Choosing Living Books to Spark Kindness| Professional Development Course given by Michael Fitzgerald

by Michael Fitzgerald. He's going to share with you many of his experiences with the idea of living books and what that means within his environment at the schoolhouse. Also, we are gonna be touching on the idea of kindness. I know that is something that might have brought you to this idea of living books and how important it is that children understand that concept. So when Michael begins, if you have any questions, he's going to ask you just to put them into the chat box. And what I will do is I will monitor the chat during his presentation, and then there will be time at the end for questions and answers. So Michael, I am going to bring the mic over to you, sir. All right, thanks, Marilyn. Welcome, everybody. Yeah, like Marilyn said, the purpose of this is to sort of investigate these different ways that kindness can be brought into our world through into education. And we'll talk a little bit more about the efforts of Ganjing World and how do we help promote kindness through education, but in the larger goal, because we want that to blossom throughout society. And so Ganjing World is making great efforts in trying to do that. And they're working really, really hard on this. And I'll discuss more about their efforts, their great efforts at the end of this and how that relates to education. And so let me go ahead and share my screen. Let's see, we want entire screen. There we go. All right, hopefully you can see this. So again, Michael Fitzgerald. I teach currently, I work with Northern as kind of a large system of schools. And there's a lot of things happening on our campus. So I work with the Academy, which is a middle school, high school, teaching English there. And I also help run Northern Schoolhouse, which is the elementary branch of the Northern system. And we're doing some really cool things, some really exciting things, and I'm really proud of it. And one of the key components to what we do is what we call it a living education. So everything we do is full of vitality and full of life. And of course, we talk about hitting the whole child. A lot of branches of education talk about that today, but just what that means, there's sort of a lot of components to that. And one of the things I wanna talk today is about living books, how living books sort of breathe life into education and the implications for sort of nurturing kindness and compassion amongst our students and having them become broader minded and contrasting that with twaddle, which we'll talk about here. So first, when we're talking about literature, obviously everyone knows that kids should be reading and they're gonna be better off in life if they're reading a lot. But there's also a question of what they should be reading and when they should be reading it. And that one also has a lot of things that need to be addressed. But if we're just gonna talk about literature as a whole, there's these side effects we're gonna talk about. The first one that they're gonna mention is, well, what does it do to us cognitively? What does it do to us in terms of helping people become smarter and just helping their thinking and helping it flow well? And we talk about how well it helps your memory and your attention and your processing speed, your sequencing. Sequencing being how well you can order things. Obviously, if you're reading a story and there's a beginning, middle, end, it's helping you sequence. You're processing the images and you're processing the words through your mind very, very quickly. You're paying attention. A lot of times, especially with younger kids, we wanna prepare them to be able to listen to sophisticated lectures later on when they're advancing academically and they're in middle school and high school. And for the little kids, when we can get them hooked into a deep story, that's honing their attention for later on. Obviously, they're drawing on all the parts of their memory. And this is huge. So this is like the first one. But I think this is more, I think this is shallower. I think there's deeper things that are happening when we're pulling in deep literature into our lessons. And in fact, making literature the foundation of everything that we're doing. And the first one is, it's helping them with their cognition. But secondly, and I think this is maybe the most important one, I don't really know, but is it's helping immerse them into the human lineage. Helping immerse them into these deeper sort of constructs that have been developed over time for thousands and thousands of years. And they're seeing themselves as a link in that great chain all the way back to the beginning. That we're not just here and witnessing it go by or examining it through a history textbook, but that we ourselves are actually participating in it. And we call that participation, the great conversation. In classical education, it's called the great conversation. And it's the idea that all of these themes and ideas are actually discussing with each other. And, oh, thank you, thank you. Oh, perfect, thank you, thank you. And so that's what we call the great conversation. And it's just immersing ourselves into this sort of living human lineage. And then third one, and this is more of what we're all here about today, though I'll be drawing on all three of these points, is what we might call in the neuro world, large part of my background is in neuroeducation or brain-based learning and teaching. And we call this embodied experience, which we translate into other words as just compassion. And embodied experience is where when somebody else is experiencing something, we're participating in that experience as well. And obviously people can get this through a bunch of different ways. If you're really close within a family, everyone's embodying the experiences with each other. If you travel a lot, you're embodying those experiences with people you're traveling with and meeting. But one of the most fundamental ways is through literature. And literature forces you into the mind and through seeing the world through the eyes of another. And what ends up happening is it develops a sense of compassion and kindness for other people. In fact, you can't help it. This is the reason, the same thing happens when people watch movies. You can't help it that if something is happening in the story and it's touching your heart and it makes you a little nervous, your palms might sweat. Well, you know it's not real. You're reading the book and you know it's not real, yet something tragic happens in the story and it crushes you. And it literally makes your heart hurt and it brings sadness to your life. But yet you know it's fake. Yet part of your brain doesn't know that. Really only this frontal part of your brain knows that it's fake. The rest of your brain perceives it all as real. And most of your brain can't differentiate between us as the viewer and then the book itself as just the subject we're interacting with or the object. And so we call this embodied experience. So we read literature and there's all kinds of data on this. There's so much great data and literature on how scholarly literature, on how the act of reading literature brings about a more compassionate state. And a lot of this is self-reported studies, but it's people who largely