How My Mom Raised a Lifelong Learner With Janet Snoyer

Hi, everyone. I'm Manisha, and this is Teach youh Kids, a podcast and online homeschooling community. And I am just so excited today to have my favorite person in the world and who that was also once a place for me, my mother. And she is just an extraordinary, wise, learned human being with so much wisdom and compassion. When I was born, my mom was a single mom, and she really wanted to send me to private school. So she actually went through Montessori training and became a Montessori teacher at my school for many years and then has since gone on to coach hundreds of students on how to get into medical school and is the founder and director of the Mentoring alliance, which coaches both pre med students and residents. And I am just so excited to share her with you today. She has influenced my views on education and my own continuing education in so many ways. So thanks for being here, Mom.

You're welcome, Manisha.

So let's dive right in. We were chatting a little bit before the podcast about what we wanted to talk about, and you mentioned that the role of love in education was something you wanted to discuss, so maybe we could begin there.

Okay. So I learned. I learned about love from Maria Montessori's writings where she said that she was a scientist and she believed that science was what was happening in her classroom and that science was fueled by spirit. And of course, what spirit is, is love. Spirit equals love. And I remember on a very rumble tumble family trip, we were all on in one of those big SUVs, your. Your cousin Malia turned to me as a fourth or fifth grader, and we were. She was talking to me about being a schoolteacher, which I was at that time and which she now is. And I said, the most important thing that I think that a teacher needs to do is to love each student. And she said, I've never felt loved by a teacher. I never even thought about that is to dismiss the idea. And that got me really thinking about the role of love and the role of absolutely finding a way to accept every person who, you know, comes into your orbit for any kind of learning or teaching.

So when I think of love, I mean, you and I have both done a lot of meditation and been involved in various spiritual activities ranging from Sufism to Catholicism. And, you know, when. When I think about my own experience as a teacher and I think about love, I think about attachment and my sense of love, I guess I would define as this fabric that connects us all. I mean, if you think about science, we really are living in a network Ecology, where we have all of these ways that we're impacting each other at all times and underneath some of the annoyance or some of the strong passion and are these things which connect us. And what my experience as a teacher is is that when you are able to cultivate that secure attachment with a child, it gives them a foundation of safety, which then is a container for that natural curiosity within them that drives their learning. But if they don't have that healthy attachment, it's kind of like you don't have permission almost to open that door in a way, or they don't have the safety where they can really open up to learn. So you talked about love as spirit. And can you maybe expand upon that and maybe reflect on how I described it?

I like so much the word fabric, which reminds me of the word container and the idea that when we are in a teaching and learning relationship, we enfold ourselves in that fabric or container. This is why I was so impressed and thrilled with you for actually bringing secular homeschooling to the world and realizing that when a parent enrolls their child in a school, in a public school where they have no choice of teacher, they are taking on faith that that teacher will look at their child in a way similar to them, which is through the eyes of unconditional love and through seeing unconditioned potential in that child. And to me, what's the really great, the great potential of homeschooling is that the child is surrounded in a loving environment that is guaranteed. It is not guaranteed in school. I think the role of love is to focus as much at least on following and observing the child with silence and attention as it is on directing and managing the child and what they learn. There needs to be a current that goes back and forth between directing and giving information and giving context and giving theory to the child to learn with, and just watching that child and learning from that child who they are and where their spirit is telling them to go next.

I love that idea that when you have love for your student, it opens up this pathway for all these other components that are part of being a good teacher, such as patience, such as observing and curating the learning, such as making sure that your child is surrounded by safe boundaries. It's kind of like the canvas from which you can teach. And I would also imagine this kind of moves somewhat into self directed education in that when you do have a mindset that a child can direct their own learning, you, your love allows you to detach from being the one that made them learn. That you can appreciate and respect their own process and be happy that they're taking the learning very far without you.

What you just said reminds me of when we made that decision, when you made the decision through your self directedness to go to a boarding school in Northern Michigan, the Interlochen Arts Academy Academy. And I was quite distraught about that decision because I was committed to following your instincts. But I didn't want you to go away when you were only 14 years old from me. And I had to really fight that in myself. And you got a roommate there who was from Korea. And when I asked her why she had gone all the way from Korea to this little art school in Northern Michigan, she told me about how regimented the learning was in Korea and how she could be the vessel. She could sit there for the hours and she could learn the math problems and she could take the tests and spit back the information, but that something so vital to who she was was missing that she felt she had to leave her whole country and culture and her family at a very young age in order to be able to learn in the creative environment of the Interlaken Arts Academy. So you can make a child look like they're learning with regimentation, oppression, authoritarianism. But I don't. I would posit that that learning may not be so useful for a life that feels satisfying and actually even in an aspirational sense, lives up to your greatest dreams.

Yeah. And I think that if we come back to this idea of, like, what's the nature of love? Because when some people hear the word love, they might think about, you know, kind spoiling the child or just very sweet and, you know, nurturing and not challenging. But, you know, a kind of a specific example comes to my mind, which is that I had one writing teacher at Interlaken who was known for being a very challenging teacher who never gave A's. And I had another teacher who was a very challenging poetry teacher who basically, you know, ripped every single poem I read apart word by word until I was sobbing in his office. Brilliant person. And my writing teacher, you know, no one would describe this woman as, you know, what a sweetie. She's. She's a tough lady and, you know, might as well use her name because I'm going to say positive words of her. But Amy Stevens, you know, I just wanted so much to get an A in our class. And, you know, I would bring this poem to my poetry teacher and I would end up sobbing, and I would bring my paper to Amy Stevens, and she would cover the entire thing with red marks and let me continue to bring it to her until it reached perfection. And sadly, I rarely ever write poetry anymore. But I love writing essays and research. And when I got to college it was so easy for me to write a paper because I had those really strong fundamentals. And I think the big difference is that her. It's a question of ego, like real love. You have a certain kind of detachment that it's not about. I'm going to be the best teacher and, and curate the best students. It's like my job is to help give you the tools to be a strong writer because strong writing skills are going to take you so far in the world. And for me, my writing has allowed me to transform people's hearts and minds towards the kind of education system that I think will benefit children in our world. And so that I think that English teacher was a really great example of, for lack of a better word, tough love or true love that's detached. Whereas I had another English teacher, yet another writing teacher, who all we did in his class was just talk about the book. There was no real structure, there was no real expectations of the essays. It was all just about let's enjoy learning, let's talk. And I really didn't learn anything in that class. And I think that I don't know what his motivations were or if he just wasn't motivated. But I think that with real love there comes a certain type of fierceness where you're really acting in the best interests of the student you're serving. What do you think? Yeah.

One of your early teachers, Mrs. Hill at the Montessori School, once said to me she was the founder of the school and so she supervised me when I was in the teaching in the six to nine year old class. And one of the things she said to me is, your goal as a teacher is to provide the highest expectations for each child in an environment of love. High expectations in love. And I never forgot that because sometimes love does feel like Ms. Softy. And I had students at the Montessori School who are down syndrome students and they would, I would love them and I would have high expectations for them and they would learn things and the next day they would come in and they'd be really eager to learn that same thing again. Yeah, yeah.

And also just want to ping here is that love is also about relationships. Right. So if you're a teacher and hopefully you don't have 50 students in your class and you're going to take the right medicine for each child, there are some students who, you know, are very boisterous, not really emotionally sensitive, who love kind of this back and forth banter and teasing and need to be prodded a little bit. Whereas there's other students who are just very raw and need a more gentle, kind approach. And in that way, you know, a great teacher, I think, is also a master communicator. Like, you're really touching into that person's energy and seeing what they need in that moment to support their learning. And that could be, you know, more rough energy, and it could be a softer energy. And you're. You're creating something that exists between you.

