 So one of the classes that I teach is the Social Studies Methods course. In other words, teaching elementary teachers how to teach social studies. And a phrase that you'll hear me say in that course often is, if we just learned dates, who won the war, who fought in the war, we're missing the point. The point of social studies is to talk about people. And so the phrase you'll hear me say is humanized history. It's an interesting story. My uncle was drafted to the Cuban military. And my grandmother was unwilling to allow her son to fight in Fidel Castro's army. And so she said, no, you're not going to report for duty. And in those days, they sent you the uniform. And when you reported, you were supposed to go in uniform. And all along, as the weeks led up to his departure date, she said, no, you're not going to fight in Fidel's army. And there was no plan for him to not fight. So the night before, my grandmother snuck into his room, took his uniform and burnt it. And the morning he wakes up and he says, where's my uniform? Where could it be? He was looking everywhere for it and knows there's one person who could have done something with that uniform. So he goes running to my grandmother, his mother. And he says, where is it? Where is it? And she says, you don't have it anymore. And I don't think you should report to her communist army without the uniform that they gave you. He says, what are we going to do? She says, we've been talking about leaving for so long. I think we should do it today. Because if not, tomorrow might look pretty ugly. And so without a plan, they decided that that day they were going to go to America in search of the quote, unquote American dream. My grandfather was a very hardworking man. And he sought work in the States and couldn't find any work in part because of his monolingual Spanish speaking abilities. And so someone told him to go down to this office, which is now we know is the welfare office. And they would help him establish himself. But they tried to give him something. And he didn't want that given to him. Having come from a communist government, he felt like there was probably strings attached to whatever was being given to him. And so he said, no, no, no. But they were the most helpful, but they didn't give him what he wanted, which was a job. And so unfortunately he took his own life within a year of being in the United States. And so now my family found themselves without a father with very little income and searching out the American dream. And people have often asked, why does that story influence you so much, Jessica, if you didn't actually live through that? How can that influence what you do both as a student and now as a professor? And the truth is that students who have lived a similar story wouldn't ask that question because they know that that's the reason that you do everything as a child because even though you didn't physically live that story, that story was told to you time and time again. And that's why you had to get an education. And that's why you had to make the best of every opportunity because if we were in Cuba, you wouldn't have any of these opportunities. So you better work hard. It's important that we humanize not only history, but that we humanize the educational process. I don't believe that there's a right way of teaching any given topic, but especially multicultural topics. The ideas that we're talking about differences. And differences are hard. It's hard to engage in dialogue of differences because you might not feel safe within those differences. And I think that comes back to one of my main goals as a professor is to create relationships with my students. And it's hard to do it in a 10-week time frame or in a university time frame, but we have to model that for our teacher candidates so that they can understand the importance of creating relationships with their own students. I often go about this by not lecturing, but rather having conversation and to whatever extent possible and engaging conversation in the classroom. And unfortunately, school has taught us that it's the teacher's job to ask questions and it's the student's job to answer questions. And that seems kind of ridiculous to me because if we can't encourage students to ask questions, then what are we doing? And so a launching place for my classroom to often begin is students' own questions. And that's hard to do as a professor sometimes because you don't know what questions they're going to have in advance and you might not have all the answers to the things that they were asking about. That's a way to demonstrate lifelong learning and where we all go out and say, you know what, this one seemed really important and we didn't have the answer. So why don't you look into it and I'm going to look into it as well and let's revisit it next time. So my classroom time is very much seen as a dialogue and not your traditional lecture.