say that they perceive themselves as having greater rates of compassion. And then a lot of these times these people have, they do a lot of reading themselves and it makes perfect sense. Books worth reading, ideas worth thinking. What the heck are we talking about here? At the schoolhouse, we say we only wanna give the kids the best in terms of living books. Living books, there's this idea, I'll talk more about it, but it's really the best literature and it's gonna pull the best parts out of our students. And this is an idea that's very old. It goes back to Socrates. He says, never to let any of our pupils try to study anything not perfect, anything which does not always arrive at that end which all studies ought to reach. Now it's kind of a mouthful there, but he's saying, first of all, there's kind of two main parts in here. This first one is if our students are gonna study anything, it better be perfect. It has to be perfect. We don't let them study anything not perfect, meaning we give them perfect things, the best things we can give them. And then he adds, he has a second little clause in here. It needs to arrive at that end which all studies ought to reach. So he's suggesting there is an end of studies, not just an end as in a final part, but a purpose. There's a final purpose that our studies are supposed to achieve. So it has to be perfect what we're giving them and it needs to be aiming towards something greater and very high and very worthy. And this is what Socrates was saying. All those thousands of years ago, Socrates was saying this thing. We can skip forward later into in the 1800s to certainly a great inspiration on our schooling model here. Our model is pretty original in-house, but if we were to draw on anybody the most, it would be a lady named Charlotte Mason who was an educational reformer in the 1800s. And she's pure classical education. It's really brilliant stuff. And she has this great quote. She says, for the children, they must grow up upon the best. There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts well put and inspiring tales that are well told. So our children are also equal to worthy thoughts, but they have to be put well. We can't just toss all these thoughts on top of them. We have to actually put it to them in the right way. We have to articulate it well in a way that they can understand. And then of course the inspiring tales well told. This is what feeds our children, what Charlotte Mason calls mind stuff. We give them the stuff that's gonna touch their hearts and touch their minds. And it's not just meant for entertainment. It should be entertaining as well, but it should also be deep and meaningful. And that's what she's saying. It should grow up upon the best. What are the books we're giving our kids? It's gonna be one of the most significant influences they have. Here's a longer one, but this is really good. Our business is to give him mind stuff, meaning the student. Our business is to give him mind stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential. Naturally, each of us possesses the mind stuff only in limited measure, but we know where to procure it, meaning we know where to get it. For the best thought the world possesses is stored in books. We must open books to children, the best books. Our own concern is abundant provision and orderly serving. If you go read more Charlotte Mason, she has a lot of nuggets like this that are both like pretty deep in terms of its content, but also it's the language that she uses is also deep. She's well-read and a really good writer. And so if you wanna take up the challenge to read more Charlotte Mason, I encourage you to do that. And you'll be continually rewarded by doing that. But again, here she's basically saying, what should we give our kids? What should we give our students? Of all ages, it should be the best stuff. And our only concern then, once you have the best stuff, the next main concern is how do we, she says here, abundant provision, meaning we're giving it to them in the right amounts and serving it to them in the right order. And so she's making it pretty clear what we should be giving them, and she's totally in line with Socrates. She's in the line of Socratic traditions mixed with sort of a biblical worldview. So she certainly embodies that, but when you read her, what strikes most, I think is this classical, these classical ideals she's playing. Classical meaning the best of the best is what classical means. To understand a little bit more when we're talking about education in school, we throw these words around, you're all educators in here. So you use these words all the time. We talk about school, we talk about education, and we actually don't know what they really mean. And they've almost lost their inner meaning, and that's a pity because both of these words have a very deep linguistic roots that they come from. The first one, edusere, it's a Latin word, and it literally means to draw forth or to lead out. So the idea that the education is already inside of us and we're pulling it out of the students. It's there, we're just pulling it out of them to connect with something else, or this idea that we're leading the knowledge out of them, or we're leading the students upward. Socrates compared it to a cave in which everyone is trapped, blinded, watching these flames flickering on a wall, and they think that's reality. And it's the teacher's job to go into the cave and to lead them out. And that's how Socrates put it. He's talking about edusere, the prospect of leading people out of ignorance toward wisdom, toward a more perfect understanding of reality. And that's what education is. It has its roots in edusere, which has much deeper connotation to it than just I'm giving the kids some knowledge and they're taking a test, which is necessary too. But is that what education is for? It's something much deeper than that. Well, but the question is, what are we drawing out? Draw forth what, Socrates? Enthusiasm, curiosity, joy, fearlessness. In the schoolhouse, we talk about the educated imagination. Kids naturally have imaginations, even teenagers. They have these brilliant imaginations. It's our job to sort of refine their imaginations into something that's more sophisticated, sort of give boundaries to their imagination. So that way it can really flourish. It's not just a wild garden, or a wild jungle, but it's actually a garden that we're tending to. And that's the educated imagination. And Socrates, he went so far as to say, there is no such thing as learning. There's only memory. There's only remembering what we've already known in our heart forever. And so he went that far. And I like that, but only some people wanna go that far. So the second word where we get school is from a Greek term called skole. And this is also a really beautiful term. Skole has two meanings. One, it just means that you have the space in your life, whether it's physically or it's in time, to think about, to contemplate the most worthy ideas. So it's kind of two parts. One, you have the space to think, but then what are you thinking about? The most worthy ideas. So you're not just sitting there thinking about the most recent show that you saw on Netflix. That's an idea. The question is, is it the most worthy idea? And I don't know if the ancients would agree with that, but they