Yeah. You remind me of a student I'll call Danny, who was in my Montessori class who had several different learning disabilities and came from a home environment that just wasn't about education. We tried to make our environment very nurturing and about education, but I couldn't get him to learn anything or go anywhere. And after he was in my class for three years. In the third year, he was sitting with a bunch of boys and they were all writing. And he started writing and he wrote a whole essay and he gave it to me. And I really blew it with him at that point because I was so shocked and thrilled that he actually produced something that I broke a basic principle of the love environment of Montessori, which is that I praised him effusively. The Montessori method is to thank the child for their work as a gift to me, love a gift to me. They gave me a present, their work, as opposed to I am the judge of it, and it is great. But instead I was effusive with him. And you know what he did? He took that essay, he bundled it into a little ball while I was talking, and he ate it.

Oh, my.

He swallowed it.

What do you think was the message he was trying to send to you?

I think the message he was trying to send to me is that I'm just a little flower bud. And if you pour all of this aspirational attention of good boy on me, I can't handle it. And I'm. I can't. I can't flourish in that.

I think another way I might interpret that is that he had not ever been able to produce something like that before. And when he perceived this kind of recognition and value from creating that essay along, that would have been a fear of, well, if I can't create this again, am I still going to be loved? You know, And I think that that's a principle of child centered communication. I really like, which is that, you know, if I work hard, if I spend a couple hours working on something and I'm praised for spending a couple hours working on it, I feel good. I can definitely replicate spending a couple hours working on something again. Or, you know, if. Let's say we're having a challenging conversation and I feel angry, but I take a breath and I repeat what you said back to you. You can praise that I took a breath and took a step back and how that nurtured our relationship. But if you. And so I feel empowered to do it again. But if you say, like, wow, you've really improved as a listener. I kind of feel mad because how am I supposed to replicate that? You know? And was I so bad before? Was I now lovable? Like, my love is conditional, right? Like, it's condition conditional on performance. It's conditional on something that I can't control, like writing an essay. I don't know how that essay came out of me. So. So in a way, it's almost like he's testing, like, will you still love me if I don't write an essay?

That's right. And it was such a dramatic example. So I think conditional conditioning is very much an art form with teachers to have that high expectation, but not to condition, not to use the method of putting gold stars, patting kids on the head, saying, good kid, good kid, good work, good work. But instead to just act like this whole process we're engaged in is just a co creative process of loving growth and watching growth. I think that I had a really, really seminal college course. I don't think I've ever mentioned this to you. It was called ethology. And that was a big burgeoning field when I was in College in the 70s. E T H O L O G Y and it was started by an animal scientist named Conrad Lorenz. And what he discovered is that when a baby duckling is born, if you take its mother away when it hatches from its egg, if its mother doesn't happen to be there, but he happened to be there, that the ducklings would just follow him everywhere like he was their mother. And it's called imprinting. And to some degree, in a classroom, especially with younger children, you want that kind of imprinting transference to happen, and you also are imprinted on them. So what my professor who gave this course, who was a student of Lorenz's found is that one night the dark was coming on, it was waning, and he was looking at National Geographic images of animals in bed. Okay? He was looking at National Geographic images of animals in bed. He was learning about these animals from the National Geographic magazine. And his wife came and she said to him, you need to turn up the light. You need to turn up the light because your pupils are so huge. And he looked at it, he said, but the light is fine. And he discovered that when you are curious and you're looking at something with the freshest of eyes, your pupils become large, your pupils open to this experience. And so actually some of the times when you and I have been in conversations, I've never like revealed this to.

You before, but now you become incredibly self conscious when we're in a conversation.

About something that we're both kind of out of sorts and we're having a mother, daughter, you know, reset. Sometimes I just say to myself, open your pupils, Janet, open your pupils. I think it's interesting that the word pupil is the same as a student, you know.

Oh, that's true. Wow.

My. My pupils are the way in which I know that I am actually not just feigning curiosity, but being curious.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's so physiological.

Love is physiological.

Of course it is. And, and I think that another, I mean, it's so interesting about the imprinting, but also just the value of knowledge, the value of learning, which I'm sure on some level children can intuitively feel. And to trust someone with that sacred task of helping guide me towards the information I need to know to be successful in life, have enough to eat, have enough food, and then also to fulfill my higher purpose, I mean, it's natural that that requires a high level of trust. And so that is also an element of when we talk about love is that trust. And I just want to point out here, though, I mean, when we talk about those things, there can feel an enormous pressure as a teacher because you have so much power. And I just want to bring up two points here. One is around growth mindset because it is really a hot topic these days. And everyone says, like, don't praise character, only praise hard work. You know, don't say someone is intelligent, don't say that they're special. Don't praise these qualities that they can't control. Don't tell a girl that she's pretty, for example, Right. And then, but you should say, you should praise like, wow, you made a mistake and you kept going, I love failure. Right. And so I think that sometimes it gets a little bit too extreme and that's when it comes back to, you know, just being intuitive in the moment. Maybe the moment calls for you to say, you look beautiful in that dress, or you are just such a smart cookie. That's not wrong. You know, it's just. And so we have these tools to support us, you know, so we get out of habits, like telling kids they're intelligent or stupid or lazy or smart. But we shouldn't let that kind of define everything. What's really critical is that kind of being in touch with our student and the relationship. And then the second aspect of this I wanted to highlight is why I think homeschooling is so effective. Because as a teacher, you are trying to be present to all of these unique relationships with different students, and it has such a huge impact on them and their lives. And. And it's very difficult to do if you have 20 or 30 or 40 or. I met a teacher in Vegas who had 50 special needs students in her class. But if you're a parent, you have a lot more access to how your child responds and a lot more practice. And so that's why parents can make such incredibly effective teachers for their own children, especially if there is that foundation of trust and detached love.

And there's just so much to be said for the environment, both the built physical environment and the spiritual emotional environment of the place where you learn. In one of your earlier podcasts, one of your mom, the one in Australia, was talking about how she set up ergonomically her child's life so that the way that she interacted with the screen was much more natural than it would be if you're sitting at a computer, you know, with your. With your back straight and all that. And. And so when you were. When you had a period in your. In your young life, when I think you were in, like, 9, 10 years old, you had a long sickness. And I actually hired a very accomplished teacher who was. Who was visiting the US because her husband was at Cornell, and she was a teacher. And I met her name was Geraldine. I actually hired Geraldine to come to the house to hang out with you and teach you whatever you wanted to learn when you were too sick to go to school. Because even though I was bringing a teacher into the home, that home environment was a place where you could learn, where you could have all the supplies you needed and you could rest and you could wake up. Which brings me to another topic which Sal Khan of Khan Academy taught us about, which is that his incredible ability to bring education to children through the marvels of technology, he thinks it's based on a very simple, very simple concept. Time is the Independent variable. And learning is the dependent variable. Excuse me. So you have 30 minutes to learn the spelling word and then you spell it. And how well you spell it is dependent on that. And all the standardized tests are the same way. But what he did was he said, let's make time dependent and learning independent. And I think that Maria Montessori had that view too. It's a crucial difference. And at home time is like that. In school time is not like that. In school time is 45 minute period. Now it's math time, now it's circle time. Now it's science time.

Right, exactly. And Benjamin Bloom talks about mastery learning where he says if any child can learn any skill if given the time to do so. And which I find really fascinating because also Angela Duckworth's character lab, I believe, just published some research that they took a group of students and basically over a period, everyone ended up finishing learning the concept at the same time, even though there was speeding up and slowing down. And we kind of forced children to all learn at the same rate, which is very problematic because the best learning really happens when you're going fast and then you're slowing down and then you're stepping away and then you're returning back to us. And all of our brains are working on all these different levels at the same time. So yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a real innovation with Khan Academy and the ability to learn.

Asynchronously and the huge, huge finding in the 80s by sleep researchers that teenagers have a completely different relationship to day and night and to wakefulness and sleep, and that they don't really wake up until 9 or 10 in the morning, whereas adults are waking up at 5 in the morning. And so the idea that a high school should start at 7 in the morning with a child trying to learn when their actually brain is still asleep. That biorhythm is also really, really significant, critical to learning.

