Montessori High School Teacher | Stephen Fairbanks | The Vance Crowe Podcast | Episode 46

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] This is Sarah Bon Camp, a leadership coach from Parker, Colorado, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. So what is here? Where are we? It seems like a whole bunch has changed and absolutely nothing has changed at the exact same time. I, I found myself kind of in the idea that we are in a post COVID-19 world for whatever that means. But I remember the experience of nine 11 being like, I know something has changed and I know more things will change around me in the future, but I really don't know what it means to be in a post nine 11 world. And I think that we're all kind of figuring that out right now, particularly as we're all sitting at home. I don't know about you, but I am pretty much self isolating almost completely. And it's because if you've been listening to the podcast, you know that my amazing, wonderful wife is pregnant and we don't really know what COVID-19 will do to a pregnant woman in her second trimester. And so that has caused me to be an expectant father. Somebody that wants to hyper protect not just my wife, but my in-laws and my other family members. And we have this disease running around that causes all of these challenges. And we don't know whether we're listening to hype and, and that we're being overly cautious while we're nose diving our economy.

Vance Crowe [00:01:42] Or if all of these precautions are super important because we need to protect the ones that we love and the consequences to the economy are completely worth it. It's not possible to say because we don't actually know what will happen. So I am going to shift my work and a lot of these podcasts to being digital. I'm gonna start doing something different than I've ever done before. I'm gonna start bringing people on virtually and having conversations that way. But I do have one more interview that I've done live and in person that I wanna share. It's with a man named Steven Fairbanks, who works at a very interesting school here in the St. Louis area. It's a Montessori school that is different than most Montessori schools because it's for high school age kids. And normally Montessori is kind of for younger people. So I'm gonna play this interview with Steven and I really hope that you enjoy it and that it's a break, some kind of separation from everything that you see going on in the world right now. But if you're anything like me, separating from the news is really hard to do. So I hope that you can kinda take this in and let yourself think about it and maybe think about it in terms of how can I let this apply to the future post COVID-19 world. But coming up, I will, in the next few days, probably start doing more frequent podcasts.

Vance Crowe [00:03:13] And with those podcast guests, I'll be talking with people that I think are important to the supply chain of our food. Probably in the financial industry, I'll find microbiologists. And really, if there's anybody that you think would be interesting to have a conversation with, I will try and line up an interview with them. I have found Twitter to be a really wonderful place lately. I know that there is a lot of arguing and people fighting, but a lot of that's just posturing and people dealing with their own arguments in their head, and they're putting it out into the world and they're running into resistance. And that's probably a pretty good thing. You know, if your ideas are being pushed back against in social media, it may be a good check for you to say, have I gone too far in one way? Either if it's over preparing or under preparing. But I also have had a chance to talk with people that are all over the country dealing with the virus in a variety of different ways. Everyone from my good friend Lyle Benjamin up in Montana, who is living very remotely, all the way up on the Canadian border. How is he handling this to my friend Kate Crosby, who is out in Sacramento, right at the heart of some of the epidemic out in California? And then everything in between. I've got friends in Florida and New York and other parts of the world, and I'm gonna try and tap into those things. So if you know of anybody that you think would be a particularly interesting interview, we are getting rid of the requirement that they be live and in person in St. Louis. And I'd love to hear it. And I hope that you interact with me on Twitter.

Vance Crowe [00:04:45] Tell me what's going on in your neck of the world, what you're seeing, and how things are changing. And we'll just try and paint as big and as full and as robust of a picture as we can. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to the interview with Stephen Fairbanks. I'm so glad you're here. Please stay safe and know that we're all in this together. One great big ocean now to Stephen Fairbanks. Stephen Fairbanks, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:05:15] Thanks, man. Glad to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:05:16] Last time I saw you, we were down at a high school that is fashioned in the Montessori way of doing things, and I've always heard of Montessori. And it wasn't until my buddy Rob Long actually said that he was going to, he was looking into it for his kids that I started to take it seriously. And then we went to your high school. This is years later now. I've kind of had that in the back of my mind. Maybe Montessori's not that weird if my buddy Rob's thinking about doing it. And you are the guy that I used to know from a creative agency, and now you are a major part of this really creative, interesting Montessori school. So what is different about your high school than regular other high schools?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:06:01] Well, a shorter answer to the question would probably, what isn't different, just a few sort of general things. We are what's called mastery based. So there are no grades. So there are assignments, there's curriculum, there's content subjects, et cetera. Those sorts of things all still exist, but the means of evaluation is far more flexible. And it generally takes the form of what we would call a narrative, where the guide, which is sort of the Montessori term for teacher, will have such a close working relationship with the students that they are in a position to essentially craft a story about what has been happening with a particular student. And then that story gets shared with the student itself, the student himself or herself, the student's parents on a quarterly basis and sort of a report card style. But so that's probably one of the biggest things for people who come from a traditional school setting, self

Vance Crowe [00:07:00] Included. And it's not just like you're sitting, my sense when I read these teacher's notes homes is that they're checking a, a box that says it'll take the name of the student and then put in the, is doing well at recess and is making friends, but it's just the teacher checking or unchecking things to make it compile into a story. Is that what you guys are doing?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:07:21] No, in fact, first

Vance Crowe [00:07:23] Of all, is that right? Does that actually happen? Oh,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:07:25] Sure.

Vance Crowe [00:07:25] Okay. And

Stephen Fairbanks [00:07:26] And certainly those, those sort of box checking rubrics have value in the sense of organizing your thoughts. Right? But if that's the only method, I would say it's sort of incomplete if that's a starting point, like say a new teacher, for example, to the Montessori method, which I am, I have teaching experience, but not in this environment. Those sorts of things I think can have value and can be useful. So I don't wanna necessarily summarily poo poo them, but the, I think the, where I see value in the narrative is I, I'm sending home on a quarterly basis, a, a a three or 400 word document to a parent just about how their student is doing in reading and writing, just about how their student is doing in humanities, which is sort of our version of history. And so the parent, and then down the road, perhaps potential employers, college admissions, are getting a much more comprehensive picture of the child, of the student. Then a number or a box checking type thing could possibly provide. I think

Vance Crowe [00:08:30] If I was going to regular high school, I get there at eight o'clock, I go to English class, I go to social studies, I hit PE a little bit later. We get lunch, I got two or three more classes, I'm out of there. That's my conception of the way high school works. Is that how you guys do it?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:08:47] No, we have one, one detail. We we're actually middle school and high school, which is interesting. So we have grade seven through 12. Although right now our student body just has seven through 11. So we've not yet graduated a student.

Vance Crowe [00:09:01] Oh, okay. You're really new though.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:09:02] Very much so. Our typical day, our our week, I should say includes three core academic days and two days that are community and activity focused. So on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the students come in around eight 30. We have a meeting which we call sort of a morning circle that happens at 8 45, sort of a welcome introduction to the day, any necessary announcements. And then at nine o'clock, the entire school, which in our case is 31 students, has 30 minutes of silent reading, they can go anywhere in the school and engage in a book. The only requirement it is, it actually has to be a book. Graphic novels are fine. NonFiction's fine, fiction's fine. Not a magazine, not on the computer reading. You

Vance Crowe [00:09:48] Know what I thought you were gonna say? Hmm? I thought you were gonna say first we sing some songs

Stephen Fairbanks [00:09:53] We've not sang. Well, I'll tell you later a story about, I had to sing a song once,

Vance Crowe [00:09:58] But it's, but we don't sing. It's not like a, it's not like going to summer camp or

Stephen Fairbanks [00:10:00] Something. Nope.

Vance Crowe [00:10:02] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:10:02] No,

Vance Crowe [00:10:02] This is interesting. Yeah. I wasn't expecting the silent reading. I was, I was imagining like hippie flower children.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:10:09] No.

Vance Crowe [00:10:10] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:10:11] No. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:10:12] 'cause just to be totally honest, the way that I knew about Montessori is that I was living out in Mendocino, California. And for people that don't know where Mendocino is, it's the, it's about, it's about two, three hours north of Berkeley.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:10:26] And

Vance Crowe [00:10:26] The people that move there are the ones that think Berkeley is too conservative. They're like, Berkeley just isn't far enough to the left for me. And they go up there and they're perfectly lovely people. Wonderful. You know? Yeah, yeah. Love 'em, love them. But they, they were very granola, California esque. And there was this one woman named Athena, this Greek woman that loved Montessori. I had no idea what it was. I, one time was like, Athena, you're a teacher. Would you like to come? We, we were thinking about doing a spelling bee on the radio. I was working at this public radio station.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:10:57] Oh, so cool. And

Vance Crowe [00:10:58] I was like, we were thinking about doing a spelling bee, and she lost her mind on me. She was so upset. I have never seen this sweet, sweet woman. She was like, how could you possibly think I would turn children's education competitive? How, how, you know, you don't know me at all. And I didn't realize what I was saying was so offensive. But in my mind, this whole time, I've thought, well, then that's what Montessori is. It's for the people that it's no competition. Everybody's clapping hands and we sing lots of songs. So that's where I started on the Montessori. That's why when you told me that you had left your job to go do Montessori, I was like, okay,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:11:40] Pause.

Vance Crowe [00:11:43] So now you, you you've got me at 30 minutes of silent reading. I was not expecting that. Okay. So now what? Now what, how does their day go?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:11:51] Then? Then at that point we split high school, middle school, which in our case means seven and eight are together. Nine, 10, and 11 are together. So in the sense it's, it's multi-age education or one room schoolhouse style. I teach middle school humanities, reading and writing. So all the seventh and eighth graders are together for those classes. The high school teachers who handled the similar courses have nine, 10, and 11 together. At that point. They'll go to reading and writing for 30 minutes. My middle school students come upstairs with me in that middle room that I showed you. And then high school students stay downstairs, and then at 10 o'clock on the academic days,

Vance Crowe [00:12:31] What is reading and writing class all about then

Stephen Fairbanks [00:12:33] Language and literature. So they're gonna get writing instruction, whether everything from creative writing to argumentative writing to expository writing to journalism.

Vance Crowe [00:12:43] Is all writing being done on computers or do they write things out longhand?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:12:47] There's a off awful lot of long hand, although there are, I have a substantial, I have enough students that get frustrated with their own handwriting that we do allow a lot of composition on the computer.

Vance Crowe [00:13:01] I'm glad you said that. So I was hanging out with a group of my buddies last night and we pulled out our kind of like, how do you keep notes, you know, when you're running around. And we were looking at the handwriting and man, I wish that was a skill I had paid attention to earlier, because I'm going to try and improve my handwriting. But it is going to be so hard after having done it for as many years as I have. But your own handwriting is the only way you really capture ideas. I think. Like I put 'em into my phone, they're gone.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:13:30] Agree. Agree. And there's, apparently, I wish I could cite chapter and verse the neuroscience, but there's a, there's a substantial amount of data that shows that a handwritten note, a hand, hand taken note, is far more effective in leaving an impression on the brain and leading to recall understanding than a typed note.

Vance Crowe [00:13:50] And just think about when you receive a handwritten note versus an email. You know, somebody takes the time to write you out a long, beautiful email about something great. Yeah. Somebody sits down and writes with pen and paper and then mails it to you. There's something genuine about it.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:06] I wanna save those things.

Vance Crowe [00:14:07] That's right.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:08] I want to put 'em in a, a special place. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:14:10] And

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:10] It's easy to put an email in a folder or delete it.

Vance Crowe [00:14:12] Right? Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:13] And

Vance Crowe [00:14:13] Even if you print it, then you've got nice, google's like, you know, letterhead on top of this, you know, deeply personal thing that you have. Right. So I'm, I'm, I think that I, that it's definitely worthwhile for kids not just to have handwriting class, but really focus on it. There's something to it. Totally

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:30] Agree. And we, you know, we even get into it, some of the kids who are struggling, like, what position are you sitting in when you're taking notes? 'cause posture will affect like a comfort level. The wrist will be less sore. The, you know, the, the kids who like lie down on their bed to do their homework. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:14:44] Oh, you know what, we, you should have Annie come in and put on a class about posture in school.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:49] I would love that

Vance Crowe [00:14:50] She'd be able to look at the chairs. I would Absolutely. Yes. And talk about like, these kind of chairs will be good for these kind of students and Oh, and the kids will love it. Yeah. She's really good.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:14:57] For sure. Yeah. I would absolutely love it. And they love when, when somebody comes in and it's not just like, oh, the teacher said, no, no, no, no. Somebody who studies ergonomics says, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:15:06] That's right. They're

Stephen Fairbanks [00:15:07] Very receptive to that. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:15:08] And you know, if, there's so many things that had, I known when I was a little kid about your posture in particular, that you're like, it's not just like your mom being like, don't slouch. It's like, hey, hold your body in this way. Because when you grow up to be an adult, you're gonna look like a doofus. 'cause you can't sit up straight in a chair or you're like, leaned over. I, I mean, if only someone had shown me, I would've corrected it. And it sounds like you're in an environment where the kids could actually learn that 'cause Oh,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:15:34] For sure. Whatcha

Vance Crowe [00:15:34] You gonna go do this at the middle school up the street? No way. No, it would never fit into their curriculum.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:15:39] No. I have a buddy who says, for similar reasons, he says, deadlifts are good for the soul. Like the whole idea of being upright, not just physically, but morally.