didn't have Netflix. So I don't know what they would say. But skole means the space to contemplate the most worthy ideas. You have the space and the time. And when you're using that time, you're thinking about awesome things. The second one is kind of, it's related to the first one, but the other meaning of skole is something goes into us. We learn something. And skole is when that learned thing comes back out of us. So skole would be like, if you had, an example I often use is, you have a young girl who's been learning French and she's learned how to count in French one through 10. Okay, so it's gone in and we say it's been learned, but skole has not been achieved. And you'll see it when she's outside skipping through the grass and she's counting the trees in French. That would be skole. The ideas have gone in and now the ideas are coming out. You'll see this a lot with kids when they watch television shows. We can always tell, as the weekends pass and we come back to school, we can always tell what each of our kids have watched during the week, during the weekend, because they can't stop talking about it and acting it out. And that's skole. So often the kids will come in and they'll be acting like Iron Man or something. And I'm like, oh, you watched that this weekend, didn't you? Because they can't help it. Whatever goes in is gonna come out. You'll see this as well when we teach Beowulf to the young kids. And next thing you know, they'll be acting as Beowulf or they'll be acting as Gilgamesh. And they're acting as these people from this great literature and they're acting it out. That's skole. Skole is when a high school student might learn something in physics and they wanna go become a physicist. That's skole, acting out. Skole doesn't always get acted out, even if the kids pass the test. They don't act it out. They don't bring it into their lives. They pass the test. So just because they're at school doesn't mean skole is being achieved. The question is, how do we achieve edusere? How do we achieve skole? And what's the most worthy? History, literature, music, art. All these things we're teaching the kids at school are the most worthy. The things that we pass on to the kids are the most worthy things to contemplate. Language, nature, arithmetic, beauty, relationships, goodness, truth, purpose, virtue. These are the things we want the kids acting out in their lives. We present it to them on a platter. They pick the pieces that they want and they go apply it to their lives. That's skole. We can also think of it something like this. We kind of have a spectrum. And at the top, we have what we might call the deep culture or the great conversation. The ideas that have been played with by the ancients and are still being played with today and we're participating in that. At the lower levels, we have pop culture. We have what we might call bread and circuses. Meaning it's just things to feed my belly and entertain me. And it's good enough because I'm full and I'm laughing at the thing. It's good enough. The question is, so skole is anything that we take in is gonna come back out. So if we're watching a bunch of pop shows on television, those are the things we're gonna talk about with other people. So that's skole, but it's a little bit lower on, it's a little bit lower on the staircase. It's just fine. Skole is gonna come out, but that would be lower skole. It's things that are a little bit more shallow and fine, they're perfectly okay. They're just not very deep. They're shallow. Whereas as you go farther up the staircase, you're entering into deeper skole. Skole is things that are older and that have the most meaning for humans. And actually they're the things that have outlasted entire kingdoms. Netflix is not gonna outlast many kingdoms, but ideas like good versus evil, and the ideas played within Beowulf and Shakespeare in the Bible, these ideas are not going away. They've outlasted entire kingdoms. And those are the, when we learn those things, skole can come out of it. So that's one side, you have skole, but then the other side is edusere. How do we take the kids who are at one level and bring them up to the next level? That's when we're practicing edusere. So we meet the kids where they're at and we bring them up to the next level. That's edusere. Everything is skole, edusere is the job of the teacher to raise them up. But Socrates also said that there is an end, there is a purpose. So we also have to know what that end purpose is. What is the end purpose of education? Why are kids going to school? How do we lift up edusere toward higher skole? That's the job of the educator. That's what we're all doing. We even call ourselves educators. Well, we should be lifting up. We lift them up towards something. The best way to do this, as far as I can tell, is through living books. One of the best ways, there's other great ways. One of the great ways is through living books. Living books, this is according to Charlotte Mason. Living books are whole books. They're firsthand sources. They're the classics. Books that display imagination, originality, and those having the human touch. Notice she doesn't say textbooks. Textbooks are not living books. Textbooks are just fine as references. Dictionaries are just fine as references. Textbooks are about as interesting as a dictionary to read. And they're great for reference. They are not a living book. They don't display the vitality of life, of the human experience. Living books do, and they've stood the test of time. When we're talking about living books, we say, is the writing of excellent quality? Is it a little, is it a step above where my students might be? Students should really be reading at three levels. They should have access to three levels of writing. They should have access to reading that is right at their level. They should have access to reading that's below their level, and it's very easy. But they should also be reading books that are way outside of them. When a kid goes and grabs a book, a young child, that's totally outside of their league, and they sit down with it and start flipping through the pages, awesome. That's exactly what we want. And then they're becoming a complete reader. So we want students participating in each one of those. The second one, does it contain living ideas and knowledge suitable for the child? So the living ideas, meaning it just, it stretches back into time. Living ideas, ideas that are never going away. Does the child react with delight caused by the spark of ideas? So they hear the story, and this is, I say child, but this is the same for teenagers. I've been working with teenagers for a long time. I can talk more about how living books play into them because there is a difference, how we apply these things. But do they react with delight? They hear the stories and they want more. And does it impact their mind as shown by narrations? I won't talk too much about narrations. It's a tried and true classical technique that's very excellent and deep. And it's one of the key features of our schoolhouse education. Narrations are one of the gold standards of classical education, but I won't talk too much about that today. All of this versus twaddle. Twaddle means it's kind of a book that's maybe lowly. It's what we might also call candy. It might be shiny and the kids only want to read it because