Yeah, yeah. I remember my eighth grade year. Basically I missed every single first period of class and you just kept writing those notes and driving me to school. Yeah, that was not my time to shine.

Yeah. The learning environment is not just don't have one of those desks or let people sit on the floor or make it comfortable with animals around. It has to do with the chronobiology of the classroom. It has to do with the timing of how much independent time you're allowed to learn, the things that you are directed to learn and the things you want to learn.

Absolutely. It's so fascinating how in my own experience, I Responded differently to the different learning environments I was in. First, we started out in Montessori and that environment was so wonderful for me as a small child. I think maybe a little challenging in preschool just because I was such an attached little duckling. But then as I got into fifth or sixth grade, it became a very frustrating environment for me and I started having temper tantrums. And I think I was kind of starting to make my own sense of the world and what was right and what was wrong and wanting more autonomy over that than what was available. And the class just felt too small. And then I went to this democratic free school which was such an innovative, you know, such an innovative model to be allowing kids to vote and form committees and raise funding for their own trips and choose their classes. And there were no grades and you only had to do projects and they would give you a complete or an incomplete. And come ninth grade, every single. My classes was incomplete. There was just something about I just stopped turning in homework. I just didn't have any motivation to ever remember a test, study for a test. Teachers didn't know what to do with me because I was pretty smart, but I just didn't do any of the work, learned the material fine. I remember that one math class where I spaced out the entire year, never turned in an assignment, failed every quiz. And then they gave the final exam and they gave us unlimited time. So most of the students finished in an hour. And I took six hours, got a perfect score. And the teacher said like, I think that she might be a genius or something, but it was just so, so bad for me that, that model. And then I went to Interlochen, which just had. Was so structured with grades and essays and I just did great, no problem.

Well, the thing was, you changed. You were not the same learner at 3 years old that you were at 15 years old. You changed.

Yeah. It's just funny how we find ourselves in these different environments and we respond and what really strikes me, and I know you think this is somewhat health related, but I think it's not. The whole story is that, you know, when I think of myself in eighth grade, I just think about sitting at the desk in my bedroom with this like list of homework assignments I haven't completed. That just felt like endless, endless, endless lists from, you know, the beginning of the semester. Didn't know how I would ever get started on it. Usually ended up not doing the homework at all because it just, it was like such this feeling of masochism and flash forward. I don't know where I learned them. But I will say, if I'm to talk about my strong suits, executive functioning is definitely an area where I excel. I, you know, I've created three companies. I just have this. I just, I get stuff done. When I say I'm going to do something, I finish it. I finish it on time. I'm consistent. So how did someone who started out with such an inability to focus and complete tasks become someone who has this super power of completing tasks and being organized?

I mean, you finished college summa cum laude with two majors, two honors, theses practically, you know, got an A minus in, in Arabic and A's in every other subject. I know you still thought about that. A minus, but you ended up with a 3.97. You know, so, so. And summa cum laude again, which makes, you know, which was, you know, kind of the crowning joy of my life. I was finally allowed to.

It just didn't get better after that.

When I think of you in second grade, as I walked past the classroom where you were taking your second grade standardized exam at the end of the year, and you were just drawing little faces inside the dots instead of filling them in or reading the questions. I said to my colleague, how can Leslie. How can you let her not take that test? Just sit there? And she said, because the test is bullshit. That's why. Why?

Okay, so. So how did someone so spacey become so well organized? What did I learn that did my brain just develop?

The spaciness was only apparent in the educational environment.

I mean, I remember when I was.

It's not apparent at home. It was not apparent. And of course I was paying attention. You were, you know, it's just me.

And you for me. All right, that's kind of irrelevant. We can talk about it. But about this executive functioning, because I know a lot of parents would like to help their children improve in this regard. And I mean, if you would ask any of my teachers in middle school, I think ADHD was not a diagnosis then, but I just literally for hours would not pay attention to a single word that was said. And when I got to interlock in and I started getting grades for the first time in my life, and I made the connection that good grades got me into a good college. And for some reason I had this drive to be the best and I wanted to get in the best college. And, you know, that was kind of a challenge because I wanted to go to Harvard because Harvard was the best, not because I necessarily thought that Harvard was great. I kind of told myself a Story that they had this program I wanted to go to, but I really wanted to be number one school, so I would be number one. So I wanted to get A's. And I was so motivated by this desire to get A's that I think I started teaching myself how to be organized. Like, I would still space out in class, but I learned that if I wrote, if I took notes and I wrote space out whenever I spaced out, that helped me focus. So I just kind of came up with this practice on my own of writing, writing, writing what they were saying and then saying space out. Which is funny because that's kind of a meditation practice, right? I'm just remembering it now. And I didn't sleep. I was very tired. I would often fall asleep in class and then I would just be like, sleep. You know, I was, I was noting, I was noting. And I. No one had ever taught me that meditation practice. And then. So I think that I kind of developed these skills in order to achieve this goal that was really important to me. But it's kind of a double edged sword because, you know, I used to be a child actress and I really wanted, I worked really hard in performing and memorizing and, you know, being really connected and present and focused on stage. And I. And I've always had this ability to have like a laser focus. But I think that when you are performing, a lot of that is attached to the accolades you get from your performance. And so now as an adult, I don't want my motivation to be attached to this kind of external success. Like I don't want to. I want to be more in connection with the intrinsic reward, not like I was. So I worked so well that I raised $4 million for my startup. You know, I work. And so, so it's a little bit tricky because I think that sometimes it's a little bit harder to be intrinsically motivated.

Well, I just want to say that because you have your mother on the podcast, I'm shamelessly going to report here that you weren't just a child actress. You were the child that was chosen to play Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker at our very prominent repertory theater after six auditions, including with child actors who are professionals from other cities, like New York City, for example. You also were starring in three, I think, National Geographic educational films. So you were established professional child actress. And the people that worked with you there never reported to me that you were spacey or told me you needed more nutrition or more sleep or anything like that. You always showed those things executive functioning qualities because you did feel best when you were most attached to your creative process. And when, for example, the Miracle Worker ended, you became an impossible person to be around. You were so angry and out of sorts. That's why I drove you to Newfoundland, to get away from it all. And I don't think it ever was about the fact that you didn't have the audience clapping for you. I mean, it certainly wasn't that in the films that you did. Although the director would say that was a good job. I think it was just that there's some part of you that always needed to be lit up and entrepreneurial. Your entrepreneurial spirit seems to light up similar parts in you. Not the same, but similar. So you did have a very long and winding road to academic success.

Yeah, And I remember that after being this child actress and, you know, then returning, you know, and I continued acting and. But at a certain point in my adult life, I felt like my acting was pretty mediocre. And I had this insight where I decided to allow myself to be ugly and bad and. Yeah, and when I allowed myself to be ugly and bad, it paved the way for me to take more risks on stage, and it made the whole process so much more fun. And a similar thing happened in my writing. And, you know, you know, I've always had challenges showing you my writing because if you offer one tiny piece of feedback, I go into a mad rage. And, you know, I've been. I've been working on that. We've made a little progress, or I can handle the occasional typo. But I think that I had a wonderful English teacher, Howard, his name was.

And he.

I was. What was happening is I was spending, like days on the first paragraph of my essay just editing it, editing every single sentence. And he just said, you have to sit down and write the entire thing and then come back and edit. And that lesson of writing is editing was really valuable to me. So I think, you know, that kind of returns to our idea. Talking about growth, mindset and being and having, you know, part of that creative process is just like, if you're in the flow, you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes and for it to be ugly. And then you can come back and fine tune it. And sometimes you'll be surprised. You know, the thing that you wrote that you don't think is very good, people love or the thing that you think is amazing, it doesn't really resonate with people or your Van Gogh, maybe it resonates with people after you're gone. So. Yeah. And I think that's also been important to me in my startup journey. And you know, I really had a problem with confidence going out to fundraise and one of my mentors told me, you know, confidence is about integrity. So you have your plan, you have your idea, you have your plan, you sincerely feel that you've done the best job you could with it and you acknowledge you could be wrong, but that's the path that you're going to choose. And that, that's really helped me when I have approached investors because some people think it's good and some people don't. But if I can say, you know what, I have this experience teaching, I have this experience in tech, I think that, you know, I could be wrong. But I think that these are the best way forward for these XYZ reasons. It's a lot easier because it's less attached to my ego and more about the process.

