Beginning faculty often receive warnings that lead to antagonistic relationships with their students. In this episode, Cate Denial joins us to discuss how a pedagogy of kindness can build productive learning environments for all students.
Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. She is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and sits on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life. She is also the author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, one of the first publications in the new Oklahoma University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller.
Show Notes
- Denial, C. J. (2024). A pedagogy of kindness. University of Oklahoma Press.
- Denial, C. (2019). A Pedagogy of Kindness. Hybrid Pedagogy.
- Denial, Cate (2021). A Pedagogy of Kindness. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 210. December 20.
- Denial, Cate (2016). The Pre-Teaching Jitters. December 9.
- Care in the Academy
Transcript
John: Beginning faculty often receive warnings that lead to antagonistic relationships with their students. In this episode, we examine how a pedagogy of kindness can build productive learning environments for all students.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by
John: , an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Cate Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. She is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and sits on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life. She is also the author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, one of the first publications in the new Oklahoma University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller. Welcome back, Cate.
Cate: Thank you.
John: Our teas today are:… Cate, are you drinking tea?
Cate: I am. I am drinking Harney and Sons Decaf Earl Grey.
John: …very nice.
Rebecca: It’s a great choice. I have a green tea today.
John: A what tea?
Rebecca: I don’t know it’s just green tea. [LAUGHTER] Sorry.
John: And I have a peppermint spearmint blend today.
Rebecca: Sounds nice and calming. So we’ve invited you here, Cate, to talk about the Pedagogy of Kindness. I think we last talked to you in October of 2021, when the book project was just getting started. And our discussion focused on a “Pedagogy of Kindness,” an essay on the topic that you posted in I think, August of 2019. This essay was such a great resource that helped so many people and I know, our community here was really interested in the subject. Can you talk a little bit about how this essay evolved into a book?
Cate: So, as I wrote the essay, there was so much I wanted to say, and I had to sort of just express it in the most concise form that I could. After I was done, I was sort of pondering the other things that I wish I’d had the space to be able to include. And then Josh Eyler, who is now at the University of Mississippi, messaged me and said, “Hey, I think this needs to be a book.” And I was like “Me too.” [LAUGHTER] So I started thinking of what I would do to make it a longer treatment. And I wrote up a proposal, sent that off, and started writing, pretty much straight away.
John: In this book, you argue for a teaching approach based on kindness. You note that many people, though, confuse “kindness” with “being nice.” How do you define “kindness?” And how is it different from “being nice.”
Cate: So, being nice is a lot of what we do in academia, nice lies, nice will do anything to just get along, it will avoid conflict, and it will just try and paper over cracks in our institutions, whereas kindness is fundamentally honest. So it means you’re going to have some really tough conversations with your colleagues and with your students. You’re not going to mislead them about how they’re doing in your class. And kindness is really about accountability, it’s about positionality, and it’s about responsibility. And those are all things that I think niceness just elides.
Rebecca: I know that I found myself saying many times after reading your essay: “Telling the truth here or letting a student know what their real situation is, would be the kind of thing to do. [LAUGHTER]
Cate: Exactly,exactly. And I often have people, as I go around the country and talk to other faculty, ask me: “Exactly how do you have these conversations, when the student comes to you and says, ‘this terrible thing has happened, and please just excuse this paper,’ or ‘don’t include this in my grade’…and you have to, especially if you are in a professional school, for example, or a medical school or something like that.” And that’s when that distinction between niceness and kindness really comes into play. Because niceness is just about getting along. And kindness is like, “Well, let’s have a real conversation about what’s going on here. Why these expectations are, what they are, whether it’s possible for us to make some kind of adjustment here, or whether this is a moment where we really have to talk about what your future is in this course, or in this program,” things like that.
John: In the introduction to the book, you note that this is not quite how you started teaching, that you started teaching, like many of us, with a somewhat different focus in terms of interactions with students. Could you tell us a little bit about your perspective when you first entered teaching?