it's shiny or it's very shallow and has these sorts of things. We might call it twaddle. I have twaddle at my house. I don't keep twaddle in my library, but at my house, I have some twaddle. Twaddle might be like Dr. Seuss. It's super fun. I enjoy it. My kids love reading and I enjoy reading with them, but I'm not under any sort of illusion that it's some great work of art. It's not. It's not a living book. It's fun. It's entertaining. It's more on the bread and circus side. It's circusy. And we'll talk more about that versus twaddle. So kind of the final piece here is when we first kind of put this schoolhouse model together and we're still developing it, and there's a lot more to be said about some of the things that we're doing, but this idea that in classical education, there's kind of two ways that you start a classical school. The first would be start with a garden and build around the garden. That would be the first idea. The garden is the centerpiece. It's the space for scole. It's a quiet space where you can contemplate the most worthy ideas. And it's in that garden where you can have discussions. I mean, Confucius often strolled with his disciples through gardens. Plato's Academy was literally an olive grove. And so you would go to these places and you were just in nature and you were seeing the changes of nature. And it was a very deep and connecting experience. And that's why they always had gardens. So the first idea, you start with a garden, build around it. This is if you're starting from scratch. The second idea, if you don't have a garden space, would be start with a library. The library, we all have the opportunity to do this. Schools don't necessarily do this. The library is sort of a supplement, but the library should be the centerpiece. If not physically the centerpiece, we're lucky in our school because the library is literally the center and the classrooms hook into it. That's just fortunate for us. It can't always be that way, but ideologically is the library the center of everything. Everything runs in and out of it philosophically. And if living books is something that's important, then it naturally becomes that because everything is moving through the living books. All of the curriculum is based on living books. And I'll talk more about that here. So we say, when we first put our library together, we had the standard. And there are five points to this standard, five key aspects that we say, does this particular book that I'm gonna use, would it receive, there is no neutral. Would it receive a negative or a positive? If it, in terms of a living book, or maybe if it's really nice, it's a double positive. And for any book we have in the schoolhouse, it has to at least be a level of six. So it could be a level of six, meaning it's a minus in some areas, but it's very, very good in other areas, or it's just mostly good across the board. Pardon me. So let me go over these five points and we'll see where that takes us. The first one, does the text employ sophisticated language? Different texts are gonna do this in different ways. And it has to be, there's some texts that are meant for younger students that the language isn't gonna be as sophisticated, but at their level, it's sophisticated. It's not just trying to give them caveman talk and it's just filled mostly with pictures. The book actually incorporates language to get its point across, not just pictures. Of course, I wanna be clear, in my house, I have plenty of twaddle, but in my library that I help put together, no twaddle. We don't keep any of that stuff around. And if the kids bring it in, we encourage them toward other things and encourage them to leave it at home. They can read that stuff on their own time, but when they're here, they should take the deep stuff, the big stuff. And indeed, we have, you'll walk in and you'll see kids sitting on the sofa reading Shakespeare. It's a funny thing. When you surround them with nothing but good stuff, they default to good stuff. What do you want them defaulting toward? That's the question. And if you keep a bunch of candy around, they'll eat the candy. If you keep a bunch of broccoli around, they might go hungry for a minute and then guess what happens when they're hungry? They eat the broccoli. So it works. Sophisticated language. We mean, we should take into consideration the sentence length and variety. The vocabulary, does it employ complex grammar? How about the words per page? For instance, you might have a book like, this is a book about Bach. And I'll talk more about this in a moment on, this is history. So you see, there's a lot of words on there. So this is a little easier. This is a little more accessible versus something more like maybe this. This is tales from Shakespeare. This is rewritten for kids, but it's still really hard. This is more words per page. When we have, for instance, if I grab one of these, this is from classic starts. So these are all the classics rewritten for kids. The language is fairly simple. My goal with a student who's a pretty good reader would be to get him into these, but these are fairly easy reads. You see, they're not very big books. There's lots of words on the page and they're pretty big words. I mean, the physical size of the words. And the language isn't that complex. I'd give this probably a one. This would get a one because most of the kids at this level who are reading this, it's gonna be right at their level or slightly above. But what you really wanna do is you wanna move kids from this to the next level of Golliver's Travels, which would be something that looks more like this. And I'll talk more about this one in particular in just a moment. To something that looks more like, if I can get to one, has much more words on the page. So it's like trying to graduate the kids up, edusere, raising them up level by level. So starting with classical material, but this one's pretty easy. The language is sophisticated at a certain level, but my goal is to get them here and then raise them up to a higher level. So again, consider the sophistication of the language. We have to know our books. We have to think about it. The second one, does it promote traditional human culture? Does it look at, for instance, the old, does it value the old stuff? Does it look at, does it explore customs of humans, their traditions, their rituals? Does it incorporate some levels of spirituality? Is it historically relevant itself? It's either examining things that are historically relevant or it itself is historically relevant. So this one, again, none of this is black and white, but this one, somebody could make an argument for Dr. Seuss on this one. You could say, well, Dr. Seuss, its content isn't promoting traditional human culture by any means. I mean, the cat in the hat comes, and then at the end, he destroys your whole house, and then at the end, it's like, well, I don't know if any of you have read it, but I've read it plenty of times. And at the very end, the kids are left sitting and the mom comes home. She's like, well, what'd you do today? And the final lines are like, well, what would you do if your mom asked you? So do we tell her the truth or do we lie to her about the cat in the hat who came to our house that day? I don't know. To me, that's not promoting traditional human culture, that part, because it's giving