Vance Crowe [00:15:46] Oh, yeah. And

Stephen Fairbanks [00:15:47] So he makes the, the connection. He is like, no, you'll, you'll be a better human if you do deadlifts a lot because you're improving your posture. And if you naturally just sort of stand up straight, there are gonna be positive outcomes.

Vance Crowe [00:15:57] Amen. From

Stephen Fairbanks [00:15:58] That. Yeah, for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:15:59] And so kids are doing reading, they get reading and writing, they're reading what in your classes?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:16:06] We started with a short story unit where we sort of broke into topics and they could self-select a collection of three short stories.

Vance Crowe [00:16:12] They get to choose their own books.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:16:14] Oh yeah. The, the, the Montessori's huge on choice with, within guidelines provided by the parameters. And I think that's part of the reasons that they, they've latched onto the term guide rather than teacher. 'cause teacher has so many connotations of like a top down command and control. Like I'm the great bestower of knowledge when almost all the research about education tells us that the more the student is engaged in designing the learning process, the more likely they are going to be to retain anything from it. And so I gave 'em six options. Each option had three stories. They could pick those. So the kids that were into like survival read three Dr. London stories, the kids that are like really into goth and sci-fi, read some Edgar Grow and Poe and some William Faulkner. Is

Vance Crowe [00:17:02] This the same reading that they're doing in school now? 'cause I know those are the books. I should have been, I read a ton as a kid, but way outside of the bounds of what was required, because what that was required, they were trying to do it for the middle of the bell distribution and making it like, we're gonna try and choose a book that most of you can read,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:17:21] But a bunch of you're gonna be bored outta your mind by probably

Vance Crowe [00:17:23] Yeah. And it's not gonna make any sense to you. And, and the classics are just too hard because the further we get away from 'em, then people think like, oh, oh

Stephen Fairbanks [00:17:30] No. The, I would absolutely say these are within, these are canonical texts. That's

Vance Crowe [00:17:34] Great. For

Stephen Fairbanks [00:17:34] Sure. Yeah. That's one of the sort of myths about Montessori that I think we could dispel right away. At least in our school, we are absolutely about the classics and, and sort of what we think should be taught within the parameter of the students still helping, like construct how they're learning.

Vance Crowe [00:17:55] This is interesting. So what does Montessori think the classics are?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:00] Well, I think what you would expect. No,

Vance Crowe [00:18:04] I mean, I think that this is like a Okay, okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:06] So is

Vance Crowe [00:18:06] Like a cultural thing. We think that everybody else

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:08] I have say I, I have a master's in literature Okay. In English

Vance Crowe [00:18:11] Literature. Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:12] And so the text that I was exposed to as somebody who majored in English under undergrad and then studied it at the graduate school level, that collection of authors, sort of the canon. And I think it's, it's,

Vance Crowe [00:18:22] So let's mark that in time because that's like, this is a good question. Like what, what is the cannon? So is, so you mentioned Jack London, right? So he was writing those what, in the

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:34] Twenties? Late late 18 hundreds.

Vance Crowe [00:18:35] Late 18 hundreds. Okay. Yep. So it being old gives it some significance 'cause you're like, Hey, it's lasted quite a long time. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:42] That's one of the tests for sure. I think another one of the tests is what, what, what are the texts that other people who have studied literature are engaging with and still talking about?

Vance Crowe [00:18:54] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:18:54] So as far as how old we, our kids are going back to Shakespeare, our kids are going back to, we were reading some Mesopotamian texts in our humanities class, Gilgamesh the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is probably considered to be the first thing, at least in the Western tradition, the first story ever written down.

Vance Crowe [00:19:12] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:19:13] So they were engaged with pieces of that. And I'm sure you know that you have a dog named Tia Matt. So,

Vance Crowe [00:19:19] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:19:20] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:19:20] That's good catch there, man.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:19:22] So yeah, I would say that that my notion of the cannon has always been one that expands and grows as we learn more. So it's not rigid in the sense that there's just this group and there's a lock and key on the box and nobody else is allowed in. Obviously the cannon expands when you get to the 20th century and finally starts to including more writers of color, more women, et cetera. But I still think what makes it canonical is, is it great?

Vance Crowe [00:19:51] Yeah, that's right. Is it archetypal? Does it have something that transcends? So you're gonna be perfect to talk with it. So I have this book club actually, like I started it, but now it's kinda run by the group. Right? Awesome. Like, they have ideas about what books they wanna read. And, and I've been focused on this concept of Lindy, the Lindy effect. So this is coined by Nasem Taleb, and he's basically just saying, what is the likelihood that a book will be around 10 years, 20 years, a hundred years in the future? Will the odds go up for a book if it has been around for that long? So basically saying, you know, if a book's been around since to kill a, let's say a Bill O'Reilly book from five years ago, New York Times bestseller odds are probably be around for another five years more than that. We don't know To Kill a Mockingbird written in whatever the late fifties, early sixties probably gonna be around for another 60 years. We can count on that safely, maybe longer, but definitely that amount. So the further that you go back, the more likely it is to be in the future because it survived the kind of culling that goes on with just people quit reading it.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:20:57] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:20:58] And so I'm interested, do you, do you see books in that way too, that kind of Lindy?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:21:04] I do. I do. And, and I also have another lens that I've been using for some time. And it, and it's, and it's an approach I borrowed from a mentor in undergrad who used to say that great literature does two things. It it rewards repeated effort. So if you come back to what, what makes a piece of literature great, is if you can come back to it on a second, read and get more Oh, that's good than you got the first time.

Vance Crowe [00:21:29] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:21:29] That's one criteria

Vance Crowe [00:21:31] For great

Stephen Fairbanks [00:21:31] Literature. That's another criteria for great literature, is that it should accomplish two things. You should learn something specific about the time in which the author wrote it about the people, about the sort of zeitgeist, for lack of a better word. And there should be an attempt to, to communicate with what we might call the literary tradition. That, that, that the eternal concerns that mankind has been exploring through literature, that great literature should do those two things. You should, you should Learn To Kill a Mockingbird should teach us about the moment in time in which Atticus Finch was taking up the, the mantle of race relations. And it should also connect us to something about striving or the questions that mankind has been trying to, to ask himself for, for, for centuries.

Vance Crowe [00:22:18] Man, I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're here because there's a lot to talk about because I, I was just listening to something today. I I, somebody put up a book club that was like the ag book club, and I was like, Hey, look, let's look at these books and let's see, are there any books in here that I'm not going to agree with? Yeah, there's one right there. And it's a, it's a book on veganism, and the guy starts off, it's, it's called To Eat Animals or something like that. It's very simple cover. It's the ag book club, if you wanna look it up. But in the, I I've only listened to the first two chapters and he is clearly creating characters that are gonna, he's gonna place into the world. Like this was my grandmother who, you know, went through these terrible trying times and she would eat anything she could get her hands on. And I had my son and he's so pure and I only wanna feed him the best things I can. So he's like placing these symbols on the shelf and you know, he's coming back for him.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:23:18] Oh, sure.

Vance Crowe [00:23:18] And so I'm just sitting here, here hearing him spin a yarn. And it's, it's interesting because one of the things that he says early in the book is stories, articulate rules, convey rules, stories, convey rules. And that is what our Bible, Torah, you know, any of the other books, the fairytales, they are trying to convey the rules. Rules that you should, you should play by in order that you can get along better in the world. Oh yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:23:49] And they're far easy, easier to remember rules that way than like chiseled into stone tablets and, and handed down from Mount Sinai. Right. That, or, or not, not not remember, but so much as like adhere to them. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:24:03] If

Stephen Fairbanks [00:24:03] I have an example of somebody who's,

Vance Crowe [00:24:05] You know, how to apply 'em.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:24:06] Yes. Yeah, for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:24:08] In, in some way, like when you say guide for the student, they are kind of on this adventure to learn for themselves

Stephen Fairbanks [00:24:16] If I'm doing my job right. Absolutely. And

Vance Crowe [00:24:19] Do you see every kid naturally having that alertness, that awakeness that knows I've got a chance to learn here

Stephen Fairbanks [00:24:27] To varying degrees? Yes, there are, there are, there are students who are already very clearly high achievers because of the environments in which they've been raised and, and already have some pretty astounding habits in place. There are others who have, what do you mean

Vance Crowe [00:24:43] Astounding habits?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:24:46] I have a seventh grader who is a black belt in TaeKwonDo and who wants to win the Olympic gold medal in four years. Like it's a stated life goal. And literally every decision he makes every day of his life is for that. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:25:02] I wasn't that disciplined.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:25:03] Yeah, not so much. I have another seventh grader who has been doing aerial silks, the, the fabrics that hang from the ceiling, like at the Cirque de Soleil. Yeah. Since she was six, when she and her family lived in Vegas and also does theater and sings and writes fan fiction every night of her life for like 90 minutes. She goes home and she just writes, she creates these stories based on the books that she's reading. That's

Vance Crowe [00:25:33] The way you get good. Just

Stephen Fairbanks [00:25:35] Keep

Vance Crowe [00:25:35] Cranking on that writing.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:25:36] Yeah. And, and that's a habit, that's not a homework assignment. That's a, I look forward to this every day of my life.

Vance Crowe [00:25:42] Wow.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:25:43] I have kids who are devouring books like Jared, diamonds, guns, derms, and Steel in the seventh grade and coming back for more.

Vance Crowe [00:25:52] Why? What, I mean, this spark takes energy. Right. Why, why is this in them and not, I mean, I don't, maybe the, maybe other kids are doing that, but my impression is it's not going on in other places.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:26:04] Well, I mean, have I met other kids like it? Yeah. I would honestly put my own daughter in that category. She, she definitely, and

Vance Crowe [00:26:10] She went to regular non Montessori school. What do you call schools that aren't Montessori? Are they just

Stephen Fairbanks [00:26:15] Traditional trust? Both

Vance Crowe [00:26:16] Traditional. Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:26:17] I I, the, the general dichotomy in the educational world is traditional and non-traditional.

Vance Crowe [00:26:22] Okay. So you're coupled with all the non-traditional and traditional is that state run,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:26:27] State run. But I think there are traditional private schools

Vance Crowe [00:26:30] For sure. Okay. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:26:31] In terms of you're segregated by age, you are, the day is segmented in a very regimented, what you might call industrial kind of way. There are metrics that you are calculating and then evaluating against whether those metrics are attendance 99 out of a hundred on a test, et cetera.

Vance Crowe [00:26:58] Yeah. And you have to make it fair and you have to make it transparent because all students are compared with one another and you're going in the great book and there's people on the top and people on the bottom.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:27:08] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:27:09] Right. And, and your case is that students don't learn as well in that environment.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:27:16] I, when I got into Montessori education, I read something interesting by a, by a prominent advocate for adolescent, which in the Montessori world is sort of age 12 and above for, for adolescent Montessori pedagogy. And that statement was, the traditional school system works just fine for the best students. So the students who have good habits of work, who comes from, who come from homes where both mom and dad are there and present and talking to them and college educated and read, you know, all the sort of the socioeconomic indicators that underpin high academic achievement, the, that, that, that the traditional system works just fine for those students. And the traditional system worked just fine for me. I, I did well, I tested well, I wanted to learn. My parents reinforced that at home. What I was missing when it was working out for me was the, the sort of vast gulf between me and my peers and the people around me who were sort of like floundering or just sort of meandering aimlessly through school.

Vance Crowe [00:28:21] Did you do well in school?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:28:23] I did.

Vance Crowe [00:28:24] Did you like it?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:28:25] I loved it.

Vance Crowe [00:28:26] Who were you in high school?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:28:30] I was a little, little confused because I had transplanted into St. Louis as a sophomore after six years in a small town in western Pennsylvania. So who I was, was a little muddled, but I played soccer

Vance Crowe [00:28:45] More than, more mud, more muddled than most people's. Well,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:28:47] In retrospect, no. And I did a just a, I did a fine job of hiding it for sure. I don't think anybody who knew me then would've been like, oh yeah, Steven was so muddled in high school. I was in honor society, I was involved in like the pep rallies and stuff like that. I was enthusiastic about where I went to school. Like I said, I played varsity sports and then tested off the charts and got a full scholarship to college, but never bothered acquiring work, good habits of work. And so I ended up dropping outta college pretty quick.

