Ashanti Branch:
I remember when I first left engineering to become a teacher, I knew the feeling it felt when you told somebody you’re an engineer and how they look at you, right? I knew how they looked at you, I know the surprise on their face as they emoted. And then when I became a teacher, I saw a different emote, and the emote was like, “Oh, okay.”
Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Ashanti Branch. You’re hearing his voice because today it is our great pleasure to share Ashanti’s conversation with physics feature Dr. Tim Daponte from Ashanti’s podcast, Taking Off the Mask. Here’s how Ashanti describes his show, “Taking Off the Mask is an experience of getting real, providing men a space to have conversations about life, challenges, joys, heartbreak, dreams, failures, and whatever is ready to be revealed.” The podcast is structured around the mask, a social-emotional learning tool that Ashanti created. Ashanti and his guest discuss what is on the front of their masks, the things we gladly share with the world, and the back of their masks, the things we don’t normally share or talk about. Here’s the episode, enjoy.
Tim Daponte:
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to get on the bed of nails.
students:
I’m scared.
Tim Daponte:
Brittany’s going to put the 40 pound block of concrete on my chest, Lauren is going to take the 12 pound sledgehammer, break the concrete block into millions of pieces, and according to the law of conservation of energy, I should be okay.
students:
We should talk you out.
No, no.
No, he has a helmet now.
Tim Daponte:
Okay, okay, I’m good, come one, come on.
students:
Oh my gosh.
Oh my goodness.
She’s having a good time.
Aren’t you supposed to have the goggles on your head?
Wait, wait.
Oh my goodness.
Let’s give him a round of applause.
Ashanti Branch:
Hello, and welcome to the Taking Off the Mask Podcast, my name’s Ashanti Branch and I’m really glad you’ve joined us. Today’s guest is Dr. Tim Daponte. Dr. Tim and I go way back. When I first became a teacher I learned about this opportunity to travel as a teacher. When I left engineering I thought, I’m never going to be able to travel again, I ain’t got no money, how am I going to save anything because I’m barely making anything to survive. There was a lot of stuff happening internally as I was making this decision to follow my heart. But a teacher told me, “Look, Ashanti, after you teach for five years, you can apply for a Fulbright, and it’s an exchange program. So a teacher from that country will come here, and you will go there,” and I’m like, all right, okay, I can get some travel in.
So I applied to travel to either India or Mexico. Now I got accepted to both, with India I needed only English language, with Mexico I needed Spanish language, and I had enough Spanish language to qualify for Mexico. The challenge with Mexico is that Mexico was a one-year program. I couldn’t be away from Ever Forward for one year. Now India was seven months, so it allowed me to come back to Ever Forward and still complete our 24-hour relay challenge, our college tour, and be there for graduation. So even though there was some frustrated students when I told them I was leaving for seven months, I knew that I was going to be back in time to make sure that we completed all of our big events, and all of our big events are usually in the spring.
Tim was one of the teachers, one of the eight educators who were accepted to India, and we met up three times in India, and we stayed in touch over the last 15 years. That was 2007 when I got to go to India to teach, I still have connection with students who I taught in India, I still have connections with Dr. Daponte. He’s an educator, he’s a father, and he’s a person who really understands that there’s more to teaching than just academics. And in this conversation, as you know, we talked to some educators recently, several of them, we’re getting the understanding and more about how teaching profession, how teachers and educators, how we have to navigate our own masks as well.
And so this conversation actually gets a little academic. We start talking about law of conservation of energy, and the bed of nails. So if you’ve never seen or heard about a bed of nails, he’s going to tell you all about it. We talk about some other stuff, some of the titles that he named, I’m not even going to try and name all those things, but what we talk about is how connecting with students is so important. And I guess I was already getting excited about this episode, but this episode is also important because we’re recording it the week of what took place in Uvalde in Texas, and Tim is actually, he was recording from Texas. And so we spend some time there as well.
And so as we touch on these topics in this conversation, I just want to invite each of you as you’re out there, if you’re parents, if you’re educators, if you’re community people, to please share this episode with somebody, please recommend a teacher that we should talk to in this work. Please nominate somebody who you think would be a good guest for us to have a conversation with about their own masks as well, whether they’re an educator, teacher, administrator, maybe they’re a student, maybe there’s a teenager out there that you know that we should connect with. You help us to know who you want to be hearing from, and your ability to connect us with those people are going to be powerful because you may already know them.
