KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 76: Excellence in Writing. A Conversation with Andrew Pudewa.
Andrew Pudewa, founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, joins us to unpack how skill-first teaching unlocks motivation, builds real confidence, and quite literally reshapes the brain for better thinking. We trace the invisible steps the mind takes to write a single sentence, then show how to lower the cognitive load with structure, small wins, and a steady climb: easy plus one.
• the true goal of writing as expressing ideas, not feelings
• why motivation follows mastery and “kids like what they can do”
• the cognitive steps of writing and why it feels hard
• breaking tasks into “easy plus one” to lower load
• building a language database through read‑alouds and poetry
• using structure and style: outlines, units, and checklists
• feedback that builds: edit to legal, A/I grading
• separating spelling from composition early on
• mixed‑age groups benefiting from repetition and modeling
• tech and AI as tools, not replacements for thinking
• resources: IEW, Arts of Language Podcast, Memory practices
About our guest
Andrew Pudewa is the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in
Writing. Presenting around the world, he addresses issues relating to teaching, writing, thinking, spelling, and music with clarity, insight, practical experience, and humor. His seminars for parents, students, and teachers have helped transform many a reluctant writer and have equipped educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve students’ skills.
Connect with Andrew
Institute for Excellence in Writing
andrewpudewa.com
The Arts of Language Podcast
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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Kids like to do what they can do. Right? Yes. That that's what they like is being able to do stuff. Like people say, I hate math. Nobody can hate math. Math is intrinsically beautiful. Math is is the order of the universe. You can't hate that. What you hate is not being able to do it. So if your goal is to help the student gain skills and improve, then the byproduct is they will dislike it less and possibly even start to enjoy it.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Kindle Podcast. I'm Katie, your host for today. And in this episode, we're talking to Andrew Pudua about writing. I learned so much in this episode, and especially about how important writing is as a tool to helping kids and humans become good thinkers, especially about how like it literally affects the architecture of the brain as we write and go through that process. We also talk about what to do when kids hate writing and how to help kind of scaffold them out of that, but still have high expectations and still really like teach them how to do it. So that was super helpful. And then we also talk about how important it is to have a strong and steady stream of language and literature going into the child's brain if we ever expect them to be able to write and to produce excellent writing. We they need to have the vocabulary, the background knowledge, all of the things need to be going into their brain before we can get them out of the brain. So super interesting conversation, and I'm excited to share it with you today. Before we jump into it, I'll share a little bit more about who Andrew Poudois is. He's the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, which is a very well-known and like highly thought-of writing program, especially in the homeschool world. It's also used in like classical charter schools. He's presented around the world. He addresses issues relating to teaching, writing, thinking, spelling, and music with clarity, insight, practical experience, and humor, which I agree with. His seminars for parents, students, and teachers have helped transform many a reluctant writer and have equipped educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve students' skills. Let's talk to Andrew. Andrew Pudawa, welcome to the Kindle Podcast. We're super excited to have you on today.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Katie. It's good to be with you.
SPEAKER_01:All right. So I want to back up and just give you a chance to kind of like tell your what's what's the Andrew Pudawa origin story? You know, like how did you come to the work you're doing? And then what is your big why? What is the change you're trying to make in the world?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I have no training or degrees either in education or in English. My actual formal training is in music. And so I was working as a Suzuki violin teacher and also teaching kinder music for young children. And I was connected with a school in Montana. And this school had a Canadian teacher who was very excited about this thing called the Blended Soundsite Program of Learning. She said this is the best thing to hit education ever. And she convinced our whole faculty to travel up to northern Alberta and take this 10-day teacher training course, which is where I learned the structure and style in composition program from my mentor, Dr. James Webster. And so I came back, I taught in that school part-time, dabbled with this writing stuff. I was still pretty much full-time income teaching music. But what interested me was I saw, wow, this approach to teaching English composition is almost identical in philosophy to the Suzuki method of teaching music. So there were lots of continent ideas there, the clear pathway, the repetition, the mastery approach to learning, the mixed age capacity for it. So I did that for a few more years and then I went and did something else. And then I I was finally thought, I've just got to do something to break out of this poverty of music teaching. And so I I did a seminar. I got 40 people to pay, well, I think I got 20 people to pay 40 bucks to listen to me talk for one day, which is more than I could make in a whole week of teaching violin as hard as possible back in, was it 1994? So for about five years, I did this IEW thing, Institute for Excellence and Writing, as a part-time, you know, gig just to make extra money on the weekends, things like that. And then by 99, it had become more uh profitable than I had ever expected. And we had made some videos and created a spelling program. So in 99, I left where I was living, moved to a different city, went full-time, and we've just gone uphill from there. So it is a a rather odd way to get going. I didn't have any particular ambition to start, you know, a business. I just wanted something I could do on the side to bring in a couple thousand a month enough to crack my nut.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, and here you are now. IEW is one of the most like, I mean, I've been in the homeschool world for a long, long time. And like it is the thing that everyone points to as like one of the most effective. It's just like the go-to if you want like a really structured writing curriculum.
