Ixchell Reyes 0:01
Are you aware of how trauma impacts your classroom? How can teachers who are not trained become more aware of the needs of their students? Today, on episode 134, of the DIESOL podcast, we’re taking a first look at Trauma awareness in the adult ESOL classroom. I

Brent Warner 0:32
welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL and author of edtech for multilingual learners. I guess I gotta say something with Ixchell Reyes, award winning educator in innovation, professional development and specializing in teacher training with an edtech focus, Ixchell, we’re not really talking ed tech today. We’re talking something? No, this is a topic we’ve mentioned a few times in the past. You wanted to do, actually, you’ve wanted to do several episodes on this. We’re but we’re kind of doing our first, our first attempt at it today. So what are we into today?

Ixchell Reyes 1:18
We’re looking at trauma in the adult ESOL classroom, and it is a heavy topic, so we just have pushed this conversation away. And I think it’s finally enough, and we do need to be talking about this, especially given the circumstances in our field. We’re gonna we’re gonna be surrounded by populations that have more likely than not experienced trauma, and we should have a disclaimer that we are not formally trained in dealing with trauma, and for that reason, for that very reason, we’re looking at research articles for ways that we can best support our students while they’re in our classrooms. So a big thank you to our friend and friend of the pod, Teresa Bestwick, because she had asked her for resources a while back, and she gave me so many resources, and I’ve been working on them, powering through, reading through them, and finally, we’re able to to take a look. So she’s also the co founder of the TESOL development hub online, and you can find her on Instagram.

Brent Warner 2:32
Awesome, yeah. So this is, yeah, as you mentioned, we’ve talked about a lot. I feel very under qualified, you know, on the on this conversation. So I think if you’re kind of in the same place as me, we’re just kind of sitting here, like, what are the things we need to recognize? What are the things that we you know, that goes on around these conversations? You know, maybe some people have avoided it. It’s just like another thing to take on that’s, that’s a big feeling for a lot of people, is just like, another heavy thing to take on, on top of the work that I’m already doing, right? So I totally understand all of that. But that said, you know, like, at some point we have to recognize the world we’re living in and recognize that people have, you know, needs that change and thing and that might impact our classes in ways we hadn’t thought about so Ixchell, you’re going to be kind of guiding us through this conversation, because you know a bit more about it than I do. But to everybody, Yeah, take that disclaimer in mind. If you want to start getting involved with it, you’re really going to have to do some real work on it. But if you’ve been like, hey, what’s the deal here? Let’s look at it today. So Ixchell, let’s start with just the basic what is trauma.

Ixchell Reyes 3:47
Okay, so, Brent, are you familiar with Dr Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote the Body Keeps the Score. Have you heard of him? Okay, so he has a very popular book that many researchers and I think counselors and therapists look at. He’s got the most experience, and I think it’s like 30 years of research worth of studies, and he defines trauma as not just an event that took some time in the past, it is also the imprint left by that experience on our mind, brain and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way Mind and Brain manage perceptions, and here’s the key, it changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. And so that has a lot of implications for our students.

Brent Warner 4:56
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I. I can’t, I can’t imagine the word trauma without kind of imagining something negative, right? But this definition doesn’t actually talk about negative issues. I’m not sure if that’s just kind of how he defined it, or if it’s part, if it’s intentional there, but like, you know, it talks about, it’s this idea that we are reorganizing, or kind of re shifting the way we think about things because of these experiences, right? And so I’m always like, okay, like, if you you know, if you grew up in a low income household, right, you might have trauma around some of that. And like, how you deal with money, or what your expectations are of people doing things, right, obviously, now, as we’re talking about war torn areas, right? And how much you you know how, how you would interact with a stranger in some of those situations, right? So anyways, yeah, it’s fascinating description here. I think we need to get a lot deeper. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes 6:01
Well, I think, I think the important part is that you don’t need to have a negative experience necessarily in the way that we think of it as this big event. It’s, it’s the impact it had on you. So, for example, those of you that don’t know I have a phobia of butterflies. Okay, butterflies are not going to eat me or kill me or whatever. They are not a threat to me, but my body perceives them as a threat due to I don’t know. I think when I was little, one got stuck to my hat, and so I saw the shadow of it fluttering, and I didn’t know what it was. So I that was so imprinted in my brain that now I like jerk whenever I see butterflies, so it’s not necessarily this big disastrous thing, it’s the that it kick started your nervous system, right? And anything that’s kick starting your nervous system is going to trigger that impact of fight or flight or freeze or the reaction, right? Because your brain just wants to protect you. And so here we’re going to get a little bit deeper now then. So how does trauma impact the brain, and what does that look like in the classroom? And there are three areas, when we looked at research, and all of these sources are going to be listed in our show notes, there are three areas of the brain, three network areas that monitor and enforce attention control, and these are the salience network, and this network allows human to determine what stimuli to focus on, the default mode network, which assists in self regulation, and the central executive network, which is critical for controlling thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