And you've always chosen extremely competitive venues for your gifts from acting to entre being a woman entrepreneur. But if you don't mind, Manisha, I'd like to go back a little bit to what might look like an apparent paradox or irony in your life story, which is that you're all about homeschooling.

Apparent paradox from my parent.

Yeah, from your parent, your parent docs. My parent doctrine here is that you, you went, you know, you went through this, this Montessori and then you went to this alternative public high school and in both cases you outgrew their models. And then when you are outgrowing then, whereas that incredible, itchy, bratty, bitchy time and then. But not you, I'm not talking about you. And then you. And then you decide suddenly to go to what most people might consider the opposite of homeschooling, which is to go to boarding school a thousand miles away, 500 miles away, or a thousand miles round trip from me. And you know, when, before you went, I was really kind of blown into, I was very depressed and sad about you going, but I always felt that you should, you know, you should, I never felt I should hold you back. So you. And that's why I sent you to these schools to begin with and you know, changed my career path to become a Montessori teacher so we could afford the Montessori education. But at that point I was really sad to sort of feel like I was losing you. But I was working. I had part time jobs at one, at a college and I was working with an older woman who'd gone back to college, who had six children. Her husband had Died suddenly and leaving her with six children. And after they finished high school, after they finished middle school, she sent them all to boarding school. And she said that the reason she sent them to boarding school was because she learned from the first one that boarding school teachers are professional parents. That's what she said to me. They are professional parents. So they are able to be high expectations and love in a nurturing, intimate environment for your child when maybe you are too depleted and exhausted just from the job of single parenting all these years. So I decided that was the one bright spot. So when you went away to boarding school, I had to face and accept the fact, which is also a, an act of love, that other people were in a better position to be unconditionally loving. This new Manisha, who was such an achievement oriented person who had changed so much from being this person who is just falling in love with big ideas and pursuing them and learning and taking everything at her own pace and resisting the authoritarian oppressiveness of assignments and just suddenly transitioning into this person who wanted to get A's all the time. A person who had essentially flunked out of the alternative middle school of the.

Alternative project based learning.

Basically, how does this person who flunks out of the school that lets you be you?

I mean, basically, yeah, I was like kicked out of Montessori school for throwing protests and tantrums. And then I was kicked out of the alternative school verb just stopping doing any work at all.

And you become this high achiever when you get away from your home and you find a new home and become autonomous and independent. Such an interesting.

Such an interesting. So I would say I have, I have a few points I kind of want to push on here because there is a big difference between the situation I was in when I was in school and the situation now in terms of the technology that exists to support learning. And what I would say is that I do believe that boarding school challenged me intellectually. But I don't think that the emotional support was there in the way that it should be. And it was. When I think back at that time, you know, I love a lot of people that I met, but I don't have a desire to return to that environment. And I don't think that boarding school is an ideal choice for children, Especially in the early years, that parent attachment is so critical. And what happens is that rather than getting that parental love from a parent, from another adult, your primary caregivers become your peers. And peers are not people who can give that same kind of secure attachment and unconditional love in the way that mature adults can. And I was fortunate my first two years that there was a wonderful guidance counselor, Debbie Ludwig, who really did take on some of that parental role. But there was only so much she could give, you know, in terms of all the students that she needed to serve. So, and so I think that, you know, what is great now is that if I was going through this now, I could get access to the best tutorial in the world online. You know, I could take really stimulating college level courses. You know, in terms of structuring the environment, it's a bit tricky because it does require some discipline. I mean, I did try to do a distance French course when I was at Interlochen and I didn't complete a single assignment. So that theme came back, you know, I just didn't do it. So I do, I find I do need a little bit of support in terms of that. But I, but I think that, I think that now we do have that opportunity where you don't have to go away to get connected to the best teachers in the world. The best teachers in the world can come to you. And, you know, I've never received any kind of diagnosis as gifted or profoundly gifted. It's a bit of an unfortunate term because the word gifted implies better than. But there is a certain kind of child who just at an age is absorbing a lot of information very quickly. And at that age I was absorbing a lot of information very quickly and there becomes this hunger for intellectual stimulation that I was able to get in the theater when I was memorizing text and analyzing literature and had these brilliant directors and was surrounded by these smart college students and professors who were acting. But I wasn't able to get it at school. And what happens in that type of environment. What happened to me is I became depressed, unmotivated, turned into this student who didn't do any work, who didn't have executive functioning skills. And so I think if parents are in that situation where maybe their 12 or 13 year old is being, you know, they're told that, okay, they're lazy, they're disorganized, they're spacing out at school, sometimes that is a sign that the child could be not intellectually stimulated in the way that they need to be. And luckily you don't have to send them away to get that intellectual stimulation Now. There are just so many incredible adaptations. Adaptive learning apps and online classes. I think I would have just loved adaptive learning apps. I remember I loved Tetris and all those games I think I would have just adored Beast Academy and some of the other really cool writing apps and things that exist today. Yeah. So I'm curious to go a little bit more into the work that you do with pre med students now. You're meeting students at an age where they have completed elementary school and high school and are in college or have completed college. So you're seeing them kind of at the end of their formal K through, I guess, senior year education. So with that lens, what are some of the challenges you're seeing in your students? You know, things that they either haven't learned at school that you need to work with them on as a coach as they move towards medical school?

Yes, I would say that the Montessori theoretical framework that I absorbed in philosophy from that training has really informed me as a good mentor and coach for young adults. The students I work with now, the youngest ones are 20, and most of them are in their mid-20s, 23, 24, 25, and they've taken off a few years after college. What I've seen is that I'm going to just speak off the cuff here. I feel that the pandemic coronavirus pandemic decimated student. How students emerged from their formal learning experience in high school and college. They had to pivot to this learning in the environment, often of their small bedroom at home, which was never really up the place where they did their best learning, and they had to do it in front of their screen. And more importantly, their teachers had to adapt to that learning model. And nobody, nobody, no matter how gifted the teacher, either wanted to or was very capable in the beginning, in those first two semesters where Covid shut everything down of teachings effectively. And so what happened was that it created a massive lack of confidence. That word confidence that you used earlier is a really big word for me. And confidence comes from the root of faith. Fiddle. Faith and confidence means coming together in faith. And every kind of act of learning is a leap of faith, which is as we, as we have, you know, talked about in this conversation, you know, fueled by love and fueled by. Fueled by an understanding. There's something within that wants to know. So the students are, you know, just to put it really in a, in a very assessment sort of model. They have not learned how to express who they are, who they really are. Example, you know, that's what everybody, everybody say that so easy to say. I worked with someone yesterday who has a medical school interview coming up at Stanford, which is one of the most competitive med schools in the United States. And in preparing for this, I asked her to tell me about a time when she felt uncomfortable and unsettled. And this is a common question in a group situation where you had to rise to the occasion and sort of take the reins of leading this group. She could not say I felt sad, I felt angry. She could not say I felt disgusted or I felt fearful. She could not name those basic four negative emotions when she talked about her feelings. Instead, she said, I felt the other people were lost. I felt the other people weren't doing their holding their weight. I felt this. I felt that. She hasn't learned in school what it means to claim and declare a feeling so that you can do go from that inner awareness which you spoke about, that inner awareness, you cultivated an interlocking of like I am spaced out, I am not feeling. She hasn't learned to express what a feeling is. She hasn't learned to be okay with this is my feeling. And she's getting ready to enter medical training. So that's just an example of not knowing who you are. But I wanted to give a grounded example of it. But not being able to express who you are comes from, of course in some cases from imposter syndrome of thinking I'm not good enough. Which is a common, you know, a common self criticism of of all people, but especially people who want to be physicians, they don't feel good enough. Even physicians often say I'm not good enough. But that just that deep sense of they haven't learned to express themselves verbally, they haven't learned to express themselves in writing. The writing that I see when they get started, when they answer simple questions about their experience is really, really lacking, lacking in grammar, syntax, you know, having a vocabulary that you can use to express yourself besides saying that was amazing. And in incredible. They think of more nuanced words or even words that are more interesting than that. And then when it comes to, you know, how they choose what they do to show that they are service oriented people and that they think that even the goriest aspects of clinical medicine are really cool and fascinating to them and move them towards medicine, they feel that these things are all regulated by some kind of superior rule setter or authoritarian who's going to say this is a good experiment experience, this is not a good experience. This is a good enough experience. This is enough time. How many hours should I, you know, should I have spent on that experience in order to pass the, the exam of this being me, learning what I need to learn everything very superficial and transactional in that Department. So there's just a great opportunity with the people I work with to just show them the way back to who you are, is just a magnificent person who's going to heal tens of thousands of lives someday and is going to do it from a place of getting energy from that work.