SPEAKER_00:That's what we hope people will believe to be true. You know, I get letters almost every day from you know, kids who's who've had transformed attitudes. I used to hate writing, but now it's my favorite thing, or from older kids who are in college or adults who will write and say, this was really super valuable thing from my, you know, homeschooling when I was a kid and helped me get A's on all my papers in college. And I'm so thankful. And so you get a lot of of validation. And so I I think I can be very confident that the work we are doing is making a a big difference. And of course, you know, we've started to grow even faster. COVID was a huge explosion in alternative education of all sorts: homeschooling, hybrid schools, charter schools, and I think just yeah, micro schools. I think that trend is just gonna continue very significantly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Okay, we're gonna get super deep into the whole writing thing, but I want to kind of pull back a little bit and just ask like broadly. So I I actually have heard you speak before. I we homeschooling, this was maybe I don't know, like a decade ago or something. We were homeschooling and we were starting this big co-op in our area, and can't even remember how I like got invited to, but you were speaking and I you were talking about like the using literature for like the moral development of our children, something around around that topic. And I was just so fascinated, and I had all these little kids, and you know, they hadn't I hadn't quite developed so I I've created a literacy curriculum and I helped do all of the curriculum at Prenda. Um, but I was just very early in my journey, you know. So it's like one of the one of the formative experiences in my like coming up in in like curriculum and systems design and things like that. So one, thank you. Um and two, some of the things that you said were like much more broad than like let's teach kids how to write. Just take a minute and like tell me what do you think is off in education. It seems like the boat's not pointed in the right direction. We're trying to like, you know, reorient things to um to be more effective and to be more fail family oriented and things like that. So just like I guess that's my question is what do you see as off and like what what's the world doing wrong? Just solve all the problems, please, in the next two minutes.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. I have a good friend, Andrew Kern, who does the Circe Institute, and he and I will sometimes start a conversation like when we are co-dictators of the world, this is what we will but well, it you know, it's very interesting. I am a believer in truth, that truth exists and that it matters. And uh I think that, you know, as we kind of go back in history, we we cease to be, to steal John Henry Newman's words, cease to be Protestant, I think we cease to be progressive. We cease to be enamored with the flashy new ideas that come and go and come and go. And we've been, oh, a little over a hundred years of new wave education coming in, you know, Deweyism and then the 50s and 60s and the creativity as the God and the 70s, 80s, 90s, standardized testing will solve all our problems. And then we hit the O's, and for the last couple decades, and certainly right now, we're in this belief that somehow technology is going to solve all of our education problems. And if we can just, you know, get every kid with a Chromebook and hook them up to the internet, they'd have access to all the knowledge of the universe, and that would just make everybody smarter. And what we have found, obviously, is that very few people even approximate a decent education of 100, 150 years ago. In fact, there's an interesting little thing. I don't know if you bumped into it, it's the Celina, Kansas 1894 eighth grade graduation exam. You can find it online, I think. Nobody I know could pass this test. Not one of us could have graduated from eighth grade in the 1890s because it required mathematical thinking, linguistic thinking, broad general knowledge, logical faculties, understanding of grammar, rhetoric, you know, before technology started to atrophy all the skills that it replaced, people used to think better and speak better and read better and calculate better and know more. So I think we we look at that and think, well, that is kind of a distinctly good thing. I mean, what person would not like to be able to think better and know more and do mental math and have better logical faculties to filter what comes to us every day? And so there's this tension and and and this weird paradox between modern education supposedly making things better because we call it progressive, because progress means better, only everything's pretty much worse, and we don't really know how to do it. So to look back and say, well, what were they doing hundred years ago, 200 years ago, you know, 2000 years ago, what what were what was education like then? Why did people do it? How did they do it? What were the goals and what were the ends? That's what really interests me right now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's that that old timey saying, not all changes progress, right? Just because you, you know, we think we're moving, and here's this new thing that's gonna make some huge difference. And then 20 years later, it's like, well, that didn't work, you know? But we're running these very uh it's we're running experiments on all of these kids essentially with all these new things. And I I I'm not I'm not anti-progress, and I'm definitely not anti-technology. Actually, when I first found Kelly, the founder of Prenda, I and I've told the story. Sorry, if you're a longtime listener, you've heard the story before. I just, I was so, I won't say I was against technology, but like I was very technology hesitant, right? Like our TV lived under our bed. We did not have toys that had batteries in them. Like we were like way over here, right? And then I was exploring all these educational ideas and principles and reading all these books. And then Kelly, the founder of Prenda, he was like reading my education blog one day, and we like connected. This is before we, you know, were building Prenda together. And he's like, I agree with everything on your blog, but I like technology. And I'm like, all right, like how can we, you know, embrace technology and use it in a way that, you know, it's like you can point to like the book, you know, like Gutenberg, like that is a form of technology. You can point to like the typewriter, like these things as these, these things are technologies, and we do need to embrace them and utilize them. But they definitely, no one was like, oh, the typewriter, that's like gonna save education or whatever. You know, like I think in a in a unique way, modern technology and like ed tech has been kind of put on this pedestal of like this is the thing that's going to just make it completely just close the book, like education's done, you know, like this is the savior of of modern education. And it's just like it's not so simple. Like, I don't I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but like you definitely have to use the tool. A computer is like a stapler, right? It's a tool to get a job done. And if you're not approaching that job with like clarity and purpose and like using your own agentic, like human like ideas, like it can definitely and like especially with young kids and like the developing brain. I know you've done a lot of research into brain development, things like that, can really surprise the brain from like uh um you know, like for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of generations, like the human brain hasn't seen a computer. Something that stimulating, that's something that, you know, it can be addictive, all the things we know. So yeah, talk lean a little bit into that. Like tell me more about like I know the IEW is not like an app, right? But you do use like videos and things like that. Sure, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You know, every business is a tech business to some degree now because we conduct all of the exchange happening through websites and online. We deliver video content to our customers. We also sell paper. And one of the interesting questions that was asked of me when we decided to buy a very large, very expensive printing machine, the finance guy said, Well, you know, with E everything, you know, do you really think there people are going to want to buy paper to educate children, you know, increasingly or decreasingly, or what's your plan? And the other thing he mentioned, of course, and it's the hot topic for everyone in my world, is how is AI going to affect the teaching of things like grammar and composition? And so I kind of pushed back on him and I said, well, yes, it's true that the whole world is careening into let's go high-tech classroom, paperless classroom, teach kids to you as AI, do all that. But there's also a lot of people who realize that if you don't develop the skills that will be developed through doing something yourself, then you won't have those skills, and that'll be a disadvantage your whole life. So, you know, I think research is a particularly interesting thing because you may have, you know, you're obviously much younger than I am. I grew up before there were even computers and homes and no internet. And to do research, you had to go to the library and get books and magazines and use little three by five cards and go through this, you know, rather tedious process. And, you know, as part of what we have in our system is a mini research process that we teach on paper, with paper, read, copy, handwrite, make outlines, and do all that. And yeah, okay, so we don't write reports on, you know, Japan or fruit flies because that information is going to enrich our lives so much as the whole action of searching for, collecting up, looking for things to compare, things that are different, things that you can put together in a logical way, that compiling of information, that is what we're training our brain to do when we grow up writing reports. So if we kind of outsource that and say, yeah, we'll just have ChatGPT do all the research that needs to be done. Well, first of all, I've seen significant errors come back in ChatGPT stocks. Of course. And the good news, I I have enough life experience to look at that and say, I got to really question that. However, you know, a person of less general knowledge might just accept it as, okay, well, that's obviously true because it told me. But even more so, if we're outsourcing the process of doing it, we're we're kind of like outsourcing our thinking in a way. And then we don't develop the thinking so that when we have to do that same thing, but internally, collect up information from various areas of our own personal experience and knowledge, and then prioritize and organize and present that, we won't have the skill to do that in the meaningful, personal, human way. So this is why, you know, I can am very driven to help teachers and parents understand why we should not just default over and not worry about teaching some of these basic skills to kids, whether it's how to put words on paper, how to spell, how to punctuate sentences correctly, what's the difference between a complete sentence and an incomplete sentence? Well, we don't need to know that because Chat GPT does it perfectly already. So that's that's a hot topic these days.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh, it's for sure a hot topic. Yeah. And I still like am really exploring like how I feel about it, right? Like I can see logic kind of like in both ways, where it's like, well, like in 1910, everybody needed to know how to like operate this tractor, this piece of technology. And like to my life, like, I don't need that. Like, you know, so there are skills and things that we as society changes that you can point to to say, like, we just don't need those skills as much anymore. But I don't think thinking is one of those skills that we're not going to need. And like this is literally changing the architecture of the developing brain. Like, as we do things, as we hand write, as we look at things in real space instead of on a screen, like our brain registers those things and those activities way differently. Like you just described this process of research where it is multi-step. You have to hold on to what you're doing through multiple steps. You have to, you know, be like, oh, this little bit of information from this source matches this source and strengthens my argument. You know, like that's a very complicated cognitive pathway that is being myelinated in the brain as we, as we do that again and again. And it makes our our thinking more effective. It makes it quicker. But like if you're never putting, if you're not putting your brain through those paces, like you're not going to have that kind of a brain. And that to me is like like scary. Like, I don't know if I want to live in a world that's kind of like run by people who don't have those skills. That sounds bad.