Brent Warner 7:47
So and central executive network, we have to remember, yes, okay, let’s talk about them one

Ixchell Reyes 7:56
at a time then. So let’s start with the working memory and executive function. So, so what does that mean? Well, you have impaired social or impaired working sorry, impaired spatial working memory, maybe under development of the prefrontal cortex and the inability to carry out goal setting and self control. So, kind of like what we look at in teenagers.

Brent Warner 8:27
So if you have some trauma related impairments around this, right? So, around your executive function, around your working memory. Thing that’s interesting, impaired spatial working memory, right? Like, so spatial memory is like the physical different understanding of the physical differences between things, right, inability to carry out goal setting and self control. Okay, so as I slow down and think about this right now, it starts to become a little bit clear about what, how this might show up in a classroom. But Ixchell, I know you’ve got some info on that. So how does it look?

Ixchell Reyes 9:05
Yeah, so in adults, this might be observable in difficulty retaining new vocabulary or grammar, the inability to control thoughts, emotions, behaviors. So maybe a quick temper or volatile emotions, maybe low participation and difficulty with complex, complex tasks or planning. So again, you might, you might say, Oh, I have this lazy student who has no study skills or poor study skills, but we’re not thinking about the underlying cause of that, and it could very well be that this student is worried about their parents, worried about their neighbors, worried about their children, or worried about their family back home, and yes, or if you’ve experienced that already somewhere else, and you’re coming to a classroom situation. Having to remember all of that, all of that information, is going to be overload on your cognitive system. Okay?

Brent Warner 10:09
So I’m going to pause it here, because immediately, I’m already thinking of a student that I’ve had in the past, right? You know, like difficulty retaining new vocab, grammar, right? Difficulty with complex tasks or planning things out, right? Had a lot of problems with this student, not problems. I mean, this is a good student, right? Like they were trying, they were doing all the things, but like they were never it was like, no matter how many times we talked about things, no matter how many different approaches, and always struggle with, like, just like, locking in the changes that well, you know, it’s like, Hey, we’ve talked about this 20 times, like, what, what, why? What’s not happening here, right? And so I want to be careful that I don’t just instantly go, Okay, well, now, now I know the answer is that you’re dealing with trauma, right? So, yeah, it’s not that, but it’s also that it hadn’t really been a consideration before, right, right? So being aware of this and going, okay, hold on, let’s look at this as a consideration. Maybe this is a thing that’s going on, and so let’s be careful not to immediately diagnose anybody, right? And again,

Ixchell Reyes 11:13
I think the important part here is to be aware. Be aware that it’s not always the thing that we think, and it doesn’t have to be trauma, it could be something else and but, but again, because of what our students are probably facing and having questions about recently, I think it’s important to have that as one of the the things you also consider, so that you’re informed and you don’t just jump to conclusions that we don’t want to jump to conclusions ever. And I think that’s that’s one of the reasons why I want to talk about this. So okay, so then the other cognitive system that’s affected is the salience network, which is attention and this, this is difficulty focusing and sustaining attention disruption and determining what to focus on. And in the classroom, this might manifest itself as concentration difficulty. So we often have students who look like they’re very hyperactive, or they’re quickly lose them. Maybe they’re hyper vigilant. I’ve had students who react very quickly or seem like they talk about how everything bad is happening to them all the time, and it might be something like they didn’t score well on a quiz that day, or they forgot their book. There’s emotional flooding, so they may very quickly become quiet or have an outburst, they may also have difficulty registering input necessary for language acquisition. I don’t know if that makes you think about, have I had to deal with situations like this? Yeah.

