Kindergarten made a big impression on Sarah Fine, so she went back and interviewed her teacher, Kemp Harris!
Show Notes
You can learn more about Kemp Harris’s music here, and find his latest album, Kemp Harris Live at The Bird SF, here.
Our other episode featuring Sarah is Season 2 Episode 14, “What Can School Learn from After-school?” You can listen to it here.
Kemp Harris:
I remember babysitting once and I came down and he had his face covered in green and there was clearly green candy on the table. It was like, “So Craig, what happened?” And without missing a beat, he went into, “Well, there was a green monster who jumped in my mouth and ran down my throat and that is why the candy is gone.” And I think right then I was like, you know what? I like working with young children.
Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton and in this episode, my friend and colleague Sarah Fine, is interviewing her kindergarten teacher can Kemp Harris because well, kindergarten made a big impression on Sarah. Sarah doesn’t say much about herself in the episode. So I’ll introduce her here. Sarah is the director of the San Diego teacher residency, which is part of the High Tech High graduate school of education. She’s the coauthor with Jal Mehta of In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. And she’s been on the podcast before in season two, episode 14. What can school learn from afterschool? Now, hear Sarah’s interview with her kindergarten teacher, Kemp Harris.
Kemp Harris:
What year was it that you were in my class?
Sarah Fine:
I was born in 83 so it would have been probably 88, 89.
Kemp Harris:
Okay. Wow. Okay.
Sarah Fine:
Do you want to just start by introducing yourself? Who you are and then we can go back to that moment at some point. Okay.
Kemp Harris:
My name is Kemp Harris and right now I am 68 years old, but I started teaching when I graduated and I started teaching in 1974. I continued to teach full-time kindergarten, first grade until I retired or I thought I was going to retire in 2012, but the principal where I was said don’t retire cause we don’t want you to go. I ended up hanging around as a ISS aid for about seven more years. I retired a couple of years back. I taught all that time and this is what brought me to Sarah because Sarah was in my kindergarten class. I remember your mom and your dad coming for conferences. It was just so fun talking with them and your mom was just awesome. I can see how you went into education and doing what you’re doing because they laid quite a groundwork of just, Hey, we’re parents here for you to be doing the best that you can actually be and we’ll make sure we support you. They were just those awesome parents who would just show up and be awesome all the time.
Sarah Fine:
Well, I will say that I look back now and I totally won the lottery. I mean, my goodness. I’m an educator too now, obviously, and I work novice educators who are just beginning their careers. I think about what it means to have been in your class in kindergarten. Gosh, I remember a lot actually and I don’t remember that much about the rest of Bowen school. I don’t know what that says and I have my own children. One of whom is about to start kinder, one of whom is in almost third grade. I feel like my kindergarten awareness is supercharged right now and so I’ve been thinking about you a lot.
Kemp Harris:
Wow. Okay.
Alec Patton:
I Want to know Sarah, because we haven’t really talked about this, maybe even like shut your eyes if it helps you go back to it. But go back to five-year-old Sarah Fine going to Mr. Harris’s class. What do you remember? What were your first impressions?
Sarah Fine:
One thing I remember, and Kemp, you might remember this too, is my sister was just about to be born. The very beginning of kindergarten, I think on the first or second day of that giant transition in my life, my aunt came to our house because my mom was in the hospital in labor and she brought me to kindergarten and Kemp, I don’t know if you remember this, but you looked at her, we walked into the classroom and you said, I know what this means. What I remember is I already felt so safe in that space. I was probably on day three or four of my first time at school. But you already knew us well enough to know exactly what was going on in our family and exactly and I don’t even know if you’d ever met my aunt before, but it was like, you were part of our family. I just remember that sense of safety. I think I remember, I don’t know. Maybe we raised chicks. I remember plants on the window sills. I remember a lot of playing.
Kemp Harris:
We did chicks, we did the plants on the window sill. I think second grade did the butterflies. But yeah, we were raising chicks. I hated that unit because I was so afraid that the chicks wouldn’t hatch and I was going to have to go out and buy baby chicks and pretend we’d hatched them. That was all of that stuff going on there. I remember that because we had gotten together, your mom and dad had come in for a visit in the summer and when they have the kids play, they come in and visit the class. I remember that you were about to become a big sister.