If you’re a first time guest and you have never listened to an episode, we’re going to talk about the front and the back of our masks, we’re going to talk about the Million Mask Movement is a campaign that we created to help people build connection. The front of the mask, which are the things that we gladly let the world see, and the back of the mask, the things that we don’t usually talk about or let people see. I’m really thankful for Tim exploring and sharing that. It was challenging for him, as a 66-year-old man, to think about what’s happening behind the scenes, and I’m really thankful for him sharing it with us.
And so hope you enjoyed today’s episode, thank you for being a part of this movement, please like, share, subscribe, and if you can write us a review, we really appreciate it, it’s going to help our podcast get in front of more people, and we thank you for that. Please enjoy today’s episode with Dr. Tim Daponte, and we look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
Tim Daponte, it is so good to see you, welcome to the Taking Off the Mask podcast.
Tim Daponte:
Hi Ashanti, it’s always good to see you.
Ashanti Branch:
Oh man, well Tim, you know what, we’re going to get into how we know each other, but will you introduce yourself to folks so they will know who you are, and then I’m really excited for us to get into this conversation.
Tim Daponte:
I’m Tim Daponte, I live in Houston, Texas. I retired from the public schools in Houston after 32 years of teaching, and from there I taught six and a half years at the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center. And last year, because of cutbacks in the county education budget, I am now teaching at Incarnate Word Academy. It’s a Catholic all girls school here in Houston, Texas. So I went from the convicts to the convent.
Ashanti Branch:
Wow. And I imagine we’re going to jump into that, that experience in the juvenile detention, because we’ve been doing some work there this year, thank you. And listen, Tim and I, we’ve known each other, and I’ve not seen you since 2000, face to face, since 2008, right? When we left India, right?
Tim Daponte:
Correct, right.
Ashanti Branch:
So how about, do you want to tell them how we met?
Tim Daponte:
Ashanti and I were both in the Fulbright Teacher Exchange program, he was based in Chennai, correct?
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah.
Tim Daponte:
There were eight American teachers who exchanged positions with an Indian teacher in the same discipline, and I was in New Delhi with my 10-year-old son, and Ashanti was basically a rockstar in Chennai. Everyone loved Ashanti immediately, including my 10-year-old son, who still thinks Ashanti is the coolest man who ever lived.
Ashanti Branch:
Oh man, your son was amazing. I think only maybe two or three of the folks had brought their families, or who had families, I didn’t have a family, and it was so great, I was like, “You brought your whole family?” It was just amazing, the people who did that experience, to come there, all the way across the world, bring their family, and it was just, it was hard enough for me moving myself.
Tim Daponte:
The others, Paul and Pat, who brought their families, they also brought their wives as well as their children with them, but I was a single parent with Matthew. And it’s difficult being a single parent no matter what the circumstances are, and being a single parent in a developing country where you cannot always drink the water, was even more challenging, watching after Matthew and making sure that his welfare and health and safety were taken care of also. So it gave me an even greater appreciation for my mother, who basically raised seven children by herself, just being a single parent for a semester was quite an experience.
Ashanti Branch:
Man, and every time we got together, I think we got together definitely two times, maybe three, I know once in Manipal and then once in Deli for the kickoff.
Tim Daponte:
Right.
Ashanti Branch:
It was just so-
Tim Daponte:
And another time after that.
Ashanti Branch:
That’s right, I think it was the closing ceremony, yeah. And just a beautiful experience of connection, and the fact that we still are connected 15 years later, even though we haven’t seen each other, we stay in touch by emails and talk.
Tim Daponte:
Sure.
Ashanti Branch:
So I’m so excited to have you here on the show. I know you mentioned this is your first podcast, so first of all, thank you for being willing to have your first podcast experience with me. This conversation is not an interview, so it’s an opportunity for us just to connect and talk about these masks. I think even when I had started the podcast, when I came to India, 2007, I had just started the Ever Forward club four years before that, 2004, so it was a brand new organization and I was just trying to figure it out, and leaving it was really hard.
So what I felt like I was leaving behind was, I was leaving behind the Ever Forward club, and having to tell those students, “Hey, I’m not going to be here next year,” I didn’t expect the emotions that were going to come, and it felt heartfelt, but it also felt like, uh oh, I didn’t expect them to take it so hard. And so leaving them felt like leaving family behind, so I was like, I could have brought them all, “All of you, come on, we’re going to all go to India for right semester abroad.” That would’ve been a great, wild, I definitely have not prepared for that kind of experience yet.
