BAIL Yourself Out

Teach, Hustle, Inspire

February 06, 2024 Kandice Whitaker Season 2 Episode 8
Teach, Hustle, Inspire
BAIL Yourself Out
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BAIL Yourself Out
Teach, Hustle, Inspire
Feb 06, 2024 Season 2 Episode 8
Kandice Whitaker
The new Bail Yourself Out podcast is hosted by Kandice Whitaker, a successful entrepreneur, and specialist in navigating corporate culture. With a fresh new approach to maximizing optimal career moves - the Bail Yourself Out podcast is where the power lunch and the after-work happy hour intersect for dynamic business discussions in a relaxed atmosphere.
Follow us @BAILYourselfOut

Season 2 Episode 8 - "Teach, Hustle, Inspire"
Guest Co-Host - Dr. Shaun Woodley

Keep up with Kandice Whitaker and the BAIL Yourself Out Community Online
www.linktr.ee/bailyourselfoutpod
© 2023 Alpha and Omega Consulting Inc. All rights reserved.





Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers
The new Bail Yourself Out podcast is hosted by Kandice Whitaker, a successful entrepreneur, and specialist in navigating corporate culture. With a fresh new approach to maximizing optimal career moves - the Bail Yourself Out podcast is where the power lunch and the after-work happy hour intersect for dynamic business discussions in a relaxed atmosphere.
Follow us @BAILYourselfOut

Season 2 Episode 8 - "Teach, Hustle, Inspire"
Guest Co-Host - Dr. Shaun Woodley

Keep up with Kandice Whitaker and the BAIL Yourself Out Community Online
www.linktr.ee/bailyourselfoutpod
© 2023 Alpha and Omega Consulting Inc. All rights reserved.





Speaker:

Welcome to the bail yourself out Appy Hour Podcast where each week we'll help you navigate the corporate jungle. Here's your host Kandice Whitaker is happy hour.

Kandice Whitaker:

I'm your coworker Candice with the K pull up a chair and your favorite drink for the bail yourself out. Happy Hour is about to start now. Hey there friends. Welcome to the bail yourself out. Happy Hour podcast. I'm your host career coach and speaker Kandice Whitaker, your guide to living your best life through resilience, classes and session, pull up a chair and learn from today's special guest co host Dr. Sean Woodley, founder of teach hustle Inspire. Today Dr. Woodley is going to be dropping gems that's going to help us raise better students and be more informed mentors to the students in our lives. But you know what, that's not all. We're going to be delving into invaluable wisdom about learning from your mistakes. Dr. Woodley opens up about the times he stumbled professionally and how those experiences became catalysts for his growth. You know why? Because he believed change was possible. So classes in session, get ready to learn and be motivated as we explore how to honor yourself. By simply being yourself and taking up space. It's time to kick back, relax, and absorb the positive vibes in the happy hour lounge. Keep away You got it.

Van Whitaker:

You're listening to Kandice with a K. And together we'll learn how to bail yourself out. Be believed that you can a except change is a natural part of any process. I inventory your strengths and the strengths available to you and your network. l learn from your experience and the experience of others.

Kandice Whitaker:

Do you want me to speak at your next event? Hit me up at bail yourself out. pod.com Now back to the show. Hey there Hey friends. This is your girl Kandice with a K hanging out with you and the bail yourself out Happy Hour lounge. Today I have my special co host and foot and friend Shaun we were just talking about this. We've known each other over 30 years we go back to middle school.

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

He is recording car seats Most definitely.

Kandice Whitaker:

We go back like the May back. But now we've all grown up. He is a former educator. He's a consultant and CEO of teach hustle, inspire. We'll tell you about that a little bit later. But he's also reppin Hampton, you y'all and Alpha Phi Alpha. Let's clap it up. Dr. Shaun wood?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Well, I am first of all, I want to thank you, I appreciate you, Kandice, for allowing me the opportunity to join your platform. I am just somebody who is here to make the world a better place for our kids like, fundamentally speaking, I'm just trying to redefine what good teaching and learning looks like for babies so that they have access to the same amount of education to the same amount of knowledge and the same amount of opportunities as anybody else. That is why literally beside my family like that is the reason that I get up every day. I

