that around. I agree with AI, the fact that it teaches facts and it will teach you better, you know, more comprehensive information about the field about anything that's happening will teach you the data. But what is needed? I don't think teachers are going to go away because I think what's going to happen is you're going to be divided into education that deals with facts and data and all that sort of stuff. But then the next level after that is what we would call a practicum where students actually have to put that information that they've gotten from AI into practice and in psychology and both Greg and I are psychology teachers, that has to mean that they have to deal with the patients, with clients, with people who are needing some help. And that sort of thing without a real person that you're using that data to do your therapy without that interaction with real people, it's not going to be all let's see. I don't think you can replace that. So I think we're just going to go to a different level. The teachers are going to sort of migrate to the on hands level and application, applying that education to actually doing. And I think that certainly that would happen in music, you know, and I wish we had time to talk about the music because it's one thing to learn notes and learn compositions and everything, but to be able to get up and do the music. And again, special kudos to Tina Turner, who was wonderful and all the musicians that have given us so much joy over the years. To do that, especially with other people like a band or whether it be big or small, that's a whole different area that I don't think AI is going to be able to teach you about that. So hopefully that's the optimistic part of the future. And we sort of run out of time. So let me just say thank you. You've given me a ray of hope. I agree. If you could move it to the practicum, you could maybe have the best of both worlds. Yeah. And I hope that we're around there to have enjoy that practicum type of thing because it would be a relief to give other people, including AI, the task of just data producing and data transfer. So we could stick to actually doing some stuff in the real world. So great stuff. Thanks, Greg, for being with us. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. And it's for sharing your expertise. Thank you. And thanks to everybody who's in the audience. We appreciate you being there. And I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks to Think Tech of Y, Jay and Haley and Michael and Ash and all those people who make this possible by doing the technology and making it so we don't look quite so bad on the screen. Now, I hope you'll all join me in two weeks, same time, same area. And we'll be with you then. And we've got a very special thing happening in two weeks. And that is that finding happiness in hard times is going to start looking at not only joy, but big question. Because I think that we need to look at big questions if we're going to actually be happy. A lot of times we avoid those big questions until they come and hit us in the head, like COVID did, for instance. So how do we protect ourselves? How do we stay healthy, that type of thing? So I've got three people coming in in two weeks who are brilliant and in very many different fields and are going to talk to us about the first big question that we'll tackle. And that big question is, what is important? I'll leave you with that so you can think about it. See you in two weeks. Thanks for being with us. Aloha.