Brent Warner 12:59
I mean, my first thought here is, you know, like these, these kinds of behaviors tend to be more common in children, right, kids and things like that, but, but I you can see them and appear in different ways for adults, right? Where it’s like, it’s like they might just, not just, you know, scream because they’re overwhelmed in the middle of class, right? But, but they might have enough aware, like, they might still have something happening, and then maybe they just walk out of the middle of class, right? And it’s like, okay, yeah, you know Is something going on here? Like, what’s happening, right? And maybe they don’t even make it obvious. Like, a lot of times I’ve seen students walk away while they’re kind of, like looking at their phone, like, as though I’ve got an important phone call to take, and maybe that’s what’s going on. Or maybe it’s just like, Hold on, I need to get myself cleared from this space for five minutes, or whatever else it is. So yeah, I could see different ways of this showing up. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes 13:52
So again, you bring up a good point that these are very easily observable in children. And we’re able to say like, okay, the child’s overwhelmed. Okay, they’re dealing with a change in in the household, but in adults, we, we, we don’t expect these behaviors to show up that way. And they’re, they’re just a little more subtle. You might have students in in a group who suddenly are I just can think of one example years ago where a student got very upset at his group and threw down his backpack and stormed out of the university classroom. And everyone was shocked, because we were not expecting that behavior from an adult, come to find out later, he was upset about something that happened in the classroom, but the underlying reason was that he was failing courses already, and he had gotten in trouble and was likely going to be sent back home. So that that is a negative, that is a negative his his brain is fight or flight or freeze, and what did he choose to do? Well, he fled. But that. Impacts the rest of the class, and at that time, I just thought, oh my goodness, let me keep the rest of let me just make sure everyone is safe.

Brent Warner 15:10
Okay, so we got we talked about working memory, executive function, we talked about the salience network. Is there anything else?

Ixchell Reyes 15:18
Yeah, the one we always mentioned, the affective filter. And we also said a fight or flight affective filter. So you tell us what the affective filter is, and why is that important?

Brent Warner 15:28
Yeah, well, the affective filter is, you know, you know, we’ve got this idea, like when we’re activating stress hormones that can limit the information that flows to our higher cognitive networks, right? Stress slows us down. Stress impedes our language learning, right? And so, so it’s kind of like we’re blocking off opportunities or blocking off options because we just need to filter out more information, right? And so that is intentionally, like our bodies are doing that intentionally, saying, Hold on, slow down. Overwhelmed. There’s, you know, there’s too much going on in here. And so, you know, when we’re talking about, you know, a lot of times we’ll talk about this in the way of, like, lowering the affective filter is, how teach, you know, teachers in our field talk about it all the time, right? How do we lower that affective filter? How do we make that student feel more welcome into the classroom, that they have a spot in there, that they can do this assignment that they’re talking about, right? And so, you know, it runs the opposite side of the scaffolding conversation, right? So it’s like, hey, we need to lower the affective filter to bring it into make it possible for you to reach here. But we also have to scaffold so that you can build it up to get to that spot, right? And so these are what I think about when I think about the, you know, the general idea of the affective filter,

Ixchell Reyes 16:47
and what might that look like in the classroom. I know you and I have done episodes on icebreakers and making the classroom a more friendly place, but and the affective filter itself, but what does that look like?

Brent Warner 17:00
Yeah, well, I mean, certainly we see students that are not wanting to talk, right, or too shy, afraid, and it’s tricky, right? Because as teachers, it’s like, we know they need to get past that, you know, we need to break some of that. But then we’re also got this other side of things where it’s like, oh, well, but we don’t want to traumatize, you know, or push, push them into places where they’re uncomfortable. But I do struggle with that sometimes because of both sides of that conversation, right? There’s also that side where we’re like, Well, hold on a second, people need to be pushed sometimes into places where they are uncomfortable in order to get past that. And it’s like, sometimes yes and sometimes no, right? And so do we know when we’re making a good decision around that, you know, I am not the almost always, like, when students give me a wrong answer, I very rarely say no, like, I don’t, I don’t throw, like, No, you’re wrong, like, right in people’s faces. And I’m like, let’s think about that a little bit more. Or, you know, well, what if we said this? Or maybe that works in some context, but not in this context, you know, like, so I am very hesitant, and I think it’s because of my, my own kind of wariness around this affective filter area where it’s like, let me just, you know, I don’t want to make a person feel stupid for making a wrong guess on a, you know, no impact question in the middle of class, right? But at the same time, like it’s just a tricky zone there,