SPEAKER_00:I I suspect that one of the side effects of this kind of explosion of popular tech brain replacing technology is there's going to be a greater disparity between the educated and the non-educated.
SPEAKER_01:Totally.
SPEAKER_00:You know, if you look back, like I'll go back to that late 1800s period. You know, an eighth-grade education was a pretty darn good education. Yes, you could go to university, you could specialize, you could get higher, but but there wasn't this huge gap between the educated and the general the general public person, right? Very high levels of literacy among the white population in North America in the 1800s. Um, but but that's been widening over time. And I think, particularly in the last 20 to 30 years, we've seen basic skills of the general public declining to the point where now, and this this frightened me, Katie, when I heard this stat, but I've heard it in more than one place, um, that the national average for proficiency, eighth grade reading proficiency is in the 30%.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. It's a lot of different things.
SPEAKER_00:And there are there are some school districts that have 0% of their students at proficient levels for reading and math. And, you know, you just extrapolate that out 10, 15 years, these kids are now all grown up in the workforce. What does that mean? Where are we going there? And I fear then that as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, one of the keys to a successful country, particularly a democratically oriented country, is the education of its citizens. And as that has declined, I think we see the potential for a lot more control over the public, control by people who have the knowledge, the power, the education. And so I guess part of what I want to do in my little corner of the world is just fight that and get the best possible language development educational impact that I can have on as many people as possible, particularly the people who might not encounter it, you know, ultimately.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally agree. I think about uh just that growing discrepancy. Like the people that are creating all of this AI, they have all the skills we're talking about, right? Like they have the a a deep thinking brain that understands how to like process multiple steps, like all like it's very complicated, right? So as soon as we progress like a few decades, it's like, okay, well, we didn't we forgot to like raise any kids that had that level of thinking. Now who's in charge? Like it's just the robots are making the robots, and it's just like humanity's done for. Like, it's scary, Andrew. I like don't know what to think about it. But I'm learning and I'm not actually, I'm not actually scared because I think that people like you and people like me and people in the alternative education world and especially people in the system too, like they're seeing this and we are going to respond well to it. Fingers crossed, I hope I have confidence and and hope that it will go well. Um, okay, I want to dig into writing real quick, not real quick, for like a long time, actually. So just some backstory. My kids have dysgraphia, and writing is like so painful for them. They have been doing IEW for the last three years in their microschool and in a few different microschools. We have lots of microschool guides who use your program. And some, like, like with any program, it's like some kids are like, yes, this is it and this is great and I love it. And some kids are like, I hate this, right? And it's like negatively impacting their love of writing. But it is definitely, I was talking to my 10-year-old uh who uses a program yesterday, and I was like, I'm interviewing like the guy that made IEW. And he's like, that's cool. And he was like, tell him that I hate it, but it's making me a great writer. And he's like, as a 10-year-old, he like knows that he's struggling and it's hard and that like persistent struggle. Like, he's like, I know that's not comfortable for me, but like I can see that my writing is a lot better and like I'm able to communicate better. So, like, even as a 10-year-old, he has that perspective. But I'm kind of watching, and like my oldest is 12, and he's the one that has dysgraphia. So I'm watching the writing pro the developmental writing process kind of unfold in my own home and unfold across Prendo. We have thousands of kids in microschools all over the country. And I'm just looking for a little guidance, honestly. I'm like, this is not my area of expertise. Like, we can talk about literacy all day long. Writing, I'm like, okay, I'm just kind of watching this for the first time. I'd love what does that developmental process look like? You know, what does an early writer look and feel like? What is a like an element, like an upper elementary, like not that we want to like tie it to age, because I really believe in like a mastery-based approach, right? It's like not, oh, you're nine, you should have these skills, but what skills do you have and where can we get to get you to next? Um, is kind of the approach I take. But walk me through that developmental process.