Sarah Fine:
I think what’s striking about that for me though is now that I have my own kids and I think about what a cataclysmic event it is for a child, especially a five and a half year old, who’s sort of fully conscious to have to have a sibling come into their life. And also what a cataclysmic event it is to go to kindergarten in the first place. Those two things happening together and yet I felt so safe in that space. I don’t know how you did it.
Kemp Harris:
That is awesome. I’m so happy to hear that.
Sarah Fine:
I also just remember going back and seeing you all the way through. I used to call you mister.
Kemp Harris:
Yes. I remember you’d go like, mister. And it’d be like, it’s Sarah Fine coming into visit.
Sarah Fine:
How did you come to teaching? What’s the story of how you landed in teaching and then at Bowen school in Newton, Massachusetts of all places. I’m so curious about that.
Kemp Harris:
I think my upbringing was such that, I lived with my mom, she was a single mom and we lived in Roxbury Mass, but she wanted me to have better schooling. I lived out in Framingham and I was living with my aunts and uncles out there. I think there’s a part of me that understood that, yeah, my mom wanted me to be in better schools. I’ll take a worse school if I can hang out with you and be there. But I think that because of that upbringing of always feeling that I was there for a good reason, but still longing to be somewhere else. I sort of learned very early how to begin to take on things and make them your own. I was in other people’s spaces when I was growing up.
Kemp Harris:
I had to figure out some really good ways to fortify myself. I think because of that upbringing for a very long time, whenever someone said, what are you going to be? I would tell them I’m going to be a social worker. I don’t know how you’re in seventh grade and you’ve decided I’m going to be a social worker. But what happened was I met this family through this gospel chorus that I was in and this man was a principal in Newton. Sam Turner was the principal of the Oak Hill school. And his wife was the pianist for the choir that we were in, but they had three kids. I sort of almost became a foster kid and I would do a lot of babysitting and their kids were hysterically funny. Particularly their two year old at the time whose name was Craig, they called them Mr. Goobers.
Kemp Harris:
And he was probably one of the most engaging and funny kids I’d ever met. I remember babysitting once and I came down, he had his face covered in green and there was clearly green candy on the table. And it was like, so Craig, what happened? Without missing a beat, he went into, well, there was a green monster who jumped in my mouth and ran down my throat and that is why the candy is gone. I think right then I was like, you know what? I like working with young children. I started doing volunteer work at Oak Hill school. I was a junior in high school and that’s when I began making that shift of, I think I’m going to be a teacher.
Kemp Harris:
And when I graduated high school, I went to Boston university and I did early childhood and it was a lot of influence, I met a lot of Newton teachers in those days. At that time, and this was like in 1969, 71, 72, Newton had a bunch of male, kindergarten teachers, first grade teachers. My vision of what men do when education was really formed by that. And then later it was sort of like, you didn’t see as many men in early education. Where my startup was like, well, of course I can do that. I’ve got like four role models in one building.
Alec Patton:
Do you have any idea why that was? Why there were so many guys?
Kemp Harris:
Wow. I know that when I was in college, it was a whole other time. I remember there was a book that I read called Push Back the Desks and it seemed that at that time, there’s a lot of very experimental education practices going on in terms of we’re just going to not do it the old way and so we don’t want to use desks. We’re going to be exploring all these other aspects of what kids bring to classrooms. There was a lot of emphasis of that. I think it was probably a hold over from old hippie times. I’m not sure, but there was this real sense of throwing out the old and just giving people a chance to experiment. When I came to teaching, I certainly had the methodology that I’ve gotten at BU, but I will say that a lot of my emphasis, especially when I first started teaching, those first few years, I just wanted to set an environment where kids were really comfortable and really felt empowered and just really knew that they were appreciated and loved.
Kemp Harris:
Of course we have to do all of the nitty gritty of curriculum. I got that, but I was really into, I want to make a space for kids and I want kids to have a space to express themselves and do all of that. We’ll get to the academics. I promise. Yes. I swear to God, we will. I wanted that classroom to be vibrant and I was sharing music and theater and it was a time. There are all these young parents who were like, absolutely go right ahead, have a great time, we love it. It was a cool wild west of hanging out with kids and teaching. It was awesome.