you the hint that it might be okay to lie to your parents. And I don't actually think that's a very, I definitely don't want my kids lying to me, that's for sure. But Dr. Seuss itself, because it's been around since the 1950s and it's well-known, it's kind of a, it has this cultural relevance in that way. You could maybe say it has a one mark for historical relevance. Sophisticated language, no, not really. It's rhythmic. I wouldn't call it sophisticated. You'd probably get a negative, but it would maybe get a one in historical relevance. Whereas, obviously, if you're gonna be going into Shakespeare, it's historically relevant in every single way. It's some of the greatest literature that's ever been written, a lot of arguments for that. And then obviously, if you're reading something like Gulliver's Travels, this is not perfectly the original, but it's very, very close. This is also, this is like, this is written in the 1700s. This is going quite early, Shakespeare's in the 1500s. And all of these types of literature are looking at these traditional aspects of humankind. For instance, this one, this is more of a picture book style. But what's so cool about this is, this is more on the history side. It's called The Great Ships. It's just a picture book. But you see, it starts in the beginning of ships and each page is a new ship through history. So this is like a timeline of ships, each one giving you a story of the ships. And the language isn't that shallow. It's not that shallow, but what's this promoting? It's promoting the traditions of humankind through ship building and sailing and fishing. Same thing with this one, Seabird. This is a perfect example of a living book. This one as well is looking at like sea life, living on a sea in these sailing vessels. It has this beautiful pictures in it. The language is hard. You read this with the kids, it's tough and it's awesome. And they love it and they eat it up even when it's a little- Go ahead. Can you lift the books up? Oh, sorry. Can you lift the books up just a little bit more? Sure. Yeah, there we go. That's it. Thank you. That one was Seabird. Tales from Shakespeare. I'll show these all at the end again as well. This is a Gulliver's Travels. Hopefully you could see that okay. But this is a, I'll talk more about this one. Robert Engpin, he does a great job. But again, the promoting traditional culture, it's kind of two angles. One is it itself is historically relevant. Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift with Gulliver's Travels, or you can even make the argument a one plus for Dr. Seuss because it's been around a long time. It's kind of withstood the test of time and it's culturally relevant. People know what you're talking about. Or it's something like the great ships where it's literally promoting these things through history but not in a textbook form. This is not textbook. Each one of these is a story because that's another really important piece. The third one, does it promote classical artistry or is it dignified, tasteful, elegant versus it's just for utility? It's kind of sloppy. Like Dr. Seuss is gonna get a negative on this. There's nothing classical about his artistry. It's just a bunch of these kind of bubbly looking creatures slapped onto the page. He put work into it, not knocking the work he put into it. It's just not beautiful. It's not dignified. It's kind of sloppy. It's kind of unrefined. This one can be a little bit harder for high school teachers to incorporate. But let me walk you through an example of this. Okay, so here's Goliath Travels. And so this gets a single plus or a double plus in every single one of these that I'm talking about. This one in particular is super awesome. Even high school students would love this because when we look at the art in here, it's all of these beautiful hand-drawn pictures. Even the cover of it is beautiful. You look at this book and you're like, oh, the book itself is a work of art. And it has these beautiful art. And even this one in here as well. This is beautiful. Hopefully you can see that very well. But it's just beautiful artwork. It's quite lovely. Here's another one. This is called The Country Diary and Edwardian Lady, Edith Holden. This is one of our main science texts that we use for a lot of science journaling. And she just has, it's her straight journals. This is her journals. And so she has this rich language over here. She's always drawing on stories of legends and myths and biblical stories and quotes and her own poetry and other poems. And then she does her own drawings and she's tying it all into her observations of the natural world. And this is so awesome. It's deep, it's hard, it's beautiful, but it has a focus on the artistic side, even her handwriting, this is all her handwriting. And she's drawing all these, the birds and the plants. And she's drawing all of this. And even just to promote this amongst the kids, high schoolers should be reading this. Elementary schools should be reading this. Like this is how all of the great artists in the past documented their scientific endeavors. All the way back from Plato to Leonardo, all the way up through Darwin. They all kept journals where they were documenting their findings and writing about it and tying it into other happenings through history. It was a complete work of art and they saw their work as philosophical and artistic. And so that's what we're talking about when we say classical artistry focus. Same thing here with Shakespeare. This would be a double plus as well. It has these beautiful drawings and paintings that have been used. This one in particular is all rewritten tales. Four children. Go ahead. Michael, I'm sorry. With the shared screen, they can't see you. Can't see me at all? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Oh, I thought you could. You can't see my screen? I can, but I don't know. I have all that your picture is up, so. Really? Somebody is saying is you can pin Michael's video and it will get bigger. So maybe that will help those who can't. That's a bummer. I'm sitting here presenting all this stuff and I'm presenting it to blind people. That's okay. I'm sorry. I can see him. Some people are saying that they can't see. I can see him. I can see all the book he presented. Okay. Okay, good. So if you can't see, maybe try the pinning thing. My understanding was that in my experiences, it usually pinned the speaker automatically. So if you can't see, go ahead and pin. And so it stays there. But this one, even if you have children in your own home, I highly recommend everyone getting this and exploring Shakespeare with the kids. Shakespeare is just about as important of an author as kids should get today. It's very hard and he's drawing on everything, the Greeks and the Romans and biblical history. And he's tying it all together in perfect poetry. Literally the perfection of poetry. This is all rewritten in verse form for children, but it's hard. This was written in the 1800s. The language in this is, it ain't kid stuff. I mean, it's like, it's really good. And even adults would love to read these. And you're like, oh, I want to know more about Shakespeare. I feel so unsophisticated. I should catch up on Shakespeare. Well, get this book and go read it. And then maybe go read his real play. And, but again, it has the artistic side. And if you're, even