Are there students that you think managed to continue to thrive during the pandemic and ways in which their parents adapted their education or they adapted their own education to make that possible?

Yeah. So let's just say that those people that work shut out of classrooms because they're working were some environments, like your school, Montessori school you went to, stayed open throughout the pandemic. That's not the example I'm giving. But students who had to go home, that have families that have just a simple practice of we always eat dinner together. No matter what time, we always eat dinner together. The mom talks about her day and her work, the dad talks about his day and his work, and the children are expected to talk about their day and their work. Something as simple as having dinner together every night.

And that comes back to attachment and love. That relationship is the foundation for all learning, whether it's intellectual or social, emotional, you have to have that basis.

And also people who have dogs, you know, families that have dogs, you know, go walk the dog and then you walk the dog, and then you meet a neighbor that you never met before and you're craving social interaction.

Absolutely. So, you know, I'd like to. I'd like to explore your Montessori training a bit more. You've referenced it quite a bit. How did your Montessori training impact your view on education, teaching, and walking through life?

So I'll just say what comes to mind immediately is that there's a learning theory from Carol Gilligan. The term for her learning theory is connected knowing. And she posits that especially girls in the ages from starting with third or fourth grade, eight or nine years old, until 12 or 13 or 14 years old at they learn best when they're connected to the teacher, the person who knows things, and when there is some kind of emotional, spiritual love connection with the teacher, that those girls learn much better. They're connected knowers. And when I work with pre meds, I can tell you just like that, who's a connected knower. So I think that Maria Montessori was, as a human being, very much of a connected knower. She was the first woman medical doctor in Italy. She was the first woman PhD in anthropology in Italy. And she was incredibly, an incredible example of the spiritual and the scientific together, which made her a tremendous strategic tactician. And strategy is one of my gifts and I really admire her for that. What Maria Montessori realized is that the most autonomy you could give to the child over the learning environment, the more learning would happen. She threw out all of the oversized equipment that children had, like a sink, they had to step on a stool to get to. And she built all the furniture the size of the children. She made all the furniture so the children felt like they were in a the same environment as a grown up environment, but it all fit them. They sat on the chair and their feet touched the ground. It's called the prepared environment. The second thing that she did was created the four period lesson, which is seminal to understanding her teaching and her learning philosophy. The way it works is in the first period, I'm your teacher and I show you how to learn something with my hands. Because hands on learning is what young children relate to. So I do this work in front of you and it's called work. It's not called a workbook or a teaching lesson, it's work. So I show you how to do this work and then you have my permission to do that work yourself. And I observe you doing that work and I hold back with discipline from saying do it this way or that way unless it is critical to mastery. Then when you have worked there in that work, you come back to me and say you'd like to give that lesson to another child who hasn't learned that yet. And then I identify that child and I watch while you give that lesson to the child. And then I know that you've mastered that material. So it's the four period lesson. It starts with you learning from someone who's connected to you, who's showing you, and it ends with you connecting to someone else and showing them. And I think that that was critical to her children's success. And when she encountered opposition, as educators will do educators do all the time, she said that she wanted to start her schools in a place that no one cared about, which was the hospitals for imbeciles, children who were imbeciles, a word we don't even use today. She said that if they wouldn't let her start a school with regular Italian children, she would start it with imbeciles. They had standardized tests at the end of every period or grade or whatever school level. What she did was she created schools inside these institutions, these depraved, under resourced 9th degree institutions. She built her schools there and at the end of the, of the time when it was time to take the test, those children outperformed the regular age graded Italian school children. Those imbeciles did better on the test than the regular children did. And that was how she strategically proved with scientific evidence that her methods were effective for learning. I just found that to be extremely impressive to me. And in terms of impressiveness, the curriculum that I became the master of, which was first, second and third grade, called the six to nine year, which was three years where you can learn, you learn everything at your pace, and at the end of the three years you move on, was based on five core lessons in different areas of human inquiry called impressionistic lessons. So you probably remember me setting up the volume volcano in the classroom to show there was one impressionistic lesson where you showed the creation of the world. And the idea was that you would so blow the children's mind with these, like really, you know, very, very impressionistic examples of volcano erupting and so forth, that they would want to learn all the work that was related to that that was on shelves in the classroom because they would be so blown away by the mysteries that you expose to them. So she really believed in that mind blowing creative experience launching you into learning. And then that beautiful method of I learn and then I teach others, and that gives me mastery.

You know, I lived for seven months in a Zen center where we had to meditate every day. And then we would come down and sit on our cushions and there's this whole tea ceremony where you pour tea. And it actually reminded me a lot about, of being at Montessori school where you, you know, every time you wanted to do work, you had this little white rug that you would take and then you would roll it out. And then when you finished, you would need to roll it up and make sure. It's very tricky to get the sides so they don't form into these big cones. And you know, just to make that rug, like really beautifully rolled so each of the sides were the same. You couldn't even really pat them at the end. You had to get started. You have to get started in the right way. And then there's this whole work around, you know, pouring, you know, each person pours, gets turns pouring. And there's these different jobs that you have in the classroom watering plants. And it's also similar to a Zen center where you have soji, where you take different jobs to care for the temple. And so I guess there's a certain mindfulness I think I cultivated at Montessori and perhaps why I'm also drawn to Zen Buddhism and French culture as well, because of that precision around the way you place things. And it makes learning kind of sacred that you're setting up this beautiful space. You're showing respect for that process of learning.

Well, as you recall, Maria Montessori was raised as a Catholic. And the foundation of learning the number system is what they call the golden beads work, which is this beautiful rack of learning. What ones are and twos are and threes are and fours are and how they all work together and to make them into actually geometrical forms. So you have these beautiful chains. Do you remember those? The 1 and the 2 and the 3 and the 4, all the way up to 10, which is the golden beads. And that's a string of 10 beads that you put together. And you can make a cube out of it or you can make a hundred out of it. And helps you understand our numeral system, that beautiful foundational way of learning. Number came from the rosary, came from sitting in church, sitting with a rosary, touching each bead, Hail Mary, full of grace, and going on with the beads and the.

All those.

The rituals and the sacraments of the Catholic Church became ingrained in the rituals of the Montessori school. So it makes sense that Zen Buddhism also comes from that essential human need for ritual. And if you look at anthropology, she was an anthropologist also. If you look at anthropology, you see that rituals form the basis of communal culture.

Yeah. And religion and learning used to be much more intertwined with math coming from Islam, and now it's secular and religious. And I've been an advocate for secular learning so that, you know, and I think there are some challenges, too, in that, in some religious paths, religion has been a way that people justify not pursuing scientific inquiry. And so, you know, in order to make sure that a child is learning about science, evolution, climate change, you kind of need to take them out of the religious texts. And so it's very unfortunate because religion, like really a lot of science, was born Jesuit community. And, you know, for some reason, there shouldn't there. Now there's this strange divide.