Vance Crowe [00:29:21] No way. Yeah. I was not expecting that.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:29:24] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:29:25] Wow. As you were telling this story, I thought, man, I've always been jealous of the people that were so good at joining things and having school spirit because they were so much more connected. And me, I want, I I was like, get me outta here. I still had friends and stuff, but I just, I just didn't join clubs. I didn't go to the meetings. I didn't find out what time they were. And then I hear you, you say like, got in there and wasn't ready for it.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:29:52] No, I, what it provided a structure for me because I didn't have those habits. The high school was like the perfect academic environment and honestly the perfect athletic environment for me too. When, when a coach yelled at me, I, I worked harder when, and, and so part of why I floundered after high school was I didn't have the coach like requiring me to be to practice for three hours a day every day. Oh. And, and it took me until probably my mid to late twenties until I reacquired good habits of fitness, reading, et cetera. And I ended up going back to college in my late twenties, early thirties. And then finished. What

Vance Crowe [00:30:28] Were you doing in the meantime? Waiting

Stephen Fairbanks [00:30:30] Tables. Got in the restaurant business, playing a lot of volleyball. I traveled around the Midwest playing like

Vance Crowe [00:30:35] That. Didn't even sound real. Playing a lot of volleyball.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:30:39] Yeah. From 93 to 97, I probably spent 35, 40 hours a week playing volleyball.

Vance Crowe [00:30:46] So you were the kinda guy that could hit the ball and make it hurt if, if it pounded on you.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:30:50] I was, I was in, in, in doubles in sand volleyball. It's less of a, we call it a goon game. It was less of a goon game of like the big monster guys who can crush it. And so you had to have all of the skills, you had to be able to pass, set and hit and play defense. And I could do that. I was athletic enough and small enough and I could still jump well enough to compete with the big boys, but sand the equalizer for me was the sand. When I got indoors, the guys that were six, six and six seven and could hurt you with the ball just dominated. But I had an advantage because I was quicker on the sand. And so I spent, I dedicated a substantial portion of my life in my twenties to that I had asked for, this

Vance Crowe [00:31:27] Is like every weekend on the, on the, on the beach and

Stephen Fairbanks [00:31:30] Oh, yeah. I mean, it was on the beach. No, on sand courts into municipalities off Hanley Road or YMCA sand court, like it was all Midwest.

Vance Crowe [00:31:40] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:31:40] I would travel to Chicago, Kansas City, Memphis, Louisville, St. Louis, Columbia.

Vance Crowe [00:31:45] And if you were to put that into like the belt system, right? You know, white belt being total novice, black belt being expert. Are you, are you familiar In blue, purple, brown. So where would you put yourself at in the

Stephen Fairbanks [00:31:57] Sand volleyball

Vance Crowe [00:31:58] World? Oh, I

Stephen Fairbanks [00:31:58] Mean, just shy of the, the, if if you, if we, if we say that the, the guys in California who are on the A VP tour are your eighth degree black belts,

Vance Crowe [00:32:08] The

Stephen Fairbanks [00:32:08] Ones who are getting invitations to the Olympics, who get sponsored by Pacific Sun, you know, stuff like that. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:32:15] Those

Stephen Fairbanks [00:32:16] Are your black belts. Then there's a tier of sort of satellite pro tours in the United States, or there was, then there was one in Michigan, up and down like Grand Haven and that coast of Michigan.

Vance Crowe [00:32:27] Okay, yeah, sure.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:32:28] Up into Traverse City. So it was like a little six or seven stop tour up there. And that was the second best money. And it would, but the drop off was astounding. Like the, the pros are winning 70 to $200,000 for a win. The stuff in Michigan is like $5,000 and then there's a Colorado tour. And so we dialed that back to like $2,000 for a win.

Vance Crowe [00:32:50] So you were playing up in Michigan at for the five?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:32:52] Never. I aspired to it and never got there.

Vance Crowe [00:32:55] Okay. Never

Stephen Fairbanks [00:32:56] Got there. Decided my, my priorities in my late twenties shifted, started having a lot of fun. Still was make, was making nice money waiting tables and just never quite got over the hump. And it was a, it was absolutely a, like a set of choices that it was like, eh, it was fun. I'm having a good time, but I don't want to take the next step in terms of commitment because I have other things.

Vance Crowe [00:33:21] So as you're, as you're living the life of going around and doing beach volleyball and hanging out, being fit hot summer, you're waiting tables, you said you're making money when you're in your twenties. Are you like, I have got this figured out.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:33:34] Oh no, absolutely not. I don't even think I dared consider uttering those words until I was probably married with a kid. And in my late thirties then I started to sort of settle and find myself and contemplate like, I've got this figured out in the sense that I know where I want to go with things. I was very much just sort of being swept along by enjoying myself. That's the best I got.

Vance Crowe [00:34:06] I mean, I think that I, I I had a constant nagging fear that I wasn't doing good enough, but that feeling wouldn't have been, it would've been there no matter what I was doing. And so it just made me have wanderlust like, okay, well I'm gonna do it here for a little while and I'm gonna run over here because I, I just had no idea. Well,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:34:26] I, I definitely, I, I could relate to the wanderlust, the, the, the volleyball emerged because I went to college to play basketball and that didn't work out. And then some friends who were also sort of like ex basketball players had just sort of picked up a volleyball club at Northeast Missouri State, which is now Truman State up in Kirksville. And then, so I ended up playing college volleyball as an afterthought, took to it, liked it, and then moved back to St. Louis in 93 learned that there was this thing, like the ability to play in what we called open tournaments, which were tournaments for money in the Midwest and just sort of started doing that. And then the close group of guys I played and trained with all the time, people were peeling off 'cause life intervened. A couple guys got married another, another kid graduated from Logan Chiropractic School.

Vance Crowe [00:35:17] Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:35:18] And moved out west, another kid moved back to the East coast. And so just the people that I was doing it with started peeling away

Vance Crowe [00:35:26] Just a couple of weeks ago. I had a guy on that was in a band and he said, this is what happened to the people that were either gonna be musicians. And then some of them were like, well, that's not gonna work. And I got married now and I got kids and he's like, it was just me and my duo partner and we were still there going forward.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:35:42] Yeah. Yeah. So, so I was very much being carried along by, it was fun and like, it, it certainly wouldn't, wouldn't ever say things like I regretted it or anything. Got a tremendous amount out of it, loved it, made great friends. And just recently, two years ago, got back into playing sand volleyball and I still see some of the faces of the guys Oh wow. I was playing with back in the nineties. Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:36:03] Did they take a break too?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:36:05] No. And that's why they're still fitter than I am and have less of a predisposition to the occasional calf or quad injury.

Vance Crowe [00:36:17] So let's go back to your Montessori school. Yeah. You're teaching after reading and stuff like that. Then they have, you said it's not history, it's humanities.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:36:26] Well, first we have movement break.

Vance Crowe [00:36:28] Movement break, yeah. Recess.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:36:29] Yeah. Which is, yes, except that there's a, like, movement is a mandatory component of it. So we have four or five options for the students to sign up for. Some of 'em can just go outside in the back and play games. Kickball Foursquare, we have some, like a bunch of hockey sticks and balls they can smack against the wall and stuff like that. When the weather gets cold, they can come inside, do yoga, ping pong. There's a group every day that walks around grant center and one of the guides leads a group. So the idea is it's, it's mid-morning we've gotten the juices flown with the reading, had the first class immediately like get up and move because of one, one of the Montessori principles is she talks about the connection between the head in the hand and that, that the moving active engaged child is far more likely to be developing the brain. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:37:20] A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, and, and like, you know that, I know that from, if I'm gonna write a speech or I've got something creative I've gotta do, I don't get it done sitting at this desk. That's just when the work gets done. Right. The thinking gets done when I'm taking a walk with my dog or I'm jogging or I'm doing like,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:37:35] Unquestionably.

Vance Crowe [00:37:35] And if you aren't moving, you aren't thinking.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:37:38] Yep. Yeah. And then, and then, you know, the whole, just the whole notion of like how toxic stasis can be, you know, just being static and then, and how that can steamroll into like what, what ended up being severe developmental challenges for, for students who are like couch bound or technology bound. So we get 'em up and moving 30 minutes, then 10 30 to 1130, I have my group in humanities. So we split into two groups so that the smaller group affords more personal attention. Eight of them are going to science, the other eight are going to humanities. And then the next day they'll swap. And so we have kind of an alternating pattern on the academic days.

Vance Crowe [00:38:24] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:38:26] Then after that, the middle school students go downstairs for a sort of a broadly understood STEM curriculum, some science, some math, some interesting problem solving type stuff. And our guides that do that are just frigging amazing. And then I teach a high school French elective during that time before lunch. So my morning, my teaching is pretty much done at lunch, which is at 1215 every day.

Vance Crowe [00:38:53] So the students are done working at, at noon as well?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:38:57] No, in the afternoons they will have electives after lunch. So the middle schools students are required to take a foundational Latin course in seventh and in eighth grade

Vance Crowe [00:39:11] Foundational Latin. Why?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:39:14] Because it's so valuable for understanding English, for instilling an understanding particularly of what word structures and spelling. The, the, the primary and elementary level Montessori approach does not harp on spelling. So a lot of students hit seventh grade and they're below average spellers. And the idea is if you just expose them to the language and then Latin being the root of so much of our language that, that those structures get incorporated in a much more natural way to your, your friend who is the, the vehement spelling bee opponent's point then like rigor, rigorous drilling. Whoa. Of word spelling. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:39:56] You're right. Because that is what a spelling bee is. It's rigorous. So, and and Latin. So I happen to check out this podcast for a while called History of the English Language.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:40:06] Have

Vance Crowe [00:40:06] You ever heard this?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:40:07] Heard of it. I've not listened to

Vance Crowe [00:40:09] It. It is mind blowing because he treats the language like an evolving animal or point,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:40:15] Which it is.

Vance Crowe [00:40:15] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:40:16] Oh, for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:40:16] And starting way, I don't even know. I mean the roots, I couldn't do it all. But he goes back to like, why is it Indo-European? Yes. Where does that come from? Do you understand all this stuff? 'cause it's mind blowing.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:40:28] I didn't until I took a linguistics course in graduate school, and now I understand much more about it. And I also have a podcast I'm fond of called Lexicon Valley, that linguistics professor at Columbia named John Macor runs. And and it's a, in the interesting quirks of language and what the sort of root causes of those quirks might be in any particular case. So like one of my, one of the ones that stuck out to me was an episode on the, the Southern accent. And it focused on people like Jimmy Carter's mother, Roslyn Carter. And he excerpted several of her speeches and then he matched them up with patterns of speech that had been in place for decades in the south. And he sort of traces their lineage, if you will.

Vance Crowe [00:41:17] Wow. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:41:17] I'm fascinated by the history of language.

Vance Crowe [00:41:19] I mean, it's, it's every, it's this symbol a symbolism of thought. Right. And that's, it's one of those things that I remember when I was a kid, my, my dad would come down and quiz us on words

Stephen Fairbanks [00:41:31] Or

Vance Crowe [00:41:32] He'd tell us a word and then, and by the end of the day he'd ask you, did you look it up? Do you know what it was? And I think my brother was annoyed by it and I loved it. It wasn't a challenge for me. It was like a game. And one of the things that I learned later was that when I went to work at a camp for inner city kids, when when they were engaging with one another, the number of words that they had to describe various emotions that they had was really limited.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:41:59] So

Vance Crowe [00:41:59] It was like, I am frustrated or I'm angry. Right. They didn't have like, I'm jealous or I'm tired, or I'm,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:42:06] They

Vance Crowe [00:42:06] Had none of that language. And without having that language, they couldn't name their thought and therefore like being able to control it was way harder. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:42:15] Imagine a frustration and not being able to name what you're, what you're feeling.

Vance Crowe [00:42:18] I hadn't thought of it that way.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:42:20] And, and all that does is exponentially increase the anger or the frustration.