SPEAKER_00:Well, gosh, there's so much to say there. The first thing I would mention is I will get moms who'll come up to me at a convention or something, and they will say, I just want my child to enjoy being able to express himself on paper. And I have to push back on that immediately because I don't think those are good goals at all. I think those are the wrong goals. First of all, writing is not about expressing yourself, it's about expressing ideas. And when you're a little kid, you know, ideas are just floating around, bouncing off inside, outside your brain. They're just scattered, they're unmanageable. And the process really has to do with wrangling ideas, not expressing what you feel and think about stuff. I'm almost certain that I've never had a completely original idea in my whole life. Every idea I've ever had came from somewhere.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And maybe I'll live long enough and I will have an original idea, but I'm not all that hopeful because I'm already pretty old. So, you know, that's one thing to challenge. The other thing is I I don't care if your kids like it or not. That's that's not a good goal because if you have that as a goal, you're gonna fall into this trap. And I think a lot of public schools have fallen to this trap. Like somehow we're gonna cheerlead kids into liking this. And we're gonna tell them this is fun and you're doing so well, and this is creative, and I just love what you're doing. And it's disingenuous because the kids basically know it's not that good. They don't like it. And you're telling them that they should like it doesn't help anything at all. So I always say, you know, if I were talking to your kid, I'd say, I don't care if you like it or not, you just do it, right? You don't have to like it, you just have to do it. But here's the really interesting thing, Katie, and I have a whole talk on motivation that would be, you know, an interesting uh subject to explore a little bit. But one of the laws of motivation is that kids like to do what they can do, right? Yes. That that's what they like is being able to do stuff. Like people say, I hate math. Nobody can hate math. Math is intrinsically beautiful. Math is is the order of the universe. You can't hate that. What you hate is not being able to do it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And how you make it makes you feel, right? Like it's like, oh, when I do math, I feel like an idiot and I don't like that feeling.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So same thing with writing. So if your goal is to help the student gain skills and improve, then the byproduct is they will dislike it less and possibly even start to enjoy it. Although I never guarantee that. I also talk to, you know, particularly boys around 12 to 14, they're the ones who'll come at you and say, Well, why do I have to learn this? I'm not going to ever use it because I'm going to go into the military or I'm going to be an engineer or I'm going to go into plumbing or whatever they think they want to do. And I always point out, yes, that's is interesting. But if you do go into the military or you become an engineer or a garbage collector, it doesn't matter. It's the people who can speak and write well that rise up to positions of influence, right? The best engineer remains an engineer because he's a good engineer. But the good engineer who's good at communicating engineering ideas, he becomes the leader. He becomes the vice president. He's the one who then has a greater opportunity to serve because of a greater influence. And so I think that's an important thing to consider is that communication skills are always at the forefront of every career's uh, you know, cutting edge of leadership. So a few things there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love all that.
SPEAKER_00:Let's go back to this problem of writing. So if someone says to you, write something, what has to happen in order for you to do that? Well, the first thing is you have to find an idea. Right? If there's no idea, there's nothing to write and you're completely dead in the water, which is why you meet a lot of parents who's who've had heard their kids say things like, Well, I can't think of anything. I don't know what to write, I can't I don't know what to say. They're stuck there. So first thing is you have to find an idea. Now, ideas can pre-exist in different forms. Ideas can pre-exist inside your memory and imagination, or they can pre-exist in a more immediate form. I'll give you an example. If I said write about the last trip you took with your family, I'm asking you to go inside your memory and imagination and pull out what you can in terms of sensory impressions or concrete thoughts that happened that are connected with that memory. So you're searching there. Whereas if I said, write something about the room that you're in right now, that would be very different, wouldn't it? You could just look around and say, well, what it what do I see? What's on the wall, what's on the shelves, what's on the desk, right? And you could you could have ideas more immediately accessible. So that's one differentiation. Another differentiation is that ideas can primarily exist in sensory impressions, or they can primarily exist uh in words. So again, an example. If I said, write something about being in nature, right? Being in a forest, being at the beach, being at the desert, you know. Okay, almost all of that you have to go in, access through memory and imagination, and those are mostly sensory impressions. You would have to wrestle words out of your uh word database and affix those words to your sensory impressions in order to approximate that and communicate something vaguely resembling your experience or your imagination. Whereas if I said, please tell me your favorite Bible story or your favorite um Aesop fable or your favorite fairy tale, that would be very different because those things came. into your consciousness uh through in words right so what is the easiest for kids to get started with uh right something that is immediate you don't have to go find it and get it and something that pre-exists in words which is why in our system as you know we start with source text and keyword outlines we don't we don't stay there forever but that's the starting place and that removes the problem of I don't know what to do I can't think of anything I don't know what to say but let's say wherever you get your idea you find an idea now what has to happen you have to speak that idea into existence maybe it pre-existed in words and now you're re-speaking it or it pre-existed in sensory impressions and you're you're affixing words and speaking it but you have to speak that idea into existence you do this if you're writing an email or you you like writing so maybe a blog post or a letter to someone you have to basically talk to yourself right you you say what you think you want to write and then you hear what you heard yourself say to yourself. Okay so you speak it into existence you have to hear what you say hear yourself say to yourself and some children that's not a natural faculty. In fact if you've hung out with children at all you will notice that very often they can say things and have no idea what they just said. So that learning to hear what you're saying to yourself then you have to hold that idea in your memory long enough to go wrestle way over in a different part of your brain the technical information of what are the words, what sequence do those words go in to say what you want to say, how do you spell those words? Which ones get capitals where does the punctuation go? What makes it a complete sentence and you have to wrestle all that technical information and then you have to read what you just wrote and decide is that accurately reflecting the idea that I was trying to communicate and if it does okay put a period and then go back and get the next idea in the sequence, speak it into existence, hear what you heard yourself say to yourself, remember what you heard yourself say to yourself, get all the technical information, wrestle it onto page or a screen or whatever, and continue that process. It's insanely complex in fact it kind of boggles the mind that anyone can do this, let alone you know little kids.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. Like just the cognitive load of doing all of that one just gives me a lot more empathy for the developing writer because to me it's like you know I'm past the develop I mean I'm still learning obviously but like I can write with that with all of that. It's kind of like learning how to drive when like you're constantly worried about all of these buttons and everything that you're doing right. And then like now I don't think about driving it's just kind of like automated. The neural pathways that do that have been myelinated and it requires a lot less effort. But when we are going through this developmental process, it is going to feel so effortful. Yeah. And the cognitive load alone that you've just described is like oh it's hard. Yeah like I get it. I get that that doesn't feel good.