Cate: So when I first entered teaching, I was brand new to teaching. I had got my degree in England one month before I stepped into a classroom in the United States. I did not know the United States educational system well at all. I felt like a complete fraud, and the limited training I had had at my graduate program really encouraged me to think of my students as antagonists, to assume they were going to cheat, they were going to try and get one over on me, that they wouldn’t do the reading, that they were going to try and negotiate for a grade that was not what they deserved to get, things like that. And walking into a classroom like that prepares you for battle [LAUGHTER] at every single moment, which is a terrible way to walk into a new relationship of any kind. It’s especially demoralizing and damaging, I think, when you are walking into a classroom, so I had to unlearn the business of thinking that my students were up to no good. I had to unlearn the business of thinking that my students were fundamentally not interested in their own education.
Rebecca: You mentioned your four day visit to a digital pedagogy lab, and how that impacted your teaching. Can you elaborate a little bit on that and share that story?
Cate: Yes. So I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute in 2017, which was in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was the most incredible experience. I went because I had the feeling that I was lagging behind in bringing digital tools into my classroom. And I thought this would be where I would learn those things. And I certainly had that opportunity. But the first thing that I was asked to do in the intro track, was to tear apart everything about my teaching, in a really good way. I was in a track that was led by Chris Friend and Sean Michael Morris. And they asked us to reflect upon everything about our pedagogy. Why were we doing things in the way that we were doing them? What was the rationale that we had for the choices we were making, and the way we addressed our students and the kinds of things that we have happen in our classrooms. Everything about that institute was predicated on kindness. And it’s not that someone actually said at some point, “Why not be kind?” But that was the subtext from everything from… it was the first Institute I think I ever went to where there were pronoun pins that people could take when they registered. There was really generous swag, there was this wonderful ethos of sharing, everybody rolled up their sleeves. and really worked hard at turning everybody’s teaching materials into something even better than what they arrived with. There was really no hierarchy. It was just a wonderful community experience of trying to get better at what we do.
Rebecca: Sounds like such a great experience, and an opportunity to really critically reflect on your teaching, which we don’t always take the time to do.
Cate: I didn’t even know I needed to do it. [LAUGHTER] So by the time I went in 2017, I was more than 20 years into my teaching career. And I thought I was pretty great at teaching at that point. But what the digital pedagogy lab made me realize was that no matter what my goal was, as a teacher, all of the documents in my course, my syllabi, my assignment sheets, the way I handled introductions, all kinds of little things, really told a different story. And they told that story of antagonism that I had been socialized into as an early instructor. And I think that is something we are socialized into globally in higher ed.
John: One of the things you talk about is finding out a little bit more about your students. Because when many of us start teaching, we tend to assume that our students are similar to us, they have similar backgrounds, they’ve been prepared in ways that were similar to ours, maybe they weren’t quite as good as students as we were. But many people start off by assuming that students will be just like them. And yet you note in your introductory chapter that as many as 71% of undergraduates in the United States are non-traditional, under a teaching approach that focuses on kindness, how might faculty begin to address the diverse identities and needs of our students?
Cate: So, I think the first thing that we need to do is take stock of who our students are. And so we need to think about the demographics on our campus, that information is usually pretty easily available. As I travel around the country and visit different campuses, I always pause and look up on their websites, what is their diversity rate? And how many low-income students are there? How many people get Pell Grants? How many people are first-gen? How many people are returning after taking some time off? Or maybe have a GED? There’s all kinds of ways in which our students are not that sort of stereotypical 18 to 22 year old, straight white student who is perhaps in a sorority or fraternity or does athletics or anything that sort of gets caught up in the stereotype of who students might be. I’m really interested in what happens behind that. Even if a student walking into my classroom is, for example, a straight white student who is 18 to 22 years old, or maybe is an athlete, maybe is in a sorority. That doesn’t mean that those things tell me who they really are. They don’t tell me what is going on in their home life. Do they have kinship obligations and responsibilities? What is happening with the way that they’re funding their education, all kinds of different things. So I think pausing at the beginning of the term and really getting to know who our students are, is vital if we’re going to meet them where they’re at in our classrooms. So there’s lots of ways of doing that. There are ways of sending out surveys to our students, either before the semester begins or right as it begins. There are ways to have conversations in class to make those introductions a little bit more substantial than just, “Hi, my name is….. And my major is….. , and I’m taking this class, because….. So trying to gather that information, and also reflecting on how my identities are showing up as I walk into a classroom. I think those are really important parts of what we do.
