with guest Penny Kittle

Penny Kittle teaches writing at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. Penny is the founder of the Book Love Foundation. She has written nine books on teaching and travels the world to learn beside teachers and students. 
Links: https://www.booklovefoundation.org/, http://www.pennykittle.net/ 

Twitter, IG: @pennykittle

Joe Bukartek empowers people to live intentionally. As host of the podcast, Intentionally Ever After [www.IntentionallyEverAfter.com], Joe is an ultramarathon runner and pickleball enthusiast, living at the beach with his family as part of his own curated intentional lifestyle.

As a board certified Intentional Lifestyle Coach, Joe helps individuals to have lives and careers that are wildly more fulfilling. Ready to curate a life of intention? Connect with Joe on his website [www.joebukartek.com] or LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/joebukartek/.]

Joe also helps emerging adults build lifelong success beyond the nest in his specialized program, Intention to Launch. This results-driven partnership guides participants as they prepare to leave home and discover their ideal lives. Ready to launch? Check out [www.IntentionToLaunch.com]

If you would like to have your own intentional conversation with Joe, either on or off the air, visit https://www.joebukartek.com/contact

Check out more episodes at intentionallyeverafter.com

Transcript

0:03

More than anything, I saw that classrooms that centered student joy and love and their natural curiosity were not only beautiful places to be, but were the places where kids learned the most. So it is an intentional stance that is against the standardization and the constant testing and the top down approach that happens in so many places in education. This is an intentionally ever after join intentional lifestyle coach Joe Brokercheck for a series of personal conversations and coaching sessions with various people about how living with intention shows up for them. Greetings everyone. Welcome to another episode of Intentionally Ever After. Today, I am absolutely delighted to be speaking with the renowned Penny Kettle. Annie, welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Joe. Yes, I'm very excited to speak with you. Penny, will you kindly introduce yourself to folks? My name is Penny Kettle, and I am a teacher here in New Hampshire. I teach writing at Florida State University, and I do some writing myself. I've written nine books that are about how to teach reading and writing. The rest of my school year travel to some places close and some places very far away to talk to teachers about creating classrooms that center joy. That center joy. That's great. I'll probably ask a little more about that throughout this call. What I'd like to do next, if you're open to it, is do kind of a rapid fire of the main questions, get a one or two line in front from you, and then we'll dig in a little bit deeper. So I. Am ready. Penny, what does it mean to live intentionally. To know your purpose and stand by it? Awesome. What is one change in habit that has had an exponential payoff? I now paddleboard almost all of the time from the minute I can until it turns to late fall winter here in New Hampshire. What have you said no to that has made a significant impact in your life? I actually have to say no a lot, and it's about balancing my schedule so that I have time for my granddaughters and things that bring me joy. So that I can share joy. What area in your life feels just about perfect? My relationship with my granddaughters from the minute my first one was born, I resigned my full time job and started taking care of her one day a week. And then now I pick them up for grandma days and it's just something I can cultivate exactly as I want it to be. Awesome. Who is someone you admire and what you admire about them? So many cats. I have lots of answers to this question. No, absolutely not. Who is someone that comes to mind when I say that? My husband. Do you have a short list as to what you admire about him? Oh, he is. He is absolutely the poster for integrity, courage, age, honesty, loves. He has high ethics. He holds people to them, but he also is filled with gentleness and kindness. What do you imagine some people admire about you? Well, one thing is that in September, I will start my 40th year of teaching. In a time when we have a mass resignation of teachers, many, many people come up to me to say they're grateful that I'm still in the work. It brings me such joy. I can't imagine when I will give it up. But they also, I think, admire that somebody called me a straight shooter the other day and someone else said that I inspire them because I'm a storyteller. It can be helpful when someone tells you directly what they admire about you. You don't have to wonder. I know because I drawing on the conference. I was out Thursday. Perfect. And recency. That's great. Okay, Penny Kendall, thank you so much. You are off the hot seat for the Rapid Fire section of the interview. Thank you very much. But now we're going to just go back through and go deeper so the seats are going to get hot again. What does it mean to live intentionally? You mentioned Joy. That was something that came up quite a bit for this one in particular. You talked about knowing your purpose and standing by it. So years ago in teaching was invited to start coaching other teachers, and I told them that I would only do it if I could keep one class for myself so that I would always have to be living what I was telling teachers I thought they should do and that they would at any time be allowed to come in and watch me fail and watch me struggle and watch me recover and figure out how to do it better. And I always stuck to that. But during that process, as observing and coaching and living beside teachers, K-12 five Elementaries, middle