SPEAKER_00:Like it's fantasy for children like you know your son who's dysgraphic and other kids, it it's pretty much the same for whatever problems. You know, kids will have dyslexia or dysgraphia they'll have attention issues they may have auditory processing issues. They may have a combination thereof they may be hypers you know hyper sensitive to various things. It's really whatever the problem is the solutions are very similar which is to take the complexity of the process and break it into very small manageable steps. That's really the key. And I think that's why we have had such great success, you know, with kids who have various learning differences and challenges but that's really true for all kids who are trying to learn something. And so breaking it into very small steps and then being sure to give them the foundation of the basic skills that they need in order to be successful at each of those small steps. And you know an example of that would be just being able to copy a word correctly right and you know the the again getting back to kind of the progressive modern creativity emphasized educational environment it's very frequent to find people in primary education meaning K12 who who sneer at the idea of giving children just copy work like copy this sentence copy this proverb copy this poem because well what does that do? It does a huge number of things first first it creates stamina like okay here's a sentence copy the whole thing don't quit give up run the whole lap do the whole 10 reps whatever the second thing is it it cultivates an attentiveness to detail okay so what are the letters in that word and what order do those letters come in and yeah you're a little dysgraphic or dyslexic well okay so what does that mean? You need to work your willpower over your brain and exercise it maybe a little more than other people in order to do that. You can either do that and grow and gain the neural muscle or you can give up and say no no it's too hard I'm never going to be able to those are those are both options. You know then then what do you get you you get this this confidence that comes out of being able to just put words on paper and and then it becomes a little bit faster a little bit easier a little bit faster mastery learning everybody working at their own pace at their own speed you know I think you and I probably agree one of the greatest dysfunctions that we have in modern education is saying because a child is X number of years old they should be able to do all of these things and if they can't now they are behind and that's bad. And now what do you do? Well you do everything they was supposed to do and what they can't do all at once which further impacts the whole stress of the thing. Completely if we could eliminate this age grade level idea from people and that's why I love you know the micro school approach which you know is is whenever you have mixed age environments you generally have better opportunity for all kids to make progress at the rate at which they will best make progress. This is one of the similarities between say being a music teacher and kind of this multi-age environment. Like music teachers don't ever think oh well because Johnny is eight years old and he's on the third piece in book two and Sally is also eight years old but she's only on the next to last piece in book one Johnny is ahead of Sally you don't think that way. You don't think that way at all that matters is that Johnny and Sally both play well whatever they do play and that they make good progress at whatever rate they are able to given all the various circumstances of their neurology, their background the amount of help they get at home the time the priority their genetics I mean you know so anyway I think our approach to teaching writing enables a teacher to teach a lesson to a group of children and then challenge them individually at whatever level of challenge they are capable of meeting and they will gain the satisfaction of having done the best that they can do.
SPEAKER_01:Let's dive into that a little bit I want I want to go so many different directions here, but so in IEW, the kids have, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like you learn a lesson and then when you write you are responsible for performing that skill, right? So you kind of are building this your personal rubric where it's like okay now I'm gonna do this dress up dress up is kind of like how would you describe a dress up? You want to define that?
SPEAKER_00:I won't we have a we have the the program is called structure and style and so we have structural models. So those are ways to collect up and organize and prepare to write ideas. And we use outlines in all of the units. Unit one and two is source text take keywords from every sentence keyword outline write it out pretty straightforward. And then unit three is the story sequence chart. So now you're going to take an existing story but not take keywords from every sentence instead say what are the key elements in this story characters and setting conflict or problem climax resolution outcome four topic lyncher paragraph unit five writing from pictures so those are ways to that's ways to collect up and organize ideas. The style are how to present those ideas so those are as you said kind of a checklist of grammatical constructions and word usages and so we start you know very simple in fact one style technique usually it's the L Y adverb dress up because it's very flexible and all the kids can relate to motion pretty easily and so okay now you've got your outline when you write this paragraph somewhere in there you have to fit in this thing this LY adverb and oh here's a nice long list of LY adverbs to choose from and hopefully you can choose one that fits and enhances the meaning and makes it work. And maybe it's a little awkward but that's okay. Awkward is normal for being a kid. Once that becomes easy now we're going to add in another style technique. Usually in our sequence the second would be the who which clause creates an adjective clause grammatically you don't have to know that you just have to use the word who or which to add more detail or connect up to ideas. So now you've got the L Y and the who which and you do those in each paragraph of each assignment until that becomes easy. And then you would add in the next style technique maybe a strong verb and you would do each of those until that becomes easy and then you would add in another one. And so that's how the checklist can be customized for individual kids or subgroups of kids in a class is because we only want to add the new technique when what you've been practicing so far has become easy. And in my way easy means you can do it without much help and it doesn't sound too goofy most of the time. And so that's what we call the easy plus one method and everything we teach is kind of based on that philosophical idea.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah I love that easy plus one that makes me think of Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development as exactly yeah at Prenda we call this the child's learning frontier you want to be not bored but not crying on the floor, right? So you want it's like that Goldilocks zone and I love that easy plus one. And I think that this is really unique in the writing world because I mean it's very overwhelming all the things that you have to know. And a lot of us are able to like write and do these things because we're very proficient speakers, right? And so like if we just write, I mean I know writing how we write and writing how we talk is very different, but it helps a whole heck of a lot to be a good verbal communicator first. Um so how like when I'm watching my kids do this, I what I love about this is that it's like you take an age mix group and you know they can progress through like maybe one kid is like he does the two dress ups and he's like I'm really still struggling with this and I'm gonna I'm gonna practice and I'm gonna have to practice this for three weeks. And another kid does it twice and he's like all right like give me the plus one and they can move at their own pace, which I think is really unique in education ever, right? To see any sort of mastery or personalized pacing or personalized mastery. But also in writing it just seems like particularly hard to do that in writing for some reason. So I think I it's just like a really unique approach that I I really like.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I would like to you said something that made me think of something very important. You said you know you're a competent speaker and that helps in your writing and of course it's a two-way street there. But one of the things that I have been very aware of and working hard to educate parents and teachers is kind of an obvious like duh thing, but tremendously important for what we're doing here is you really can't get something out of a brain that isn't in there to begin with. So if what you want is for a child to produce either spoken or written reliably correct and appropriately sophisticated language, you have to have a steady stream of that reliably correct and appropriately sophisticated language coming into their brains on a daily basis. You have to build the database there. And unfortunately our modern world does not do this very well. I think the decline most commentators today would go and track it back to television was kind of the beginning of the dumbing down of the language that most people experience. And I think for many people now shows we'll just say shows in general social media being an extension of that has further dumbed down the language. People read much less than they used to in fact the average high school student that a supermajority so over two-thirds of high school students in the country today have not read one book in the last year.
SPEAKER_01:Not even for school?