Kandice Whitaker:

absolutely love that. And that's why I wanted you to come and talk to us. So even though my people, we're not all educators listening, most of us have kids, you know, whether they're our own children or children in our lives, and we all want them to do good. So how can we as parents, or as mentors, aunties, uncles, how can we inspire our kids and help y'all who are in education?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

So it's a couple of things to understand about that. Whether you are an educator, whether you are a parent, mentor, role model, community member or something along those lines, what are the first things that it's important to understand is that education the way it is designed, it's not technically designed for everybody to be successful. As just me as a researcher, like I understand how this thing was built. And the way it was designed literally from the ground up, it was designed to exclude people from certain populations and or demographics. And a lot of people Oh, it was a race thing. But it was really a class thing. From the way it was inherently designed. And from the beginning of this, a lot of different stages of the way the public education system was designed, but fundamentally, when it was designed, if they were shooting for 30%, like the top 30%, to be the cream of the crop to have access to specific things and everybody else they were preparing to be factory workers to be, you know, laborers in some sort. So it was just training you to be an employee, and fundamentally like that foundational system is exactly the same Same as it is now we just got iPads. So wrong understanding that, like, it's important, like it's not designed for your students to be for your kids to be successful as students.

Kandice Whitaker:

So I heard you say that basically, we have the plantation system in play. Yeah,

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

it's designed so that people with certain resources can supplement what they don't get in school at home and have access to specific things. And or people in certain communities in certain zip codes have more access to certain things that people are different. On the other side of the tracks, you don't have the same resources, you don't have a lot of times, teachers with the same level experience that hold students to the same level of expectations. And so you get drastically different results like it is 100%, predictable, based on where somebody lives, you can predict the data based on where they live. And that

Kandice Whitaker:

totally makes sense. You know, after I graduated college, I did a brief stint as a teacher educator, myself, and I went to a conference, upstate New York and Buffalo. And I ran into a whole bunch of our teachers from Central Islip. And now they're talking to me, like I'm there, Pierre, I didn't necessarily feel like they appear at the time. That's a whole different conversation, very casually said, Well, you know, centralize up the numbers, they're still failing the school, I just graduated from this graduated from, like, why know that?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Like, just the broad spectrum of things, and especially like places like where we grew up. It's just this this narrative that exists, because before we I mean, think about when we were in middle school, we heard stuff about that school, Brentwood, neighboring school district, you hear stuff about school before you even get there. Yeah, oh,

Kandice Whitaker:

and the teachers withdraw cash money bullshit, to us to our faces for real. I don't know if you experienced that. But I definitely did.

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

One of the things that I really appreciate about my time in CI, is I can specifically point to specific teachers who I knew had my best interests in mind, and who wants to see us do well, and you can very easily tell the teachers that were there just because like, just for that check, because I know, you know, see, I think gets paid pretty well, especially in the longer that you're there. For example, with social media right now, I'm connected to some of, you know, our former educators and stuff like that. And even to this day, like, I still know that they were there for me, like one of my favorite teachers from that building was my one of my math teachers, Miss Cicero, the art teacher, his Baglio, like, those are my people like for real. And I knew from the first moment I stepped in that classroom that they were there because they wanted to see me do well. But I can name some of the teachers in some other subject areas who it was just like, I specifically remember, there's one teacher and I wrote about this in the book that I had, where we had packets that we got each and every week. And first of all, beyond the the amount of trees that was just being destroyed, like literally every student got a 30 page packet every single week. And there was no instruction, it was just like you go read the packet, and you answer these questions next week, read the packet. And it's like that for the entire year.

Kandice Whitaker:

I think I have that feature of social studies. Correct.

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

So that is one of the traditional with the air quotes, structures of a lot of what teaching and learning looks like. And if you remember that classroom model, I'm assuming we were in the same classroom just two different times you remember those straight rows, and the teacher stood at the front. And that's what traditional teaching looks like. That's what I mean by the design, like the design is is like that. And many people don't know that that just while that may be habit, while maybe tradition, it's not successful, because it doesn't engage students. Think about how many times you have to keep yourself awake and force yourself to pay attention like those things are. And what happens is when they blame students, when you can't focus on something that you're not technically supposed to focus on is no level of interest is no relevance. There's no way for you have to force yourself and some students have that discipline. Most don't. Exactly.

