30 "A 3D Way And Through My Body" and "I Know Everybody Loves Microfilm"

Guest 1: [00:00:00] I was really, really interested in viscous substances and I was really into slime at one point when I was studying, and so everything I was doing was exploring slime. And if you're making stuff about slime, you got to get kids involved because they love it. What the hell is my job? So I started doing workshops making slime that was all about like sensory experience and making sense of the world through your hands. So then I started doing that, and then someone from that gallery was like, oh, do you want to do some workshops as part of the program? And then they said, do you want to lead this allotment club? So I did that. And just further and further I got along.

I was like, let's look at what I do or what I've done, what makes me the most happy. And it's working with small people who just mostly make me laugh. I really struggled with school. I really struggled with formal education because I think I ask too many questions, but in this is how it felt, I felt negative that the amount of questions I used to ask, the way that I am slower to process things or I do it in a different way, the way that I have to physically do things. I have to move things around. I have to touch them. I have to understand things in a 3D way and through my body to really grasp certain concepts. I didn't have a good experience of of like formal education beyond the early years, and I didn't really realize it, but it's played into a lot of what I think and do. I've always been very, very passionate about alternative education concepts or ideas. Experimental things. I used to like, really wish that I'd gone to a Steiner school. But now looking into Steiner schools, I think probably I wouldn't like that very much. But from what I can gather, there is quite a lot of unspoken social contracts that people have between each other, and I think that's probably another thing that I am more aware of my own learning now. I need to be quite direct and I need people to be direct with me. I'm not very good at a lot of new ones, or even if I can read new ones. I get stressed out by it because I think, am I over interpreting it?

Is the way I'm thinking about it the wrong way. Have I missed something? And I and I found that a lot when I was at school, even something like doing a history comprehension. I remember reading the text you had to read, not a very long one, and then having to answer the questions about the text. And I swear to God, it was like the questions were written about different pieces of text. And I went, I went to my teacher and I was like, like, I can't answer the questions. And she's like, the information's in that text, and I just couldn't see it. So I think because of my experience of not learning in the usual way or the expected way, it makes me really passionate about allowing children to explore what way they want to learn and taking their lead. Really, because I think not enough credit is given to children. They're small humans. They have likes, dislikes, opinions. They haven't overthought themselves. They just literally come out with what they think quite a lot.

Forest school is taking children outdoors, helping them to learn what they need to learn in whatever way, like it could be attached to a curriculum. The curriculum could be based on mindfulness or confidence, and the idea is that it builds resilience, and it also builds confidence because people take more risks. One of the things built into Forest School is managed risk taking. So in terms of children, that will be a lot more climbing or a lot less saying don't do that more. What would happen if you do that and in a safe way, letting them try things out? One example might be quite often they make their own seesaw out of a log and a plank, and it's quite hair raising because you see their little fingers go towards the bit where the plank joins the log and you think, oh, and you can warm them. You can kind of say like try to keep your fingers away from that bit. But inevitably every time a seesaw gets made, someone traps a finger. And some children only need to know that it's possible to never do it and to learn that lesson that way. Some children need to squish their finger to know that that was not a good choice, and they probably shouldn't do that next time they do know themselves, you just have to give them a bit of space to know themselves and to kind of realize that about themselves. And that sounds a bit like too profound for a three year old, but I really don't think it is like they need to be empowered is the main thing. They need to be empowered to have some agency, to have autonomy and to guide their own learning.

And you just kind of falling behind, pick up on what they're thinking about or what they seem to be interested in at the moment or like a notion that's really struck them. So. A child might be really into throwing stuff because people would be like, stop throwing stuff. It's annoying. Don't throw stuff that's disruptive or whatever, but actually they're trying to work something out and they're trying to form a neural pathway. By doing that, they're learning impact and trajectory. I don't know, Freudian stuff. I don't think I care, but they're so unaware of so many things that they can only really be aware of their immediate needs and their immediate opinions. And it's very important to me to get my point across in an articulate and focused way. Otherwise, I get stressed if I feel like I've not been understood.

A lot of work in children is children not feeling like they've not been understood, and that causes frustration and then behavior happens. A lot of frustration comes from not being able to communicate, but we teach children that they don't have a voice like that. They don't have agency. Like we decide what they do. And that's one of the things about Forest School that's very important. It's child led. You actually, like, have to take the time to listen. It's really important to work into everything that you do, listening to them and giving them the power not just to speak, but just to to decide on what's happening to them. Of course, you can say like, is that a good choice? Essentially, it's not really useful to just be like, stop because someone says to me about something I'm doing stop. And I don't realize it's something that was going to cause some problem. What am I going to take from that? Someone just saying stop. I'm not going to learn anything, and I probably don't want to do it as well. So it's not going to it's not going to fix the root of the problem either. [00:06:41][401.2]