Vance Crowe [00:42:24] Yeah. Yeah. You search for it and it isn't there. And I think that that's why when you find a word that precisely describes something you felt for so long, it feels so good because it's like, ah, there, I'm not alone. Somebody else experienced this thing. Oh

Stephen Fairbanks [00:42:42] Yeah. And I'm a huge fan of the right word. The, the one of the first lessons that I've taught the, the 10 years I taught college, and then even my middle school students now on day one of writing, the first thing we talk about is how writing is an intentional act that authors make choices that aren't just because of habits. They're, they're, they're, I want to accomplish a thing with this word and that's why I'm choosing this one and not this one. And so you should read that same way. You should understand that an author chose morose instead of sad for a reason. Right. I was the same way you were that, that my mom and dad were the same way with words. And I loved the same

Vance Crowe [00:43:25] Stuff. I think, I think I've just discovered that I need to change a habit that I have because I love to look up words while I read. However I started to get it where when I, before I would just write the words down and then go look them up. This is back before there was the internet, before I had a smartphone.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:43:41] Now

Vance Crowe [00:43:42] I open up my phone and I guarantee I'm getting distracted along the way.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:43:46] Oh sure.

Vance Crowe [00:43:47] And so I should go back to that habit because when you look up a word in the dictionary and then you recall back to the thing that you were reading, you lock in with that idea, particularly normally because you notice that word because just like you're saying, they didn't choose it on accident.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:44:03] Right,

Vance Crowe [00:44:04] Right. And so you find a difficult word. I think that's also why audio books feel different than books that you read because in an audio book, the guy that's reading can slam past difficult words for you. And you don't have to be like, wait, I've never seen that word. Like, you might be like, oh, I've never heard that. But you're not gonna stop the thing to make yourself catch up with it. There's something different between audio and written word. I think.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:44:29] Agree. And I would even, I I would even argue that the, in terms of vocabulary acquisition, it's probably far more likely that the individual who reads hard copy is going to have a distinct advantage over the individual that is listening to the audio. I certainly think there's a time in the place for the audio, my, my students read Huck Finn second quarter, and two of them chose to listen to it on audiobook. And what they retained drastically outpaced their peers because they didn't have to stumble over the dialect and the dialogue of rural African American mid 19th century America. And

Vance Crowe [00:45:07] It reads like a play like the thoughts of a Oh

Stephen Fairbanks [00:45:10] Yeah. Of

Vance Crowe [00:45:10] A play. So if somebody else is speaking it to you, it would be, yeah,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:45:13] You're

Vance Crowe [00:45:14] Right. There are some cases where it's a lot better,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:45:16] But if your, if your goal of reading is enhancing vocabulary, the hard copy is the thing that's gonna do it unquestionably. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:45:23] I think, I think there's gotta be a word for ha for, or at least the description of books that are better for audio and books that are better for written.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:45:35] Hmm.

Vance Crowe [00:45:37] And it's probably several features, you know, like one Dante's Inferno, what, from what I'm told, I i, I didn't know this until about a month ago. So that was the first book in our book club. And what I thought was, man, he wrote a book that was really difficult to plow through, but for hundreds of years that was actually read as like stuff you could just throw away to the peasants. They could read it so easily. And so obviously, and the characters in there, whether they knew them or not, the way that he was describing them fit them because it was written in Italian and it was spoken in Italian, but when you hop it over to English, there's just like jarring words that you're trying that the, that the translator's trying to throw in there. And so as you're, as I'm reading it, I'm like, I don't know. I mean I kind of understand what they're saying here, but it's so much work that I'm sure, and you, I could, there's no chance I could have done that book on audio book and understood it.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:46:34] Yeah. There that you bring up a fascinating point around translation. And when I was in school, one of the things I, a professor of mine mentioned is that the Italians in fact have a phrase that is translation is treason.

Vance Crowe [00:46:47] Oh.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:46:47] That you are fundamentally like, sort of betraying the central idea of book when you attempt to translate it. That's funny. That you should mention. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:46:56] So I have, I have a friend that is a mathematician. I don't think I've ever told this story in the podcast before. So he is a PhD mathematician and he's married to a PhD mathematician. And like, he went to Brown and they like, they are amazing, brilliant people. University of Chicago. And so every time that I would see him, when we would like, our two families would come together, I'd be like, Wade, you know, tell me about your math. You're doing like cryptography. So that's like code breaking and he's just would kind of like slough me off. And I was like, what? You know, and he'd be really intensely watching Michigan football. So I was like, maybe, maybe it's the fact that he's watching football, that he doesn't want me to interrupt him. I, you know, I don't know, I don't watch that much sports, but maybe this is, and then so I'd wait for the commercials and I'd be like, Hey man, I know about, you know, elliptical curves and I know about this. Like, I'm trying to show him, like, if you give me a little bit, I know enough about math that we could have a good conversation. So this goes on for hours and I won't relent. Right. Like I, I did like, I'm, I'm completely captivated by this. And I, I'm like, why won't he tell me his math? So we go to dinner, the football's done, everybody's sitting around, we're drinking wine and Wade's having a couple glasses of wine with me. So I finally spring the trap and I'm like, Wade, I feel like when I ask you about math, you are avoiding telling me about it. And I, I mean, you're not gonna hurt my feelings, but I, I want to tell you like, I genuinely think I can understand what you're talking about.

Vance Crowe [00:48:29] And if I can't, I will write down notes. I will find out a way to understand it. And he goes, Vance, I I I, the best example I can give you is that I am painting seascapes and these seascapes, there's only like 50 people in the world that really, really like these seascapes, but they really like them. And so do I. So that's all I do is I paint seascapes. But the problem is mathematics is precise. It's not a metaphor, it's not like something else. And as soon as I say that it is like something else, then I make it not precise. Which breaks the thing that took me eight years to get to the frontier to get my PhD to discover something new. And now I'm out in the borderlands where there's only 50 other people. It will take you eight years to get here to understand me. And I don't really care if you do or not. And like at first I was like, you dick, you know, like that just really hurt my ego. And then I was like, you gotta respect a guy that isn't going to tarnish the thing that he loves precision. So he can be liked by the people around him. Oh,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:49:39] Absolutely. And I totally respect that he could actually articulate it. 'cause a lot of people don't have the either willpower or the patience to do that.

Vance Crowe [00:49:45] Yeah, that's right.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:49:46] So that, that, that shows me he's a friend.

Vance Crowe [00:49:48] That's right.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:49:49] I'm willing to explain this to you in a language you can understand.

Vance Crowe [00:49:51] That's right. And I wouldn't have understood and I would never have let

Stephen Fairbanks [00:49:54] It Yeah. I'll give you the paint by number. He would've had a couple

Vance Crowe [00:49:56] Of years of me doing this.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:50:00] That's a great story. I love that.

Vance Crowe [00:50:01] But going back to the translation, do you speak other languages? French, I guess Malana. Yeah. Can you read in French?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:50:08] I can, I can read much better than I can listen to the language. Native speakers confound my ear. I, because I, because I didn't learn it until I was in my thirties and I had double major in college, French and English did six weeks of an immersion in Quebec City, which is a hundred percent French speaking culture. Stayed with the Quebec WA family. I have a family connection. My mom's entire family is Quebecois. They all have French Canadian last names born in Northern New Hampshire. All laggers that came down from Quebec in like the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds.

Vance Crowe [00:50:37] Alright. All right. Alright. So if you can you speak for, how is it that an enclave of people within an English speaking country, why do they want to do that and, and how have they been able to make it so a small group of people can make everyone else have to have two different languages. You have to have English and French, even though it's just a small group of people that speak French. Well,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:51:02] They're, they're small, but they're persistent and they have, they have a prevailing sort of cultural narrative. You know what it says on every license plate in the province of Quebec?

Vance Crowe [00:51:11] No.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:51:13] Which means I remember. Okay. And, and the French language is fascinating for a gajillion reasons, but one of the things that's really interesting about that is, you know what a reflexive verb is? I do it to myself. So when I cut myself, I'm using cut in its reflexive sense. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:51:30] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:51:30] So when you introduce yourself in France, you say, I call myself the m the verb to call is apple. Me going in front of it. So you say I call myself, you don't say my name is Oh, you say I call myself. So Ian is the, the, the, the souvenir, the word we have in English, it comes from the French memory.

Vance Crowe [00:51:56] Oh. So

Stephen Fairbanks [00:51:58] Is the, I remember. And so they have, they have just completely built this cultural importance of being French and speaking French into their lives in a way that is, that is palpable.

Vance Crowe [00:52:17] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:52:17] When you're there.

Vance Crowe [00:52:18] And so what do they remember? What is this rallying, the uniting symbol

Stephen Fairbanks [00:52:22] That, that their identity is absolutely bound in the language. That's what they remember.

Vance Crowe [00:52:29] Whoa.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:52:30] And that's why the, that's why the Quebec separatists were considered to be like a, a sort of borderline international terrorist group for decades. They were on the terrorist watch list in like the mid 20th century, the Quebec separative.

Vance Crowe [00:52:45] Do you know what's going on in, in Canada right now

Stephen Fairbanks [00:52:47] Or no?

Vance Crowe [00:52:48] Th this blockade, I mean, by the time this comes out. Oh, the, this'll be weeks old. But no,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:52:53] I, vague impressions but not details. No.

Vance Crowe [00:52:57] So I mean, I don't know very much about it, but I can tell you that I am going to Alberta. I will have already gone by the time this thing airs. And there is a train in, in the western part of Canada that there are groups of people that are shutting it down because they don't like a gas pipeline that's coming in. Okay. They think that they're, it's violating rules and, but they are literally shutting down train lines. Not like, oh, we're not letting this one pass or that one like period. They're stopped, they're backed up. They have trouble getting grain and stuff outta the ports. Wow.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:53:30] No, I did not know that much detail.

Vance Crowe [00:53:31] Yeah, I mean like, I think that it's, it, it'll be long news. Something will have happened by the time this airs, so,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:53:37] Okay, cool. I'll have to, that I have homework tonight then. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:53:41] I mean, it's an interesting thing, but it calls to mind that that's a country that understands culture, right? Oh yeah. They recognize different tribal groups. They have the, this French connection, the Albertans definitely feel like they're separated.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:53:56] Yeah. Fascinating.

Vance Crowe [00:53:57] So tell me more about humanities and your students. They're, they're, so they come back recess now. They've not recess the play, then they do lunch, then they're doing the afterschool extracurriculars. What's next?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:54:10] The, the end of the day is sort of an independent work time. Another central component of Montessori education, and this starts in pre-K and goes all the way up, is this idea that the student who is given the materials, the space and the time, and most importantly, the support from a guide should be free to explore as they see fit. And that's why the, there's a, there's a concept, especially in the younger ages in Montessori education called the prepared environment. And one of the things you'll notice in, in the vast majority of Montessori schools is how similar they all look in terms of the materials, math materials, all look the same, the, the geo, geo geography, materials, et cetera. So that extends to our school in the sense that we finish the day with them having a block of roughly an hour and a half, hour and 15 minutes of time that is theirs to do with what they please. They can choose to complete assignments that they've been given in class. They could choose to read. They could also choose to occupy themselves in sort of the creative third of our downstairs room, which we would broadly call our maker space. And that could be everything from, I want to use power tools to build a new picnic table to, I want to use the 3D printer to play around and like design some chess pieces, or I want to go over here on the sewing machine and make some clothes or what the sort of the traditional fine arts.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:55:48] We have aspiring painters, et cetera, in the room.

Vance Crowe [00:55:54] How much time do they get to do this

Stephen Fairbanks [00:55:55] Hour? 15 hour and a half.

Vance Crowe [00:55:56] Wow. And

Stephen Fairbanks [00:55:57] It's the last thing they do before we go to what are called jobs, which is the students then clean the entire school five days a week, every week of the year. So at three 15 or three 20 jobs time is announced slash they're aware of it. And then they go and break off. And we have sort of a jobs manager, one of our eighth graders, and half the students go upstairs, half of 'em are downstairs. They're vacuuming, they're cleaning, cleaning the bathrooms, they're doing the dishes. And then we all come back together in circle for dismissal at the end of the day.

Vance Crowe [00:56:29] But no song singing,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:56:30] No song singing.

Vance Crowe [00:56:32] I'm blown away by this man. I'm blown away. I, I think that as I think about this, our giant school system is set up for numbers, right? We, we have raw goods and we've gotta mold them into something that we can use coming out the back of it. And I did okay in that system. You know, I, I, I certainly didn't thrive, you know, I was a gregarious, excited person that was basically told Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down. And yeah, I hear what you're doing. And I think if you're legitimate, like actually focusing on getting curriculum or getting these books read and staying on top of them, why isn't this way more popular?

Stephen Fairbanks [00:57:18] Well, I think there's a few hurdles. The first one would be perception, what we might call in our previous worlds a marketing challenge. The Maria Montessori before she died, which was in the shortly after World War II, had had, when she passed away, she never trademarked the Montessori approach or the Montessori name. So there's no guarantee that when you go into a Montessori school around the world, you are seeing our approach.