and High school for 15 years, more than anything, I saw that classrooms that centered student joy and love and their natural curiosity were not only beautiful places to be, but were the places where kids learned the most. So it is an intentional stance that is against the standardization, the constant testing and the top down approach that happens in so many places in education. Without asking you to. Well, maybe I will, but you respond to this as us. Why do you think it seems so counter these movements, this top down approach? Why do you think it seems so counter to this centering around the student? Choi? Well, I think that people outside of a deep understanding of learning believe that all kids can move at the same rate or believe that all kids can reach the same places at the same time. And if you've ever been in a classroom of 25 little eight year olds, for example, you would instantly know that's not true. And you would also know that they all are interested in different things and they have this need to collaborate. And we instead want them all at their own desks answering questions that they didn't ask and encouraging them to do the same kind of work. And what that creates is that you instantly have a competition because all kids are doing the exact same thing all the time. Then they feel this I'm never going to be good at this because she's better or. And so I've always been immersed in the reading and writing workshop model which values the individual growth of kids that allows you to have kids reading different things and all growing as readers, and it allows you to encourage them as writers to find their voice and their own creative organization for something. It requires a great deal from teachers. And what we know is true is that this country in particular doesn't trust teachers, and it's particularly bad right now. And if you don't trust who's with children, you know, I would have to ask you, why did you hire them? And then I would have to say, if you don't trust them, they can never do their best work. They're always working in response to something someone else told them to do. So the whole question that you began with that idea of living intentionally is that I started a foundation, a nonprofit foundation in response to the fact that teachers couldn't get money for classroom libraries. And I knew that what was happening in my classroom where kids were becoming voracious, inspired, curious readers at any age could happen if teachers had their hands on books. So in the last ten years, we've raised over $1,000,000. We give 100% of what's donated to us, to teachers, and we've put libraries in 400 classrooms across North America. We're not giving up, though. We also do professional learning. In the summer. We have 1400 teachers and a book club from 15 countries, and they all learn together. And we're determined to continue to support teachers who center joy and engagement and can continue to do this work even in all kinds of settings that really get in the way. That's great. That's great to have such a movement behind this, despite the structures that are in place or the pressures maybe that that aren't set up initially for success. It's very promising. It's great. Thank you. Yeah, it's fabulous. I have a very unrelated question, but it came up because you used the word voracious around reading. And what other instances has that word been used to describe anything else? That's the only thing I've heard it describe is reading. Can you can you enlighten me here? Wow. Very. Yes. It really is about wanting to do something or go after something with your whole self. So you could think of a lot. A voracious skier ride who attacks the mountain or skis every single day. That would be a hard place to be, but I don't use it a lot. I do use it with reading, though. That's why I asked. And I figured I could ask you because I've only ever heard it for reading. I think it's a really powerful word, but. It's insatiable, right? Yeah. So if it's insatiable, I'm a voracious consumer of chocolate, so it could be used elsewhere. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to. I'm going to endeavor to use it more frequently and outside of that context. Thanks for playing along and help me understand for yourself about your intentional lifestyle. What are the things that you insist upon in order to live intentionally? Our home is collaboration. From the very beginning, when we had our children, we had to share things and who does what and how. So teaching our kids that family meeting time meant you could bring a problem or an issue to the table. We made our home a place where readers live. We filled our house with books. As you can see. But this is only my office of Books, and we had planned reading time as a family. We read aloud all the way through all seven books of the Harry Potter series with our children. And I think that that's one piece that helps sustain my ability to do my work in very different ways. I do a lot of traveling. For example, somebody had to hold down the fort from the beginning. And the other thing is that I read across ideas, values, beliefs and experiences that I haven't had so that I deepen my own understanding and empathy for places I haven't been. And there's always just so much more to learn intentionally. I love driving an hour to work through the mountains, listening to podcasts or wonderful music and preparing myself to be in my classroom. As someone who truly loves life. It's fantastic. Would you mind sharing a little more detail about your family meeting times? What maybe logistically for folks who think that sense intriguing or appealing, which I do. So conflicts always happen in families, and it was easier to resolve conflicts by saying if it was in the heat of the moment between our kids, for example, or directed at us for making rules, let's