SPEAKER_00:No well teachers don't assign books in school because kids won't read them they just go to Clipnotes or ChatGPT and get their homework done and pretend to read. But you know even if they did have to read in school compare that though to pre you know TV or just pre-internet you know when I was a kid you would read simply to not die of boredom. Yeah because that that was why you would have a book with you. And then you know for some of us reading became a valuable part of the experience of growing up and we were also read too my parents read bedtime stories and poetry and my mom read me books when I was young that we're also losing in the modern world the bedtime story culture. So kids aren't getting books in through their eyes they're not getting books in through their ears. The quality of language that they are exposed to throughout the day on an accidental basis is busy adults and internet based, screen based, social media based or peers. And none of that is going to build a high vocabulary none of that is going to build in grammatical patterns of more complexity of beautiful use of language of poetry um memorizing poetry used to be a normal thing kids in the 18 early 1900s everybody memorized poetry and and excerpts of of documents and speeches every eighth grade kid in 1890 would have been able to recite the preamble of the Constitution the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence the Gettysburg Address and probably the last paragraph or two of Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech that was like normal discipline along with a whole slew of famous poems. Now it is a rare thing to go into a public school unless it's like a you know a classical charter school or something and find anybody having memorized anything other than the stupid lyrics to the newest pop song that everybody is listening to, which I don't think would qualify as reliably correct and appropriately sophisticated English.
SPEAKER_01:No, I don't think so. I think that's something that stops us as adults from like leaning into this is that we think like the kids will hate it, the kids will be bored like the kids will push back and like one, that's just not true. Like I've like if you raise your kids when you you're reading out loud to them high quality literature and you're introducing poems, if you're setting the model of like poems are cool and I'm gonna memorize this poem and at dinner time I'm gonna be like hey I memorize this poem and I want to say it to everyone like your six year old sees that as like oh adults in their free time memorize poems and like my mom loves this and like I'm looking to her example in the model and like what's a poem that I can you know memorize. And our our microschool guide has been doing poetry memorization with my kids this year. And every few every few weeks they come home and both of them, both my boys 10 and 12, they're like got a new one and it's like some beautiful Edward Guest poem about like hard work and like diligence. And I'm like, yes, this is awesome. And then they actually two weeks ago they came home and they were like well we memorized all her poems. Like she doesn't have any more poems for us to memorize. And I was like great like let's get on the internet and find and like instead of being like okay it's bedtime, it was like 1130 at night like very we were up very late. They were like I went and got all of the poetry books in the house and like put them all on their floor and they were all just like combing through these poetry books. A 10 and 12 year old boy who should be like playing Minecraft or like doing something you know stupid are like up late with their mom researching poems and they're like oh this is a great one. We find it my son who's very like technology oriented like figures out how to get it on my phone and then prints it from my phone is I'm like I don't know how to do that. Prints out two copies and tapes it to their wall like this they're now they're memorizing the oak tree poem. I'm I don't remember who that's from but uh maybe I'll put it in the show notes. It's a great one.
SPEAKER_00:Golden moments from parenting there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah right it's like it is possible.
SPEAKER_00:I'm just trying to inspire all parents and all teachers read to your kids out loud minimize the screens help them you help build that language database because those are the words that they're going to have available to affix to the ideas when they go to write stuff. And so many kids that I meet like in the public school world they they don't write quote creatively because they just don't have the vocabulary to do it. And so let's look at the the fundamental building of the language database in the best way possible. And we can use technology like being able to find poems and print them and get them right there. And then we go back to the distinctly human aspect of learning it by heart, bringing it into your mind, into your soul and owning it.
SPEAKER_01:We even found an app, maybe I don't know how you'll feel about this, but we found an app where you put in a quote and then you there's like a little slider that deletes the words it's like this deletes every other word this deletes every third word. So gradually it's like scaffolding you to so there's an example how technology can be used to promote this.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah no we're actually working on a memory development app right now called That's awesome. Yeah it's called Memory Mentor. Oh it's it's also got this unique feature where you can put in the audio and then you can set it for how long you want it how often you want it to play. So you can set it for every day or every other day or every third day or once a week or once a month. That way you can schedule a review because if you spend a bunch of time memorizing a poem or you know some scripture or something you don't want to then forget it. You want to be reminded to practice it often enough that you maintain as you love one of my favorite words the myelinization of the neural connections that make you smarter.
SPEAKER_01:Yep totally we have a little in prenda world in our software we have a little corner called memory challenge where we have math things and geography things and I'm working on a spelling thing and poems and things like that. So it is so important and I hate the whole concept that's like we don't need to memorize anything we can just Google it. I'm like, oh if there was a more destructive idea than that that's going around like let me know because I think that's a pretty bad one. I do I get I get where it comes from but it's like nope, I want the wisdom of the ages stored up in the hearts and minds of my kids and the kids that they're playing with in their neighborhoods too. So we're all you know just living an inspired meaningful life. I think that it's like something's lost when you're like well if I ever need that I'll just Google it. Like I don't know. It's just not a very like inspiring, edifying way to live. Okay. So I have actually some questions and maybe we've covered some of these I have specific questions that guides have sent in for you. I told everyone that I was interviewing you. They were all very excited and so we've talked a little bit about IEW in a mix mixed age group but in a micro school you'll have like kids come in and they're they'll do a year with you and then you'll have another batch of kids that come in in the next year and they're all at different ages. They're all at different different stages of the writing development how how can guides maybe I don't know I don't know if you'd see this in in a homeschool setting or in a classroom really maybe it's unique to microschools but like what should you do if you're doing IAW and like these kids are all on year three and this these kids are now fresh and assume these microschools have like 10 kids in them. Right. And usually an age range like sixth to eighth or third through fifth, you know they're kind of like ballpark age grouped but like how would you just like some quick tips for that situation.