Sarah Fine:
I’d love for you to paint a picture of that if you can. Do you have any vivid memories of a project or a theater production or something that went down in your classroom back then that kind of exemplifies that way of teaching?
Kemp Harris:
I remember we would do this thing of where we would pick a letter of the week and then you would base your entire week’s curriculum around this letter sound. It was like you were taking all your phonics, but you were doing that with some music and with some theater and with cooking and with dance. In a way, it was like Newton gave us the freedom to sort of say, this is the destination that we want to get to and how you get there, we’re going to leave that up to you. People were able to really hone in on what their strengths were and allow to run with that. We did big theater productions.
Kemp Harris:
I remember doing Wizard of Oz and you had a lot of trees, a lot of those trees throwing apples because if you got two classes together with 50 kids, but we’d have some kids backstage. They were like the backstage theater managers. That meant that we’d have to read script and we’d have to do that. It was a time when when you were allowed to, as long as you can get to the destination, we’re not going to dictate for you how to do that. I definitely remember the change when we began to get curriculum that was really system-wide because it was practically every school, depending on where it was and who the teachers were, there was a feeling that was very, very different. I remember when we went to more system-wide curriculum and there’d be a math program that was for the system. I remember developmental math processes, DMP, and when that came in. I distinctly remember one teacher saying “DMP, that stands for damn math program and I’m not teaching it.”
Kemp Harris:
It was like, you’re just what refusing to teach what they’re suggesting. It really was a shift in terms of the way people approached their jobs in that, we had been from this, get there the best way for you, to this is where we want to be and this is how we get there and you need to fit this mold a lot more now. I remember they wanted to have, and it was very interesting because they wanted to have programs for gifted children. Then you get into that real bind of, okay, so now my child is gifted, which means my child’s going to get all of this extra stuff. It’s like, eh, that’s like saying if your child’s not gifted, then you don’t get the cool stuff. We really got to that sense of wanting to get rid of the gifted program as much as just meeting kids where they were and letting them go as far as they could.
Kemp Harris:
I remember sitting in first grade and reading the Tolkien trilogies with one first grader and he was totally into it. I’d have to read just to keep up with where he was because I wanted to give that child a space to say, okay, I get it. You’re way out on another end here so I’m going to meet you there. But there are other things that I could do for other children. I knew that that some kids music was their thing and I could reach some kids through printing out lyrics of a song. I remember I used to love the Coasters, this band in the fifties. They have these crazy songs like “Yakety yak, don’t talk back,” “take out the paper and the trash, or you won’t get no spend in cash.”
Kemp Harris:
You’d type these out and I had kids color trash and cash because they rhyme. Again, it was like, you could make it up almost as you went, knowing that you had certain things that you needed to accomplish and things that you had to cover. I remember it was like, here’s the unit. This is the social studies unit and it goes like this. And at the end, we’ll all have that. I definitely see that there are very good points of particularly into reeling in people like me, who love the wild, wild west, but at the same time, I appreciated knowing that, okay, you’re giving me a very clear look at where I need to be heading and where I want to end up, but I still appreciate that leeway. But it did give less some conformity to what was happening because the other side of that wild, wild west was that there might be someone who spent most of their time doing something that they just loved because they loved it, but it’s not helping every kid.
Sarah Fine:
Well, you mentioned Newton and I would say Kemp, this is where I’m most curious. I feel like we probably haven’t talked as much in the past, but I think probably for folks who listen to the podcast later, I should paint a little picture. Newton’s a suburb of Boston, very affluent, very highly educated, very White and Asian, heavily Jewish. I can maybe say this as a Newtonite, very competitive, a lot of focus on achievement and college and credentials and doctors and lawyers and dentists and professors. I’m just immensely curious what it was like for you as a male elementary teacher, a black elementary teacher, an openly gay elementary teacher in Newton of all places. Tell me about that. And you stayed, I think also I’m just really curious how you managed to stay and sustain yourself and love the work you did.
