 Okay, I'm supposed to be in front of 30 chemistry students right now teaching, and they can do a better job than that, and there's like 400 of you, so I'll try again. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Oh, that's good. Thank you. I am absolutely honored to be here with all these amazing educators that have been speaking and in the audience, and I do find a hint of irony in it because I was never meant to be a teacher. At least in my mind, I was never supposed to be a teacher. In my first five years of college, I bounced around from degree program to degree program. I was going to be an engineer, and then I was going to be a biologist, and then I was going to be a wildlife biologist, and who knows what else I thought I was going to be. The trouble was I couldn't really see myself in those positions. I couldn't see what I was going to do with my life once I got that degree. All of that changed when I enrolled in a chemistry, I'm sorry, in a physics class. From day one, this man got up front, and he smiled the entire time he taught. He bounced around the room. He had an absolutely blast teaching, and I sat there just completely enamored with his teaching that I forgot to write down anything that he was teaching about, so it turns out I got to take his class again the next year. Believe it or not, I'm glad I did, because again, I was so enamored with how he was teaching, I began to realize, wait a minute, maybe there's a profession out there for me. Maybe I could do something where I get to have fun every day, and so I started taking more education classes, or I started taking them in more and more, and pretty soon three years after that, I graduated. Now if you're a math teacher, you know that's eight years to become a public school teacher, which is not the norm, but I made it, and I sure am glad that I did. Now there were a lot of things that this professor did in his class that really, really stuck in my mind, and most of it was his delivery, and one of those days, one of the real big things that just still is burned into my memory was the day that he came out with a bed of nails. So mine's got 540 sharpened nails on it, and he said, I'm going to lay on this bed of nails and teach you about physics. Remember I missed the rest of it because I was just enamored with his teaching, and I forgot to write things down, and he said, my assistant is going to come out, welcome my assistant. This, my assistant is far more beautiful than his, this is my wife, Christy Beals, and she has got an eight pound sledgehammer, so we can talk about my stupidity later, because I think you're about to see what's going to happen. He laid down on the bed of nails, I'm going to put these on, and he encouraged his assistant to smash a cinder block over his chest, okay, there we go, okay, okay, oh, and just to model, because that's what we do in teaching, right, we model. All right, mama, in one, two, three, hit me, good gravy, I don't know why she enjoys that so much, but she does, and thank you, give Vanna a hand, thank you, but the thing was, it wasn't actually the act of being crushed that stuck into my brain. What did was that when he got up off of the bed of nails, and went to put his coat back on, he briefly turned around for just a split second, and then he went on teaching physics, I'm in the back of the class going, that dude had fake blood on his shirt, at some point this man had to lay awake at night and say, how do I take that where I'm going to lay on a bed of nails and get crushed with a cinder block, how do I take that and step that up one more notch to grab the attention of that kid in the back of the class who's been here for two years, he hasn't written a single thing down, and grab him by the collar and shake him and go, you can do this, man, you can learn, and I found myself continually thinking about how much joy this man had in his job, and I wanted that for myself, so I said, I finally graduated, right, finally, and I got a teaching job, and I was so honored to get a teaching job, I didn't think they would ever hire somebody who had failed so many classes as I had, I retook them all, so my GPA wasn't that bad, but that's because I took them all twice, and I got a job, I said, I'm going to start to change lives, we're going to have so much fun in my class, I'm going to be that teacher, and these kids are going to know science like nobody ever knew science, so I stayed up every single night late making these PowerPoints that were the most amazing PowerPoints you've ever seen, I literally had words that would fly in from the side of the screen, and if it was something I really wanted them to know, I would make it spin, and that was, I mean, I was proud of myself, I had photographs, they were open source, so it was totally legal, I was pretty proud of that too, and every day I would be like, alright, get out your notebooks, we're going to do some PowerPoints, and finally this kid says in the back of the class, he goes, oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding me, I looked at him, I said, what do you mean, oh my gosh, he says, it's so boring, I'm like, what's so boring, it was your class dude, it's so boring, and I was mad, because quite honestly, I was staying up all hours of the night, and this is