Tim Daponte:
I left my wife and younger son George, who has special needs, back in Houston for that time too, so yeah, I understand what it was like leaving family.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah. Well listen, I’m so glad that we get to jump into this conversation. You as an educator, and we’ve actually been interviewing several, not even planned, we talked about interviewing more educators, but just recently we’ve been interviewing a lot more educators. And I think that what we are seeing in our schools, and what we know post pandemic is, well what I believe, and what I see, is that our kids are in such a deep need for emotional and social supports. I think that schools get stuck into the academic, which is absolutely important, and sometimes at the expense of the social and emotional wellbeing of students. And I think, as you probably experience now at this school you’re at now, compared to where you were before, if a kid is not emotionally present, their academics are probably going to have some effect, it’s going to affect their academics in some way.
Tim Daponte:
Of course, yes.
Ashanti Branch:
And so this mask, you and I get to talk about our masks first, and maybe as we explore how they show up in our own lives, then maybe we can talk about education. Because I think right now, and more than ever, and I didn’t make the connection, actually when we scheduled this, what we’re dealing with in the world right now hadn’t happened. So what’s happening in our, just giving everybody a timeline, this is May 26th, and we just had a… Sometimes even hard to talk about, I feel like sometimes it’s even awkward to even name it. I feel my emotions actually rising.
Tim Daponte:
I feel the same way. You’re talking about the massacre in Uvalde, and massacre is a very powerful word, but I don’t think there’s any word that really can justify the horror of this. I live in Texas, and I like Houston, but it is harder to get a six-pack of beer than it is a AR-15. I was an army medic, and I have seen what an M16 can do to a human being, and a lot of people don’t really appreciate that. If you’re 18, you cannot rent a car, but you can buy a M16 or automatic rifle, there’s a disconnect there.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah, yeah. You can’t rent a car, you can’t even have a drink.
Tim Daponte:
Yeah.
Ashanti Branch:
All the things that they make you hold up to, and then-
Tim Daponte:
Right.
Ashanti Branch:
So today is a real day, and thank you for being here, I’m super excited about this conversation. So our guests get to decide who goes first, so either you go first, or you want me to go first, in sharing the mask, and then we’ll just share the mask and talk about any pieces that stand out for you, and then the conversation will go wherever it’s meant to go.
Tim Daponte:
I’ll lead off, I was the lead off batter in baseball occasionally, because I was not a power hitter. My mask.
Ashanti Branch:
So how about do this, show the front, just fold it, maybe fold it back so you can just show the front.
Tim Daponte:
Sorry.
Ashanti Branch:
No, that’s okay, we’ll leave the suspense to seeing the back later.
Tim Daponte:
Okay.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Tim Daponte:
Can you see that Ashanti?
Ashanti Branch:
I can, I can.
Tim Daponte:
Okay. I’m not much of an artist, and it shows a happy guy with a baseball hat, says, “I’m happy, I’m a teacher, I’m educated.” That’s three words that people might use to describe me. The back, I’ve really had to think about this. It took me a long time to think of three words that I don’t want, or people don’t necessarily see. Insecure, a lot of family issues, brothers, sisters, mostly brothers. And my father was very physically abusive, so I’ve had some trauma in my life, a lot. And I’m willing to talk about that, it took me years of therapy to get over a lot of this, but that’s something that we have to deal with each day.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah, thank you, thank you brother. Thank you, thank you for that. And I think you helped me figure where I was going to go on the back of mine as well, and I’m going to jump into that too, and I’ll show you the front. This is the front of my mask, I wrote, this is what I drew, I don’t know what that is right now.
Tim Daponte:
Energetic, serious, and caring, I would agree with that.
Ashanti Branch:
And ironically, the E and the C, this was not planned, literally, but there’s an E here, E, and then there’s a C right there.
Tim Daponte:
Okay, yes, kind of like Picasso.
Ashanti Branch:
All right, don’t get me started, I’m going to have to save this for somebody to buy later.
And then the back, energetic, serious, caring. When I thought about, lately I’ve been really thinking about the caring part. I am really, my heart is open, and I care a lot about not only the state of education, the state of schools, the state of young men who are emotionally overloaded with life, but I put caring last, and I think that sometimes, because I feel it so deeply, I almost push caring back to behind because I think I would just be maybe crying all the time. Just what I feel, and I have to get to work, and I got to do stuff, and I got things to do, and I got business, I got an organization to run, and I almost have to feel like sometimes I have to compartmentalize who I am. The caring part of myself, okay, when I get home at night then I can think about, and look on the news and watch some stuff and just feel. But during the day I’m like, hey, I got stuff to do, I got an organization to run, and the caring part of myself, I’ll keep it behind sometimes.