if you're reading poetry, it's like even poetry counts as that artistic side anyways, because it's highly artistic. And so it's very dignified and elegant itself. But we're talking more on the picture side. So there's that. Oh, Seabird as well is another great example. This would be another double plus. All these hand-drawn stuff in here. This is a great book. They love this. He actually has three different books he wrote that are all similar in this vein. This is like a mixture of science meets geography, meets history, meets these traditions. So good. So cool. You'll love this. Read it yourself and you'll love it. Whereas, okay, something like this, this is the complete work of Charles Dickens. It's rewritten for children. Again, the language is still fairly sophisticated. It's definitely a double plus on sophisticated language. My, I'm not sold on the art. The art is well done, but it's all computer art. So nothing wrong with that. They did a really good job on this, but sometimes it's a little bit too, what would you say? It doesn't have that classical sense to it. So they are, they're maintaining the proper orientation of that time in which it's written, that it's trying to picture for this time in London. But it's sort of, you'll lose a little something without the hand drawn. And so erring toward the side of hand drawn and paintings and things like this. And if we're gonna have stuff that is based on like the graphic art, like digital art like this, then we should be very careful that it's very tasteful. And this one is, it's very tasteful. I would still call this very dignified. Whereas there are some other ones that they're just not very good. They're ugly, they're sloppy. They're just thrown to make a dollar really fast so they can make their book. And all the people have really big, huge eyes and nothing looks real. It looks like cartoons. And I highly recommend to veer away from those. We want to raise the kids up to higher sophistication. So we should immerse them into a culture that values that. Now, if we're teaching high school, high school is a little harder. Let's say for instance, because in high school, you might need to have class copies for all the students. And let's say you have 30 students or 15 students. And you're like, well, each of these kids needs to be reading something. And so you might download for them the PDF so they can read it on their computer. And okay, that's a minus for living books for the classical artistry. But we have to consider that as we're working with high school students. So let's say for instance, you were gonna read some Plato with them. So we give them this book. There's nothing fancy about this book by Dover. I love Dover. But this book is pure utility. This is only meant to give the kids to have class copies. And the translation is fine. There's no problems with any of that. It's just that it's not meant for anything greater. So how do we help promote the classical artistry side on the living books in high school? Well, we have to give them all the class copy. There's no problem with that. But let's say we were doing, there's two different ways. Let's say we were going to read Shakespeare with them, for example, and you were gonna study Julius Caesar with your high school kids. And so you were gonna give them all this copy. And this is like, it's kind of lame. And it's this pure utility. You're gonna read Julius Caesar and this is pure utility. And I have 23 kids and they're all gonna get this copy and we're gonna read it. We're starting with act one tomorrow. So I hand this out. But, and this particular book is gonna get a negative. There's nothing, this is just utility. And of course, like it has that nice image on there, but there's nothing special about that. It doesn't strike you as like a wonderful piece of art. What you would do is in the introduction to this unit, let's show them the actual works of Shakespeare. So let's pull out the hard bound copy with the gold pages, the gold trim pages, with the bookmark, the little dangly bookmark in there. And let's show them the actual one great artistic version that ranks much higher on the classical artistry focus. And we start with this to show them, of course, this is showing them that this is much deeper. This is the culture piece of it, but we want to engage them with the artistic side and we want to promote this. We wanna say, but look, isn't this copy so beautiful? How lovely that they make Shakespeare and put it into beautiful copies. We're gonna read this one as a class, but I just want you to see that this book is awesome. And so I will be reading from this one while you all read from this one. I don't know, something like that. Same thing if you're reading Marcus Aurelius's meditations, this is pure utility. It has the statue on the cover and that's just fine. And it's cool, it's a great read, good translation is my personal copy, but this is pure utility. Whereas let's pull out the hard bound book that was created in the 1940s. We can get even older copies. It's a hard bound book, nothing fancy, but it's very dignified. And it's a hard bound cover with the red edging. And again, it's nothing fancy on the inside, but it's an older copy that was just made a little more carefully. And so it has the hard bound. And so just to also show them there are different versions of this, and some of them are quite lovely. Maybe you even have, you project up different covers of the work itself and different forms of art that come from the work. And while we're reading the book and we're reviewing the different passages we've been reading of Shakespeare or meditations or Plato or whatever you're reading, showing the artwork that corresponds to that work as we go through the class, because we want to promote the classical artistry focus. So if we're high school teachers and it's not necessarily in the text and it's not on the text, we should give them access to the artistic side of it because that's what a living book does. A living book promotes with the language, with the culture, it also focuses on that artistry. Okay. Hi, Michael. I just wanted to be your timer. It's 1243. I know you want to give some time for questions and answers at the end and also share a little bit more about Gungeon World and connections. Perfect. Thank you, Marilyn. We're almost done here. So thank you for keeping me on track. This one here is careful narrative. So the idea here is the story, what we're trying to promote actually has a beginning, middle, end. It has characters. It has some sort of conflict that's being worked through like a story. It contains a story versus it's just a report. It's just a textbook. It's just a dictionary. Those are great as reference points. But even if we're teaching science and we're in a physics class, why aren't we also reading about the biographies of these scientists? That's what makes it a living book. If we're reading, if we're studying science, a science might be like, well, how do I pull living books and I just have the science textbook? No, pull in some biography and don't just rely on the little square biography. As you're flipping through your textbook, they always have the half page. It's like talking about Newton. It's like, no, let's read about Newton. That would be a living book. And that's what gets people excited. It either pulls you into