 So, in 2015 I was teaching here, this is James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York, and I thought I was a gift to quadratic equations. I had my curriculum down, I had my grading down, I had students from all over the world and it was just a really magical place, but then in 2016 this happened. My son Isaac was born, and my wife and I decided very prudently that we wanted to move back to the Washington, D.C. area where both of our families lived. So that entailed some job hunting, and I ended up here at Lincoln Middle School. I was going to be teaching eighth grade, Algebra I, it's a bilingual school, really excited about it, love my new AP. I've taught ninth grade Algebra I, how different can eighth grade Algebra I be? Well, if you cannot read this, that is a ton of bricks. And that is how I felt like in those last few days of August. The culture was different, the flow was different, the messaging to the students was different, their attitudes towards me were different, and things did not go well. Students were not engaged with what I was doing, they were out of their seats, they were fighting with each other, they were fighting with me, and I just felt really unsure about what to do, how to proceed. On top of that, I felt frustrated, here I am a veteran teacher, I know how to do group-worthy tasks, I know how to differentiate, I know how to leverage student artifacts for understanding, why am I having all these classroom management problems? If I play in good lessons, I shouldn't have to manage. Now, my school had some help for me. One of the things they pushed was this idea of champs, this is an acronym that says, if you spell out everything, all your expectations and activity clearly, everything will go perfectly. Not so much. I also had detention, so if students came late, if they cursed, if they didn't sit in their assigned seat, detention, detention, detention, my students started joking, that was my favorite word, and you can probably guess how well that went towards getting eighth graders to learn math. So a friend of mine who had worked in a no-excuses charter and wasn't having very much success with merits and demerits got this book secretly slipped to him by one of his administrators. It's called Love and Logic, and it starts from this premise that the rules are for the kids who are already going to follow them anyway. So if you say the expectation is to stay in your seat, like three-quarters of the kids were already going to do that anyway, so spelling them out is not going to help, giving detention is not going to help. So four basic expectations for a class. The first, I allow students to remain in the classroom as long as they don't cause a problem for anyone else, and if they cross a problem, I will ask them to fix it. So let's unpack those first couple a little bit. The first is if there's a problem, you lovingly hand it back to your students. If you give a consequence, you're short-circuiting a process whereby students think about their behavior and think about its effect on other people and about how they want to reshape what they're doing. So instead of you're supposed to be in your seats because my PowerPoint says you are, you just say to the student, I'm distracted with you walking around the classroom. That's all you say. And then leave it to the student to say, oh, okay, well, I better sit down. Parts three and four as follows. If the student can't or won't fix the problem, I will do something, but what I do depends on a unique situation. So that depends on my relationship with the student, that depends on the situation in the class, and the situations are different. So you can always say, I'm not sure what the consequence will be, we'll discuss later. So that buys you breathing room. So instead of saying detention, detention, detention, you just say, I'm gonna think about it a minute, I'm gonna think about the situation and we'll go from there. Also when you're giving consequences, you always empathize or validate first. So I'm sorry that you're bored and you can't be rolling around the floor. I don't like what she said to you either and you can't throw your pencil at her. So that's the beginning point for the conversation. Finally, if you're arguing you've already lost. You can say to students, I argue before school, at lunch, or after school, but not during class. You can empathize instead or you can ignore instead, but a back and forth is losing. So how did it turn out? I'd love to say everything was transformed, but we all know we live in a world of incremental change. I think what the book did for me was just shift my thinking and put the attention back on relationships to build with my students. And at the end of the year, at the end of the experience of teaching eighth grade, I think I'm ready to admit that challenged forced me to innovate. Without, I would never have read this book had I not put myself out there and done something new. And this was just the classroom management pieces, not even the instructional innovations I made. So very highly recommended. There's also versions for parenting. And I think just a lot of really interesting implications for human interaction in general. Thank you very much. Thank you.