Vance Crowe [00:57:48] I mean, I've heard everybody say that. Everyone is different. Yeah. Everyone is different. I've heard that. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:57:52] And I've heard, I've heard stories ranging from sort of military rigidity in the classroom and calling that Montessori, it was like whistles and bells and standing at attention and everything short of a uniform and a, and a bayonet to, okay, do what you want. We'll be over here. And everything in between the the what my mentors in my current role, we call 'em the Melissas, the two women who found her at our school are both named Melissa. And they were trained by a woman who actually studied under Maria Montessori 65 years ago before she died. And, and so there's a strain of thought and an agency that accredits schools called Association Montessori International, a MI and a MI schools all do kind of what we are doing, which is we are, we are dedicated to simultaneously a culture of work and a culture of knowledge. And those are the, that's the two-prong approach that we take. That the, that the student who is engaged in work that they find meaningful is the student that's most likely to thrive and succeed and be able to like, define the terms of their success in their way. Not a school board hands the curriculum to a teacher who does this and then is rubber stamped by an accreditation. And then you, like you said, use the industrial analogy, just get 'em out the door.

Stephen Fairbanks [00:59:26] 'cause we got the numbers to deal with. So the

Vance Crowe [00:59:32] Man I really struggled in high school, like the more I'm hearing you describe this, I remember hating so badly when people would be like, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Because I could describe like, these are things that I like, but really what they wanted is, are you gonna go do pr? Are you gonna do advertising? Are you gonna do, see, I,

Stephen Fairbanks [00:59:52] I'd much rather have a student tell me what they like and then, and then I can like satisfy your needs by showing you amazing things that can, like, I don't want to know what, what the data we have says what, like less than 10% of people say they know what they want and actually pursue it. The other 90% are like trying this. And then, nah, okay, I wanna try something else. And no. And so I, I think what we're trying to do is meet students like you and prepare them with some sort of fundamental knowledge, but more importantly, like a little awareness of themselves. What they like, what they dislike. Yeah. Just

Vance Crowe [01:00:28] Make, if you can make a kid conscious yes.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:00:31] That

Vance Crowe [01:00:31] You can make decisions and that there are actually no rules. You just have to figure out how to get along with your fellow human beings and stand upright. Like be able to do your deadlifts. And, and that's, if you can do that, then fit in however you want. Thank God, when I was in college, right before I graduated, I, we had a, a family friend named brother Leo Ryan. And he, he was the dean of the business school at DePaul. And he came up and he met with me. He was, and he said, Vance, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And I gave him a whole bunch of bullshit answers. Like, I don't know, I was thinking about being a fireman next week. And he like, didn't pretend laugh. He was like, what is it that you really want? What is it that you care about? And I was like, brother Leo, I don't know what I want to do. I know all I want to do is travel. And he goes, okay, there you go. Find a job that allows you to travel. Don't go get a job so that you can travel two weeks outta the year. Go do that thing that you're drawn to do and figure out how to get somebody to pay you to do it. Now, I knew nobody was gonna pay me to go to the Singapore office for their PR firm, so I became a deckhand and it was the best decision I could have made. But no one ever tells people, you don't have to follow the regular path.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:01:44] Oh yeah. In fact, everybody to the contrary is telling people you have to follow the regular path. When we, we start asking kids in like, middle school, what do you want to be when you grow up? Right? Yeah. I think it, I think it's a travesty for sure. Back to your question about why, what are the hurdles? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:02:04] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:02:05] The the first hurdles Impression, right? The or perception, the, the idea that you're thinking. It's one thing when in fact it isn't. The second hurdle is in most situations it's private. And so there is a cost barrier for sure. There are examples of Montessori informed or influenced rather public schools, but they're rare and it's very difficult to scale up to like the district level or certainly beyond that.

Vance Crowe [01:02:32] It's difficult to stomach paying property taxes in one place and then send your kid to a private school somewhere else.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:02:39] For sure.

Vance Crowe [01:02:40] For sure. And particularly if you live in a neighborhood where you're like, Hey, we pay probably more in property taxes because we have this good school system. Exactly. System. And it makes it competitive.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:02:48] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:02:49] But I like what you're doing. How, how do you see these growing? Is what you're doing gonna be around in larger quantities in the future? Or are you guys

Stephen Fairbanks [01:02:57] Well, that's certainly the goal. Our, our school started as an independent entity called Montessori Adolescent Program Map School. And it started three and a half years ago. So our current crop of 10th graders all started nine of them as seventh graders. The next year there were 15 students. No, it went to 7, 9, 18, 31. It's our fourth year. So they had seven students the first year, nine the second year. Right. And last year the board of directors went to a TI, the Academy of Thought and Industry, which is this nationwide network that we're now part of and said, Hey, we have this going. We know, we think we align value wise with what you are doing. Are you interested in partnering? And so we joined with them. I don't wanna speak for the founders of the school, but as I understand their intent, it was to do exactly that. To continue keeping what we have amazing and special, but make it available to as many people as possible.

Vance Crowe [01:04:04] Well, it's gonna be really hard to scale because it, the, it's culture, culture, culture and culture. It's, I mean, I'm reminded of the way that you're talking about the lineage being passed down. Same thing goes on in Juujitsu, right? This coach learned from this person Yes. Studied under this person. And you can't just go out and be like, let me just pluck this out and put it here. But you are new or to the system. Right? You haven't been there forever. Right. So how did you get brought into the fold enough that you understand it?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:04:33] Well, I, some combination of luck, life circumstances. And thanks to you, I have the vocabulary to answer this last one. Listening to my Damon.

Vance Crowe [01:04:45] Yeah, there you go. Hey. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:04:48] So my backstory educationally, I finished graduate school in, started graduate school in 2010. Got a fellowship to start teaching at UMSL here in St. Louis then, and have been since teaching college writing. So comp one, comp two, business writing. That whole time, every spring I would look for full-time teaching jobs. 'cause I thought, I like this, I wanna do it. At the time I thought I'd wanna just work at a small community college around here. I liked working with the type of student who landed at umsl, who typically has had some like past life circumstance challenges. I had a lot of single moms coming back to school in their twenties and thirties. A lot of kids that had like flunked outta college the first time and then came back at 25, started over on their own dime kind of a thing.

Vance Crowe [01:05:35] Yeah,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:05:36] That's a, that's a really, really interesting group of people because

Vance Crowe [01:05:40] They're going back Well that's you.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:05:41] Well, yeah. And they're there because they want to be, not because mom and dad are alums.

Vance Crowe [01:05:45] Yeah, that's

Stephen Fairbanks [01:05:46] Right. And and they're following in the footsteps. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:05:48] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:05:49] And so I thought community college, something like that. Three years, nothing happens. I'm still waiting tables on the weekends to make ends meet while being an adjunct teacher and have a child married that's getting old. I've been, at this point, I've been waiting tables for like 22, 23 years,

Vance Crowe [01:06:06] Man.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:06:07] And was starting to get tired of it. Was wanting to spend more time with my family on the weekends and in the evenings. And so I threw my hat in for my first agency job and that's when I started copywriting. And so that was six and a half years ago. Still would look for a teaching job every spring.

Vance Crowe [01:06:22] Was it hard for you to go towards the agency world and, and get outta teaching?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:06:27] Well, I kept teaching. I just reduced my load. I went from four classes a semester to just one every semester.

Vance Crowe [01:06:33] What was your Damon saying?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:06:36] My Damon was listening to my legs and lower back who were, who were very tired.

Vance Crowe [01:06:41] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:06:42] And, and also my,

Vance Crowe [01:06:44] I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And

Stephen Fairbanks [01:06:45] Also my pocketbook or

Vance Crowe [01:06:46] My

Stephen Fairbanks [01:06:46] Checkbook, if you will, the agency was the first time in my life at the age of 42 that I got paid to take Labor Day off. Whoa. First time in my life I had plenty of Labor days off because the restaurant I was working in were closed. But that was the first time I ever got paid to take Labor Day off in 2013.

Vance Crowe [01:07:08] Man, that is a long road to hope. Yeah, man.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:07:11] A long ways. So, so it was, it was an easy, and, and I had the good fortune of landing in the right place. I landed at Osborn and Bar in downtown St. Louis, and immediately it was taken under the wing of some spectacular mentors. And I've always been intellectually curious, regardless of what the thing was that I was doing. I knew food, I didn't really know agriculture. And they threw me right into Monsanto's, America's farmer stuff shortly after that working for the United Soybean Board. And so I just threw myself into the work and I was curious and super interested. And I got paid to go to conferences and interview farmers and teach the, the women farmers from common ground that USB group teach writing seminars to them because they all wanted to learn how to blog. So I was in my element, I was enjoying it for sure, but I missed full-time teaching for sure.

Vance Crowe [01:08:00] That is interesting that of all the communications work that you could do, you were in that particular kind. 'cause it's pretty damn close to teaching.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:08:08] Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think there's a, that's a, that's a valid point each spring applying for jobs each spring. None coming. So I kept working and I, and I, and I started working my way up the ladder in the agency world and, and getting promotions and getting raises and then, and that held a certain amount of appeal for a couple of reasons. Never thought I would experience it. So it was like, wow, this is neat. Like, having enough money to travel and buy things that I hadn't considered would be part of my life. So that was kind of,

Vance Crowe [01:08:41] I remember when I made it into the cool

Stephen Fairbanks [01:08:42] And tempting

Vance Crowe [01:08:43] Into the white collar class. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was 30, you know, and I remember like before seeing people out at restaurants and being like, this guy's just wasting money. Look how expensive it is. Like I, I I was fighting for every single dollar I had. Now

Stephen Fairbanks [01:08:58] I'm like, table for four on Saturday night. Right, right.

Vance Crowe [01:09:00] Yeah, yeah,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:09:00] Totally.

Vance Crowe [01:09:01] Yeah,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:09:01] Totally.

Vance Crowe [01:09:01] And it's a, it's a life change. Completely changed your life. Oh, for

Stephen Fairbanks [01:09:05] Sure. For sure. And I, and I, and again, like I said, I took to it and at every stop I had good people around me. I learned a lot from them. And it was just fascinating. And then in the summer of 2017, my mother who at that point had been teaching in middle school math in charter schools here in the city of St. Louis for about 10 years, she'd been teaching, she got cancer.

Vance Crowe [01:09:30] What did she do before? She was a teacher.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:09:32] She was a computer programmer. She spent 31 years as like a data analyst, computer programmer from the mid eighties all the way through like the first round of layoffs at Merits when they started outsourcing data processing to India, I wanna say oh six, maybe oh 5, 0 6. And so she was probably in her early fifties without a job, had double majored in math and computer science way back in the day. So she went back to school, got her master's in education and started teaching. And I used to go visit her at her school. She would have, she would use me, this is a great, she would use me as a cautionary tale for her students. She'd be like, I want you to meet my son who's Mr. Know-it-all and rock the a CT and the SAT and got a full scholarship and then dropped outta college. Oh. And so she'd have me come and like, give him my testimony about

Vance Crowe [01:10:27] Wow, what

Stephen Fairbanks [01:10:28] It was like to fail after being a high achieving individual.

Vance Crowe [01:10:30] And to hear your mom ask that, was that a, was that a, yeah, I deserve that. How did that feel? Oh, unquestionably.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:10:37] Unquestionably.

Vance Crowe [01:10:38] Were they upset that you dropped outta college?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:10:41] They were just pointed.

Vance Crowe [01:10:43] How hard was it to drop out?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:10:45] Not very,

Vance Crowe [01:10:47] What do you mean?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:10:48] I mean, I was, I was, I was, I was lazy. I was still in my, like the whole world is happening to me phase of my life, not taking ownership from my own decisions, those sorts of things. And so it was very easy. Like my freshman year, my dad got laid off from his job and I took that harder than he did, which is absurd. Right. I'm old enough and mature enough now to realize that. Like, I get like caring for your, you know, a, a loved one who's going through a hard time. But I was, I I took self-pity to another level.