Kemp Harris:
I’ll tell you, when I graduated, one to have a man who was in early education, people were really clamoring for that. I was hired right away and it was certainly, there was a lot of influence by this family that I lived with because Sam Turner was a principal there. But I was so welcomed into that city. I came at a time when you would be in a school for two years and then there’d be declining enrollment so you would be moved to another building. I went from the Hyde school to the Cabot school, to the Underwood school. And then I landed at Bowen where I spent 28 years. But my whole time in Newton, and I’m sure there are people who experienced racism. I’m sure there are folks who experienced homophobia at Newton. It’s not like if you’re in Newton, you’re going to be shielded from everything.
Kemp Harris:
But as an employee and as an educator working in Newton, I found that parents were so enamored to have their children experience the diversity of one, a man, one, a black man. And then when I became really comfortable being out and gay, I just had a sense of real, acceptance is not the word because I think to be accepted, it sounds like it’s a gift that someone gives you. But that sense that I was really appreciated for what I brought to that city. I never had those moments of regretting where I was. I think that when Newton got on the, there was an era when there was a lot of racial diversity training and Newton really spent a lot of time doing that.
Kemp Harris:
And then like all things, after you’ve done that for a while you say, well, we’ve accomplished that goal. We’re comfortable. There is a period in Newton where there was just a lot of racial awareness going on. I was glad that I was in a system that was taking that on. My experience in Newton, I remember being in school and this was back in the eighties, I probably told you this, but Christopher Columbus day, which is now indigenous people day, back in the seventies and eighties, I’d be like, well, it’s going to be Christopher Columbus day. We’re not going to have school as a holiday, but there some people who are not going to celebrate this because it’s not a happy time for them. It would be like you inviting a friend to your house and they discover your toys and take them.
Kemp Harris:
And at that point, kids would be like, ah! But I was always waiting when they went home, you know what Mr. Harris said, that some people don’t like Christopher Columbus day. I never got that blowback. In fact, I’d have parents who would come in and go, yeah, my son told me about that coming to take your toys thing. I think that really let them know what it was like to have Chris Columbus come over and take your land. I was very supported. I do remember there was one time, there was one family that had an issue with my gayness and the principal was basically said to them, I’m sorry that you have that issue, but it’s your issue. I was supported all the way through. My time in Newton was good.
Sarah Fine:
I love hearing that. There’s so much conversation right now about teacher retention and how do we get them to stay given how intense of a job it is and often how unsupported of a job it is. Some people would say, oh, well, those scripted curriculums can help teachers stay more because it lightens the load of the planning. But then other people argue well, but it’s the creativity that draws the teachers in the first place. I’m just curious what did you do to sustain yourself? Regardless of Newton or not, there’s not that many teachers who stay for 40 years. What were some of the practices that you, I know you had your music, I’d love to hear about that. And also who did you connect with? How did you keep yourself from getting burned out? Were there moments where you thought about leaving?
Kemp Harris:
I think that for me, I always had a dual life going on. I think that there are people who get into their teaching and their teaching is the only focus that they have. They are very, very good at it, but it really consumes everything they do. To the point that some folks that I knew would say, I can’t wait for the summer to be over because it’s like they live in the classroom. For me, I always had dual things going on from the very beginning. I was doing theater and I remember Newton had kindergarten, it was part-time. The other kids stayed until three, but kindergarten was done at 11:30. We were like, half-time teachers. 11:45 kids got out. And then I remember when they shifted and the kids got out at 1230. I was like 45 extra minutes.
Kemp Harris:
I have things to do. I have to be at the theater. I remember being in class and they left at 1145 and I had rehearsal at one o’clock and it’s winter time. I’d be like, okay, I know it’s going to take them 20 minutes to get their boots on. We’d start getting ready about 1135 so that way exactly at 11:45, they could go home and I could head to the theater. I was doing acting work, TV, commercial work, some films. It was almost to the point that kids in my class thought that all teachers do star market commercials. Mine does, doesn’t yours? Parents, if my room did not have a piano, I remember one year parents went out and got me an old upright piano that they brought in because they knew that was important for me.
Kemp Harris:
For me, it was one of those things of, I was teaching because I loved teaching and it was my livelihood. That was where I made my money to sustain myself. But I could also do theater and I could be in bands and I could do all that. I didn’t have to rely on that as my livelihood, which meant that I could do this job that I loved as a teacher, make my livelihood, and then that freed me to do theater and music and band work and all of that without depending on it for money so that I didn’t feel, I was one of those actors who was scrounging for every single job. I would do a job or do a theater piece because I wanted to do one. I remember doing Hair and some parents brought their kids to see me in Hair at the turtling theater and Hair had a lot of swearing in it.