Rebecca: What are some of the ways that adopting a pedagogy of kindness changes the ways that instructors and students interact?
Cate: I think it is all about undermining that presumption of antagonism. If we do not assume that our students are out to get us, But rather, that our students, in the vast majority of cases, are actually really invested in being there, and are perhaps a little bit scared of us, that they are a little bit uncertain, a little bit unsure, maybe they are first years, or this is their first class in a certain discipline, or they’ve been out of school for a while. There’s all kinds of ways that they might be very, very nervous coming into our classrooms. And so I think, taking the time to think about that, and address that, and make space for that, so that our students are not some sort of terrible, antagonistic, cruel set of people who really don’t want us to succeed or for themselves to succeed. That’s just not based in reality.
John: And I would think it would be a much more enjoyable environment, both for students and for the instructor, when there’s that trust between students and faculty.
Cate: Yeah, I actually have a blog post that I wrote, I think back in 2016, called the first-day jitters, that was about how nervous I would get before I would meet my students for the first time every semester. And once I changed my outlook and stopped expecting antagonism, I stopped getting nervous. I walked into the classroom and was excited about what was going to be co-created in that space. And it made an enormous difference to me and to my students. Certainly, I saw it in the ways that they interacted with one another and with me in our classroom spaces, but it changed everything for me about showing up as a teacher.
Rebecca: One of the things that you’re pointing to or hinting at is the idea that the pedagogy of kindness also applies to being kind to yourself. Can you talk a little bit about ways that instructors can be more kind to themselves?
Cate: Yeah, I think the number one way in which we can all be really kind to ourselves is to have impeccable boundaries. [LAUGHTER] I think it’s really important that we not prostrate ourselves, not give beyond what we are capable of giving, and have a really good understanding of what our capabilities are. So for example, if I am someone who is stringing together three jobs to make a livable income, if I have a family, if I have caregiving responsibilities, if I have a really long commute, all of those things are in the mix. And I cannot then be someone who 24/7 is simply available to my students. I don’t think that’s healthy, even if you don’t have any of those other responsibilities or considerations. I think that we all need time to have downtime, to have rest, to have play to, have pleasure. But I think that we need to be able to say, “I am available by email between these hours, you can expect an answer from me within a certain period of time.” Communicate those things incredibly clearly to our students. And that means that we’re also modeling for them that it is okay to take time for yourself and to have good boundaries.
John: In the second chapter of your book, you focus on the syllabus, which is often one of the first forms of communication between the instructor and students. Quite often the syllabi look more like legal documents than they do a welcoming introduction to the course. What are some of your suggestions on how to demonstrate kindness in your syllabus?
Cate: So an exercise that I was asked to do at the Digital Pedagogy Lab was to read my syllabus with a critical eye and ask myself who I was addressing when I wrote it. And what I found was that I was addressing someone who I assumed was going to screw up somehow. I assumed that they were going to disappoint me they were going to let me down, that they were going to try and get away with something… that old antagonism rearing its head. So then I had to stop and go, “That’s not who I think my students are, so why is that reflected in the language I’m using in my syllabus?” So then I stopped and I rewrote. And I kept in mind a student who is very real, I pick students to have actual students in my mind when I’m writing my syllabi, or when I’m revising them. And in addressing those students, I was able to make my language welcoming and warm. It doesn’t mean that it’s soft, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have boundaries and that I don’t have expectations. It simply means that I’m talking to them as I would if we were in person. That’s one thing that I learned to do. Another is that I learned that for many students, syllabi are impenetrable walls of text. And I’m sure all of us, in our time, if we haven’t written that syllabus, have seen that syllabus, maybe when we too were students. Those are really hard for students who have things like ADHD, for example, to be able to parse, to find the important information. They don’t look welcoming. They look like legal documents. And so I’ve changed my syllabi, for example, to have really colorful welcoming headers. I make a point of always saying “welcome to the class,” as the first thing that you see on the syllabus. I make a point of emphasizing relationship early and saying, “This is how you can get hold of me. Here are what my student hours are and what student hours mean.” And only then do I get into the stuff like, here’s what we’re going to read and here’s the assignments we’re going to do. It’s all about establishing warmth and a relationship from the get go.