schedule a family meeting time which allows everybody to cool off because, you know, it is maybe going to be a couple of hours from now after dinner or perhaps we need to move it to the next day or so. There's nothing official about them. Everybody got comfortable. We faced each other always. And then it could be about one thing or it could be about two or three things. But we kept them short so that it was never a feeling of like a board meeting or something, but rather, let's try to work on this. And I can remember we got two cats because they really wanted cats. And my husband and I, neither one of us really liked cats and the kids had promised, as all do, to clean the litter box, etc. They weren't. And so Potter I would call a family meeting, you guys, this is it's making us frustrated. And you're able to teach your kids how to name their feelings, how to resolve conflicts, how to have conversations when you are in close proximity to somebody that you disagree with quite a bit. And that I think it's such an important piece of parenting is to teach your kids the language of resolving conflicts. What a great way of modeling it as well and being part of it and not just go tell your sister you said you're sorry or make them, you know, give a hug. Oh, we did that too. And then they don't have to be mutually exclusive. Right. But you show it another way. You were part of that as well. And that's fabulous. In the planned reading time, this sounds like something that maybe fewer families might do. Can you tell us with that what that looked like or still does? I'll tell you one of the reasons why there's a new book out by Daniel Williams. I don't know his last name. He wrote a book called Why Do Kids Hate School? And then his newest one is called The Reading Mind. He's a cognitive psychologist that believes that leisurely reading is what everyone has lost. So if you're sitting on a plane and you see you're the only one with your head in a book, that's one of the examples. And you'll notice that if you start looking for it and he says the reason it's the number of options. And so one of the things that I'm so struck by with parents, they will tell me now none of us are readers or we just really don't like reading or they'll read on their phones. And what we're talking about is sustained engagement with something over hundreds of pages and there is this famous research on a book called Priest in the Squared by Marianne Wells. She was at Tufts then. That talks about a bi literate brain that we have brains that can skin scan for information and get things quickly, and that's useful in this modern age. But there are also there's wiring in our brain that goes back a millennia where we can read, we can stay in engagement with something. And the truth is we're losing that wiring because we are practicing it. And so the idea that it doesn't truly matter to me what the book is, but I want kids to experience the entire arc of a story across 300 pages. I want them to experience that deep dive into being transported. And the only way to do that is to develop the stamina first to stay with something that long. And so what you have is that the skim across your phone, reading that click and go that fast thing does not develop stamina. It develops something else entirely. And so if you think about it, everyone's going to read you guys. It's reading time, doesn't matter what you read. But in my house, our kids were young before phones. I would have been more adamant about now, but I would always say, not on your phone. And what I always talk to parents and to kids about and teachers is there's a balance needed in everything. And kids have enough time on their screens. They don't need more time than that. So during that 30 minutes, they can be reading a book, they can be reading a magazine, something that sustains their engagement. And over time, this comfortable feeling of all of us are curled up with whatever it is. And do you know your heart rate begins to slow? After 6 minutes of reading? One thing my students always tell me because it's a part of what we do in my work is that they never knew reading could cause them to feel calmer, less anxious about the world, just reading by itself. And it's true because you are relaxing into reading. So family reading time, I mean, create it however you want, but make it this sacred time when everybody gets to relax into what they're reading. And, you know, I know some families have conversations after or, you know, we didn't always talk about our reading, but sometimes it morphs into, let's all read this together, and then somebody reads aloud pretty lessons. That's great. So effectively become the family book club. But the importance was about carving aside the time not being on your screen and I imagine there's benefits to everyone doing it at the same time. Everyone again, the kids seeing the parents doing it as well. So it wasn't at any point a form of punishment or, you know, you got to make sure you do your reading before you do anything else because you cared about your children's development. Yeah, it's like we all have to be human if a kid falls asleep. What they're reading during that time, I don't wait and not be like, get back there. Right. You're just. But it's this sense of, you know, did we have nights we skipped it? Yeah. Because we had somebody had hockey out of town or we had but we made it enough of a routine that they knew how much it mattered and they experienced the joy of reading. Yeah. How about these days? Your daughters, are they. Are they readers? Would they, would you say their readers or would they, the. Granddaughters. Or even granddaughters? Yeah. Yeah, I know everybody in our family is still a reader. We all all read a lot. And my granddaughters, you know, it's the perfect example. You fill your house with books and you put them in their path and they are read to every night and they go to the library and they develop a love of reading. But we know they won't sustain it without continual joy in their lives from books. It can't all be heart. It can't all be because you have to write. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you for sharing that as well. The one change in habit that for you has had an exponential payoff. You mentioned paddle boarding. Kindly share more about that. Well, it was early COVID here in New Hampshire. We're a very rural community with a lot of outdoor space, and my daughter and I rented Paddleboards one afternoon. We'd never done it. And she was up here teaching summer house for eight months when it first shut down the world. My husband and I had tried it on vacation and we went to a lake. She picked it up very quickly and we both immediately could feel that the rest of the world kind of disappeared. Because when you are paddle boarding, you're rarely surrounded by other people, and especially here in our state. And we started, you know, seeking different lakes. We could try and see how long we went before we wanted to come back. And one of the things I noticed right away is that we split up. We would start out from shore at the same time, but we would disappear into our and there was such a meditative thing. You have nothing else to do but notice the birds and the dragonflies and the wind in the trees and how the lake shifts when a boat goes by, or what it feels like to stay balanced. And we, after only a few times, we're dying to buy our own Paddleboards we didn't, but we wanted to. And then to have a place where we didn't have to strap into the car. It's like one of my failings as a human is I struggle with all of those kinds of things. I kept setting them up wrong and the husbands come home, be like, How did you do it this way? So we eventually bought a camp on a lake and that's where we store everything and patent I paddled from the minute it is warm enough, you know, the ice has gone on the lake until we can't anymore. That's great. So. So this is daily. Then you try to get out there on a regular basis. I try to ever a single morning when the lake is completely flat, you know, and it's like glass is the best time to be out. It's beautiful. Mm hmm. What have you said? No to that has made a significant impact on your life. The biggest was saying no to my full time, everyday work at the high school. And I knew that if I. I work at plumbers two days a week now, and so that would open up space for me to decide what to do with my time. So that's the biggest difference. And I know there's a lot of privilege bound up in that that I can decide to only work part time. But I'm 61, so I'm pretty close to, you know, retiring. But that it was just the idea of saying I need more space to make decisions about what I do. Time to write, time to. I don't know. I work in all kinds of different spaces because I have the time to. Yeah, well, it sounds like it's very big about managing your time, your schedule, And in the Rapid Fire section, you, you mentioned the minute your granddaughter was born that you resigned the one job. So that seemed very clear to you that you've got this new commitment, this new priority, and there's got to be room for it. So it sounds like that was that was a big piece for you? Yeah, it's just one of those, to tell you the truth. My phone, I never had my phone in class. And the day that they had gone into the hospital, I brought it to class and I said to my students, I've actually even got it on because when she's born, I want to know. And all of a sudden the phone rang in class and I didn't even notice. And the student goes, This girl, it's the baby. So I was like, Oh my goodness, I was crying before I even answered the phone. And I just knew that to have this relationship with my granddaughter. And now two of them was going to be more important than anything I could imagine I still had to do as a full time teacher at the high school. So it was just that clear to me. I hung up the phone and thought, That's it, I need more time. Yeah, that's great. It's nice when things are that clear and obvious. Hey, it's time on the planet, Joe. You got to live long enough to know exactly what works and what doesn't. These would be very different answers if you were talking to me at 30. Well, that's fair. I think that's fair. So, relatedly, what do you struggle maybe still to say no to? My husband would say everything because of my passion for the Book Club Foundation. I say yes to a lot of things that are donations or are free. And it seems so easy at first to say, Oh, I'll go do that. And then it's in your schedule, which is pressure. And so you might open up a day in my week and see five different things I've agreed to do. And it's not that any of them aren't going to be good, but that I also have groceries to shop for, you know, life. And and so I do tend to overcommit. I really have to work to leave days free in my schedule and I need time to write because I still use my writing to do all kinds of work in the world and I need time. That's set aside for that because writing doesn't come easily. It's always a process. So having my mornings to write is important, but they're often used up. Yeah, that makes sense. So I engage with a number of writers now in my in my network, Given who I live with, how do you set up your writing space, the writing environment, when it's time to write? Do you do you have a process or a formula that you use? Okay, so that little chair over there. Or. Is it? I have my writer's notebook. It's always by hand. That's how everything starts in my life. And right behind that chair are all books of poetry. And I always read poetry and it just gets my brain moving and I start writing and my writing is not linear. It's all over the place. I write sideways, I write all