science or it increases your appreciation of science if you're already on that side. And then finally, the fifth one, does it promote direct observation of human life or nature? This is very similar to number two up there, but this is where we're looking at codes of conduct amongst humans, heroic values, moral lessons, psychology, the natural world, that would be this. It's following people and dealing with their hardships and it's examining their relationship with the natural world, Shakespeare as well. It's all about psychology and trying to, people moving away from morals and the retribution that follows them. And it's examining good versus bad, good versus evil, all these sorts of things. So does it promote human life or nature? Is it showing that, the direct observation of that? This one does as well. This is all about that. This is all about a human interacting with nature. That's what this book is for. That's the sole focus of this book. The great ships as well, it's ships through time. Like I could put this on a timeline for you. I could put this in a history textbook for you or I could tell you about the development of ships and the stories of the men and women who helped develop them through time. It's like, this is awesome. And everyone could learn so much from this, not just elementary kids. The language is good. This is meant for everybody. Okay, so there's kind of our five points that we use to look at living books as well. Even history, if we're looking at history, let's read about Abraham Lincoln. Let's just not read about him in a textbook. Let's read about this guy and who he was. This is for elementary kids. Another one here, it's a great book on George Washington. We have other ones of these, but these are tracking George Washington's whole life in narrative form. But the book jumps around to different times in history that were happening around the world at the same time as him. It's a giant Wikipedia hyperlink book. One thing leads to something else, it's awesome. Even high school kids would learn so much from this. And I think they would like it more than their history textbooks. We move from this to the history textbook, rather than the history book, the textbook being the center. We do a great disservice to students' love of learning when the textbook is the sole focus, rather than a living book. The textbook should be reference, just like dictionaries are reference. We don't read dictionaries for fun. Though, I had a time when my early childhood, I did that, but most kids aren't doing that. And that was very short-lived. Some recommendations. If you wanna read more about any of these ideas, I have four up here that you can go check out on your own time. Home Education, book one by Charlotte Mason. Looks, here's our copy of this. Very cool, very fun to read. Go read this thing, book one, Charlotte Mason. Tough will not let you down. It will constantly reward you. Here's another one, this is a very small book. Beauty Matters by Stephen Turley. And this one is very tough read. It's very sophisticated, but so good. This is all about what's the environment we have? Is it classically, is it classically oriented? Another one, Mortimer Adler, very great classical educator. Six great ideas, check him out. And then another one that's just good for teachers in general, Promoting an Atmosphere of Excellence by Ron Berger. This is called An Ethic of Excellence. It's also a very small book and it's worth your time. So all of these things are worth your time here. Before we take any questions, I just wanna do some more promotion here. Not promotion, just let you know what these guys are doing because Ganjing World, they've done a lot of work to help pull this together. And they have a lot more coming down the tube in the future. But I just wanna show you a little bit here about Ganjing World and what they're doing. So Ganjing World is trying to use, there's this such a focus, again, it's like everything's moved away from, as we move away from living books, we move away from an emphasis on morals and traditions and coming together with good, wholesome things. They're trying to use the space of the tech world to pull it back together. The tech isn't going away. The social media platforms and video sharing platforms aren't going away. So Ganjing World is here again, you see this here, utilization of technology to revitalize tradition, a culture of care, kindness, mutual respect. So the same thing I'm talking about today, living books pulls us back to kindness. It pulls us back to being a whole human, which is all about engaging with that compassion deep inside of us. Living books do it naturally. It's unescapable. Ganjing World is aiming for the same thing, but through the tech side. So they also have a lot of endeavors that they're working on. Family entertainment, just all these things. You can go check this out. It's very good. Please do. They have the spaces for kids. They have spaces for educators and just trying to work on this stuff. And so again, here's another one here, putting good back into the algorithm. So you can go read about this. I hope you do. And there's very cool stuff that they're working on. Very important. We're all just living in this tech space now. And so where is the purity amidst that? And where's the quality control? They have a lot of people working at Ganjing World. It's just their job to try and decide what content is traditionally based and from the stuff that's just gratuitous and pointless and pure candy. So I encourage you to check them out. They also have an education space called Ganjing Campus. It's still growing. And so I think it's going to be a leader in the education forum, in the education tech world. I think it's going to be a leader in a very short time. So I encourage all you fellow teachers with me to go check that out and see what can come out of that. So that's what I have to share with you all. And hopefully some of those points are useful. Even if one thing was useful, then that's great. And you can forget about the rest. If there was one thing that was useful, then that's great because that's what I wanted to achieve by coming out here and chatting with you all. Also the evaluation, can somebody, I don't have access to the evaluation. Maybe somebody could put the evaluation into the chat box. Please, after you leave here, before you leave, go fill out the evaluation on today's presentation. I think something like that. Yes, and I just put it in the chat. So please make sure to fill that out so that we can use your feedback for our next opportunity to share information with you and to see what your interests are. So are there any questions out there, anything that you want to ask Michael while we have some time left? I would like to like promote what Michael just introduced. And because I, most of the time I'm in Ganjin word, the Chinese version. So if possible to give us training, what's the content in English Ganjin word, just like Michael introduced? I'm gonna leave that to Stephanie. Maybe you can fill anybody in on that to anyone who wants any more information on Ganjin world and how you can contribute to that or understand more about it. Stephanie, maybe there's more you can fill in with them. Michael, Christina asks, is there a list of the books talked about today or the books used at the schoolhouse? Oh man, we