Anyway, that’s interesting, I’m going to show you what I put on the back, because this is the back, the things I don’t normally show, sad, worry, and family drama. And yeah, I think that, I didn’t have a father growing up, but my mom got married when I was 11 or 12, and there was a lot of drama with the man she married in my life. It turned into a really horrible season of my life, I would say. But sad and worry is one that is really pressing today, pressing into me today. I’m not talking about it, I am trying to figure out how to talk about it, I want to talk about it.
And so I think those are the things I’m caring right now a lot, I’m carrying the sadness and the worry for kids all over the country, and parents who are having to send off their little kids, and the worry that they’re having in their minds as they drive off to work and knowing that they just hope. You wonder how many people are at work not even fully present because they’re just worried if their kids are okay. It’s like, how much collective energetic pull does that pull our people in this country? And then people all over the world, but definitely people here who have seen and experienced, and people right there in that city, and the city’s around. So those are the things that are really present for me right now.
I guess one of the, this is not an interview, so I guess-
Tim Daponte:
Oh, okay.
Ashanti Branch:
No, no, oh yeah, this is more, I mean, maybe you have a question, I have a question, but I think about this a lot when I think about education and teachers and schools. We do this activity with schools all over, we go into schools, we have students make a mask, we mix up the masks, and we invite some students to come up and read some masks. And what we often find, even at private schools, public schools, charter schools, juvenile detention schools, I think people are sometimes shocked that people around them are going through real stuff, because people get really good at putting on that emotional mask.
Tim Daponte:
Yeah. I put down insecure on mine, and I’m a teacher, I have two masters, my doctorate, but I always felt that, my father would always call me stupid, stupid. The only good piece of advice he ever gave me was, “You don’t have much of a brain, so you might as well learn how to use your hands. So I took a lot of shop classes in high school, which has served me well in that respect, but I always felt that even though I have all these diplomas on the wall, that I, for some reason, am just faking it, and someday someone’s going to pull back the curtain and, “Hey, we looked at your dissertation and it’s all wrong,” or whatever.
I dated a woman for a while, she had graduated from Barnard College in New York, which is attached to Columbia University. And the line she would say when we were with her Ivy League friends would be, “He’s not Ivy League material,” whatever that means. Well, it was a way to put you in your place, and always being somewhat the outsider. I’ve known people who’ve gone to very top universities in the country. I mean, my wife is a Harvard graduate, and supremely intelligent, but there’s always that academic and intellectual insecurity, I think, and that’s traced back to growing up, the family issues and the trauma too. And I don’t think we ever, we might get over that, but we’ll never forget it.
Ashanti Branch:
Get over it versus forgetting it. Two things came up as you said that, let me write this, get over it. When you talked about your father, that quote you said he said to you, “You don’t have much of a brain, you better learn to use your hands.” Did you ever have a chance later to talk to your father about-
Tim Daponte:
No.
Ashanti Branch:
Oh, no.
Tim Daponte:
No, he deserted the family. But no, nor did I ever want to.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah.
Tim Daponte:
I always thought, well, geez, I graduated from high school, and it wasn’t until I was in the army that I took some college courses, just because I had some free time, at the University of Maryland’s branch overseas in Europe, and I did well, and I had the GI Bill so I figured, okay, I’ll go to college for free, which was great. And that validation, I think the reason I even pursued a doctorate was because I needed that validation. Also teaching, if you had a doctorate, you made a substantial amount of money more than if you just had your masters, so it was economically advantageous to me, but it’s that validation.
I had one woman ask me once, she got into an argument, she said, “What do you think you are, some sort of PhD?” I didn’t know what to say, Ashanti, so I went to the other room, I looked at the wall, there was a diploma on it, and it said according to the University of Houston I was some sort of PhD. I pointed that out to her, I also pointed out that she wasn’t, and last time I saw her, believe it or not.
Ashanti Branch:
Safe to say that was some writing on the wall, literally.
Tim Daponte:
Literally and figuratively, right, right.
Ashanti Branch:
And figuratively, yeah. Man.