SPEAKER_00:Our approach I think is uniquely suited to this because we have our nine units and we recommend that you start you know at the beginning of the school year, August or whenever and work through those nine units over the course of the school year. With the primary grades you know three through five we would probably say up to unit seven but then middle school and beyond up through unit nine and we even have some extensions off unit eight and nine for more academic upper level writing. But you work through all those nine units and you're using stories and articles and if you're using one of our theme-based writing lesson books those are connected around a theme like you know medieval history or Narnia or something and and you're introducing the stylistic techniques according to the easy plus one method that we have used, being able to customize the checklists for different kids in your group. Okay, so you've done that. Now you've got a new wave of kids coming in. They haven't done it before. So you go back and you start again at unit one and two in the fall. And I have found that kids if they take kind of take off the summer and they have two months of not doing something they actually forget quite a lot. I've been often amazed at what they say no I don't remember that from last year. Okay well fine let's presume let's assume that everybody forgot everything and now we've got new kids and they didn't know it to begin with. So okay we're all in the same boat. Let's learn it together and you walk through those nine units. Now some of the kids are gonna be like oh I remember this excellent good then their writing becomes a better example of how to do it for the kids who either don't remember or never learned it which is one thing I really like about teaching groups of kids is that you can read something that somebody wrote, read it aloud, acknowledge what you like about it and then even showcase certain little things. Wow listen to that sentence wasn't that a nicely balanced sentence or what a great vocabulary word you put in there or that was really a fun way you did that. And so then you're pointing out that what you like to the whole group and so you've always got some kids who are more likely to give you that kind of grist for your mill but the whole group is benefiting because then they get ideas of oh that's how you would use that word that way or a similar word or that's how you would use that you know sentence opener or dress up technique, whatever. So then the second year though, you're using different articles. So that's why we have uh several years worth of these theme-based writing lesson books is so that yeah one year you're doing ancient history next year you could do medieval history next year you could do US history or we have another series we did in conjunction with Hillsdale College Adventures in writing discoveries in writing explorations in writing so that each year the things you're writing about are different but the structural models are being reinforced.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:And then the stylistic techniques are each year going a little bit faster because they become easier more quickly because you remember doing them before. So you really can keep a group of kids, you know, for three or four years with new kids coming in. A good example of this and maybe some listeners are familiar with the way classical conversations is set up, they have their essentials program. And so the kids are in that essentials program for three years. They do the same thing first year and then they do it again the next year and they do it again the next year. And if they come in on you know US history then the next year they go back to ancient if they come in on you know medieval they do US and then they go back to ancient so so they're getting all three years worth but not in the same sequence. And you can do that with science and history is not chronological anyway. So that idea of that mixed age group and the repetition then they the first year everybody's kind of like oh this is hard and difficult and I don't really know what to do and mom's giving a lot of help. The second year the kids are I remember oh yeah I remember doing this okay that and then the third year it's like yep here let me explain it to you. Yeah. And that's where you really love to see the kids on that mastery side. So I think you can work with a mixed age group very effectively and you can can challenge each student at their point of challenge for the most part there's always going to be a few outliers. But even then letting them do what they can do and get better at that even if it's not what you wish they could do or were doing that's okay too.
SPEAKER_01:Love that. Okay next question from guides sometimes you know like they'll do a rough draft and then there's some feedback given based on like the dress up rubric. And some kids take those edits really hard and kind of come away with the idea that like I am a bad writer and just kind of reinforces the I don't like this because I'm bad at it. How can we give feedback and like not just be like oh it's fine let's not like sweep things under the rug but how can we give feedback in a way that doesn't make kids feel this way or do we just not care if they feel that way.
SPEAKER_00:Well two thoughts there first one is it's really important to communicate to them that learning to write is like learning anything else learning to cook, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a sport. You don't you don't just wake up one morning able to do those things you need a coach you need feedback you need someone to show you a slightly better way to do one of those things you're trying to do. Otherwise you just keep doing it the way you're doing it you won't improve. So I always say to kids look you're a writer like it or not you're stuck here every writer has an editor but your editor is not telling you you were wrong or bad your editor is trying to help you be the best version of yourself. You know I'd be an idiot to write something and send it out to thousands of people without having at least one person, hopefully several people look at it and give me suggestions or feedback. And it doesn't mean that I was wrong or bad. It means wow there's someone with an objective eye who could give me a better way to say that well that's good for me. And then in implementing that suggestion I actually learn oh here's another different probably better way to do that. And kids range from perfectionistic any kind of criticism just breaks me into pieces to I couldn't care less what you think. I'm gonna do whatever I want anyway and you can just go edit yourself. And and there's that range but I think we can work within that the other thing and I point this out too is I think the best kind of editing comes with no lecture attached. Just get the kid's paper, fix the spelling put in the period in the capital cross out the word that doesn't work put in the word that does work make it into a complete sentence but I take the approach make as few edits as possible to make it legal. Don't try to make it good, just try to make it legal. Hand it back with no lecture attached don't try to explain why you made all those changes because that's when the kids is hearing like they don't like that. So just give it back here implement these changes turn it in one last time and you're done and I'm a proponent of the a slash I grading model. You can get an A or you can get an I there's no other B. There's no option there's no B or C. So it's A for accepted or accomplished that means you did 100% of the things on the checklist or it's an I mean incomplete you're not finished yet. What did you miss? I will help you figure out how to get that into your paper. You put it in produce a final version you get an A. You just have to be sure that all the parents and everybody involved isn't comparing and saying well this A is so much more creative and well written than this other A. That's not what you're grading on. You're grading on accomplished did they do the assignment and you just assume they did to the best of their creativity or ability and that's that's the best way to go. You know, Plato said that which is honored will be cultivated. So if you spend lots of time letting them know what you like about what they did and not giving lectures on what they should have done better, you'll get more of what you like and then they can just fix up in this kind of anonymous non personal way oh yeah that's that word is spelled that way and oh yeah I should have Comma there and oh yeah, that word didn't really make sense. I just couldn't think of a better one. That's a better one. Okay, so then you're growing. It's like modeling. So I think the best thing is for the, you know, teachers and parents and mentors and coaches to remember it's very much like playing a musical instrument or learning a sport. You have to have a coach if you're going to improve. And there's absolutely no stigma attached to that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And like even you could get a book and say, like, this person's a published author, and let's find the name of their editor in here. You know, like they even have an editor, Michael Phelps, whoever like their sports idol is. Like that person has a coach. And their coach isn't like, like every day they're not like Michael Phelps, you're bad. Like, swim better. Like, that's not what coaching is, right? It's like, I'm giving you actual advice.