Rebecca: How do you balance that approach with some institutional policy or other things that you maybe have to include in a syllabus that don’t have that same tone and tenor?
Cate: Yeah, that’s a really big consideration for a lot of people. There’s a lot of boilerplate language that has to go into many syllabi. So there, I borrow from Remi Kalir, who has students annotate the syllabus, and I’ve been doing this for several years. Now, my students get the syllabus at the end of the first class session, and they take it away for homework and they annotate it. I give them a really simple definition of what annotation is. And then in our second class period, we come back and they get to tell us what their questions were, what their comments were, what seemed unusual to them, what really stuck out and we have a conversation about all of that. And if you have a bigger class than I do, this is the sort of thing that you can have small groups do or you can have parents do. And then you can have people report out some of the things that they thought were most pressing. What that does is it returns to students some agency, and they can comment on the language shift, the tonal shift between the things you wrote and the things that you have to include, and you can have open conversations about “So why do you think we have to include this stuff? And what are ways that we could say this differently?” or “What is the way that you understand this best,?” Having that conversation is really important in allowing students to talk back to that document. And to make it clear that it’s a human creation, that it’s not just spit out by a machine somewhere, that there are people behind it, and that we are collectively always polishing and revising our syllabi in light of these relationships that we have on our campuses.
Rebecca: In smaller classes, I’ve done the annotation in a single document. And it’s been really interesting to have students comment on each other’s comments in a digital format, too. And it really brings some interesting things to light.
Cate: That’s a great way of doing it. I tend to have my students do it individually, just because they don’t know each other very well yet. And I found that my students tend to respond better to individual documents, and then a group discussion, but it works differently with every single instructor and every single set of students. So there are multiple ways that people could do this kind of annotation.
John: You did mention that this syllabus is not something spit out by a computer, but last week, we had a workshop where one of the things I suggested was that faculty may want to submit their syllabus to one of the AI tools out there and have it checked for inclusive language or to rewrite it in a more inclusive manner. And I think a lot of people found that, in that case, the computer did a better job than they did [LAUGHTER] in terms of creating that inclusive syllabus. But, at the other extreme, one of the things I’ve often done and I think you mentioned this in your book is in smaller classes, co-create the syllabus with students at the very start of the semester.
Cate: Yeah, I teach a course on history pedagogy. And there I give my students blank sheets of paper and say “Here’s your syllabus,” [LAUGHTER] and then they get to start brainstorming the things that they should put in syllabuses. They’re experts at syllabi, they read them all the time, they see many more than most of us do. And so they brainstorm what they think it should include. And then I put them in small groups. And together, they start to talk about, “Oh, that was a great idea you came up with, I didn’t think of that. Let’s put that in our syllabus.” Then we write their syllabi up on huge post-it notes that we put on the wall. And then everybody gets little post-it notes. And they get to walk around, and I ask them to do what I was asked to do at the Digital Pedagogy Lab, which is to say, “Who is the student that these authors are imagining as they write the syllabus?” Write it on your little post-it note, put your reactions on the wall. And what they very quickly learn is that they too have absorbed the idea that students are antagonists, students can’t be trusted, students are going to mess up somehow. And so then, as a class, we sit down together, and we say, “Okay, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to make those assumptions. So how are we going to write a document that accurately sets out expectations, that also supports and that communicates trust?”