Ixchell Reyes 18:29
yeah, and again, I think it’s important to be aware, because, yes, we’re adding one more thing you have to remember, but it makes you a better instructor. It makes you a better support system for your student. We can’t. I mean, whether we like it or not, we are we, in many cases, we’re the only support system, and so not jumping to conclusions and then pausing a little bit more and maybe being more empathetic, that will win you a lot of points in the classroom. And you’re also addressing issues that you may not even be aware of.

Brent Warner 19:04
And can I point out we’re gonna go on break? Yeah, second here. But can I point out that? Like, I definitely recognize that this stuff feels overwhelming to go like, Okay, you have to be aware it is. Think of this overwhelming, just as overwhelming on the teacher’s perspective, right? Like, it’s like, Hey, hold on a second. I have a lot of this stuff to deal with, but learning that also makes it less heavy when you’re dealing with it in the moment, right, which is right that like, hey, oh, now I can kind of deal with this and so, so the heaviness is like, you take it on up front to learn what it means, but actually you deal with it a lot better in the actual situations. And maybe you can guide the students through much more smoothly than you might if you just said, Well, okay, now I have to imagine that I’m figuring out all these solutions to things because I have no background in it, and I’m just trying to be empathetic to my student. You know, like having that repertoire built up for yourself. Self can give you a lot of relief later on, when the real problems come

Ixchell Reyes 20:05
and Brent, I have to say here that I’ve been reading these research articles for the longest. I feel like it’s a long time, because it’s been about maybe a year and a half, maybe more, since I got all of these resources, but I feel better equipped, and I’m more comfortable in the classroom talking about these issues. And so again, the later you you start, the bigger the gap becomes, and the scarier it is, right? So it’s, it’s a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, but something is better than zero. So our break, you

Brent Warner 20:43
all right, so I will be at TESOL and Ixchell I still haven’t convinced you to come.

Ixchell Reyes 20:49
Have I got no funds, I got no money, I got no annual leave.

Brent Warner 20:56
None of it’s working out right now, but I will be doing a session on Thursday, March 26 at 8am it’s called 10 tools to lighten teachers loads. It will be a more lighthearted conversation than we’re having, right? Yes, you know useful like, what I’m looking for is useful, practical things that you can understand, that you can kind of work with. And so if you’re wanting to join me, bright and early on Thursday morning, I will be there and so please come find me.

Ixchell Reyes 21:29
It’s early, but you know what? He’s funny or corny so you can Yeah,

Brent Warner 21:37
I have a my presentations are pretty lively, Punchy.

Ixchell Reyes 21:47
Show up 8am you won’t miss it. I mean, you won’t regret it. You won’t

Brent Warner 21:56
want to miss it. Great show. You’re just burning me all day long here, all right, but also, so that’ll be my session, but also, if you’re interested in today’s topic, and that’s not all, if you’re interested in trauma. So I just searched if you’re interested, yeah, if you’re interested in the trauma side of things I did search it, there’s like, at least nine different trauma informed teaching sessions going on so there. So it’s a well recognized and needed conversation by TESOL, and there will be a lot of good looks like there’s a lot of good sessions on it. Just from me typing in the word trauma, I’m sure that there are other ones that are kind of phrasing this on like, you know, supporting students through difficult, you know, things that don’t exactly have the word trauma in the title, but are still kind of around that idea. So take a look. Try to get to, yeah, a couple sessions, if you can. I know we’re busy. There’s lots of good choices to go from, but peek through see what might be useful for you. If this topic is interesting to you. All right, so Ixchell, we’re, we’re back, and we’re going to talk a little bit just about some strategies to do, to consider, right? We’re not, you know, just things to think about. And again, we’re providing a lot of resources a little bit later in the show notes. And so what are some of the things that strategies that teachers can consider as they’re dealing with all of these trauma related issues,