Tim Daponte:
I think that insecurity is always going to be there too. Both you and I are Fulbrights, and that was kind of like the punctuation on the, okay, you want to call me stupid? Well, I have a Fulbright and you don’t, okay.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah. I wonder even, and thank you for sharing that story because I think that what we think about is, it seems like for that, even that woman who said that thing, for the dad, if people, and people will always try and question our abilities or knowledge, and I think I’ve experienced that, and I think one of the things I first say, okay, how can I work? Normally I put on the front of my mask I’m a hard worker, because I believe I am. And I think I always feel like I’m always trying to prove that I am worthy. When I think about that insecure, and I think about that piece, that word, which resonates with me as well, I think about if I work hard enough then it’s going to show it, right?
And I wonder, for myself, as I hear you talk about this, and I’m wondering how often I have been trying to prove it to myself sometimes. Constantly trying to, Ashanti, yes, you are an engineer, but you’re a teacher and you love teaching. You don’t need to prove to people that you are an engineer who became a teacher. I remember when I first left engineering to become a teacher, I knew the feeling it felt when you told somebody you’re an engineer and how they look at you. I knew how they looked at you, I know the surprise on their face as they emoted. And then when I became a teacher, I saw a different emote, and the emote was like, “Oh, okay.” And so then I realized, I need to qualify the fact that I’m a teacher with me being an engineer, so I would always be like, “Well, I used to work in engineering, and now I’m a teacher.”
And I felt like I was doing it for self-preservation, almost an ego piece, because I knew what that felt like, to have somebody be like, “Oh, nice for you, teacher.” Like, “Oh, good job.” And I never felt that as an engineer, I felt a whole different vibe. So it’s interesting how often people in the world, as a teacher, as I see students who are trying to go after things that they don’t really want, but they feel like they have to because they need to improve or impress or make somebody else happy, I wonder how often people, I mean, I know it happens a lot, I don’t know the percentage of that, but how often people get stuck, because what if somebody got into a career they didn’t really want to be in, and how long do you stay before this is not enough? Or do you just stay there for the rest of your life?
Tim Daponte:
I don’t know how many people, lawyers, whatever, are just miserable in their career, and they make buckets of money, but they dread going to work. And people say, “Well, you have all these degrees, you have all this qualifications, Tim, why are you still in the classroom?” Well, I enjoy it, and I’m really good at it too. And I think that’s what keeps me in the classroom and not going up to the boardroom. So teachers, my wife worked in investment banking for a bajillion years, and we used to go to some professional functions, and people, “Oh Tim, what do you do?” “I’m a teacher, I teach in the Houston School District.” “Oh, that’s nice,” and walk away, because I couldn’t advance their career.
I always told my wife, semi-seriously, that whenever we go to any of her business functions I should always have my W2 form stapled to my lapel. But Ginny, my wife Virginia, that didn’t make any difference to her how much money I made. I tell the story that when we first met I had a Ford pickup truck and the ignition switch was broken, so instead of going to AutoZone, I’m not plugging AutoZone, but that’s where I do all my holiday shopping, to get an ignition switch, I had a screwdriver, and I just popped it, and that was it. And I picked Ginny up and I started the truck, and she said, “Why don’t you have an ignition switch?” And I said, “I’m a teacher.” And that was okay with her, starting the truck with the ignition switch.
Her father, we had been going together for close to a year and I met him, and he was in the pickup truck, I started it, and I said, this is June or July in Houston, I said, “Time to turn on the air conditioning.” He didn’t blink, he just rolled down the window, because he knew my air conditioning system.
Ashanti Branch:
Did not exist, probably.
Tim Daponte:
Yeah, well, open up both windows, drive fast.
Ashanti Branch:
That’s really awesome, and I think in comparison to the person who said, “You’re not a PhD, are you?” I think to know that the person who accepted you, the person where you found connection and partnership was a person who was like, “Hey, sounds good, it works,” and I think that is what people I think are looking for. I think young people, I mean this is, you can imagine now the way young people get validation is on these devices, and I love my phone, but I always tell young people about how I never had to worry about impressing somebody outside of my, if I wanted to impress them, they had to be at my school or somebody I was going to see, not people who I’m never going to know, who are meanboy244, I’m not going to have to impress some fictitious person with an emoji as their image.
And that’s a lot of work, to be trying to impress people you don’t even know or see or think they are real, right? It’s hard enough to try and, if you wanted to impress people where you are, where I physically am. And I think sometimes young people today, when they get sucked into these devices, I think sometimes this idea of, I want to impress somebody outside of myself, and I think how amazing it could be for young people to just say, I’m going to be happy myself. I’m going to just be myself, and I’m going to first start there. And then whoever is willing to accept me, will accept me. Whoever’s willing to accept me will see me and value me, and I think that’s so important.