Kemp Harris:
I come out and I’m about to do the thing and I look first row and there’s some parents and their kids. I was like, oh, wow. I came in the next day and I was like, okay, last night, when you saw me sing a lot of those words that were inappropriate, that’s called theater and it’s called acting. We don’t use those words in our real life. But it was that sense of that sustained me a lot. There’s a real community of teachers going on there. I don’t know if you remember Mr. Silverman from Bowen school but we had a volleyball league. We would get together on certain days and we would do, I think Tuesdays and Thursdays were short days or something. We had like a floor hockey league. We’d get together with teachers from all the elementary schools.
Kemp Harris:
There was a real sense of camaraderie going on and yeah, just a bunch of young teachers figuring this all out and in it together. That’s where I got a lot of strength from. I just had other outlets that really gave me space to exercise everything that I wanted to do and still do this job of teaching that I loved. It didn’t get in my way. My music didn’t get in its way. In fact, I think I combined a lot of it. A lot of the theater. If you’re a teacher, you’re pretty much on. If you have an improvisational thing to you, it means you can just walk into a classroom and you can talk with kids and nothing that they do can throw you because you’re just ready to go. I used my theater, I used my music in my classroom. I sort of was able to meld the two in a very interesting way. I think had I been a fifth grade math teacher, it would have been a very different scenario, but I chose the place that I liked and I liked working with five and six year old kids.
Sarah Fine:
Alec, I don’t know if you’re feeling the same way, but Kemp listening to you, it almost sounds like you’re describing a different era or a different planet in a beautiful way. Being able to sustain yourself in the afternoons and the weekends and the summer through this other set of passions and talents you had and then bring those into classroom. I just think the teachers I work with now and they’re in their classrooms from 7:00 AM till 5:00 PM. Their summer ends at the beginning of August and there’s three or four weeks of staff development and learning. I’m really torn. I’m curious what you’d say, because I feel like on the one hand, there’s a recognition of how complex, both intellectually and academically and social emotionally teaching is, and how much often goes into the best teaching.
Sarah Fine:
There’s this, well, we do need to have conversations as a staff about these things and we do need time to plan collaboratively. We do need to be meeting with parents regularly and all of this. And then there’s another part of me that thinks if all of our teachers had a little bit more buffer around their days and their years to do things that they love, that they can then bring into their teaching and their projects, we might all benefit including mainly the students. Our teachers might be staying longer and they might not be burning out so quickly. I don’t know what to make of that really.
Kemp Harris:
In the last seven years after I retired full-time and I stayed at the angel school and I was there for seven years in subbing and doing whatever else was necessary. I really looked at how the job had changed. Technology changed a lot of things. Technology had been coming and going all the time anyway. You can’t stop time. You can’t stop progress from moving on, but I began to look at the teaching job that teachers had. And again, as you said, so much of it was in the planning of what you’re going to do and the gathering of what you were going to do in terms of your attack and the presentation and you need to have your entire schedule written on the whiteboard, because that way if anyone walked into the classroom they should be able to look at that whiteboard and know where you are at that moment and to know what your kids are going to learn that day.
Kemp Harris:
I found that so stifling because when I was teaching it was sort of like something would happen that might turn your entire focus of what you were teaching to a different area and you were allowed to just go there. The thought that I need to have my entire day listed in such a way that a stranger could walk in and they should be able to look at that schedule and say, yes, that’s where you want to be now. The other one that I loved was that anyone should be able to walk in and say to a child in your classroom, “so what are you doing right now?” And that, that child should be able to between the board and everything should be able to tell them very succinctly that we’re doing this, this, this. I’m not sure that I want a six year old to be able to do that. I really don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. I would hope that your answer would be, “what do you mean? Well, I’m going to do read this book, but yeah, we were playing and then we did a story.”