Kandice Whitaker:

And, you know, this is one intersection of our experiences. I think I'm a year older than you so I was a year ahead of you. But I would really hate when they would sit us alphabetical order, because we're both W so that means we was in the back. I hate it every time every time. Yep. And I already have ADHD undiagnosed at the time. It was so hard for me to pay attention. I get bored so easily. You know, I was frequently talkative. Before we move on really quick, I just want to shout out my amazing teachers from CI the ones I know who cared. Shout out to Mrs. Leibert. My fifth grade teacher I'll never forget you, Mrs. Knights, seventh, eighth grade English and Jimbo Perris in high school, you guys definitely made it me fact for me being who I am today, yeah,

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

my music teachers, I'm telling you like, just with me like music and art. Fortunately, I recognized early what my skill set was. And so what got me through was that I knew I had music and arts depend on and besides like athletics and things like that hindsight being 2020. And one of the reasons that I can tap back into my love for those things is that allowed me to be creative in all of those disciplines, because I'm a natural creative, like those things hold my attention. Creativity, if you look at the research, would it like it just the way that it naturally engages and allows you to intrinsically be moved by something that is a strong, strong motivator. And in many classes where you find students struggling, you can point to several reasons why and a couple of them that that doesn't engage the brain, the way that the brain wants to be engaged, there's no opportunity for or there's low levels of motivation, with low levels of creativity, there's low levels of expectations from the teacher, amongst other things. And so like when you talked about earlier, like what parents can do, and thinking about those things, it's understanding that first and foremost, and then understanding like, you have to make sure that you are at home, pouring into your child, because of the way that the system is designed, it's not going to do that we send a lot of times we send our kids to school with the expectation that they're going to be poured into and believe them, but it's not designed for belief in your kids, some special teachers do it inherently. But most, the way that it's structured is not going to happen unless you supplement that.

Kandice Whitaker:

I totally believe what you're saying. And it makes sense. But it's hard for me to believe that people think educators would inherently pour into their children. Because think about it, we all went to school, how many teachers did you have pour into you, I named my three, you named your two, it's strange to me that somebody would think that would be happening when in fact, that didn't happen to you, things haven't changed?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Well, I'll say this, one of the reasons is it's systemic. Because if you think about the struggles that a lot of people of color have had in this country, many of them can be traced back to systemic issues, one of those competing systemic issues with people of color and trying to just make a life for themselves and live. Because we find ourselves having to work a lot, many people have a full time job and a part time job help even sometimes two full time jobs. And so with that, when I get home, at the end of the day, whatever time that may be, I gotta feed you, I got to make sure I try if I have a second to look at your homework, I don't have time to then reteach you some of the things. So my trust, I'm trusting now, when I send you to school, they're teaching you and they're holding you to high expectations, like that's what some of the trust is. And then on the other side of that same coin, you have the opposite, where I don't trust, and I don't like just not even with sometimes without reason I don't like I don't trust but think about it like this. When we were in school, a lot of times, if a teacher called home and spoke to one of our parents or grandparents, whatever it may be, it was understood that if that teacher calls that house to tell you something, you are in trouble. Now, case, if the teacher calls home, then let's just say there's a parent meeting, and it's the teacher, and the student and the parent, like nine times out of 10, it's the parent and the student versus a teacher. And there is this combative point where the teacher is wrong, you don't have my child's best interest at all. And so it's like this, it's a switch to roll where it used to be the parent, not the versus, but it used to be the teacher and the parent who would be on the same side, making sure that kind of the community feel making sure that you hold the kid the child to a high standard, but right now that's flipped, and it's the teacher versus the student and parent. And it's the parent and the student data saying, Well, you did this and then they try and blame the teacher for everything that's going wrong. Like it's it's not that community feel it's more of a combat situation. And it's it's really, it's really a different dynamic sometimes.

