 One of my students was writing an essay about his ninth grade experience and one of the things that he put in his Introduction was his ninth grade year was crazy because all he had was substitutes In some cities like in Philadelphia, I think you know the vast majority of their teachers leave within the first three years nationwide Collectively we spent two point two billion dollars Recruiting hiring and training new teachers. I started the teaching well because after my third year of teaching I was burnt out. I felt like I was short with my students And I knew if I had to do this another year that I wasn't going to be able to make it the long-run When the only way you're gonna get promoted is to live another year then there's no incentive for you to improve and to stay and so People exit they either exit to charter networks where there is a room for growth or they exit the profession entirely I Went back to the drawing board and initially it started with me working on me And I went into the 200 hour yoga training and in that yoga training I realized how can I be who I am on my yoga mat with my students and We now offer professional development for teachers during their contracted school hours So they can get wellness practice and longevity supports during their work day We talk about nutrition we talk about understanding your body's unique signals for stress and We also talk about really being aware of what your strengths are I think it's important for us always to Explain when we're talking about teacher burnout or teacher turnover that there are probably ten percent of people that thrive in the Educational system even as it stands today, but they're an eighty percent chunk of people there who could be excellent educators and Because the education system the way it's set up today and because of the external pressers that are put on teachers They end up leaving I'm dealing with students who have severe trauma in their life who bring in all of their baggage One of my students earlier today showed me her life map and she had three deaths on that life map You look at the schools where I taught in Watts and you say those kids need the most incredible teachers And instead they just get the bottom of the barrel They get who falls there and they're losing their teachers every year and it's it's tragic Then you have certain countries like Finland where the government decided that the health and well-being as well as a Salaries of the people who were literally raising their children was really important What we've seen in those countries is that just by value of putting that into the adults on campuses We've raised the socio-emotional well-being and the academic achievement of students without even trying I went a few weeks ago to my first grade teacher's retirement party now. I'm 30. I had her when I was six I remember the lessons verbatim and you know just to be able to tell her listen miss Bernard You change my life like that. I mean how how many of me are there and she's been doing this for 30 plus years And I think that if we could do more to support these teachers We'll have more miss Bernard's and we'll have more people like me who still remember their first grade teachers and thank them for the future success