And I think what I’m seeing today more than ever is so many students and young people are not comfortable in their own skin. They’re always like, who am I having to be around these people? I saw the other day, you sent me a picture, I think I saw, of you allowing a student with a sledgehammer to break-
Tim Daponte:
The bed of nails trick. I’ve been doing that for, it’s the last magic trick of the year, and I was teaching at a high school in Houston, John H. Reagan High School, and the wood shop kids needed a final project. So two of the guys made me a bed of nails, 2088 nails, and it demonstrates the law of conservation of energy, and I don’t think there’s enough time for us to go over this. Anyway, I get on the bed of nails, put a 40 pound block of concrete cinder block on my chest, and the student takes a sledgehammer and breaks it. Well, what it does is the energy from the sledgehammer breaks the concrete block. My weight is distributed on over 2000 points, and with the population I have right now, all girls, are just screaming and yelling and, “Oh, you’re going to die, you’re going to die.” But it gets their interest, they’re going to remember that for the rest of their lives.
Okay, okay, I’m ready, come on, come on.
students:
Oh my gosh.
Oh my goodness.
She’s having a good time.
Aren’t you supposed to have the goggles on your head?
Wait, wait.
Oh my goodness.
Let’s give him a round of applause for that one.
Oh my word.
Tim Daponte:
A hand for Lauren, a hand for Brittney.
And we have to use different strategies. Now we have to remember that for too many kids, too many students, their attention span might be measured in nanoseconds, so always doing something different. And in physics, as opposed to other subjects, you can actually get these kids doing something, whether that’s doing the class experiment with just pulleys, lifting up the weight with multiple pulleys, or whatever, getting them to actually do it as opposed to just sitting there, because I learn more actually doing things with my hands and applying the principal of physics to that, as opposed to just somebody just drawing a picture on the board and this is how it works.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah, I’m definitely a learner like that too. I think I’ll never forget my high school physics teacher, Mr. Miller. Oh, he was a rebel, he was a revolutionary rebel. He had his own little radio station, he had his own little private radio station he wouldn’t tell you about until you became a high school graduate, he would tell you his channel, because he’s like, “Nah, I can’t tell you now, you got to wait until you graduate.” Then he would tell you the channel, he’s like, “Don’t tell anybody, you can’t tell any of the younger kids,” this has to be their rites of passage. And he was talking about education and trying to get money, more money for education, he was a really cool guy. I remember he had this activity where you sat in this chair, and there’s a bike, a tire, a bike tire.
Tim Daponte:
Oh yeah.
Ashanti Branch:
A wheel of a bike.
Tim Daponte:
Angular momentum.
Ashanti Branch:
See, I wasn’t even going to claim to even have a title for it, so thank you for that. I’m going to go into the basic description. I’m going to go into the basic description. And so he would spin it, and then he’d say, “Okay, now turn it, start turning it,” and you would start rotating. Those are things that I think so many kids need. I’ll never forget, I didn’t know the name, I mean, I probably could have looked it up, but I didn’t know what it was called, but I’ll never forget the feeling of it, like oh my God, this little wheel, I mean, not a wheel, it was a tire.
Tim Daponte:
Bicycle tire, right.
Ashanti Branch:
Bicycle tire, it was moving me. And I’ve been a big kid my whole life, so anything that can move me without some serious force was like, what’s going on here? And so I think, how many kids can we find teachers who are excited about their own teaching to get kids excited about learning, that it looks very different than it did when I was in high school. It has to look different. And I told my students when I became a teacher, “First of all, I don’t have enough energy to be running around, jumping, and trying to match energy from your cartoons, I’m not going to do that.”
Tim Daponte:
Right.
Ashanti Branch:
“But I am going to do my best to engage you in things that are going to be real life, real world, and real experiences,” and I think that that’s a part of the work that is so undervalued sometimes. It’s like, how do we get their attention? What is the thing that’s going to get your attention? And one thing that’s going to get one kid’s attention, the other kid is going to be like, “That’s so dumb, why would I want to sit in the chair and spin around in the chair?” So one thing that’s going to get one kid excited won’t be the same for the other, but at least it gives us an opportunity for connection. And I think we’ve been talking a lot about this education thing, which is really important, but I want to, as we wind down at this time I want to just ask you, what do you envision schools… How long have you been a teacher? What was your first year teaching, do you remember?
Tim Daponte:
Yeah, 1981 was the first year I taught.