Yeah. And I think that came from, again, just going back to what you were saying about Interlochen Arts Academy needing to send two people to the Curtis Institute every year in to order to gain their own prestige. In the same way, you know, evangelistic Christianity needed to gather so many believers so they could be a bigger church and, you know, grow and grow and grow. And what's lost in that is that beautiful, quiet ritual.

Yeah. And the curiosity and awe of the miracle of life, like this is so extraordinary. I want to learn more about this mystery. And, you know, these Jesuits are planting little beans and learning about genetics through that. And. And that's kind of like what you talk about spirit and faith and that spirit, curiosity. Yeah. And it seems like the opposite of that is saying, well, God said it's this way. And so I'm just going to turn off my brain and not question it anymore.

That's exactly where it can go and has gone in many respects.

Yeah. It's important to remember that, you know, a lot of this learning and education and just being in a world where learning has become democratized, it used to be only a privilege of the elite has, you know, came from religion in its. In its origins. So I have kind of a question forming about skills. I do want to return to your rant about religion, though. Maybe we should do that first. Is it really bubbling up into side of you?

It is.

Go for it.

About religion and education and learning and secular.

Yeah. And, you know, approaching. Approaching spirit. Like for your religion to be about curiosity and awe and learning and science versus your religion being about, you know, I hate gay people. Evolution doesn't exist. Climate change isn't real. We should ban the dictionary from schools because it has the word sex in it. You know, you know, you know, religion changing from something about this ever open, unknowing and moving towards the known that you can ever attain versus just closing the door.

I mean, the scientists that most impress me are the ones who, when they're on podcasts and get asked a question about their field, say, great question. I don't know the answer to that. That's my next frontier. One of the things, yes, I do, and one of the things that I think I brought to medical school admissions, advising that other people were afraid to, is to encourage strongly that students going into medicine reclaim the faith of their childhood and express it as part of who they are. Because higher education, even though they have their little place where kids can worship and it's like this universal central education, like the college where you went to, had these three beautiful towers, one for Islam, one for Judaism, one for Christianity. And it was built architecturally, chapels, so they would never cast shadow on each other. This incredibly beautiful metaphor at the center of campus, as I recall it, even though that is given, and even though Notre Dame was formed by the Catholic Church and Brandeis University was formed by the Jewish faith, even though there is that faith in there, in the classroom, in the scientific classroom, especially Students are heavily conditioned to believe that everything is. Is everything. Faith based is of lesser value than everything that is evidence based. And evidence and faith are two separate things. Scientists do not ascribe to that, because scientists have hunches and hypotheses that come from who knows where. And then they test them and either prove them or disprove them. So a doctor who wants to heal a person needs to heal their spirit as well as their body. And that requires a certain faith. So I'm strongly, strongly encouraged students to talk about their faith and to bring it up in their essays to schools.

Absolutely. And when you think about a physicist, it's someone who has to really think outside of the box to be able to wrap their mind around something like quantum physics or ways that the universe works galaxies away. I mean, you just have to step completely outside of that logical system of thinking in order to access new ideas.

When I was in graduate school at Cornell, that's where I. That's how I got to Cornell. Originally, they had 17 libraries, 17 separate libraries located at different places on campus. And being a person who likes to study in a lot of different environments and not stay in one very long, I traveled to all these libraries. What I was learning. And I noticed some really interesting differences. And one of them that struck me since that time, which was now almost 50 years ago, is that in the physics library, you would see all these students working out all these problems on paper. Not linearly, but like a big piece of white paper, working out these problems in a more holistic kind of approaching the answer in the middle, as opposed to starting at the beginning, getting to the end. And they would suddenly just stand up in the middle, middle of it, and they would walk away. And you could walk outside the library, and you'd see all these people kind of just walking up and down the hallway, lost in thought, like milling around, just thinking, and no one talking and no one interrupting that process. And that taught me an essential key to problem solving, which is knowing when to look away from the object. And to just allow the truth to show up in your brain, allow it to just come to you. Because your working mind is. Is at that moment absorbed with it. And you're going to get inspiration from where? Who cares, Right?

Absolutely. And I think, you know, we think about. I guess spiritual traditions sometimes talk about this idea of awakening, where all of a sudden the obvious is just right there in front of you. Like, how could you have possibly missed it? And I think I've kind of come to that in how I see Homeschooling in that, you know, everybody assumes that the school system, like, there must be a good reason for this, that we're doing it in this way. But now what I see is, I mean, why is it that parents are outsourcing their children's education? Why would that be something that someone else would do? When you have an opportunity to nurture your child's natural love of learning, when you have all of these educational resources you can use to support it, when. And of course, there's the childcare piece, but school really does not provide great childcare at all. The whole summer is not there. Everyone has to get up at a ridiculously early hour. And then you look at one on one learning, where a child is learning at their own pace versus a teacher trying to curate the learning towards 30 kids at the same time in the same way. It just doesn't make sense. And even, you know, you think about the unit economics, like paying for these expensive buildings and the oversight and the budget. And so for me, you know, when I talk about homeschooling, people think like, oh my gosh, that's such a brilliant idea. But for me, having taught in all these different educational environments to so many types of students, it's just obvious, of course this works better if you can make it work. And you know, there's a million questions about like the structure of childcare and social services and how we support children who are undernourished. But again, we can't assume that the school system is doing a great job at that. But the whole concept that should I send my child away to learn or should I nurture? They're learning through these amazing resources available and give them one on one instruction, it just makes absolute sense. And you know, and we see with homeschooling, with this very focused two or three hours a day of learning, you just learn so much quicker than you do seven hours a day sitting in a classroom. The idea that you're expecting children to just sit, little children who need to run around and play and just sit and listen to a boring lecture, it's absurd. And even we look at a lot of the educational materials and they're just not designed for kids. I mean, unfortunately, even Khan Academy, like the videos are so boring. Education is the only product where we don't think about the end user almost at all. Every other product has to be entertaining, engaging, exciting. But you know, we force kids to do stuff because we can.

And when I think about the lessons learned and the things that have most stayed with me through my Life from my childhood, for me, school was a haven. I love school. And the things that I was good at. Reading and math, I'm still good at. But what I learned as a child at home was to have a lifelong interest in addiction and alcoholism, especially because both of your grandparents on my. On my side were alcoholics. And watching how their behavior changed, reading Dr. Spock under the covers so that I would understand how they should be treating me as opposed to how they were chaotically and drunkenly treating me, and learning how to cook dinner, learning how to make recipes twice as big for a family of five children, multiplying and dividing and ingredients that were cheaper because we're limited resources. All those things that I learned as a child, I learned at home from my parents. And children are learning everything from their parents, more from their parents at home, many people say, than they are learning from their six hours in school every day. For a parent to realize that and to be aware of what they're teaching and to be responsible for their teaching will make them, you know, will make them feel better about who they are, too.

So you came from an incredibly traumatic, abusive, neglectful childhood where you were reminded by your primary caregiver that you were not loved and not wanted. I mean, the first five years of your life were basically taking care of yourself on a beach with your brother and sister, and then, you know, leaving that single mother household and going to an abusive alcoholic one where you were taking care of your younger sisters. And so when we talk about education being love, where did you receive the love that allowed you to learn from? Where did that come from?

It came from some of the teachers. Yep, it came from some of those teachers. I felt so much more loved and so much more safe in school than I felt at home. Just so much more loved and so much more safe. And when I encountered a mean teacher in sixth grade, a mean and manipulative teacher in sixth grade who was my all day long teacher, I basically was crushed by that teacher. Emotionally crushed. And I ended up seeking solace with the school librarian who understood that she needed to be there for me and let me come there all the time and gave me a job that I had to be there certain times of the day. Yeah, I did get it from school. School was always my safe haven. Schools were different then. They were great.