Kandice Whitaker:

You see why you're saying that from a teacher's perspective. But as a child who has had the phone call more than once, and weapons and stuff I didn't do, I don't think from my perspective, when a teacher calls, I'm like, immediately on the side, I want to hear the full story. But also as a child, who experienced teachers who legitimately just didn't like me, I understand that that can be part of the dynamic and so thus, I want to hear the whole story. But I also want to see that teachers interaction with my child had a personal experience with my older child where I called her math teacher to task. It wasn't a behavioral problem, but sometimes when you have a good kid who's a good student They tend to get ignored. So I just asked questions. And that turned into that educator being aggressive towards my child. So I understand what you're saying. And that's not exactly right. But there are also people who are educators, and all this stuff and firing off right in their head. And we have to protect our kids. So there's both. Yeah,

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

you're completely right. And what's difficult is if I'm an educator, even with the best of intentions, I go and walk into that classroom, and I want to teach every student well, and I want to see them be successful. If you put a bet, a good educator in a bad system, nine and a half times out of 10, the system is going to win every time. And so when you consistently see things before example, right? Remember when we talked about the social studies example, when you as being undiagnosed, or the average, just not even talking about having any sort of disability, just the average student being in a classroom, and I'm getting worksheets every day and I'm, I'm continuously and regularly bored, what you have to understand is that a long, extended states of boredom, trigger stress. And then what happens with those extended states of boredom, which triggers stress, now that triggers certain things and depending on the student, they're going to react different ways, some reserve and just you know, tune out some, it triggers aggression, some it triggers them to like, you know, understand, fight, fight or freeze, you just get up and walk around, or I needed to go to the bathroom, like it triggers all these different responses. And so were you consistently from the teacher side, see these different triggered stress responses, but don't realize it's a stress response, you take it personally, you think they're just behaving that way in the classroom, again, the system, because it's traditional teaching worksheets, straight rows, but it triggers stress in many students. Now, that environment is toxic. Now, that's a place where the students are displaying these behaviors. And if you're a teacher in that, and you don't know that, now, you're unprepared to deal with those things. Whereas if you were taught, like, I had a workshop, just literally last week, where I was explaining to some teachers, and ask them, they were about 100 people in this one, I said, How many of you have ever taken a course, to understand how the brain works? A couple of people raised their hand and I said, I'm not talking about psychology, I'm talking about neuroscience, we're in a profession where we're supposed to aim for the brain, and we're not taught how the brain works. That's not by accident. And that's what I mean, like we're taught when you go to college, and you want to be a teacher, or when you are in a career switcher program, and you want to be a teacher, there's a specific curriculum, there are specific things that the college says that you have to do, which come from the state government, federal home department of education, which comes from the federal Department of Education, which comes from people who are not educators like that, it's that trickles down to just things that don't match up. So what you have is a generation of teachers, after generation of teachers who are in the classroom who don't really know how to brain works, and so you put them in that bad system. And you keep getting the stress responses from students. And people think it's the students when it's really just a system that is not structured properly.

Kandice Whitaker:

Oh, my goodness, I love this conversation, you are making great points. I'm going to put a paper clip in it and take a break right here. When we come back, we're going to talk about what your catalyst was for Teach hustle, inspire. We'll be back.

Van Whitaker:

Get the full one one on the bail yourself out Happy Hour lounge community by signing up for our community newsletter. And when you sign up, you'll get a free download of your choice. And you'll be entered to win a limited edition Bill yourself out podcast t shirt in our monthly drawing, Sign up today at bail yourself out pod.com We'll see you there. Let's learn some more.

Kandice Whitaker:

Hey there friends, we are back from the happy hour lounge with my friend Dr. Shawn woods. And we are talking about our kids in education, and also his call to teach hustle and inspire. So what was the catalyst for this vision. So