how I thought I was going to inspire young people, I was going to get them to know science and love science, I was wrong, and then I did something probably even more wrong, but I thought it was very creative at the time, I met that young man at the door the next day with a big garbage bag, and I said, if my class is so boring, I've got another activity for you to do, you can go out to the garbage, or out to the parking lot and pick up garbage while the rest of us learn from my magical PowerPoints, and off he went, about halfway through class, he came back with a very full garbage bag, and I was awful puffed up and proud of myself, and I said, so welcome back, why don't you grab your seat and join us, and he said, oh no dude, I was just seeing if you had another garbage bag, oh now I'm really mad, and that night I reflected on it and realized he was right, and he was speaking for every student in my class, this was not why I got into teaching, so I don't know why I was teaching it that way, I thought this is how I was supposed to do it, but it was doing it all wrong, and I wasn't even having fun, I started to change things, I started to change my thinking, and instead of staying up late making PowerPoints, I stayed up late, and started making things that we could play with in the class, and then we could model science, we could do science, we could like science could become a verb in my class instead of this passive thing where they sit there, and then I came up with stories like one of the stories I love to tell is that before I was a teacher I was a ghost buster, but it turns out ghost busting didn't pay all that much, so I got a teaching job, even even my students understand the irony in that one, and I started to destroy things around the house, like I took our garbage cans and cut holes in them, and then I raised money to buy things like fog machines, so I could teach about vortices and pressure, and we could really start to remember, have fun, and find the joy in science, look at that, yeah, see now you want to come back to high school science class, right, and it's just the tip of the iceberg, because I don't want the alarm to go off, I'm gonna stop now, I'm actually quite famous for that in my school, but that's a whole other talk, and when I first started teaching, and I was PowerPoint-in-the-way like a crazy person, I refused to go to the local fast food joints in our small town, because I knew every kid that was working there, and I knew that they would spit in my burger, how did I know that? Because if I was a teenager working at a fast food joint, and I would have shown up, I would have spit in my burger, but then I knew that I had arrived as a teacher, some years later, when I pulled up at the McDonald's drive-through, with my whole family in the vehicle, and one of my students stuck her head out the window and said, Mr. Beals, and she turned around into McDonald's and yelled, Mr. Beals is here, and three kids, three other kids stick their head out and they all wanted to talk, they wanted to say hi to my kids, they wanted to see what my family looked like, I realized I'd arrived, I was finally doing something right, the kids enjoyed me, and I enjoyed seeing them out in the community, and to me, this is the really, really important thing, there was one other really, really important person in my teaching, when I was trying to decide if I was going to become a teacher, I would race home during lunch while I was in college, because I only had one station, you know, the rabbit ears, and I couldn't afford cable because I was in college, still can't, and I would race home and turn on the TV, and I would watch Bob Ross, you remember Bob Ross, right? He enjoyed his job so much that he called it the joy of painting, so here I am in my formative years, and I'm finding out that, wait, maybe I could take some education classes, I could become a teacher, this guy in front of me, he's having a great time, and then at lunchtime I'm watching Bob Ross, and he's having the time of his life painting things, and I said, I want to be Bob, I want to be that guy, and so finally we reached that point, now I think that the important thing is, I've been trying to do that with my hair for years, I think the important thing is this, is that if we as teachers can find the joy in teaching, we can really transform things for our students, and it's the people that enjoy teaching, that need to convince everybody else that they can enjoy teaching as well, there's nothing wrong with enjoying this job, it's the hardest job you'll ever do, I get that, which is why we need to have a little bit of fun sometimes, and if we're gonna spread the joy, maybe we should spread it like toilet paper all across this crowd, this is me spreading joy people, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, that is not joyful, somebody, somebody loaded my cannons wrong, and I'll give you a hint, it was not my assistant, it was me, let's try this one, yeah that's better, that's the joy, yeah, ah, Costco's got good toilet paper, so here's the deal I think if we can find the joy in teaching, we can do just like those teachers that impacted me so much, they can teach, or we can teach our students to find the joy in learning, and that is our goal as teachers, thank you.