Ixchell Reyes 23:24
yeah, so first I want to say that a lot of resources can be found through the TESOL site. If you follow them on their Instagram. They recently put out a link, and I didn’t go through them yet, because there’s a ton of them, but there’s a compilation of good sources, so check them out on Instagram. I looked at the resources that Theresa gave me. So first of all, rapport and interaction. Brent, you and I have talked about this trauma or no trauma, right? You’ve got to build trust, and you reduce the affective filter. So how do you do that? We’ll ask. I think many of us already do that, but, you know, ask about their family. Ask about hobbies. Use positive body language, smiling, nodding, all the external, visual things that help someone to feel welcome or feel like they’re in a non threatening environment, and sometimes expect unexpected responses and avoid putting students on the spot. I have had unexpected responses where a student will blurt out everything that happened, and I was not prepared. And in other cultures, sometimes when you do ask about how they’re doing, they’re going to tell you how they’re doing, whether it’s pleasant or not pleasant. If they’re angry, they might tell you.

Brent Warner 24:39
So Wasn’t that wonderful? I mean, what a novel concept telling you how you feel when you ask how you feel, right?

Ixchell Reyes 24:47
You know, because we’re just like, Hi, how are you? I’m fine. Thank you and you, yeah.

Brent Warner 24:53
I mean, well, we all know the game, right? But it’s like, it is interesting when, when we break that mold. So, all right, great. Uh. So build some more rapport. You know, work on work on your interaction. I will say there are some times when it’s like, you try and it’s rough, right? Like you try to, and it’s like, oh, the students just not wanting to open that up at all yet, right? And so don’t give up if it doesn’t work one time, right? Just figure, figure out different approaches.

Ixchell Reyes 25:20
You also should think about your instructional design. The learner needs might be the memory deficits, right and attention control, so scaffolding instruction to the task level, offering different ways of repetition, frequent repetition, writing things on the board, but also maybe modeling it in your in your body language, using a lot of body language, encouraging students and using concrete examples. So again, a lot of us are already doing this, so it’s not mind blowing stuff. Oh, what a terrible thing to hear in the background. There’s an emergency vehicle. But teaching strategies to students that will help them to self regulate. So there are times, for example, that a student may become upset because they’re not achieving, I don’t know their score, or they’re not receiving information from the university that they’re applying to after your class, or they got a parking ticket. But those, those situations, become a chance for you to to help them, to help them regulate their their nervous system. Oftentimes, they’re not used to our culture. They’re not used to like, yeah, here you got to go to court and pay your bill, your your parking ticket. It’s not like an app where you just pay, I think, and not in all states, right? So helping them navigate through those situations gives them strategies,

Brent Warner 26:49
yeah, and I’m going to add in here, because we’re talking a little bit about this on our campus, we’re doing a book club, and we’re reading the opposite of cheating, and we’re doing a book club around it. One of the conversations was, you know, a lot of times as teachers, we think we’re being clear on the directions, or we put it up on our and we’re like, Hey, this is what to do. And so one technique to deal with that is to run it through AI, right? And say, like, how would you describe this? In a much easier way for someone who’s learning a language, right? Okay, I felt because I, you know, because I’ve been teaching for so many years, that obviously my ideas and the way I presented is very clear. And you’re like, hold on a second, actually, let’s really think about that. Because we get this false sense of how well we know something because we’ve been doing it for so many years, but our students, it’s their first time in our class, right? And so how are you building that design for them, and not for what you know, but for what they don’t know? So just be careful of that, right?

Ixchell Reyes 27:52
And so again, focusing on strengths and letting students, I mean, I’ve had plenty of students who are very quick to tell me where their weakness is, and they’re just very down on themselves, but they’re also self deprecating. And while it’s important to understand weaknesses so that we can strengthen them, it’s also important to honor the things that you can do, because oftentimes language learners have tunnel vision, and they don’t realize that they indeed are learning, even if it’s a little bit and they can’t recognize it a little bit at a time. And so I draw attention to like, hey, yesterday you couldn’t do that. But guess what? I just heard you do it today. That’s a great thing. A win is a win. And I always say something is better than zero. Something is better than nothing.