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

essentially, when I got started in the classroom, I was teaching at a school that was the narrative of the school got to me before I even got to the school. And so it shaped my expectations about what I expected from my students. And fundamentally what I expected from them, I had low expectations. And that's exactly what I got. And then, like there used to be this whole narrative about when you're a teacher and you're teaching in tough neighborhoods and tough conditions like don't smile before November. I took it entirely to Florida and smile for like two years because the idea is you want to be strict. You want to be disciplined for for those kids and I'm saying that with the air quotes. And so that's the mentality that I took into that classroom until I got a phone call from I was teaching middle school at the time and one of my sixth grade students when So one of the sweet if you could imagine, the ideal, like student perfect like it was her, and her mom called me and said that my daughter's scared in their classroom. So I'm using fear as a teaching tactic. Mind you not even realizing that I'm leveraging this tool, I'm using fear to teach, but I'm not really teaching I'm controlling. That was a wake up call for me, I realized I had to start doing some things differently, started making some changes, coupled with the fact that now I'm digging back into the books, I'm trying to understand what it is that I need to do to be able to connect with my students better to get the most out of them. So fast forward another year or two later, we do things so well, that we not only excel, excuse me achieved for the building, like we got state level recognition. And I was teaching in the state of Virginia. So we got a Blue Ribbon Award that year for our achievements, like we did that. Well. And we were the only one in the district to do that. And I don't know, I haven't checked, honestly. But I don't know if it has been done since. But that was just something that helped me to realize one key thing is that those students could do it. And so now what that led me to do was to say, Okay, if I could do this, and there's potential there, what can I do to make that same information available to more to unlock the intellectual treasure of not just to students in that building, but in that community, in that state and in that region. And so that's where it spawned for me to try to serve at a higher level.

Kandice Whitaker:

I love that story. And there's so many nuggets in there that you can grasp on, right, so the first thing is, I heard you say you came to the situation with basically low expectations. And one of the key things that I talked about in helping people build their resilience is believing that you can write because your mind is the center of everything, what you think is a self fulfilling prophecy. And so basically, you went in there thinking, this is going to be nuts. You treat it as such, and then you present it as a person that you didn't want to be. That was great. Not that you did that. But when you were presented with the information of how you were being seen, right, your favorite student, the best student, she's afraid of you who would want that you didn't say not us, not me, that's completely wrong. You were able to self reflecting inventory and say, Hold. A lot of people can't do that. Yeah. So kudos to you for being able to take information when it's presented to you and say, hold up, this is not who I want to be. This is not how I want to show up in the world. And to make a paradigm shift not only for you, not only for the students you were educating, but to be able to show other people how to do that is tremendous.

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Yeah, it was, it was very eye opening for me. And since you you know, now that you say that, it allows me to reflect on my reflecting, I guess, if you will, kind of looking back into stepping outside of the matrix. And it was a really, it was a good testament to, I guess the level of emotional intelligence that I at the time, I didn't understand what it was. But now understanding that that's what it was. And I I appreciate that I was able to demonstrate that in that moment. And I think that is incredibly important. Because you're right, I could have easily said, Well, no, she is she's just looking at it the wrong way. Or she's she should toughen up, I could have reacted a number of different ways

Kandice Whitaker:

that speaks to who you are as a person, and to be able to take feedback and positively transition that into something that your family eats off of today. You can teach other people how to do and truly our children deserve better. And because I know you, Shawn, I can say, I know that you didn't go in that classroom and say y'all make these kids afraid of me. Yeah, yeah. I know, you didn't think that and I'm sure that wasn't your intention. But because you had this information of people in your ears like yo, this is what you need to be. You made yourself who you thought you needed to be.

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

To survive. Exactly right. Who I thought I needed to be. Yep. I thought I needed to be a disciplinarian. I thought I needed to get those kids in check. And I lived up to those expectations. But

Kandice Whitaker:

see, here's the thing, right? I think that message transcends education. How often have we gotten information about something, a person a situation, and we created this narrative of who we should be or how we should show up based on that information that we had. And next thing, you know, you're like, Who the hell is this person? This ad was shown on?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Exactly. That is exactly right. And the thing was, when I was showing up each and every day, that person that was supposed to be it wasn't comfortable, because I wasn't being myself.