Yeah. No, and I mean, I think teachers still provide that for many students who don't have that love from their parents. And I think that, you know, it's often a misconception that every single parent loves their child the most and would do anything for them. A lot of people aren't position for that. And I think that, you know, ultimately your father really came around and as an adult was able to give you love that he wasn't able to as a child. Do you think that there are ways that, you know, you grew up in the 1950s. There are ways that the system could have supported your parents better in a way to allow them to give you that love and maybe even take it into the context of today. You know, are there ways that we can, you know, not just for teachers and kids, but like, how can we, you know, support parents in a way that would allow them to tap into that, into that love?

That's a. That's something I don't know the answer to, Manisha, but what. One of the things that I find encouraging is all the parent support groups online for parents to get information. Even what your work is where parents can learn from each other and can vent with each other about the problems that they're facing with their kids. There's such a. There's such a crazy thing going on with parents that are well resourced, or as I was with you in your later years, not well resourced, but very aspirationally resourced. Where, you know, people find psychologists who are going to give their children diagnoses that allow them to take tests, you know, a time and a half, it would most definitely have found the money to get you connected to a teacher, to a psychologist who would have given you time and a half on tests.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I will say one resource that comes to mind in your household is Alcoholics Anonymous.

Mm, that's true.

You know, that alcohol is really the enemy of love in that household. And I also think anti Semitism, you know, I mean, that really impacted your father's career and, you know, he had to move around the country a lot. Not necessarily because of anti Semitism, but probably because, you know, some of the career pathways he took and you know.

In terms so touched that you remember that.

Yeah, I mean, I think about it a lot. Having, you know, gone to Jewish sponsored university and also, you know, now seeing what's happening in college campuses and you know, it's. It's the trauma of having ancestors who went through the Holocaust is alive and well in the third generation. And certainly, you know, for your. For your dad who had. My grandpa who had relatives that were killed and my. On my father's side, you know, that's a person who, you know, routinely reminds me that I was not wanted and that feels tricked into me being born. And I'm, you know, well, what am I supposed to do? Crawl back into the womb? I'm a little big, you know, so, you know, and it's painful, right? And so I think about, you know, what kind of support he could have received as a child. And he had, you know, a father who's Jewish, they left Germany. There's also alcohol in that household. And you know, and you know, there's, there's a, there's a difficulty among, you know, men who feel like they need this freedom so much, but they think freedom is different than somehow connection prevents freedom, that the more you're connected, the more, the less freedom you have. Instead of seeing like there's room for both for love and freedom in our true selves, we can love completely and be completely free at the same time.

I'd like to just present a little bit of a model that I'm working on in my head. Having worked many years in higher education in the student services capacity at a university, what I noticed over, over the years is that people that work to support students in the university are very much become second class citizens of the academy. And the reason why the whole idea that professors are not pre med advisors or counselors or academic advisors is because professors, the academy decided that professors bringing in grant money and enriching the university in that way should be their sole pursuit. As a result of that, teaching is something that you can be bad at and still get tenure, but research is not something that you can be bad at and still get tenure. And because of those values, teaching and learning in the classroom is a second class effort. And the people who do advising and counseling and mentoring and coaching are second class citizens. And I would argue that that same structure has been shown to, has been evinced a word you hate.

I love the word events.

You do, you just tease me about it.

I like the word events more than I like other overused words that you use.

Anyway, events in the family has been evinced in the family because in the 50s the father went out and earned the living and did whatever else he wanted to do outside the home. And the mother stayed home and did the cooking and cleaning and took care of the children. And I unfortunately got, you know, kind of adopted by my father because my mother abandoned me on the beach and left the country. And so our model was different, but he brought in a wife whose job was to stay at home and do everything. And what happened in the 70s with the rise of feminism is that very much like the university, women did not want to be second class citizens of the world anymore. They wanted to have jobs, they wanted to have careers. So there was this natural tension in families. And what happened is that the children and raising the children and teaching the children became second class work. And there were fights about who should do that. You know, vacuuming the floor and raising the child basically had very similar valences in terms of the self worth you attach to being able to do these things. And just because you love the children, sometimes they raising them became more important to you than loving vacuuming or loving washing the dishes. And we are still emerging from that part of society where the parents need to be told that the most important work you have is educating children. Just like when you look at all the socioeconomic problems that are facing developing countries, the single most important way to ameliorate those is educating women.

Absolutely. And I would take it even a step further to say it's about the relationship you cultivate with your child. Because what we keep returning to is that when teachers are really in tune and that connection is strong and that secure attachment is strong, learning flows from that place. It's not about how much information you dump into your child's head or how many tutors you hire them. It's about feeling safe, feeling loved, and quality guidance coming from that place of love. And I was thinking about, you know, what you were saying about how it's because you had teachers in your life that you were able to develop your passion for learning. But I do want to make sure that we highlight the role of divine love in your own learning. Because, you know, if it's all right to say, I mean, until you were in your 40s, you suffered from very severe depression. And it was through connecting with teachers and through connecting to a group of people who were passionate about learning about themselves, that you had an experience of divine love that really transformed the rest of your life. So when we talk about this kind of relational learning, it's also useful to note that this is different for different kids. And then I think about, you know, the child who never wrote an essay until he was around other kids who were writing in it, right. Who were writing the essay and then promptly ate the essay.

The kid who swallowed his work. Yeah.

Yes, he swallowed his work. I'm sure he's doing great now. And, you know, every teacher has a moment they can think of that they were ashamed of because it's just so intense. I did want to ask you about skills because I, you know, we have these standards of what we think children should learn in school. There are some people who think that learning should be entirely self directed as much as possible by the child. And it's clear there's this burning desire to know. And if you are able to allow children to experience natural consequences while keeping them safe and giving them tools, it's really extraordinary what they can do, especially if they have models in their life of a learning environment. So there's other people who think that what we should be teaching children is how to learn. And certainly I think that in my own education and through you, I was given a lot of tools on how to learn. And you teach study skills, you used to teach study skills. That definitely influenced me. But I do feel it's funny because, you know, and some people say just to be about a love of learning, you know, cultivating that love of learning. So we were recently kind of going through some of our stuff and we came upon this bookshelf. And one side were the books that I chose to read in school, and on the other side were the books that I had chosen to read as an adult. And on the side of books I read in school was, you know, these wonderful Nancy Drew mystery novels that I used to be so obsessed with. It was Les Memoires d' un jeune firanger, which is like the life story of Simone de Beauvoir. There's, you know, Russian literature, you know, kind of epic books on, you know, the studies of American culture and history. And on the right side, the books I choose to read as adult was a dating book. You lost him at hello. Make the first move. You know, Secrets of a Million Dollar Mind. Like, it was all about personal finance and dating. And on one level, I felt extremely shallow looking at this bookshelf. Like, who have I become? You know, I used to be reading this incredibly rich, you know, fiction, and. And now all I'm reading is dating books and how to balance your budget books. And. And I. And I felt kind of like, what have I become? But I also felt like these are still areas where I struggle, you know, Like, I feel like I wish that I had gone to college understanding, like, how to form a romantic relationship. And it's still something that I struggle with. Like, I wish that I knew how to budget and make more money than I spend a little bit better. It seems like these are like really basic skills. And it just like, I wonder, you know, is there some way that could have been incorporated into my education or just there's certain things that you have to learn based on your own Priorities in life. And I mean, what, what are your thoughts on, on that?

Let's just, I mean, if we're going to be completely honest, transparent with the world here right now, you grew up with a mother that didn't have that relationship and he was, you know, to send you to boarding school. I had seven jobs, seven simultaneous part time jobs just to scrape together the quarters in order to pay the fees at the boarding school. So you, although, you know, the generation, my father was, you know, you could say wealthy, he did not share that with me when I was raising you. Only sometimes, sometimes he would help me, but he was completely, you know, pretty much oblivious to it all. My mother wasn't in the picture at all, so there was no family wealth to fall back on. So I was a single mother struggling to survive. I mean, your first, we were homeless for parts of the time.