Vance Crowe [01:11:23] I at that point, I you see that happen? Yeah. You see that happen because particularly when you're a young person, if you don't have things figured out, you'll take on somebody else's cause to get rid of your faults for not doing stuff. Totally. And you wanna, you wanna join up with the large group, the mass movement. Totally.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:11:37] And I had to go down, I had to go down a little bit of a spiral of feeling sorry for myself. And then there's this, it's the like disappointing people you love at that age. It almost became like a drug where, like that, that was like the only way that I knew things were like I was moving through the world, was I was disappointing my mom and dad or my sisters or my girlfriend or whatever. Like, it was just, I've thought about this a lot since then. And so, to answer your question, was it hard to quit? No. It was pretty easy to,

Vance Crowe [01:12:14] So, so this, this is a really interesting way to describe that, that it became addictive, meaning that they were then paying attention to you.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:12:23] I suppose that's a ver there's a version of it in which that's, or that's a component of it for sure. And then, and then you get the whole, like, you sort of wallow in being disappointed in yourself and, and that becomes your sort of defining mode with the world. And it, it, it even influenced sort of my early political leanings when I became like, super, the world is an evil place. Corporations are bad.

Vance Crowe [01:12:54] Yeah. Reading

Stephen Fairbanks [01:12:55] Z Magazine and Howard Zinn and like, totally immersing myself in that world. It was primarily coming from a I've disappointed myself, therefore I'm gonna be disappointed in the world. I'm just gonna take that as my default move.

Vance Crowe [01:13:10] Yeah. And, and then the more disappointed I am in the world, I can be like, you know, this is why things aren't working. Exactly. 'cause nothing works. Right. Exactly.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:13:17] And

Vance Crowe [01:13:18] I mean, I, I had those leanings for sure. And then this last month we read the book The True Believer, which is all about why do people join mass movements? And you, part one of the groups he points out is the people that have unfulfilled dreams. So they had all these dreams of the way the world was gonna be, then they got there and they're like, that's gonna be pretty hard to get there. I don't know. They drop out and then they join mass movements because they get to shed their own individual self.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:13:46] Yep,

Vance Crowe [01:13:48] Sure man. For sure. How what, what pulled you outta that hole?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:13:52] I met my wife.

Vance Crowe [01:13:53] No shit.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:13:54] Yeah, good

Vance Crowe [01:13:55] Answer. She,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:13:56] Well, it's funny, I've, I heard that phrase, you know, make an honest man outta me type. I've heard that my entire life. And probably until my mid to late twenties thought it was horseshit. And then when I met Christie in 1999, it started to, like, I had started to do things like I was writing creatively for myself. I had starting like to, to attempt down the path of maybe writing some novels and writing poetry and, and I was taking it more seriously in a way that, that I could then be like, all right, I'm committing myself to this and, and I could feel that I was building some better habits. And then, and then when I met her, it was the first time I started thinking like, this is somebody I want to build a life with and not just be with, but like make myself a better version of me. Because I had been content to be like the slacky, the slacker version of me, the lazy version, the self-pitying version of me for quite some time. And I look back on how patient my parents had had to have been when I, like in 1998 on a whim, took a job at Starbucks as a store manager and spent that year opening the first five Starbucks in St. Louis. Right. And convincing myself that like, no, actually this is like, this is the corporate ladder I'm gonna climb. Is I'm gonna be a Starbucks dude. Lasted a year right. Back waiting tables. So I'm sure by that point my parents were like, all right, whatever. We support you.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:15:27] Wow.

Vance Crowe [01:15:27] We love you.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:15:28] I met Christie and then started to make deliberate long-term restorative decisions for myself. Not like just for us. The first one of which was I enrolled in nursing school at Lutheran College of Nursing in South St. Louis in 2001.

Vance Crowe [01:15:45] How far did you get in that?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:15:47] A year and a half. And then we moved to Georgia in 2002 and I fully intended to transfer to their nursing school where I eventually got my degree from University of North Georgia. Small town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, about an hour north of Atlanta. And had a really, I majored in biology, took a year of biology for biology majors, a year of chemistry for science majors. And just had a horrible experience with the administrator of the nursing school down there and got all pissed off and changed my major to English and French, which were the classes that I'd always loved the most. And so just completely changed my major kind of as an act of faith. Christie totally supported me in it. She could tell that I was unhappy with all the, the stuff. And then we got married, had a kid, bought our first house, finished school down there in 2008. Have been back here in St. Louis ever since. So it was a very herky jerky road.

Vance Crowe [01:16:49] I mean, I, I know the experience of having a, a wife that makes you go like, oh man, I, if I stay the guy that I actually am and I don't become the person that she thinks I am, like she's gonna see the delta and I'm going to, she's gonna leave. Right. So now I have to become like, what a mistake I made because I sh I, I got her to fall in love with this guy that's better than me. And I, that's gotta be like archetypal. That's gotta be the story. You're right. Making honest man out of you. Because really the better Vance was the one that was like not loafing around not doing stupid stuff, not going out to the bars, not, you know, like that's true.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:17:30] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:17:31] And there was, and I couldn't even imagine before I met her like that, that would be possible.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:17:37] Oh, for sure. And I think that's a, that's a great point. I had never even imagined it. And, and I, and I don't know that at the time there was a, anything sort of revelatory in terms of a moment, but but in the aggregate over time.

Vance Crowe [01:17:51] Yes, that's right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:17:52] And then, and then when we moved, that sealed the deal because we had to create a life for ourselves. We had a life here and we were both in the restaurant business when we met. Still had some pretty bad habits that were restaurant related in terms of partying and staying out late. And

Vance Crowe [01:18:09] I hear the, the waiter culture is pretty wild.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:18:12] Oh yeah, yeah. I've, I've, I've buried a couple friends seen if you go to jail, seen a lot go to rehab.

Vance Crowe [01:18:19] Oh, like that's pretty serious. Yeah. Like that's, that's like they party and then they go down the path towards hell Yeah. And don't, don't always come out.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:18:27] Yeah. And so we were lucky enough to extract ourselves from that. Got this great opportunity in Georgia.

Vance Crowe [01:18:33] Well that's not a small, is that a conversation that you guys sit down and have? Is that an evolution of a, of a change? Is it, how does that change happen when you're both a part of the culture?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:18:44] We, we, we got on the plane on the way back, they offered her the job. She went down for her interview and we got on the plane on the way back and our pro con list was the con lack of access to the party, the pro lack of access to the party.

Vance Crowe [01:19:03] Wow.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:19:03] We're literally writing it.

Vance Crowe [01:19:05] Yeah. On

Stephen Fairbanks [01:19:05] Our little list of paper. And we landed, she picked up the phone, accepted the job, and so we had to go down to this place where we knew nobody in a community that was breathtakingly beautiful in the mountains reminded me a lot of where I grew up as a kid in Northern New England. 'cause it's the same mountain chain. Right. The Appalachian Trail runs from Maine to the county we lived in in Georgia.

Vance Crowe [01:19:29] Oh wow.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:19:29] And so the, the geographical similarities are quite striking in terms of rocky mountainous trees everywhere. And I was, I was just drawn to it and so was she. And so we, we, we rebuilt our lives there and became sort of improved. I, I would argue we both became improved versions of ourself. I got a job writing for the local newspaper. She was on the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce in town. So we were like man and woman about town in this super small, tight-knit community and fell ahead of her heels in love with one another. And that place over that six year period of time.

Vance Crowe [01:20:11] Man, that's a great story. You know, in the ag world, like I know a lot of people and over time some of the people that I met early on are now leaving farming and everybody, anybody that leaves a job that they've done for a long time, that's a hard thing. Particularly if you imagined this is part of who I am. But to hear you tell the story of like, then we went to this new place and we got to be better versions of ourselves. That's absolutely the best approach that you can take from it. It's alright. Well there are some downsides to it, but one of the upsides to move in schools when you're a little kid is that you don't carry a reputation with you. You get to be whoever you are.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:20:54] Yeah. Unquestionably. For sure. And so that was, that that profound, profoundly impacted us. It was tough leaving family Christie's from Hannibal. So her mom and dad were up there. My folks were still here. Both my sisters were here, my brother-in-law and their kids. So it was hard, but it was definitely the right thing. Moved back in oh eight and then have kind of, things have just proceeded nicely since then. So fast forward to 2017, my mom gets sick, we spend a lot of time together in the nine months before she died and she died, didn't die telling me this, told me that she was going to die with one regret. Just one. And that was that she didn't become a teacher sooner. And that whoa waylaid me. I kind of had known how much, but she spent a lot of time when she was sick, missing the kids. And she was probably in stages one and two of cholangiocarcinoma while teaching 80 hours a week. Whoa. When they finally found the cancer, she was already well into stages three and four.

Vance Crowe [01:22:07] And she was treating, she was teaching in a traditional school?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:22:10] No, in Achar. Well, traditional. Yeah, they had grades and stuff, but it was a charter school down in the city.

Vance Crowe [01:22:16] And so she then passes away

Stephen Fairbanks [01:22:19] In March of 2018.

Vance Crowe [01:22:21] And what happens with you

Stephen Fairbanks [01:22:22] That spring? We, we started a foundation in her honor, my family to raise a little money and like start trying to help support inner city kids with some of the challenges that they were facing. In particular, my mom was a huge fan of theater and so we thought it'd be cool to like give kids arts experiences from different schools. And so that was kind of our driving mission there. Ended up partnering with Big Brothers Big Sisters, the nonprofit to make them kind of our first donation. And that led to, my wife is now the vice president of Marking for the Big Brothers Big Sisters here.

Vance Crowe [01:23:10] Because you ended up meeting people and getting involved. Yeah. That's cool.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:23:13] Yeah. So that's another fortuitous And it all emerged because my mom passed away that spring. Obviously with her being sick and passing and everything else going on. Didn't have an opportunity to go through the application cycle then. But then in 2019 when the cycle came back around again that march I was hungry and I worked harder at looking for the options that were in front of me. And at the same time I get this amazing sort of upgrade offer from Paraki to do like a design your experience position where I get to take my interest in like teaching my interest in learning and sort of be like our little in-house expert to help all the creatives understand this amazingly complex ag industry. So

Vance Crowe [01:24:00] For anybody that doesn't know we met because you were at Paraki. Correct. And St. Louis Bank had hired Paraki. We had met before that at, when I was working at Monsanto at

Stephen Fairbanks [01:24:09] At least digitally Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:24:09] If

Stephen Fairbanks [01:24:10] Not face to face. Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:24:11] And then, and then St. Louis Bank ended up hiring you guys to work on some of our stuff as we were buying the bank. Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:24:18] Including

Vance Crowe [01:24:18] That logo up there. Right. But that is one of the coolest creatives agencies I've I've ever met

Stephen Fairbanks [01:24:26] Unquestionably.

Vance Crowe [01:24:27] And like, so I think they, their, their staff are cool. I like, we have these meetings where I come outta there being like, every single one of those guys actually did their homework. I I met with a lot of creative agencies, like when I walked into that room the first time, you, you guys had a huge high bar to get over because I've worked in, at the World Bank and all these other like high end places where everybody's competing to get their, their work and the people show up and they're so ground into to dust by the amount of work that they have to do that nobody's done any research. Nobody knows anything about your subject and they're just waiting to give you factory style answers. Right. And Paraki Paraki is the, the Montessori of creatives. Right. Like we came in, we had these great meetings, I really liked them. So when you and I became better and better friends, and then one day you were like, I got the, you know, the opportunity to design my job, but I'm gonna go teach at a Montessori school. What the hell

Stephen Fairbanks [01:25:29] It was. It was, it was a really hard decision. The fact that I had the, the background with my mom and the desire to teach wasn't new. Certainly make it easier. Made it easier. And I remember when I gave my notice, the, the reaction of the, the, the three men that I'd worked with most closely as kind of superiors of mine there was, was was consistent across all three. They were like, man, I'm gonna miss the hell outta you and I'm so happy you're gonna be teaching. Like, they're able to entertain both of those thoughts simultaneously.

Vance Crowe [01:26:05] You know, that's, that's the mark of somebody that is wanting the best for you. Mm.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:26:12] You know what I mean? Without a doubt.