Ashanti Branch:
You’ve seen lots of transitions in education, lots of-
Tim Daponte:
Well, it’s always the next best thing coming in, and right now it’s Google Classroom, or whatever. But nothing is going to really replace in physics, in my discipline, a teacher coming in and engaging these students, and explaining, or giving them an opportunity to actually experience the pulleys, or the levers. And those labs go back to Archimedes, same thing, but it’s a principle a lot of these kids don’t understand, and by actually doing it they’ll understand it. Why is a car radiator black as opposed to silver or red, or whatever? Well, it has to do with black body radiation, and I’m not going to bore you with the details, but black will absorb heat faster than, let’s say white, from the car engine, but it’ll also lose heat faster. So making that real to these students, getting them real life experiences. Everyone’s going to have a car, why is the radiator black? Well, I can tell you now. Okay, not only can I tell you, but I did that in Dr. Daponte’s class.
Ashanti Branch:
That’s it. I guess as a teacher now, and one of the things that maybe in this, as we think about where education is, and I think that’s really powerful about physics, I think, as well, the Google Classrooms, the Zoom classrooms, all the things we had to do to make learning happen.
Tim Daponte:
During COVID, yes.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah. I imagine even for… How did you do that? How did you do the pandemic teaching?
Tim Daponte:
I was actually at the juvenile detention center at that time, and we actually went in during COVID. And that was an experience too. But when the vaccines first came out, county employees were at the top of the list. I think we got them before anybody else in the world, perhaps. But I think we’re still seeing the effects of that too. The students just aren’t going to learn as much watching me on the screen as opposed to actually doing something, engaging them. I’d love to sit down with you across the table, Ashanti, but we’re halfway across the country, but this is how we can connect right now. And I think having a connection, a direct connection with the students, that’s important too, because so many of our students, especially in the inner city, the teacher might be the only stable person they see every day.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah. How have you found, I guess as we think about our mask, you and I shared our masks here publicly, but when we come to a school, students, they have their mask on. And we talk about masks as being not anything wrong with having a mask, it’s just do you have a place to take it off? Do you have a place to talk about those things that you may not regularly let people see, but that could help you benefit, take some of that steam off?
I think as we talked about at the beginning of the show, how many young people, especially you’re in an all girls school now, but I will say when you worked with more co-ed audiences, or at the juvenile detention center, how have you seen those masks show up in the classroom? If you think about the metaphor, how have you seen it show up? And maybe what were ways that you found ways of helping students to let you in a little bit to be able to help teach them? Because some students are not going to learn from you unless they can have a connection with you, and some kids will do the work even if you don’t show up.
Tim Daponte:
Yeah. I think it’s important that the teacher in my class, we will break up for labs every day, every other day, and I’ll circulate between groups and just saying, “Hey, how’s it going? What are you doing? Do you understand this?” Showing some interest in what the kid is doing. And I think having that connection, students are much more apt to come to you with their masks off. Sometimes when they do take the masks off it is not a pleasant experience that they want to share with you, but it’s a cry for help, and from there we are, in many cases, legally bound to refer them to the social workers or the administration or law enforcement too. I’ve had a few students who were comfortable enough with me to share that they were being abused sexually, and red flags go off immediately. And we are in the state of Texas, I’m sure the same in California, if a student tells you that, you are legally bound to document it and refer it to social workers, children’s protective services, law enforcement, whatever.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah, the mandated reporters, it’s an important responsibility, and sometimes those spaces are, the kids need to have to talk about those things in a deep way. A thought was coming to my mind, as you become an educator, as you went to the army and found out you were good at school, and then you decide, I’m going to take some classes, I’m going to keep going, was there a teacher who, in maybe K-12, before you got to the Army and you were taking those classes, was there a teacher that you remember that really stood out to you?
Tim Daponte:
Oh yeah, Mr. Salah, Robert Salah, the biology teacher at Stratford High School. And he had only been teaching a few years, so he was younger than some of the other teachers, but he actively engaged with the students, and we did I don’t know how many labs, “Let’s go look at a tree,” or something like that, “Let’s go collect soil samples.” Well, you dig up by the baseball field, or something like that, the PE field, doing soil samples. And he really inspired me in a sense that, okay, it’s okay to go beyond the book. Because biology can be really boring, the Krebs cycle is just, oh my goodness, you don’t want to bring that up in a cocktail party. But actually, he was actually able to motivate many of us in high school, so he was the teacher who stands out.
Ashanti Branch:
Nice.
Tim Daponte:
In fact, geez, it was about 20 years after I graduated from high school I went back to the high school and my hometown, I was visiting my mother, and I said, I’m going to go see Mr. Salah, school’s in sessions. And I went there, and I thanked him for what he did, for how he taught.