Yes. And you're also made to feel extremely guilty whenever you asked for money, which.

Exactly, exactly. So you grew up in a family that was hand to mouth where there wasn't a loving relationship to see you didn't learn that at home. You were not homeschooled in those two important things. And so now you're still trying to learn those things. That to me is the most obvious way to answer your question. And I feel, when I say it, I feel really close to tears because that's something I would have loved to have given you or given us, you.

Know, and it, but it also shows how hard it is to learn things that you don't have modeled in your home environment, like literacy. The children who have parents at home who can help them with math and reading are at such an advantage in school to the ones who don't. And it just, you know, and that's why the most successful educational programs I've seen are mentoring programs. You know, it's outside of school, it's elders in the community, college students who are working with the kids and supporting the families. And just the impact of parent training, you know, like makes more of an impact on the child's education, teaching a family how to read and speak English than it does teaching the kid. Right.

And it makes the mother feel so, and the father feels so important, makes them feel good about themselves, that they can do that for their children.

But I will say you have always, at every moment in my life, been committed to finding your own happiness, even when you weren't happy by going to meditation, reading spiritual books, talking to psychotherapists, making. And for me, being happy is just the number one thing you Know, happy and healthy and health is connected to happiness. And that pursuit comes naturally because even, you know, if I might not like, get the perfect husband or boyfriend or kids or. Or I always seem to be like, now I have money, now I don't too much information. I do feel happy and I feel completely not at rest when I'm not happy, I notice immediately and I start looking for tools to support my short term and long term happiness. So I think that that just really illustrates the impact of modeling in the home.

Yeah. Another thing that was very important to me with you growing up that still affects me now that you've been out of the house for such a long time, is that I always was very selective about the friends that I had around. I always wanted my friends to be close and secure and to be there for you. And there were so many times in your life when one of my friends was the primary person who helped you through a crisis when I couldn't be that person or you didn't want me to be that person.

It's a network we can't learn in a vacuum. And that, you know, that's actually part of what's great about homeschooling is with these communities, people have access to all these mentors and networks and other parents in the community, and people are collaborating and supporting each other in a very organic way. Whereas with school there's these kind of more firm boundaries in terms of what's possible. Although I think of Matilda and Miss Honey adopting Matilda, which was wonderful, wonderful story to teach her. So.

But, you know, I don't think there's that much said about how important it is for a family to surround themselves with good friends.

Yeah. Oh, it's so, so, so important. And asking for help and seeing how happy people are to help. Yeah, for sure. I can think of many times in Paula and Rebecca Dolch just kind of, you know, Rebecca Dolch, like crawling in bed with me when I was depressed and got sent home from an emotional leave in high school. She just. And I just didn't want to even talk to you. And she just knocked on my door, came to her room, came under the COVID and we just kind of looked at each other and chatted or all the times I called Paula to talk about issues of all kinds of issues from depression to sex to all these things. I didn't, you know, for whatever reason, felt too intense to go through with you or even our own relationship. And I think even if people have like a mom and a dad, you do need all these different influences. And people being able to pick up the weight. And I think it's important for single people to be involved in the lives of people with kids. And I think sometimes you with kids don't realize what joy it can bring a single person to be let into the family to help care for the children and. And them. So I guess as we wrap it up, I'm wondering, is there anything about education or learning, you know, that I mean, of course there's a lot we haven't touched upon, but anything that's really kind of speaking in your heart that we haven't gone into yet today?

What I want to say is that you and I just spent almost three weeks on a vacation, a pure vacation, where we traveled by train through Europe, we walked around to cities all day, where we experimented with fine wine and Saint Emilion, and where I really got a very powerful realization of the effect of human creativity and human potential. Looking at Notre Dame, looking at it being rebuilt, tasting these unetherial wines that are produced often by religious orders and just how much humans have made a culture. And you were raised in a kind of rural environment where nature was very important to both of us. And when I got home, I really wanted to go back and embrace nature because the nature. Nature is such an important way to restore a child or even an adult's attention. Nature restores attention, and attention is needed to learn. I want to say that parents who live in cities would be well advised to go on camping trips with their children or just to go for day hikes and just to feel and know the enormity and beauty of nature.

You talked about once how there's kind of fractals that appear in nature that don't appear anywhere else, and looking at them can soothe your mind. And because I've been practicing meditation for a while, I consistently noticed that if I just sit for five minutes in the morning, completely impacts the rest of the day, my ability to focus, my sense of purpose, how tasks unfold, the quality of my writing. And walking in nature is also a form of meditation and preparation of the mind. It's like Montessori, they say it's like preparing the mind. You roll out the rug. You can't just expect your mind to work, work, work all the time and not prepare your canvas.

Yeah. And the preparation is. It is a form of self love, it's a form of receiving love. And it's a way of stepping outside of form so that you can actually see a much broader sense of what you have to. What you can access in order to do all these things you have to do in the world.

I usually wrap up every podcast by asking my guest, what is something you're learning now? And I happen to know that you've been doing a lot of research on longevity and was wondering if you would like to share some of your insights with my audience, many of whom are our friends and family members. Because I know that you have been really excited to share your learnings with them and I think this is a good opportunity for them to hear them.

Yeah, there's a lot of things I need to learn in order to work with pre meds about the world of medicine and about how what medicine is doing and how medical models work and how different careers and and suddenly I just hit upon at 72 years old, this burgeoning field of longevity and sometimes referred to as increasing or improving your health span. And it dovetails perfectly. It integrates perfectly with meditation and love. Because health span is about living the most beautiful, healthy moment right now that you possibly can and not thinking about that. You're a certain age and you look a certain way and you're going to die in a certain amount of time and you're going to deteriorate between now and then. It's instead focusing the attention and the mindset on how you can grow your experience of health right now, today by the not just by the choices that you make, but by just the way you inhabit your human body. So I've been studying on it and learning a lot about different chemicals and supplements and about I'm just, it's a positive approach to living my life. So I have been just doing a lot of fun things and learning some fun hacks and just basically feeling like, you know, that's how I want to spend my golden years is being healthy and healthier, healthier and happier. That's my motto.

So for people listening, if there were what are the three main takeaways that you would love to see your best friends implement today? Everyone. You want to live a long, healthy life. What are the three main thing ways you would want them to change their behavior?

Number one. Number one, become aware of your sleep and learn how to make your sleep architecture better and how to maximize the restoration you get from your sleep. Number two, which is really number one, is to move more, move more often and move more and move more in a way that uses more muscles and more parts of your body. And the third one is to eat food, mostly plants.

Love it.

Michael of Michael Pollan's book book. But to really be able to appreciate in your body the value of a plant based diet. And that's based diet. That doesn't mean I'm advocating don't eat any animals which. But I don't eat any animals.

Yeah, right.

But to make your. To make your food nutrient based. So eating, moving and sleeping are the three. And then of course the fourth one is just to find joy everywhere comes back to love. Yes. Love and joy.

What. What would you say is the one that is hardest to convince your friends to do?

Probably eating. For me, it's moving so much. That's why I love being around you.

I know. All right, well, my mama, my darling mama, this has been darling daughter, so lovely. The time flew and I love our conversations so very much. I love nothing more than your undivided attention. So this has been a wonderful gift for me and I really hope that others will enjoy this kind of inside peek into one of our heart to hearts. It's just, you know, I think our relationship and the love, you know, the relationship we have today has taken a lot of. I don't like to use the word work, but a lot of self awareness on both of our ends and a sincere desire to have a strong loving relationship we have. You know, When I was 13, we used to fight constantly. And it's not been, you know, it's not. We definitely were like this when I was little. But you know, today I think the mature adult relationship we have has come from, you know, a real true intention and strength and courage and openness.

So it's a willingness to open your.

Pupils, a willingness to learn and a hunger to learn and a faith in learning that you can learn and things can grow. So I feel really grateful for that. Thank you for being on my show, mom, and being my biggest fan. I love you.

I love you too.