Naty: [00:06:45] Hey folks, it's Naty. We'll be back with more right after this break. [00:06:49][3.6]

Guest 2: [00:06:57] Well, Roger, Jack was one who I'd known about for, I'm gonna say, like, most of my life, just because, you know, he's. He's somebody that nobody's ever heard of, but he's somebody who I had seen little bits about. And it's like one of these things, it's a unicorn because, you know, you go to races and it's all white guys. You don't see any black people. So it just had this hearing about it. And you know, this guy who was racing in this lily white sport and he just had the determination that he wanted to do this. He wanted to race. He wanted to participate in the sport where everybody said, no, you you can't do this. A lot of book publishers. They don't really care about the subject matter as much as they care about kind of audience can you bring to it? And, you know, I've been a journalist for a long time, so I have at least some sort of audience on my own that I've built over the years, and that's what they really cared about. When it was scheduled to be released in May of 2020. And, let's face it, the whole world fell apart. And when the when that book published, the publisher had laid off all their staff dumped out in the world. At that point, I was just happy somebody is willing to publish a book that I wrote about a dead black racecar driver know he's heard of and has been dead for 60 years old. Racecar drivers love to talk. They will talk to you for hours.

I talked to 105 year old check theory. His mental capacity is not great. He has to go into the hall at his house for some reason to be able to talk to you. I don't understand that. But as soon as I brought up, he still just. He understood right away. Just a snap of a finger. He he's like, oh yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to see him at the NASCAR Speedway and he'd go sit in the stands and read his Bible after the races. And you have to make certain assumptions, especially when you're dealing with somebody who's been dead that long because a lot of information has been lost. If I had written that ten years earlier, if I'd written 20 years earlier, there would've been so much more information around. But I couldn't do it at that point because I didn't know what I was doing. It took me a long time to really learn how to do this stuff, to be able to do it in a book form. I had been working as a sports reporter for 20 years, or it was around the time when I started to get that book published. I'd transitioned over to writing news because, you can't be a sports reporter forever.

You're only, you know, you're only in your 20s and 30s once. So I needed also more time to be able to do all of this stuff because these these take a lot of time, honestly. Like moving over to news too, though I learned a new skill set. So I went I went to write the book about Sheryl Glass. I had this this entire skill set of here's how you get public records, here's what records are available. Here's how you go find it. Even if you're not in your state court records, police records, all that stuff. I had no idea how to do that before when I started writing the first book. If I hadn't had that knowledge base, I would have never been able to write the Sheryl Glass book like I did. And like I went and sat down with Sheryl Glass's mother in July of 2020 at her house. I was wearing an N95. I had blue gloves on the entire time, Shirley said. Well, my doctor just told me that my cancer stage for I don't know how much longer I'm going to have you better come up to the house.

And she was happy to talk with me for, you know, three days and details. I didn't have to, like, reconstruct entire narratives based upon, you know, some little story I found in a in an article in a magazine from the 1950s. I would say it was much easier to to do that with Sheryl Glass, but it was also more fun to do that because, you know, you're talking to people. You're not just in a library staring at a book or staring at microfilm. You know, I I'd rather deal with actual people than, you know, not that I don't like microfilm. I and let's face it, I know everybody loves microfilm in the world. I said, during the pandemic, because libraries are closed down, I couldn't use that microfilm machines. I'd say, you know, it's the safest place to be. There's nobody there. You go to the microfilm section of any library. I had to sneak into some of them, too, during the pandemic because, you know, libraries were closed. And even for year last year, I had to sneak in because libraries have have microfilm of old newspapers. So my father died in 2016 when he left me all of his racing books. So I used a lot of those books programs, you know, old racing papers as part of the, you know, foundation of the research. I'm the son of a librarian, the nephew of a librarian, the Grand Central Library, and my sister's on a library board. So they're very near and dear to me.

I'm going and giving a talk at the library here in Salem, Oregon in a couple of weeks. And they are talking about closing that one, those pieces of information. Once a library closes, there's no way to access it. There's a lot of these microfilm ones that there are companies that are digitizing this stuff. And so it helps, but it doesn't get everything. There's always going to be some that's left behind or forgotten. A lot of them that you see that are not digitized are the traditionally black newspapers, ones that were there for five years in the 1920s and closed, and they have tons of information, tons of great stuff that was not covered by the mainstream media. It was not covered by what you would call the white press. It's only there in those little bits. And even finding that microfilm is a gigantic pain. I'm afraid some of these are going to close and the information will no longer be available. And that's that's a tragedy. [00:11:56][298.5]

Naty: [00:11:57] I hope you like the episode. Please help us out by reading us, sharing with your friends, or buying us a coffee at buy me a coffee.com slash. What the hell is my job? It costs us money and time to be here for you at the start of every single week, so please consider supporting us. See you next time. [00:11:57][0.0]

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