because it's I have this idea and it continues over here, but it's not part of this through line. And I allow myself to write anyway that gets the work done. So as messily as someone else would look at it and say, That's so disorganized. And it might be to me as well, but to me, none of that matters. What matters is can I find the place that's going to get this idea space enough to grow into, to become that can use. When I'm working on a book or chapter, I am. I work differently for the generation of it. The beginnings. I'm often in my notebook or I started my notebook. I got to write that assessment chapter, so I'm going to write it my notebook because I'm most comfortable. I relax, but then I always move to some kind of or document or Google or, you know, depending on if I'm collaborating. And then it becomes there's a finished quality when you open up your laptop. And there's a document for me personally, it's a finished I'm working on a draft that looks done very different than when I'm handwriting because I know it's not done. So I am a little more tense. And sometimes that focus is at the right time because I'm in edits or I'm responding to editorial feedback and that's where it should be. But I also know that those two parts are very different. And if I'm given an assignment or a question to answer in an article, I will play with it for quite a long time and in my notebook I'll even box it in colors so I can find all the pages where I wrote about that thing. When I go back to try to start pulling it together. Yeah. Do you have a favorite writing implement or brand of pens that you like to use? I don't have one here. It's a super cheap little pilot pen that has a black nib. And the problem is for a long time I wrote only in cartridge pens, so I have some gorgeous cartridge pens, but I don't use them anymore. They often smear they all kinds of reasons, but that's one of my favorites. The problem is they're disposable. So when these run out, I'm not using them because the environment is in need of all of us. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a nice thought. That's a very responsible thought, especially for someone who spent so much time out in the environment and benefits directly from enjoying it. Now, what area in your life feels just about perfect? It just has to be family time. You have these bonds with people and some of my best friends I would include as family and they there are people you make time for. We have started a tradition of traveling with my best friend from high school, who's still my best friend and her husband and we do that once a year at least that kind of time. It's the unstructured. What do you want to do? Have a glass of great wine. Sit out on the deck until it's dark. You know, that kind of stuff. Being able to be on this journey with my son and his daughters and my daughter, who's in her fourth year of teaching. So we have a lot to talk about. This journey of lives is the greatest thing in my life. That's fabulous. Does your daughter take in all of your words of wisdom at this early stage in her career. So she didn't go to school to become a teacher? She actually graduated in public service, and so she looked at work in nonprofits and then started working in charter schools to pay bills and decided maybe she wanted to be a teacher. And her first couple of years, I think it was just too much to try to also listen to her mom. I may have had some lessons back in there, you know, in her head somewhere, but she's terrific. She does not need my advice. In fact, she works with multi-lingual learners and has crafted some skills that that I don't have. But for this most recent book I wrote, we got to teach her class together, teach it. And the kids called us Miss Kettle and Little Miss Kettle because she's only five feet tall. I can't imagine a more powerful moment in my career than to teach side by side with my daughter. It was really incredible. Wow. Yeah. I can only imagine. This is a recently published book. Yes. Yes. It came out in the fall in November. I thought so. Would you would you mind or would you be willing to share a little bit about that book, that work in particular of the many you've done so far? It's called Micro Mentor Texts, and it is about taking the books that we all have in our classrooms that we love already and finding little passages that teach writing craft. So it might be like how writers organize, as I call it, artfully, the power of three or the list, and just showing students lots of examples of what that looks like through the eyes of case in calendar, for example, who wrote King and the Dragonflies. And you pull out passages, you teach them how they work, you have kids imitate them. How do you imitate this? Move the list in your own work and they start writing their own stories and ideas using the craft that authors use. So it's a craft moves and examples of each one. Lots of examples because I work with Scholastic, who has relationships with authors, and we got a lot of permissions I probably couldn't have gotten anywhere else, and it was a joy to write. It is a joy to share with teachers. They send me stuff all the time that their kids have done with the craft moves, So it's been really fun. It's fantastic. Who is someone you admire? You're allowed to change it from your original answer. But you know, I'll remind you that you did say your husband. And what did you admire? What do you admire about them? Pat just is he's so many things. He's this incredible friend. He's thoughtful. I got to tell you, we have had this tradition our whole married life, where he will give me something as a Christmas gift and he'll say, this is going to make the top ten and what he means as he has these gifts that have hit the top ten because they are so thoughtful. So one time, for example, he knew I had been teaching at a university, one