Ashanti Branch:
I imagine he was really appreciating that.
Tim Daponte:
Yeah, I think so.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah.
Tim Daponte:
And if he’s ever watching this, Robert Salah, thank you.
Ashanti Branch:
Yeah. I thank all the teachers out there who are helping kids navigate the world in ways that they may not be able to do on their own. Tim, as we close up, is there any last words you have, you want to say about this mask experience? How was this for you? This is your first time on a podcast, but also you were asked to-
Tim Daponte:
It took me a while, Ashanti, it really did. Not the front of the mask, okay, I’m happy, educated, I’m a teacher, but the back of the mask, three words that you don’t necessarily share with people. Insecure, yeah. Family issues. My younger son, the reason he wasn’t able to come to India is because he has special needs. He’s 22, he’s nonverbal, and that’s something I just, I’m not ashamed of it, of course, but it’s something that we deal with every day, and past trauma too. The thing is, I don’t think I’m unique in that.
Ashanti Branch:
Thank you, thank you for those words, and what I’m hoping is that in this conversation, that more men out there in the world will realize that you’re not alone. I mean, I think you are unique, but behind the mask stuff, we’re not unique in the things that we’ve been through it.
Tim Daponte:
Right.
Ashanti Branch:
And I think it would help us if we knew that there were other men in our community, if you’re a man, if you’re a woman, there are other people in your community who are probably going through things you’re going through, but we’ve been maybe taught or trained that no one wants to hear it. So therefore we bottle it up, we stuff it, we repress it, and hopefully we can keep going while we’re repressing all of these things that are happening, and what we know is that some people can’t. And this conversation has been around making space for people all over the world to realize they’re not alone. So I want to thank you for sharing some of your mask with us today, and as the students that you work with, as you get ready for next school year. Are you on summer break yet or are you getting close?
Tim Daponte:
Actually Friday’s our last day here.
Ashanti Branch:
You almost forgot, that’s like two days away. That’s tomorrow.
Tim Daponte:
Friday’s manana.
Ashanti Branch:
That’s tomorrow.
Tim Daponte:
Right.
Ashanti Branch:
Man.
Tim Daponte:
You’re in a time warp, Ashanti.
Ashanti Branch:
I feel like it sometime, I tell you, for sure.
Tim Daponte:
Right.
Ashanti Branch:
Well have a great summer break, and maybe next year, as your school comes back, maybe the mask movement is something that could benefit teachers and students in those spaces, to recognize I’m not alone, I’m going through stuff.
Tim Daponte:
We have a teacher, I referred a teacher here, incarnate word to you.
Ashanti Branch:
Great.
Tim Daponte:
And a lot of this deals with men, but I think women it also applies to.
Ashanti Branch:
Absolutely. Oh, we make masks with everyone, so absolutely. We have masks that are from everyone and from all over the world, so I look forward to that, and I just want to say thank you for being on the show. It is so good, I almost, how did I forget that we have Zoom? We could have seen each other a long time ago, but I have not seen you in so long, but it was such a pleasure.
Tim Daponte:
I love you, Ashanti.
Ashanti Branch:
Love you too, brother. Hey Tim, as we close up, is there any way you would like people to, if they want to follow up with you, would you have a way of them contacting you?
Tim Daponte:
I’m on LinkedIn, Tim Daponte, and that’d probably be the easiest way to do that.
Ashanti Branch:
Fantastic.
Tim Daponte:
The personal email, we might not want to share that with everyone.
Ashanti Branch:
No worries, we’ll just do LinkedIn, we’ll just put the link for the LinkedIn, it’ll be perfect.
Tim Daponte:
Yeah, just the LinkedIn, okay.
Ashanti Branch:
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, and folks, if you want to make a mask out there, Tim and I shared our mask publicly, but you can do it also anonymously at millionmasks.org. We are appreciating you for being a part. Please, if you found this episode inspiring, maybe there’s a teacher you know who needs to hear some of these words from these two teachers talking about their own mask, maybe you can share this episode with them, you can review us on Apple Podcast, and we look forward to you being a part of the next episode. So thank you so much, and we’ll see you soon, folks.
Tim Daponte:
Thank you.
Ashanti Branch:
Thank you, Tim.
Tim Daponte:
All right, love you Ashanti.
Ashanti Branch:
Love you too, brother
Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is written and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. You can find Taking Off the Mask wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve also included a link to Ashanti Branch’s Ever Forward club in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
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