Rebecca: In chapter three, you focus a bit on assessment. And many faculty note that when students do less well than maybe they thought they were going to or anticipated on a graded activity, they might become disengaged or lose interest or disappear. Can you talk a little bit about ways that we can make our assessments more equitable, and to make expectations more transparent to our students?
Cate: There are so many ways that we can do that. Including students in the process at all points, I think, is a way that we can never really go wrong. But I think that one of the most important ways we can approach assessment is to think about, are we being inclusive? are we giving our students the tools they need to be able to show us what they know?…because so often, what we’re actually grading or assessing or giving feedback on is, how they write about what they know, or how they make an equation about what they know, we’re not actually just finding out what they know, what they have learned. So giving them multiple ways to express what they know, is a great way of leveling the playing field of allowing students who maybe don’t excel at writing to still be able to show “Hey, I have been thinking, I’ve been turning this over and over, I have some new appreciation for whatever it is art, or music, or fishbones, or an equation, or set of chemical compounds.” So in my classes, it’s traditional for history to be assessed through writing papers. And I certainly do have my students do written work, I don’t get rid of it altogether. But I also make an assignment where my students get to create projects. And they can do anything they want to, except write a paper. So they do things like make quilts, and food, and board games, and they knit and make pottery. I’ve had people make raps and sea shanties. I’ve had people dress up as pirates and come talk to us about a day in their life. All of these things are based on historical research. All of these things have a reflective component at the end. But for a student who really struggles with writing, for example, this gives them a way of being able to show me they have been learning that term, that they have done research, that they’ve really engaged with the class material in a way that doesn’t limit them in any way.
John: In chapter 4, you address kindness in the classroom. Could you share a couple of ways in which faculty can display kindness in their classroom interactions?
Cate: I think one of the most basic and important ways that we show kindness in the classroom is we learn who our students are. And that means names. And that is increasingly challenging. It depends on how many, if you’ve got 300 students in your classroom, how do you learn their names? I tend to have smaller classes. So it is really doable for me to learn their names, but I still rely on tools that helped me do that. So I bring in name tags, and for the first several sessions, my students will write their name on their name tag, and if they feel comfortable, they’ll put their pronouns on there too. I know that Vigi Sathy and Kelly Hogan talk about having name tents in their big lecture classes. And those name tents are also color coded. So then that helps them put people into small groups. People can turn those name tents on their end when they want to indicate they want to participate in conversation. They’re wonderful, wonderful tools. So there’s lots of resources out there that sort of suggests there are many, many ways to make sure that we’re getting to know our students, but I think that’s a really basic thing we do that says, “I know who you are. I know when you’re here, I really appreciate you being here and being engaged in a classroom activity.” I also think that it’s important to teach our students how to be in that space together. I think this is really important coming out of the height of the pandemic. We’re not done yet. but we are coming out of those most acute years. And certainly I have seen among my students on campus, that there was a period of time where it was odd for them to interact with other people because they hadn’t had practice. They had been in lockdown. They had been at home. They had been doing school online. And so we really had to sort of think about how do we interact? How do we talk to one another? How do we show that we respect one another? When something goes wrong, how do we show that we are accountable and responsible? How do we apologize, and mean, it. These are all things that we need to teach, as instructors to make sure that our classrooms are kind spaces in which learning can really happen.
John: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners that we haven’t yet discussed?
Cate: One of the things that comes up in the conclusion to my book is that it’s very easy to feel tossed around in higher education, like we’re in tiny little boats on a very large and angry ocean.[LAUGHTER] And certainly, there are structural problems that need our attention in higher ed. But we’re not powerless. And we get to make changes in the spheres that we control. And we get to approach our students, as fellow human beings who matter, we get to treat ourselves as people who matter. And kindness is the fabric of that, it’s what weaves everything together. It is the material from which we build inclusive spaces, and spaces where people’s words and ideas are valued. And without kindness, we end up with places that are disrespectful, we end up with places where people do not feel like someone’s listening to them. So I have the metaphor, that little boat being tossed around in my conclusion, but ultimately say, if we can just be kind to one another, then we can sort of temper that storm.