book by Jonathan Kozol for years. So as my birthday was coming up now it was Christmas. He sent Jonathan Kozol a letter telling him about how much I loved his work, along with copies of my first two books, and asked him sent him the copy I usually used in my teaching to sign it and return it. So on Christmas I got a paperback book and he handed it to me and said, This is going to make the top ten. I was like, He can't. I know what it is. Paperback book. There's no book is going to be that important. Inside the book was Jonathan's beautiful words to me, the letter that Pat had written him. Then he had responded with comments on my books. I mean, what a wonderful thing to do. Right. And Pat does that not just for me, but for his kids, for he's he's really observant and he's an incredible problem solver. So I think we often admire people who do things we can't do. And so problem solving, I do all kinds of that in my work, but not the kind of problem solving he does. He's an engineer by training, so he's always got stuff figured out that I wouldn't even know what questions to ask, but never carries that in an arrogant way. It's always just, Isn't this kind of cool? You know, he's building walls in the basement to do something else, and I admire that. He's always looking for a solution. He's not somebody who gets mired in the problem, but is always looking for how do we fix it, how do we solve it. How to make it better? Listen. Yeah, well, I can say I'm very fortunate enough to have gotten to know Pat a little bit. Well, my family's time in your area was less than a calendar year, but I got to know him fairly well. You're not lying. In case anyone thinks that you're a big fat liar. No, He's such a delightful, delightful man. So this this checks out. This just enhances the story of Pat for me. So thank you for sharing that. So what you would imagine that some people admire about you. That's always a much harder question, I think. I think it's got to go back to I was not afraid to say to people I worked for that I either disagreed. You know, there were principals who would bring in programs and say, this is, you know, really early on a principal who said to me, so your kids don't carry around this grammar book like the other teachers kids do in seventh grade. How come? Right. And those things never scared me. It was like, I have an opportunity, right? I'm going to convert her. And it was funny because she's a super powerful, very successful woman. And I was a young teacher and I said, Well, and I just opened up the grammar book and it was something like the inverted commas. I won't say it right, but some weird phrase. And I said, So tell me what this is. And she goes, She can tell. It is like a little bit of a challenge. She kind of sat back and she went, I have no idea. And I said, And you are an amazing writer, a good communicator, professional woman, and you haven't had the need for that information. And what I'm telling you is that I'm going to work super hard to make our kids stronger readers and writers. But it is not about rules. It's about learning how language works in context. And that's what I'm going to focus on. And any time you want to come see what that looks like, come on down. And then years later, in my own town here, the local paper published an editorial where the person attacked the spelling scores of kids in the district. And I wrote an article, an op ed, if you will, for just to explain that I taught eighth grade at the high school or the middle school, high school, and that, you know, the misunderstanding about these isolate skills and their impact and how kids learn to spell and all kinds of things. And then at the end I said, and if you ever want to see what this looks like, please come and visit my classroom. And I knew it was going out to the entire town, right? Well, what I didn't know is that the former guru of writing read that editorial. He had retired to this area in my work. Donald grade's name just met everything. He wrote a book that sold 250,000 copies in 1980, and he read parts of my editorial out loud at the national convention. And the only reason I knew that I didn't go was that a person in town told me, did you know He read from that editorial in his keynote speech to the national convention? I was like, and it was it was moments like that that you realize you can stand up. If you can back up what you're doing, you can stand up for this. Years later, I went to my principal, said, I'm only going to be gone an hour. I've got this meeting across town. Could you cover my class? And he said he would, but he happened to be covering it on a day when the kids were writing these reflections on their lives as readers. And he left my room and said, How did you make that happen? I didn't know that was going to happen, but it was like those moments when you say, this is too important, I'm going to show you what it means and I'm willing to struggle with it in front of you. That doesn't scare me. What scares me is that we'll make the wrong decision. So I think what people admire is that I've always tried to change the world for kids as learners, and that I've been unafraid to do that. One might say you were voracious about it. Yeah, maybe they do. Maybe people use that word. You never go. I'm gonna. I'm gonna I'm just going to go ahead and go on record and say it. So you you kind of alluded to this phenomenon that age gives you maybe either more confidence in being able to say no or just more wisdom, experience, what have you. What do you think it was about you as a younger professional that made you feel confident enough or give you the nerve to speak up then? Compared to now, you can do so based off of empirical research. And then again, all these experiences you've been a part of. That's the trickiest question you've asked me yet. I'm trying to think back when I