Vance Crowe [01:26:13] And there are a lot of bosses that, because they, they hear somebody else coming in and they know this is gonna mess up my workflow, my management, my whatever, and they can't get past it to be happy for the person. Yeah. They can kind of fake it. But when somebody is actually happy for you,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:26:29] Oh yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:26:29] That's a self-actualized person question. You can only be happy for others when you're comfortable with yourself and who you are. And I

Stephen Fairbanks [01:26:36] Think it's a que it's a function there of the culture that they've built. Earlier you mentioned how difficult it's to scale anything when culture is the central criteria. Right. For growth. And that's what, that's what Paraki is. I've never worked anywhere and I've worked at places with 10 employees and 250 employees and everything in between. Never worked anywhere where they were so dedicated to replicating culture rather than just sort of replicating expertise for the sake of Right. And

Vance Crowe [01:27:07] Who's in the power spot. Like that's what other, the, the, I mean it's just like in your schools right? You have a couple powerful people. They're the ones that make decisions. Oh yeah, we want change. You gotta convince that person. And if you can't get 'em to change, that makes the work environment. So it's exactly like you're describing with school top down.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:27:25] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:27:26] And you, I I, it's interesting because I have Paraki as a, as an example and another company called AgBiome of companies that are large size, they're doing really sophisticated work. Like how many people were at Paraki when you left?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:27:41] Well, when I started I was like the 55th employee and they had, because of the, the bear business coming on, they, they're probably up into the eighties, maybe even nineties by the time I left. And

Vance Crowe [01:27:50] I think, I think ag biomes that same kind of way. Okay. I think there's probably some, have you heard of this concept called the Dunbar number? So it's the number of social connections that you can have before relationships start breaking down. Yeah. I'm sure that happens working in a business and that once they get over, I think the, like regular person's Dunbar numbers, like 300 or 340 people. Yep. You can kind of keep track of relationships enough that you can stay in touch with them. Right. Facebook tries to not show you more than a few, like a hundred or so people because you can't keep up with these other people really.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:28:25] They

Vance Crowe [01:28:25] Know it. If they just showed you a constant stream of everything that you 900 friends say, you'd lose your mind. You'd be like, I don't understand what's, you know, this person doing over here, but they show you the same band and then they have kind of concentric circles outside of that. Sure, sure. And I think that that's true in work environments, that once you get above a certain number, people don't know each other. So trust breaks down and it collapse because when I think of the same thing that's going on with AgBiome and Paraki, you have a culture and what you're describing with the Montessori where the people want that environment so they behave the way that people in that environment would behave.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:29:04] And and I think it's the ultimate buffer for stressful work, which certainly supporting industrial agricultural communications in 2019 is stressful work. Unquestionably, you're trying to convince an awful lot of people to either change their point of view or at the very least soften and accept and, and they're, the stakes are high.

Vance Crowe [01:29:30] That's so interesting that that's how you described that work. That I I that is because you're, you were working on the same types of things that I was. Oh,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:29:40] Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:29:41] But I have never have described it that way

Stephen Fairbanks [01:29:43] Really. How have you described it?

Vance Crowe [01:29:47] I don't even know. Like I, you know, I don't know.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:29:51] That's absolutely what, what we felt like we were doing. And, and, and so the stakes are high. And the other, the other I think hallmark of the culture there at Paraki, and I would argue at my school too, is everybody has an intense amount of pride in what they do. So not only do they want to do this difficult thing, they want to hit a home run. Right? They want to wow the pants off of these random guys from St. Louis Bank that we've never met before. And yeah, we've never done banking, but they just seem really cool 'cause Gus had met Travis. And so there's all this like, yeah, let's give it a shot. And, and so everybody gets excited for it. And the only buffer I think that's is able, that you can sustain is the buffer that is culture and trusting the people you work with and being able to be like, all right, we're all in this together.

Vance Crowe [01:30:43] You know, it's so weird because when you get into these business relationships where you're asking somebody else to be creative for you, it, there is a weird tension that comes up because people won't agree that they li love something. If they don't love it, they may say, ah, that's okay. I don't, you know. But once you start exchanging money for your creative ideas and you get a group of people together that have to be like, alright guys, we have to have enough pride that we do things well, but not so much ego that we're hurt when they don't like it or that they don't understand it.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:31:23] Yeah. And the other thing that I learned at Paraki, Brad Houck, their VP of creative there taught me this, is is it's awfully tempting as an ambitious smart individual to trust in your first idea. 'cause a lot of times, especially if you come through traditional schools, what a teacher's reward the first idea and

Vance Crowe [01:31:44] To show your work. Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:31:47] What one of the things I learned there, and it was a painful learning process because it involved damage to the ego, but then you rebuild is, is being able to come back on a first idea that at the end end the moment you're like, man, this is good. A clever turn of phrase or an interesting sort of creative concept. And then, and then to hear the smart people around you be like not feeling it.

Vance Crowe [01:32:12] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:32:12] And then like be able to like look in the mirror and go, yeah, you're right. We're gonna go back. And, and that, that's where that logo came from, is people who were willing to be like, yeah, almost. Well, not quite. All right, let's keep

Vance Crowe [01:32:28] And, and just having the ideas continually molded, like you were taking people's conversations and their thoughts and, and taking ideas that were wild stretches away. Like I I the creative process, I particularly if you thinking about graphic design, right? What you're trying to say is we want to create a symbol that will bring to mind people, you or your organization or the things that you do, but it is captured just in this squiggles on a page. Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:33:02] It's astounding. It really is. And the people who are good at it and, and and like the visual side of it still feels almost like a foreign language to me. I, I'm still at the point where when somebody shows me the thing that is elite and just very good, I still sometimes have a hard time telling you like what the difference is between the decisions that went into it. Because like your, it's gonna take eight years to understand my seascapes analogy. I was working with people who'd been graphic designers for 15, 20 years and they still had the same hunger and willingness to doubt themselves and and critically improve themselves that they had on day one when they were like eager to get the, that's

Vance Crowe [01:33:47] The only way that if you, if you're gonna work Yeah. That's the only way to make your life worth living. Agree. Like if, if you are not working on something where you are proud of like the skill that you are hewing out of that, that experience, there's gotta be something else. Agree.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:34:06] Totally agree. And I feel like I've found that at my school. I feel like I have found that like, and I found an environment in which I'm allowed to tinker and experiment and improve myself in a way that can happen like day to day, week to week instead of you're locked in for this year. If it doesn't go well, okay, you keep forging on, we'll try again next year. Like I'm able to adjust on the fly if something doesn't work immediately.

Vance Crowe [01:34:41] So what, what skill is this then, you know, hewing out of the, the parts of you, what has been hard about what you're doing here that's made you better?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:34:53] A couple things. You think school, obviously there's content or curriculum, right? I am building curriculum for my classes. We don't use textbooks. Another difference between us and traditional schools. So to build a history, an American history curriculum, sort of the, the act of what a textbook writer would do. But I would argue better because I'm personalizing it to my group of students and I'm getting to weave in things that I'm passionate about and interested in. So, hey, I spent six years working in agriculture. I'm gonna have like this ag technology theme that I'm weaving through my entire year of this year's world history. And the students are into it 'cause I'm fired up about it,

Vance Crowe [01:35:37] Not because I'm

Stephen Fairbanks [01:35:38] Giving not 'em some like arbitrary list. So and so says agriculture's important. It's like, no, I met farmers and they're cool and this and that. And so that, that's one skill that I'm definitely honing and sharpening another skill and I would argue is every bit as important and one that has been harder for me to sharpen is the psychological term for adolescents is like what they call the social emotional plane. So at this point in their lives, social development is the thing. Academic development will come, but social development in adolescence is critical in terms of shaping a successful human right. Discipline, issues arise, emerge. One approach is the student who can't sit still, you yell at him to shut up and sit down. Not everybody's gonna turn out like Vance Crow. If enough teachers tell them to be quiet and sit down, some of them are eventually gonna shut down or worse. Right? So, so I have kids who struggle with a DHD for example, and have a very, very difficult time not talking out or not like jumping up in the middle of the classroom. And one of my coworkers, Andrew, who's our science teacher, talked to me about one of these students before the year and he says, you know, what I learned halfway through the year last year is I could just say to him, Hey, why don't you go run outside and run around the school and then come back and this is probably the most well read kid in the entire school.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:37:16] He is thirsty to learn and he is

Vance Crowe [01:37:23] Just, I mean I couldn't, you couldn't stop me from saying the answer Yeah. Once I knew it

Stephen Fairbanks [01:37:27] And I was that same kid.

Vance Crowe [01:37:29] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:37:29] And so I, I can relate to him and we've developed a special bond because of, because but now I can say to him, Hey, why don't you just run outside for a little while, come back, boom. And we're good.

Vance Crowe [01:37:37] And I have to imagine that this happens on some level in the schools, the traditional schools, but time seems so pressed there. Oh, for sure. And everything has to be organized and, and pressed into boxes.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:37:51] Like

Vance Crowe [01:37:52] I understand the value of of order because you can do it in mass production and this chaos way means that it is incumbent on the parent to be like, let's go check out the French teacher. Does he actually, you know, get French classes done? Because in the school system you can just kinda count on like yeah, they're gonna do, we know they're gonna do this job. Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:38:12] Let's

Vance Crowe [01:38:12] Hope every once in a while they were, because I ran into like, I should be very clear, I ran into high school teachers that were great and profound and, and everybody has them and they, they heated their calling. But my Spanish teacher, I don't have any problem in the world saying she just phoned it in. You know, like she, and she was just barely phoning it in. Yep. And when I needed Spanish, I didn't have it. I had to learn it on my own.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:38:36] Yep. Yep. Yeah. So the discipline, the discipline thing has been tough for me because again, I was an athlete my whole life. I coached a whole bunch and

Vance Crowe [01:38:44] And you responded to the yelling? I

Stephen Fairbanks [01:38:45] Responded to the yelling and that was always been my, like I would make 'em run sprints after practice. Like you would, you punish bad behavior. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:38:53] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:38:54] The other thing too is wait,

Vance Crowe [01:38:56] What do you know about bad behavior? Can you not, do you not punish it? Now

Stephen Fairbanks [01:39:01] I have a story.

Vance Crowe [01:39:02] Alright.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:39:02] The way we go about intervening, for lack of a better word, is you don't react in the moment unless emotional or physical harm is impending.

Vance Crowe [01:39:17] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:39:18] So an extreme bullying situation, for example, you would, you would step in, somebody's about to get hurt physically, you would step in just about every other situation you observe and you observe as closely as you possibly can. Then when you have access to the student or the group of students later after the situation has been diffused, you come back and you approach 'em and you don't approach 'em and say like, like a student who's having a hard time, you wouldn't say like, what's wrong? You wouldn't start there. You wouldn't assume that like something is broken or bad or wrong.

Vance Crowe [01:39:55] Okay.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:39:55] You would say, what I observed was you raised your voice and you said these words to this person. And, and what I observed earlier today was like you seemed a little disengaged in class and you, you lead the student toward some awareness of themselves. And, and when it works, it doesn't always work instantly, but when it does, invariably what happens is the student picks up the threat of conversation and continues and admits that they made a mistake, admits sort of why they're off today.

Vance Crowe [01:40:34] And is that happening because they don't feel threatened by they're about to get in trouble. Yep.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:40:39] And so you have to build a space where that can happen. So again, you have to have culture. And our two co-founders, Melissa, Melissa have done that. They, it, it, it's funny, Andrew's only been there a year and a half and I'm the, I'm the newest guy and he's told me what his whole first year was like last year. And he calls what they do, Jedi mind tricks because they almost, I've never heard either of them raise their voice ever. And, and we have a group of students that can tempt one to respond by ranging your voice. There's certainly kids in there that are wanting to sort of hijinks. Right? And so, and they almost never actually respond in the moment. And they have accumulated so much credibility with these kids, especially the ones that are sophomores and have been there for two and a half, three years. Right. That when they do open their mouth, it's like someone scraping the needle off the record. Like everybody stops. So we'll be in our morning circle and, and our, our the level of expectation there is the way you show attention is with eye contact and by not talking, that's how you show a guide or another student

Vance Crowe [01:41:44] That's correct. That you're paying attention. That's the correct answer.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:41:46] The two things. Right. So if somebody's not doing those two things, my inclination would be to be fans, will you please stop talking? Right. Which might solve the problem in the moment, but it also might piss you off because you're 14, you're having a crappy day, you didn't get enough sleep last night, you're going through puberty yesterday, somebody made fun of your hat. Right? And so all this is spinning around your head and now I'm the bad guy because I told you to be quiet. What they do is very quietly say, could everybody please show their attention to Emma when she's talking please? And everybody shuts up. And I just turn and look. Wow. It's incredible to see

Vance Crowe [01:42:36] It's expectation, right? Yeah. It's, that's that's really powerful.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:42:39] Yeah. Like we've talked about this. I'm not introducing a new concept. How do we show attention? And I'll see 'em in class too. The class will get rowdy and, and, and one of them will say like, somebody remind me please what the expectation is for paying attention in class. And and you even see posture shift when that happens. Now is it perfect? Do kids still have bad days? Of course it's not perfect. Right. But it is profoundly impactful in ways that I had never

Vance Crowe [01:43:06] Anticipated. Well, and I think the long term like spin that that molecule that child gets is I even for being six foot four, you know, 200 some odd pounds, I still really fear getting in trouble. Yes. I don't want to get in trouble and like, you know, eventually you hit a point where you're talking with your wife and eventually she says, you know, like, I'm not, I'm not gonna get you in trouble. Like, was you just, just talk to me about what's going on. Right. And you have that realization of like, oh that's right. There is no one in charge. Like I can do what I'm, you know, what I think is and as long as I am upright, as long as I am thinking about it for me, well then I'm gonna navigate through the world better. But if your view of the reason that you should behave is 'cause you're gonna get in trouble. One, it gives you a really bad relationship with authority.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:43:57] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:43:57] And two, it makes you frightened to step outside of the lines 'cause you don't want to get in trouble.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:44:01] Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:44:03] That's powerful stuff, man.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:44:04] Yeah, it is. And so those are the two fronts I would say that I feel myself developing on for sure. Yeah. I would say that the, the curriculum front, the discipline front, the other stuff has been, has been sort of feels more like play to me because we're so small. We all do all the things. So we don't have a school nurse, we don't have an administrator, we don't have a principal. We have five guides and 31 students. We're all in the boat together. So when we build out a creative expressions unit like our art class or a physical expressions unit, like our gym class, we have to work with the tools in front of us. So my coworker Andrew is a certified personal trainer. So he does like a track and field unit because he has experience doing,

Vance Crowe [01:45:00] Man, my PE teacher didn't know that much about right. About about exactly personal training.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:45:06] I'm able to draw on my past lives in, in basketball and volleyball and cycling in ways that I can be a resource for the students doing the things I love doing and talking about the things I love talking about.