Kemp Harris:
I want them to have a sense of there was some leeway and buffer in their lives. That they could be kids. I get the situation that because of where we, our planning what’s necessary and our coordination with other people and how we put this all together is very necessary, but there’s also a part of me that kids do so much independently these days between their devices and their things that they learn on there, I’d like to do some more communal, working on some other kinds of things. I sometimes thought that if kids could swipe left, that it would make me go away from teaching in front of them. When I was subbing in fourth, fifth grade, it’s like, dude, I’m just going to swipe left and you’ll leave me alone. I can go back to my device and finish doing what I’m doing. I absolutely understand it. It would be hard for someone like me and where I came from and my upbringing of education to be a teacher today. I could probably pull it off, but it would be a hard slug for me.
Sarah Fine:
What would be your advice to young teachers now? This is what I do is my life now.
Kemp Harris:
[inaudible 00:30:33] Help them. They’d be like, Sarah, your kindergarten teacher told me this and it totally doesn’t work. Hang loose. Be free. Keep going, go ahead. I’ll try to think of an answer.
Sarah Fine:
No. I wouldn’t feel to pressured. I’m just curious more about that. How in this environment, it sounds like you do know a bit, you’ve lived through some changes and you know kind of the ways things feel now for a young teacher who has the creativity, who has the inspiration, who loves the children and is hoping to stay in the field for a long time. That’s one of the things we look for in the teachers we bring into my program, is folks who aren’t just like, oh, well, I’ll teach for a couple of years and then I’ll go into policy. We hear that a lot. But if they’re planning to stay and they do have the instinct to be more improvisational and creative. And also their training is going to teach them how to manage some of the demands that schools and communities make now. What wisdom might you have to share to them? What might you want to tell your young teacher self if you could go back and talk to him?
Kemp Harris:
I would say that you should expect that in the first few years of your teaching, it is a real process of pooling all of that study and all of that practice and all of that together and it’s going to be hard. There is that time where you’re just on the edge of your seat and making sure that you’ve got all of your curriculum covered and that you used all the practices and you’ve done all these things. I know it sounds cliche, but it’s that sense that it does get better. I think that once teachers are comfortable with their field of whatever the [inaudible 00:32:14] of what they’re teaching, I think injecting yourself into what you do is so important. There’s a friend of mine. His name is Doug Herbst and he teaches out in Midway and he did fourth grade when I was working at Bowen and he was there. But this is a guy who, he’s a soccer fanatic.
Kemp Harris:
He is a New York Yankees fan, but he knew his curriculum, he had that down, but he also shared with kids who he was. Every kid in his class knew Mr. Herbst is a Yankee fan and if you go in and you start talking some smack about the Red Sox, it’s not going to be cute. But they would do stuff they do like baseball scores and the run batting average of blah, blah, blah. It’s bringing yourself to your job in such a way that the kids totally know who you are and respect you as their teacher, but they also know that you, friend is not the word, but they know you really like them and they really like you because that’s half of it right there.
Kemp Harris:
I think if you’re not genuine with yourself and with your kids, they can sense that. That’s why I say with young teachers like you, you need a good, I don’t know how many years I want to say, but you need that jelling period. And then when it does work, it’s just awesome. I remember my first year of teaching. I was going to be everybody’s friend and I came in and I think I gave my phone number. And it was like if anybody wants to call me or say anything and I remember being at home with my husband now, my partner Bill, and the phone rings, and he’s like, hello. It was this voice like, is Mr. Harris there? And I was like, who? I don’t know. It’s a kid.
Kemp Harris:
After that year, it’s like okay, you do not give you a phone number. I was just like, I’m going to be your best friend. Call me up and I will come to every birthday party. It’s like, okay, you don’t need to do all that. They will love you, but you need time to just figure out the art of teaching and then put yourself in it. It takes a little while, but when it gels up, it’s awesome.
Sarah Fine:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Alec Patton:
Thank you so much, Kemp, for taking the time.
Sarah Fine:
It’s amazing to see you.
Kemp Harris:
You’re welcome.
Sarah Fine:
Hopefully see you soon.
Kemp Harris:
Good seeing you.
Sarah Fine:
Bye. Thanks Alec.
Alec Patton:
My pleasure.
Kemp Harris:
Okay. Bye bye.
Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by brother Herschel. A huge thank you to Sarah Fine and Kemp Harris for this week’s episode. Now I need to tell you, in addition to teaching and acting, Kemp released some fantastic albums. His latest is Live With the Bird SF. We put a link to it in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
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