SPEAKER_00:I just tell the kids too. You know, and I tell the kids, your editor may make a change, but you do have the final say. If you don't like the change they made, you don't have to accept it. And that gives them the final agency, which I think that's what they they really appreciate too.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, one quick last question. Let's talk about spelling for half a second. I'm all for, and maybe you're against this, I'll have to let me know. Like early, early days, you're learning how to read still, right? You're like writing in my mind looks like if you've got all of the sounds like represented in a word, awesome, we should celebrate that, right? Like, when do we make the transition? Maybe you disagree. Feel free to disagree with that. Um, but when do we make the transition from like great, you're like getting your words out on paper to like, and now there's an expectation that these words be spelled correctly? And like, how do you bridge them into working on spelling?
SPEAKER_00:Well, a few things to keep in mind here. Number one, spelling has nothing to do with the language function of the brain. So kids are over in the language part of their brain trying to find the words to attach, put the words into a logical order that makes sense into a sentence, and then put sentences into a logical sequence. That's a language function. So one of the problems that happens is they want to write a word and they they know that maybe they could spell it, but what they would have to do is leave the language part of their brain, go all the way over to the spelling part of their brain, search around in the little discs there, grab that word and carry it all the way back. And by the time they've done that, they forgot what they even want to do with that word, and they have to go back and reconstruct the idea. So you'll very often see that kids will misspell a word that they might be able to spell on demand when they're in the middle of writing. So, you know, I usually say, you know, give it your best shot, or I'll be your human dictionary, but we'll fix it up later. And then, you know, you you have some kind of spelling program or something you're using. Hopefully, you can look at the words that they are most likely to want to use and not spell correctly and get those into some spelling lists and all that. Really, spelling is a huge, deep concept. It's it's a huge, deep question about what is spelling and how does the brain do it and what's the best ways to learn it or not. It deserves more than a couple minutes. But you know, I would say for the most part, I try to keep those separate until the student has got so much faculty with fun, they can start to integrate. You use the analogy of driving, very good analogy. When you first start doing it, it's like, okay, you know, the wheel, the mirrors, the other cars, these pedals, I can do this and not kill us. And then after you've been at it 10 years, you can, you know, drink lattes, check your phone, look for cops, you know, think about things, play your audiobook. You can do all sorts of things while you're driving and not even notice that you're doing it. So it just does take time. And for, you know, parents, that often translates into patience.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think there's also this like societal pressure that like uh I feel the same thing about uh handwriting. It's like this signal of intelligence. Like if you're a good speller, if you good handwriting, and a lot of times as parents, especially if you've chosen to do something like an alternative education choice, you're kind of like on the hook for like being a little bit judged. People are judging your choice based on like your kids. And I think like that can be really damaging to the child to like involve your own, like kind of am I doing the the right things as a parent? kind of in there. So keeping that separate and just really creating the space for the kid to learn at their own pace and giving them the resources and the feedback that they need and the encouragement. I love how positive you're encouraging us all to be calling out what they're doing well and things like that. I think that's that's really gonna help kids get the skills. Like sometimes we just it's we feel like it's a trade-off, right? Like, I want this to be like really cushy and I want them to like it and things like that. So I'm gonna withhold my feedback and I'm gonna give them a lower expectation so they have this good vibe feeling, but really we're just undercutting their skills, which is not gonna lead to long-term competence, which is actually what the the child's future self really wants. You know, like that's that's the thing that is going to actually allow them to use their agency and their autonomy to accomplish what they want is that competency. So, like we've got to put these things together. Uh, I think that sometimes I think I am probably uh a proponent of like, like I probably err on the side of like be more gentle or like want them to like it. Like when you were just like, I don't care if if you like it or not. I was like, that was actually kind of freeing for me to hear because like I do kind of care if they like it. And I think like we can do a lot more in education to build relationships and be gentle with kids and things like that. But that's not what I'm not hearing you say, like, just be ruthless with them. Like that's not what you're saying at all. Like you can do both things. Like you can build a good relationship, you can have strong rapport, you can give feedback, and you don't have to lower your expectations.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and if they're getting better, you know, even slowly, they will start to like it or at least dislike it less because they're getting better. And then one day they may wake up and say, Hey, this is my favorite thing about school.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And then I I've even heard stories of, you know, 10-year-old boys who hated writing cried just with the sight of it, and at 14 were writing their first novel. So and kids grow up a lot during that time period, too. So you have to always keep in mind that there's a developmental change that's gonna happen as well.
SPEAKER_01:Love it. Okay, let's wrap up. How can people learn more about IEW or your work in general?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we have an easy website, iew.com, and we have tons of resources. AndrewPudua.com. It redirects you to a page that has a lot of conference talks and YouTube videos and things, for example, on motivation, spelling, some of the things that we we didn't have time to unpack here fully. Um I also have a podcast called the Arts of Language Podcast. We drop one episode once a week. Short form 20 minutes. You can listen while you're taking your walk for the day.
SPEAKER_01:Love it.
SPEAKER_00:I know. Tons of information available. And uh we have a super customer service team, all of whom of whom were either homeschool kids now grown up who used our writing stuff or homeschool moms who taught our writing stuff. And uh, so if you have any questions about our materials or curriculum, just call our team and they'll love to find out what your situation is and help you figure out the best thing for you.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, your team is actually super, super helpful. I agree with that. Um, and then last question Who is someone in your upbringing who has kindled your motivation, your passion, your helped helped you become who you are?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I've been blessed with several great mentors in my life, but if I had to choose one, I would probably choose Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, who created the Suzuki Music School, or in Japanese, it would translate more directly as the talent education method. And uh I grew up playing the violin, one of the early Suzuki kids in Southern California in the 60s and early 70s, and then 1982, 1985, I lived in Japan, studied with Suzuki, and while there you could go off and talk about him for hours. The one thing that I would put at the pinnacle of his of his extraordinary self, he believed in people. He believed in me, he believed that every child could learn and that we could, as teachers and parents, we could find the right method, the right circumstance, the right environment, the right attitudes that we could we could help every child reach high levels of excellence and learning. And he just believed in everybody. Even people who didn't seem to be all that talented. He believed in them. And he just loved that this this phenomenal love that he had for people was truly a a saintly quality. And I think he's one of he is probably the greatest human being I've had the privilege of meeting, probably one of the greatest human beings of his century.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. What an example. All right. Well, let's wrap up. Thank you so much for coming on the Kindled Podcast. This has been a very informative, exciting conversation for me.
SPEAKER_00:I've enjoyed it. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing microschool based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled Podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Prenda Learn. And if you'd like more information about starting a microschool, just go to Prenda.com. Thanks for listening and remember to keep Kindling.