Kandice Whitaker:

I was gonna ask you that. How does that feel? for you, because when you are, I know that there have been times in my life, especially in corporate scenarios where I felt like I needed to be something. And in those times when I felt like I needed to be something, there was a time when little canvas would try to fit the expectations of the people who are around me. But to me that looked like depression. To me that showed up as a lack of energy, I'm tired all the time. What did that look like in you?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Similar because it takes and I really like your choice of words that that energy because it takes extra energy to be somebody that you're not. And so when you have to expend that energy to fit into somebody who you are not naturally, who you are not naturally, it's very easy to get to the end of the day, and just be absolutely exhausted. And then now, when you come home, let's just say, and you have family that needs your energy, you don't have it when you have school, or other aspirations that need your energy, you don't have it. So that affects so many other things. It absolutely

Kandice Whitaker:

does. So, in understanding, this is who I am. Now that you've turned the page, how do you keep yourself grounded in that I

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

keep myself grounded in the idea that I'm being I'm bringing my true authentic self to the classroom. But with the understanding that what it is that I'm trying to do, I want to do it in the best way to get the most out of my students. And that includes from RE familiarizing myself with some of the things that I may have missed. Like that was one of the key things to me why I started to see okay, hold on, it started to open me up to some of the things with the hate to sound back. I feel like I sound like a Hotep Weigela the system but like that's really where it started to open my eyes to some of the things I hold on. And I started to just dig into this and I got curious. And the more curious that I got the more things that I started to find out, the more I started to uncover and like, okay, hold on. Okay, I'm being set up right now. And it wasn't really like by a person that wasn't somebody that could point to per se, but it was more like, I need to make sure that I do better for myself and for my children because I know what they can do. And so I started to just make some changes, get into the research about what instructionally I can do to be different to be better.

Kandice Whitaker:

I absolutely love that. When we get back from this break, we're going to talk about what makes an urban educator different we'll be back. Knowing Yeah, happy hour community family online with a party never stops. Check out bail yourself out on socials Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok. We'll see you there.

Van Whitaker:

What do you want to talk about? Do you have a show idea? Drop Candice alive at bail yourself out. pod.com.

Kandice Whitaker:

We are back in the happy hour lounge with our guest co host today. Dr. Shaun Woodley, yo, we've been talking about Teach, hustle, inspire, you talk about in Teach, hustle inspire, being an urban educator, and what that looks like and how that's different. Now, you mentioned earlier that the system of education wasn't necessarily set up on race, right? It was more of a class system. But because of the history of the United States race and class run parallel, not all the time, but a lot of the time. And so I can see how people would make that distinction. But how does that translate to being an urban educator? What makes them different? Well, right

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

now, if you parse through the data, similarly to what I mentioned before you plug in a zip code, it's very predictable as to what those results will be. And often when you talk about urban and even culturally diverse communities, where the data skews more towards black and brown students, not necessarily in an urban community, because what happens is, when people say urban, the meaning of it at its literal definition is like, quote unquote, inner city. Well, yeah, when you say urban as far as education, it just means with a high number of black and brown students, and that's not necessarily inner city that can be Suburban. So, you know, it's important to understand that those footprints of those neighborhoods and communities when there are higher percentages and or higher numbers of black and brown families, which directly contributes to black and brown students, there are often different, sometimes often less resources available. When you have situations where students are coming into the class and they don't have access to the same number of AP programs. and they don't have the same access to the same number of after school and extracurricular activities were in a neighborhood across the proverbial tracks does. That's a problem. There are so many factors that go into how schools and things are funded. Fundamentally, a lot of times it comes down to the home ownership and the taxes collected from those types of things. So if you have a system or community of people that does not have a high amount of home owners, which tend to be communities with high numbers of people of color, because systemically they were redlined, by these things, and they were excluded from loan opportunities, and those results are still being the effect of these results is still very, very clear today. It's all you can point back to many different things, many different systems, but they all point in one direction. It's they overlap in a lot of different ways. And so being an educator in an urban community, you have all of these different narratives, you have only histories of problems that really just can directly contribute to a lack of resources, a lack of opportunities, a lack of quality instruction, which directly contributes to low levels of achievement, which directly contributes to students not seeing the value in education dropping out, which directly contributes to crime, which directly contributes to black and brown families that are struggling, incarcerate high incarceration rate, all of these things are connected. All.