have the books we use in the schoolhouse is extensive. It's very, very carefully curated and they're awesome. They're incredible books. And we have lists kind of scattered all over the place, but we don't really have like a master list. So if you want more information on any of these sorts of texts, feel free to, anybody can email me here. If you have any other questions as well, I'll put my email here. But just trying to pull in more living books and moving away from the candy is the most important thing. And so we do, we have all kinds of lists, all kinds of recommendations and suggestions and we're constantly feeding them to people. We're constantly giving people suggestions and recommendations and this stuff works. In fact, I'm a big believer that all kids need is a strong focus on living books and some math. And if they just had that, even as homeschooling parents, if they just had that, everything would be set. They'd be getting everything they need. All the educational nutrients that they need are contained in the living books. And it's the history, it's the science, it's the literature, it's the human lineage, it's the traditions. And then of course we have to help hone them with that pure logic that is arithmetic. And so if parents were just doing that, if schools were just doing that more, all of these other things we see would just dissipate. The disengagement with learning, the bullying, the disrespect for teachers and tradition. If we just moved back toward living books as the focus, all these other problems would dissipate because it's the best stuff and it's all that they want. They want a great story that enriches them, enriches their heart. And that's what you get in living books. So yeah, go ahead. I just wanna share, Michael, and we've had this conversation before, everything that is true about living books and the way that it would dissipate those other things within the schools, it would also bring in the compassion. It would also bring in that human connection that I think that over time we've lost in the schools because it goes back to the truths that are located within the stories that you've shared. Yeah, such a great point. And the main focus of this or the impetus for this discussion was what is its relationship to kindness? And kindness is an essential part of what it means to be human and having the wisdom to use that kindness in the best way possible. We have to be able to put our, we have to put our kids in the shoes of others. And when they're in a book, when they're in a text that is dealing with these very old questions of what it means to be a human and to how do we wield our power correctly? And what does it mean when people hurt us and harm us? And where you're literally in the shoes of these other people, it touches them. We had a student who was, oh, I just had the book out and I set it aside. We had a student last year, they had to move this year, they had to move to New Jersey. And so we had to sadly see them go and they were a great family. And the mother was talking about how she was never, she never saw any sort of empathy in her child. She always felt that her child was unable to connect with other people in a heartfelt way because her child who was a second grader was unable to see life through the lens of others. And she started reading this book by Minder de Jong. Let's see if I can grab one of his real quick. He has some really great ones. Here's one that's really awesome. So it's called The Wheel on the School. We're in a giant read with our students on this one as well right now, the whole school-wide read. We're always, too much to say about what the things we're doing. But she started reading one, a book by this guy, Minder de Jong with her kid. And there's these moments in it where just it's so real and so deep and so impactful. He started having these moments of like weeping for the hardship that these children were going through in this story of he was so touched and he cared about them so much. And he was trying to express this to his mom. And for the first time ever, she was seeing this empathy become unlocked. He was always such a good kid, but she was seeing this empathy become unlocked through him. And so she was so touched and she was sharing that with us that she was starting to see what we had been trying to express the whole time and she believed it, but then she started seeing it sort of unravel in real time or unfurl, I should say, in real time. And he's another great one, Minder de Jong. You can go find this guy. He's great. Classical, sort of like modern classical within the last hundred years, but you can check him out. What you're saying I think is very important too for our teachers who are here with us today is to not just use this information for themselves within the classroom, but also share this idea of living books with their families so that their children would be receiving it at school and also at home. Yeah, great point. We're all part of this larger human lineage that stretches all the way back. And we're not here to just co-opt it for ourselves, but to spread it to others. And these things really work. It really works. It's no magic wand. It takes a lot of hard work. We have to dive into literature and that it's deeply rewarding, but it's also, it takes the time and the dedication to do this, but it works. It's deeply impactful. It's the best things we can give to our kids is not only just a love of literature and a love of thinking, but the sort of the pathos that comes out of it, these sensations that they're gonna feel. And so we have to pass that on to other parents. And that's also returning them to these deeper traditions, which is in reading. And that's first and foremost, getting kids to love these things and that is gonna enrich them. Excellent. Michael, thank you so much. There's a lot of people in the chat are saying, thank you, great presentation. A few people are asking if they can get a video recording, which we will get back to them. Also too, ladies and gentlemen, you will be receiving a certificate for your time for professional development, which you may use for your PD hours. If that is something that you need for your administration for your profession. And we want to wish you all a very happy holiday season and to thank you once again for being with us for this hour. It looks like one person might've raised their hand. So if you had a question or comment, please do so. But also if anybody wants more information, please feel free to take my email, send me an email anytime we can connect by phone or whatever, I can just even throw a list your way. Whatever you would like, reach out to me. Our life is meant on spreading these ideas and helping teachers make their environment more wholesome and impactful. So please, please, please reach out. I take all the time that you need to discuss those. But did somebody else have a question or comment? Somebody was asking, when is the next class? And yeah, there was someone that raised a hand. Might've been a mistake too, might've been a mistake. For me, it was, hold on. I'm not sure. So if you did raise your hand, if you would unmute and just ask the question, that would be great. Yeah, okay. But otherwise, I think we're, I think we're probably good to go then. Yes, all right. Take care, everyone. Thank you all, farewell. Thank you.