Rebecca: It’s a great image to end on, for sure in your book. And it’s such a great metaphor for really thinking through what sometimes it really feels like to be in higher ed, not only with our students, but with other colleagues. There’s lots of ways to bring this kindness work into other spaces within higher ed outside of the classroom as well.
Cate: Yeah, I agree. And one of the projects I’ve been involved with over the last couple of years is something called Care in the Academy, which is about showing kindness and care to each other. So focused on faculty, focused on staff, focused on those relationships, and how we show one another that we matter to each other.
Rebecca: Can you share some examples about what that might look like in spaces outside of the classroom?
Cate: Yeah, so some really concrete things that we recommended after 18 months of really thinking critically about this issue were things like extended bereavement leave. Places tend to give us three, maybe five days and they’re immediate. And the idea is that whatever mourning or immediate grieving you need to do will happen in like a week. And that’s just not practical or realistic, or how humans work. And in many cultures, it’s also not reflective of the way that people process death. So we talked about having maybe another three to five days that you can use for a year after someone passes and you can mark an anniversary, or maybe there is a ceremony that you need to attend. Or maybe there is a ritual that you need to perform, and you take time away to be able to do it. It’s a very small thing, but it makes such a difference in sort of saying we respect what a difficult time this is for you. Trying to improve reimbursement culture, there are so many people who are stringing things along on their credit cards, basically making loans to their institutions, and trying to speed up the process by which they are repaid as a basic form of respect, I think is really, really important to the way that we all function around one another. To not assume that people are sitting on vast mountains of cash that they can just make available to do things like go to conferences or to travel to another town or whatever the thing is. I think that’s also really important.
John: That’s especially true for junior faculty, for people who are contingent faculty and who are struggling a bit because this occupation does not pay all that well. It gets a lot easier once your kids are out of the house and you’re past those stages, but it’s a struggle for a very large share of faculty.
Cate: Especially given student loans being what they are. This lasts a very long time.
Rebecca: It’s something that sometimes faculty have in common with students and we don’t always recognize or acknowledge that.
Cate: Yeah, I agree. And I think our students don’t often look at us and think, “Oh, wow, they’re still paying off their student loans.” [LAUGHTER] They tend to see us as something other than precarious. Whether we are in a contingent position or not, very often our financial lives are in some kind of precarious situation, just because the reality of funding higher education careers is what it is right now.
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
Cate: What’s next is that I am going to go read a book about biomimicry. And biomimicry is looking to the natural world for patterns that all organisms share, and taking wisdom from those patterns. So it helps us in terms of ecology. But I just heard a podcast that was applying this to the way that we organize our institutions, and thinking about the way that organisms heal after fire or clear cutting or a flood, for example, the different jobs that different organisms have in the recovery process, and thinking about how we make really resilient institutions and organizations by looking to the natural world. So I know very little about it. I’ve listened to that one podcast. So I am going to go read a book that is all about that topic.
Rebecca: That sounds really fun.
Cate: Yeah, I think so.
John: And I think we’ve all needed a bit of resilience over the last few years with the challenges we’ve all faced. So it sounds like an interesting way of addressing that issue.
Cate: Yeah, I’m hoping I will get some fresh ideas.
Rebecca: Reading stuff that’s unfamiliar is always a great way to reinvigorate our own work.
Cate: Yeah, and I have not really considered biology since I was 16 years old and took my GCSEs. So this will be a real treat and a delight to exercise part of my brain that hasn’t been exercised in a while.
John: Well, thank you for joining us. It’s great talking to you. And I really enjoyed reading through your book. It grew from this very nice, useful essay that many of us were reading through during the pandemic, to a much more elaborate discussion of how to be an effective teacher in all aspects of teaching.
Rebecca: Such a needed robust resource.
Cate: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be with you today and have this conversation. And I really appreciate all your kind words about the book.
Rebecca: We look forward to talking to you in the future, hopefully the near future.
Cate: Thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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