Kandice Whitaker:

Absolutely, you bring up an interesting point last season, I interviewed Jessica Bonner, who is a speech pathologist, and she has a tutoring company out in Alabama. And she mentioned in her interview, that she lives I believe in the Birmingham area. She mentioned that she graduated valedictorian of her class. And then she said, but I wasn't a strong writer. And I was like how, but what you're saying here totally lends to that. So it's the lack of resources, the lack of quality teachers, and all the things that are unfortunately, inherent in being in a large community of color. My next question that I kind of would like to hear your commentary on we are living in the time where the Supreme Court recently shut down affirmative action, knowing what you know, how do you think that will affect us, our children and people from these communities and from these zip codes that are inherently disadvantaged?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

That is a little bit outside of my area of expertise, but just with the correlation to education, it just makes me think about how educators can be recruited and or maintained, it really just depends on I know that it's going to have some effects. And people will try to justify different things, the original ruling of that was put in place because of the lack of opportunities. But people tried to spin that narrative and say, well, giving somebody an opportunity because they are black, or because they are from a disadvantaged or traditionally, underserved background is not fair. But that goes directly against what the idea of the original ruling was put in place for and so it's it's really just kind of politics and semantics and playing around with words, that really is just designed to just hold people back. I

Kandice Whitaker:

think at the end of the day, understanding that now I have a deeper understanding that this is all structurally designed, is just fitting into the original design. Set up some people to be factory workers set up other people to be professionals based on the resources that are available to them based on their parents socio economic status, which is what inherently makes it so hard in the United States, the land of opportunity for a person to go from one class to another.

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

It is hard. And then if you think about what can help you move from one class to another is income. And that income is directly affected by opportunities, if I am not afforded those opportunities, because now these quote unquote corporations and businesses that can give me those opportunities, whereas they had to have a certain number of people that looked like me, to at least give me a chance now they don't have to that significant. Exactly.

Kandice Whitaker:

I'm just curious to see what happens in the coming days, weeks and months, and to our children as they go out into the workforce. I hope that it doesn't look like when our grandparents were in the workforce when they didn't have those laws to protect them. From my mouth to God's ears. Okay, quick question. In the few minutes that we have left, just kind of want to get your perspective on this. More black and brown people are moving towards homeschooling. For a lot of reasons, and these kids are getting into top colleges like they're killing the game. What are your thoughts on that

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

my thought is do what's best for your child 100% If you know and nobody knows your child like you know your job and so if you feel that them being at home with you, or for a homeschool whether it is a homeschool would directly just with you or I know they have homeschool cohorts, whatever it is that you feel is and will give your child the best opportunity to be the best version of themselves. Do that and do it times 10 period.

Kandice Whitaker:

I love that. I got my little hand at homeschooling during the pandemic, one Yelp rating, very ghetto would not recommend I'm not doing that. But

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

it's real. Yes.

Kandice Whitaker:

Shout out to all the homeschool parents that can do it and do it. Well. Y'all are the real ones. I want to thank my special guest today Dr. Shawn Woodley, from Teach, hustle and inspire for educating us on how we can be better parents mentors. How can people reach out to you on socials?

Dr. Shaun Woodley:

Awesome. I'm pretty much everywhere. I'm at Teach, hustle, inspire. And what are just my first and last name Sean Woodley. I'm pretty much on social media almost every day and so happy to interact, as to answer questions if I can have a lot of resources there. Come up website teach us When's feiyr.com. SHA us? Yep. All right,

Kandice Whitaker:

everybody. Thank you for listening. I love you when I made it. We asked Wasn't that a great interview, hold up before you grab your hat and head out. Make sure you make your way to facebook and join the bail yourself out pod Facebook group. That's where you'll find your virtual co workers, luxuriating and chatting. Thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoy the show, please leave a review. That's how we keep the lights on. If you're on social media follow your girl Candace with the K Whitaker. And you know what, I'd love to hear from you. With that. I love you. And I mean it because there are people who hate in the world for no reason I choose to love there's no reason I believe as the great Martin Luther King Jr. said hate is too great a burden to bear so I choose to love He shall choose

Intro
The design of exclusion in traditional education
A parent's role in their child's education
The parent/teacher dynamic
Teach, Hustle, Inspire
Living up to the expectation's of others
Being an urban educator
The challenges of being an urban educator
The effect of affirmative action on education
Homeschooling