Brent Warner 28:40
Yep. Yeah. I was surprised recently when a student, kind of like, I said something, you know, nice, like, good job, you’re growing on this. I said something on that, and it really stood out to him. And he’s like, oh, you know, I was so happy when I got your message, because I know I’ve been working on it. And I was like, Oh, yeah. And I didn’t think that much about it, but I’m like, you know, but I went out of my way to say, hey, like, you are growing in the spot that we’ve been talking about, right? And he’s like, he’s like, I was really, really happy to get that because, you know, I was, I felt like I hadn’t. And so anyways, just to be aware that, like, it didn’t take much from me, but it impacted him in a big way, right?

Ixchell Reyes 29:13
And when we’re doing that positive self talk, where we’re modeling for them in many cultures, or maybe generation, depending we’re used to hearing about our flaws from our parents or from the people around us. And so you’ve got to retrain the brain to look for the areas that you can recognize growth in, because that’s growth. And so pretty soon, your body starts to react to that thinking. And then you’re changing the chemistry in your brain, of your in your body, and you’re rewiring those connections. So again, this all goes back to neuroplasticity, and that’s an area that’s fascinating.

Brent Warner 29:52
So, so when I asked you earlier today if I look handsome, you should have said yes, not no.

Ixchell Reyes 29:56
I. Brent, yes, Brent,

Brent Warner 30:05
I gotta feed myself. That’s the deal, right? All right, so we’re running out

Ixchell Reyes 30:14
of time last also thinking about your assessment and feedback. And again, then the learner needs to not have so much anxiety and also promoting growth, right? So giving. And again, I want to say that, and I always think on the positive side, I think that our audience is probably the type of audience who wants to grow and wants to do things in a way that supports students and helps them be a positive change in the classroom, but giving supportive feedback. That’s that’s focused on reduction of negative thinking, as I was saying, rewiring your brain, allowing students to check responses with others before group feedback, or before you give the feedback again, having a having someone that they trust, and that is going to maybe gently tell them or brutally honest, but because they’re their friend, they may not be so dried with anxiety, utilizing self assessments. I think self assessments, and you and I have talked about that reflections, right? Self assessments and reflections and maximizing choice and how the learning is demonstrated, because maybe there’s a student who can perform the task, but not in the same way that others or in the same standard way that your that everyone else is used to. I know you do a lot of that in your classroom, right? Yeah, yeah, especially around I know around homework, you’ve done a lot of, a lot of tweaks on tried a lot of different techniques,

Brent Warner 31:46
yeah, and I always do, I still, you know, it’s like, hey, is this working? And I found sometimes it’s interesting, because sometimes they work for us, and sometimes they work for a while, and then kind of fade out, and so, so you have to kind of keep practicing with these things. But yeah, having some level for reflection, I’m actually thinking about this as I’m looking at it like the utilizing self assessment, like we could build some cool bots that help students that don’t give them any answers, but that can, like, say, hey, let’s actually build that out in a way that, like, just ask the students to reflect and assess their own work, not that gives them any feedback or, like, any changes to their assignment, right? And so, right? A lot of students don’t know where to begin with the like, how do I self assess, right? And so even guiding through that process could with, with the bot on their own time, could be really useful.

Ixchell Reyes 32:36
Well, it’s just, you know, scaffolding, scaffolding, their own feedback and and helping them through it.

Brent Warner 32:45
Okay, so, Ixchell, I know there’s a lot more to talk this topic, and so you’re a lot maybe we could do multi parts like, you know, get next a little later and do more conversations on it as we go. I think that is a good idea. But today, we’re probably going to have to wrap and and kind of start closing things out here, if that’s

Ixchell Reyes 33:04
okay, yeah. So again, we’ll list all of the resources in our show notes, and a big thank you to Teresa, because she has been a fountain of of just a lot of information. So, yeah, you. Okay, it is time for our fun finds. And Brent earlier asked me if my whole purpose for the fun finds was to annoy people. And I mean, you got to find joy in things. So I found or annoying Brent something that brings me so much joy, much more joy than six seven, because six seven is dead, much to Brent’s disappointment, is an old meme from 2014 and I only recently found out about it, but it’s the Hamoud Habibi dancing meme, and it’s this little pixelated little dancing boy that originated in Arab speaking countries. I actually don’t know which one, but he just dances, and he sings this kind of creepy little jingle. But it recently resurfaced and is trending on social media because people are recreating the dance, and they’re recreating it with AI, they’re recreating it with themselves, with their grandparents, and it’s just so funny. And I, I, I find joy in that. Brent did not know about Hamoud Habibi, yeah, but now he knows.

