 At Horace Mann, we applaud educators' dedication to teaching excellence, ensuring all students receive a quality education. We believe in helping educators find solutions to help them achieve financial success, to live better and retire happier. That's why we proudly sponsor the NEA Foundation Horace Mann Awards for Teaching Excellence, to honor educators selected by their peers for their professional excellence and dedication to their students. Please join me in congratulating and honoring the five individuals who are this year's Horace Mann Award recipients. Good morning. Matt Bacon-Brenness. Well, yeah, it's an obvious one. He's my identical twin brother. I didn't say he was checking in with Matt what he was going to do when he graduated and Matt wasn't sure and said, but he would be interested in education and my sense, he said, hey, there's a great opportunity if you go to Japan. Here's a great program and he ended up going to Japan and changed his life forever. The reason I started teaching American history in Japanese was really it came out of an economic situation, tightening budgets in schools and I proposed that we do what we're trying to do and do a language immersion and that is deliver content but do it in Japanese so we kill two birds with one stone. My favorite lessons were about the history and the culture in Japan, but all in Japanese language. I started teaching American history in Japanese. The chunk of it was focused on preparing students to do cross-cultural studies in Japan. Teaching history and specifically US history in two languages really provides the gateway to understanding an historical event from multiple perspectives. He was able to take his like multicultural, multi-perspective point of view and weave that into his teaching through his ability to teach in Japanese. You get to learn a second language within this amazing context of a community that extends the language into the culture. The program develops a small community of people within the school that has a shared vision. We became such like a close-knit family of students that whenever anyone needed help, we'd always come to their support and help them with whatever they needed. And he tries to bring his students closer to that world by through language acquisition, through cultural teachings to make sure his students understand that the world is more than just their neighborhood. I'm of the belief that if you're going to go after that language, you need to go after that culture. And I think if you can get students to not only speak the language, but also speak the culture is what I talk about in my classroom, then you get them to take that into a much deeper level within their being. And I think therein lies the ability to be more empathetic. And I think that's what I wish for my students.