 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. My classroom is very different than many high school classrooms. It's designed sort of like a Victorian library, so to speak. It's very real, but it's also very academic. It's warm. It's inviting. It pulls them in, and right away they know this is a place to think. When you walk in his room, you know I am in an English classroom. I'm going to learn Shakespeare. This is Brit Lit. When you walk into his classroom, you can see that he is a lifelong learner. That he is someone you want your child to have as a teacher. He is someone you want to have as a colleague, but most importantly Bobby Kavanaugh or someone you want to have as a friend. I genuinely believe that art is the way we learn to see each other and put ourselves in each other's shoes and learn empathy. It is. If you've studied mid-summer, it makes a lot of sense. The importance of the humanities is that it teaches us to be human and what it means to be human. When we inspire kids on a more artistic level, they tend to grow and do even more successfully on the academic level. And part of that is being able to feel for others and know each other's stories and share each other's stories. It's actually done really smartly. It's pretty smart, yeah. Mr. Kavanaugh is a performer, like through and through. One of the things that we often say is that teaching is one-fourth preparation. And 75% pure theater. And that's what he cultivates in his classroom, where students are free and comfortable enough to start creating their own worldviews and thinking for themselves. So we do theatrical performances of Shakespeare in order to understand the text better. They'll use themselves, obviously, but they'll use parents and community members and teachers to perform just one scene. That is perfect. His flight was madness when our actions do not. Give me the daggers, the sleeping in the dinner but as pictures. They will perform these scenes, they'll record them, and then we actually watch them here in class. And that's the idea of teaching Shakespeare. It's not so that all these kids can someday go and appreciate just Shakespeare. It's so that they can see truly great theater and great literature done well and be able to realize that there is talent like that today and that they can be that talent, that they can go out and produce these things. All right, all right, excellent. I think it's a very fun way to do it, and there's never a dull moment in his classes. Mr. Kavner's class really inspired me as a teacher because I really want to create an interactive and engaging, participatory environment. His passion is public education, a quality free public education for everyone. He always calls it the great equalizer, and he goes around and speaks about it to everyone who will listen, but then also takes it through the break channel and marks their state government, you know, fighting for the students. It's stunningly good, yeah. Many of our great artists and thinkers and inventors actually were born in poverty, and were given that opportunity to let their genius show, and that's how public education equalizes life. All right, we got it.