Vance Crowe [01:45:19] Man, the more I think about this, the more I think there must be an obscene amount of teachers locked into the traditional system that would, that would love to do what you're doing.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:45:30] Yes. As a matter of fact, the guy I was telling about earlier, the guy who was a pro cyclist in the Yeah. Who was visiting, he brought a a, a friend of his who's a teacher at a local school in St. Louis because he's been wanting to like nudge him in our direction and he's been in the public schools and he's experiencing sort of the ceiling that is, I've done what I can do in his current role

Vance Crowe [01:45:53] And then the only way to do more is to become principal and change the rules. Exactly. And then in which

Stephen Fairbanks [01:45:57] Case you're not in front of the kids anymore. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:45:58] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:45:59] And you have talk about boxes to check your whole life is boxes to check.

Vance Crowe [01:46:03] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:46:04] And standard emails. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:46:06] And not upsetting anybody too much. So you get to keep in that position. Exactly. That's

Stephen Fairbanks [01:46:11] Exactly right.

Vance Crowe [01:46:11] So I'm gonna change the subject because I'm, I'm worried we're gonna run outta time. The the video. But you tried the virtual reality headset.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:46:20] I did.

Vance Crowe [01:46:21] So what was your experience there? What did you think of that?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:46:24] Well, I was surprised that I wasn't like dizzy or disoriented at all when I did the Google cardboard five years ago, four years ago. I still have it and I'll pull it out occasionally to like show people who've never experienced it at all. I was overwhelmed by like how like it was almost vertiginous. I, I I, I'll never forget once I gave my wife one and it was an undersea experience and she put it on and almost fell off the stool she was sitting on 'cause she was so disoriented. So I was really surprised at how steady I felt. And then I was surprised at how long it took me to realize that I had a 360 degree in every axis environment that I was in.

Vance Crowe [01:47:09] It just keeps becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. We're

Stephen Fairbanks [01:47:12] So conditioned to live within our peripherals.

Vance Crowe [01:47:15] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:47:15] And really even a much narrower probably That's

Vance Crowe [01:47:17] Right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:47:17] Range. And so it took me a few minutes to realize I could actually do all of that. And then I was surprised at how it, it took, I would say a minute and a half to two minutes to get the dexterity

Vance Crowe [01:47:31] Yeah.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:47:31] Down. And that's, that was the source of frustration. 'cause that's something that I pride myself on, is I feel like I have exceptionally good hand-eye coordination. I spent my whole life good at things like ping pong and pool and ball sports. And so that was frustrating to not get the fingers to work. Right. So then once all that settled down, I felt like I was in the world. And, and then I started the, the, the one that I found myself, I felt like a little boy. The paper airplanes.

Vance Crowe [01:48:03] Yeah. Like

Stephen Fairbanks [01:48:03] I'd pick one up, throw it, pick one up, throw it. Then I picked up two and I threw, and one of them kept going farther than the other. And I, I giggled, I laugh a lot, but I don't giggle much. And I had like a te he he type reaction to it that that was like, it was a central nervous system reaction. It wasn't just a

Vance Crowe [01:48:24] Yeah, that's right. It it touches you all the way down in the fact that that

Stephen Fairbanks [01:48:28] Was, it wasn't just surface at all.

Vance Crowe [01:48:30] And it's because you're figuring out just like a little kid did Yes.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:48:33] How

Vance Crowe [01:48:33] To interact with the world.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:48:34] Exactly. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:48:35] Exactly.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:48:35] Like it's the first time you tie your shoe and you're like,

Vance Crowe [01:48:38] It's a different form of consciousness and it is going to have such like huge ramifications for what is real, what is it to be human, what Like you're gonna be able to interact with things, they will react to what you're doing. And how is that different than what the way that you and I interact because I interact with you, you react to it. I don't know what your programming is just the same as, you won't know what that computer's programming is playing video games in there will be as far as your brain can capture 'em, real life.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:49:16] When one of the first thoughts I had was, who's gonna be the first person to figure out cool ways to use this for education? If I could take my kids and put them in the battle at therm Opoly, which the movie 300 was based on Yeah. With virtual reality. Or if I could take my kids and put them at,

Vance Crowe [01:49:37] Well, so think about this. Think, are you sure you wanna do that? Because like, let's imagine you did that, you're gonna have to do it in ways that are obfuscated or it would be possible to literally show them what it is like to murder a person, right? Like, and the experience of what you can do. I know you could say, well, you could do that on TV and you'd be careful of what you show kids, but you will now be experiencing things such that the, the decision, the teacher decides what software to load into that and the child will not, you won't be able to be like, oh, it was just TV honey. Right? Because it actually encompasses all of the way you look and feel and hear. Your brain won't distinguish it from real life,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:50:17] You know? It'll be interesting. Then what I would be curious to know is, let's say I did let somebody learn what it was like to kill somebody. Does that mean that their brain is now wired exactly the same way a murderer's brain is? I had not even considered that.

Vance Crowe [01:50:35] I mean, you are going to have experiences, but you've stripped away the risk, right? Like, and, and risk is valuable. And like, I I give the example of if you were surfing in Tahiti, right? On the I did it, so I'm on this, this surfboard, everywhere I look is the wave. There's not another person there. It's just the way that I am. But it's actual video there, and then you are up inside of the tube and then you fall off and you go underwater. The whole thing works, right? I had that experience, but did I, because I didn't go to Tahiti and do all the work to find out where is Tahiti, how do I get a plane ride there? How do I get out there? How do I do this safely? And yet have had this experience.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:51:16] But did you, did you have it in the sense that you had to balance Right. Or you would fall?

Vance Crowe [01:51:21] It was pretty good. Was it Okay? I mean, it's, it's only a matter of time, right? Yeah,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:51:24] That's true.

Vance Crowe [01:51:24] This is just like now that you can see what this thing can do to me, there's no, there's no edge. They will be able to do it in as high debt. You will not be able to distinguish it from regular life.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:51:35] Hmm. That's scary and pretty alluring.

Vance Crowe [01:51:41] Yeah, I got it because my, I was told telling my friend Chris Oliver how scared I was of it and he's like, then you need to buy one and you need to figure out, your fear says there's electricity there, so figure it out. Which is why I show it to people and say, right, what do you think?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:51:55] Oh, that's nuts.

Vance Crowe [01:51:56] Well, what do you think that thing costs?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:52:02] Is the cost just the device or the software that's running on it too?

Vance Crowe [01:52:06] You have to buy more games, but the, all the stuff that you did came on it. I haven't bought anything

Stephen Fairbanks [01:52:09] On it. I dunno. I'd say like two $3,000. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:52:12] It's $400. What?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:52:14] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:52:14] That's what I'm telling you, man. It's about to get crazy.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:52:17] Oh wow. It's,

Vance Crowe [01:52:18] It's about to get

Stephen Fairbanks [01:52:19] So that barrier is gonna be gone soon.

Vance Crowe [01:52:21] Gone. I mean, they're gonna give them away. In fact, the first one that I ever had that I ever touched was somebody had it given to them as a gift. And it's 'cause Oculus was trying to Sure. Get 'em out to people. We

Stephen Fairbanks [01:52:31] Actually have two Oculus headsets in our school that we've never used.

Vance Crowe [01:52:35] Yeah, well you should have a real discussion with your students about it and record it, because there will never be another time when people haven't tried vr. Right? That's right. So this is like the moment going back and saying, go check out in with people before the internet comes online, before there's Wikipedia. Right. Like go and, and I would recommend recording it and put it in a time capsule because when people see it, they won't remember what the world was like before it.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:53:06] Yeah. And now, now I'm going down this spiral rabbit hole of like, what will it do to like relationships?

Vance Crowe [01:53:16] I porn will be insane. If

Stephen Fairbanks [01:53:18] You could get, if you can get any experience without another human being providing the experience for you.

Vance Crowe [01:53:27] Oh my God. Yeah. Right, right.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:53:29] Why would you need to learn social skills?

Vance Crowe [01:53:35] You could lock yourself in your own prison and never even know about it because you then build into this virtual reality world. You invest hundreds of hours of your time and your energy, you take it off. And in physical world, you're nothing. You, you're fat, you're, you're broken down. And you could say, that's terrible. Or you could say, think of all the people sitting in nursing homes right now that nobody comes to visit them. They could be flying through dolly paintings and, and and you know, living on, you know, Mount Everest. Like, so there are these positive things, but it could be also a hellscape.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:54:12] You know what, I'd be amazed to know, has anybody tested virtuality on Alzheimer's patients?

Vance Crowe [01:54:18] I have no idea. I, I saw this thing and I bought it. I was like, I need, I need to explore this. But I have not done very much research and I just show it to everybody I can.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:54:29] I've heard fascinating things about like how engineers are, are using augmented reality on particularly tricky design problems so that they can work in a virtual space with

Vance Crowe [01:54:42] Yeah. And now you see how that would be possible. Right, right. Because you could zoom up and zoom down. Yeah. And, and like you think about the physical activities, you could train somebody to be, you know, at least have the dexterity of a box or,

Stephen Fairbanks [01:54:55] That's exactly what I thought when I was hitting that tether ball was like, this is like the, the, you know, the, we fit times a million,

Vance Crowe [01:55:01] Times a million

Stephen Fairbanks [01:55:02] Only. It's immersive, right?

Vance Crowe [01:55:03] Not

Stephen Fairbanks [01:55:03] External to you. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:55:05] And it's, and it's only just the beginning. Just wait till it's just little gloves that you put on and you actually do have the, I mean there's no limit. Well man, we could go on. I know forever. If people wanted to find more about your school, where would they go?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:55:19] You would look up the Academy of Thought and Industry and our website is thought and industry.com. And there are five campuses, five high schools nationwide. So you could search, just click on the campuses tab and St. Louis will appear there.

Vance Crowe [01:55:34] Where are the other cities on there?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:55:36] There's one in Austin. There's one in the East Village in New York, and then there's one in San Francisco. And then we also have middle schools in San Francisco and Charlotte and Hollywood Beach, Florida.

Vance Crowe [01:55:48] Wow. All right. And if people wanted to get to know you, you and I interact every once in a while on the Twitter. How would they find you there?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:55:55] On Twitter? I'm at, at s TL Word Banks.

Vance Crowe [01:56:00] Where, what's that name come from?

Stephen Fairbanks [01:56:01] St. Louis. I'm a writer. So Word, my last name is Fairbanks. I've had that. I wrote a blog I started like 10, 11 years ago that I dabbled with for a while and it was called Word Banks on Words. And it's just like my random thoughts on writing. So word banks was sort of this alter ego that I carved out for myself. So

Vance Crowe [01:56:17] It's STL word Banks? Correct.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:56:19] Alright

Vance Crowe [01:56:20] Man, thank you so much for

Stephen Fairbanks [01:56:21] Around this. Great. Thanks for having me on Vance.

Vance Crowe [01:57:21] Woo. This is good.

Stephen Fairbanks [01:57:23] Oh, that was fun dude.

Vance Crowe [01:57:24] Great. Yeah, I'm always so nervous that I'm gonna miss the time and the videos will shut off and

Stephen Fairbanks [01:57:30] I want to cut it off. How long are we talking?

Vance Crowe [01:57:33] Jesus, see here.