Brent Warner 34:44
I know. For today, we’ll see if I keep that in my memory for a long time.

Ixchell Reyes 34:49
Hey, mention it to your students, especially if they speak Arabic, they will know and they’ll be impressed. So impressed. Ask them about Hamoud Habibi,

Brent Warner 34:58
I’ll be interested. Will they be impressed or will it be like, Dude, that’s so old.

Ixchell Reyes 35:04
They’re gonna say, how do you know that

Brent Warner 35:06
some of my students, we have to recognize they would have been four years old when that came out, right?

Ixchell Reyes 35:12
So, yeah, but they know, and if you know, you know, some of them will tell me, oh, so here’s the other one of my students, who’s like, 18 years old, told me, Oh, I used to be so creeped out by him, because he used to show up as a as a character on Minecraft. And so there’s like this whole lore around it, where the little boy chases you, and there’s like a little girl version of him, and there’s all sorts of versions of him. So you could probably see who would have been on your screen right now, but, yeah, check him out.

Brent Warner 35:45
Like I have no idea what she’s talking about. Join the club. All right. So mine is a YouTube channel called professor of rock. It is a, it’s to say, you know, it’s a, it’s just this, this guy who goes through all sorts of really interesting things about rock history. He tells cool little stories about things, you know, it could be deep, long lore stories, or it could be, you know, like what happened with this single or this one hit wonder, or whatever else it is, he does a ton. So he does like every like every day. He does like 3020, 30 minute shows, and he talks about these different things. It’s the

Ixchell Reyes 36:29
first one you’ve watched. Or find it. What should I click on?

Brent Warner 36:34
Well, it kind of depends on what you’re interested in, right? Because so the problem, here’s two problems with it. The biggest problem to me is, like, it kind of does click baby titles, right? And so you kind of have to, we do click baby titles. This is more, like, even more than this, right? So, like, like, Look at this. I hated this band until I met them, right? This song had to trick racist so their kids could watch the show, right? All these things. It’s like, it’s like, okay, but it was really interesting, yeah, I’m going to click, yeah, and so, like, I watched, I’m like, it wasn’t really about that, right? It was like, you know, it was much deeper about, like, popular cartoon song tracks that had higher success rates than the show itself, right? Was that that’s what ended up being. But in order to get seen, he has to do some of these things. So, so you just kind of have to pick and choose, like, maybe loosely, I’m interested in this thing, and then you can go and watch an episode. Unfortunately, he seems to be having these problems with, like, AI stealing his content, so he mentions it. He kind of talks about that in some of the language, so it is very tricky. So it’s just like, do you want to watch this? You want to watch this? Do you want to sit down for half an hour, maybe while you’re having lunch, and just kind of hear what this guy’s talking about? He is really deeply knowledgeable about all sorts of rock music and things like that, and he’s a big music fan, so I really do like them, but it is, you know, you just kind of have to pick and choose what you’re getting or what you’re watching when you show so Professor of rock on YouTube. Cool.

Ixchell Reyes 38:08
All right. Well, if you stuck through and made it to the end of this episode, you can find the show notes and other episodes DIESOL.org you can find this episode@DIESOL.org slash slash 134 you can find us on most socials at DIESOL pod,

Brent Warner 38:28
yes, you can find me at @BrentGWarner

Ixchell Reyes 38:32
and me at @ixy_pixy_, that’s i x y underscore p i x y underscore, don’t find me anymore.

Brent Warner 38:42
You can find us here. You can find us on DIESOL.org, so All right, thanks everybody so much, and I will see some of you at DIESOL. And finally, the

Ixchell Reyes 38:54
Yes! Buttons, Patches, pins!

Brent Warner 38:57
I’ll have all the stuff

Ixchell Reyes 38:59
Get some swag!