became a really serious tennis player in late middle school. I had been playing for years and I started playing in tournaments and and I was good. And I think, you know, I think a lot of it I was 13 when I started high school because my parents put me in kindergarten early and I made the varsity tennis team for what is now a five day school. And they had never had a freshman on the team. And there was something about that. I was tall by the end of freshman year and I was a good athlete. That gave a lot of confidence. That's all I can trace it to. I was a lazy student in high school. I mean, really. I mean, you think about the other parts of my life, I wasn't necessarily going to be anything except that I you have to have a lot of courage to play in a match with all eyes on you. And it's, you know, the team wins or loses based on what you do that day. It's also an individual sport. You're on a team, but you're individually responsible. I mean, I married a Division one track, very excellent runner, and both of us talk about that, that idea that when you're playing or in a sport where it's all on you, that does change you a little bit. Sure. Well, it sounds like as an individual contributor or a high achiever in a space where maybe you weren't expected to, you lived the experience that, hey, I'm doing a thing that most people thought I couldn't. So maybe it just showed you that it is possible. Not only is it possible that you're doing it. So maybe that gave you I don't know. It's so interesting. Well, it's true that our family didn't have any money. We were a very struggling family and there were a lot of kids with private coaches and memberships at clubs in town. Because I was in Portland, Oregon. That certainly had a reason to be more confident than I did, right? I was really trying to scratch my way to the top. So I think there is something about that. I also, you know, it's funny, middle school, there was no girls basketball team. So my best friend and I tried out for the boys team because Title nine, you know, I was going to say these things are equal but hadn't come to our town. And I said when we tried out, he did not want us on the team, but her dad called and her dad had political influence and he had to put us on the team. And it was really miserable. I mean, he would never turn the lights on locker room. He would make us sit on the bench and wait for one of the other boys to decide we could be on their team. And then he even went so far as to say he had no uniforms for us and we couldn't sit with the team at the first match, first game because we didn't have uniforms on. So we had to sit up in the stands. I mean, it was just horrible. But there was something about that, like, you aren't stopping us. My dad used to laugh that I didn't sleep on curlers that night. I was like trying to be the girl. But then I would show up and play hard on the boys basketball team like it was. I don't know, Maybe I was a fighter from the get go. It certainly sounds like it. And I bet if we more time on it, we could go a little, little further back, like right. Or if I had the benefit of your your parents vision or view on it, they would probably share some things as well. Yeah, that's great. Penny, what other thoughts do you have on living intentionally or anything else you'd like to share in the name of intention? I think that no one's going to give you permission lots of times to do the thing you most want to do and you have to figure out what that is. For me, it was always that I wanted to create these experiences for young kids that would lead them to have lives of joy. And how was I going to create that if I was trapped in a system that wouldn't allow it? Right? So pushing back against that became super important. And I think for so many people, COVID woke them up to, I'm in a job that I don't like and maybe it's time that I make a change. And there was a lot of movement across different professions, and one of those is teaching. And there has never been a time when we've needed teachers more than we do now. And so I just think, you know, if somebody is out there thinking, hey, I always wondered if I could do that, that you might find that you could and that you would find joy there, because people will say, why would anyone want to be a teacher right now? And I'm always like, because it is the greatest work there is. You get to be with 25 or however many young people day after day, and they are filled with hope and they are constantly going to surprise you and just make life brighter. So I think part of what we all have to do is say we have a limited amount of time on this planet, right? We don't have time to waste. We don't know how much we have, but we don't have time to waste. Let's do something that makes us live as fully as we would want our kids to live. And is awesome. That is very refreshing in particular about the teaching profession, right? Because that's not typically the narrative for as long as I can ever remember, you know. But yeah, the permission to to, to pursue what you think you even might want to do, whether you know it or not. You're right. No, it's just going to give it to you. But it sounds like Penny Kettle you are giving everyone listening to this conversation the permission to pursue what they're interested in. Is that quoting you correctly? For sure. Okay, beautiful. Thank you. I thought so. I want to thank you for the time and for that careful consideration of my questions and sharing a little bit about you and your insights and experience. I really appreciate the time. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Wonderful. This has been intentionally ever after hosted by intentional lifestyle coach Joe Booker Tech. If you would like to have your own intentional conversation with Joe on or off the air visit intentionally ever after dot com. Thanks for listening.