Taking off the Mask with Ashanti Branch

(Transcribed by Sonix.ai - Remove this message by upgrading your Sonix account) Welcome to Educating to Be Human, a podcast where we'll explore what it means to be human in today's world at the intersection of education, technology and culture. I'm your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.

Each week, I'll speak with people who are supporting transformative change in education today, that is, ordinary people creating extraordinary impact. Thank you very much for listening. In this episode of Educating to Be Human, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ashante branch. He's a former math teacher in Oakland, California, and he's founder of the Ever Forward Club.

Now Ashanti's classroom experience led him to see how the bright young men he taught were not thriving, and he took it upon himself to better understand how the challenges in their personal lives kept them from making school a priority. So, as founder of the Million Mask Movement, Ashanti leads a powerful initiative aimed at helping young men, especially young men of color, to better understand the metaphorical masks they hide behind so as not to outwardly express their fears and emotions.

So, through the development of an anonymous mask creation activity, which we'll hear more about later, these young men are given the space and the encouragement to express their full selves, and in doing so, they're able to better understand, share, and support their struggles with others. So in this episode, we talk about Ashanti's journey, the future of the Million Masks Project, and the powerful impact of creating a more authentic and supportive world for our youth and for each other.

So let's go behind the mask. Hi, Ashanti. Welcome! I'd love to start today by asking you about what the Ever Forward Club is and a little bit about your start as a teacher. Yeah. Thank you. You know, I was a first year teacher. I had just left my engineering career, and my vision was in life to be rich. And when teaching called me, I ran from it.

And so the fact that I was finding myself, you know, day one in this classroom with these students scared out of my mind, like, what's going to happen next? I was clear that I was there for a reason. I didn't know the only reason at the moment, I didn't know the reason at the moment, but I deeply felt like there's a calling happening in my life. And so I began teaching at San Lorenzo High School, and I saw, like, really smart young men failing my class.

Like, I was like, wait a minute, you're smart. I can tell you're smart. I can see it in you. You're maybe trying to hide it from others, but I can tell, like in just the context and how quickly you pick up on things like. But school wasn't cool to a lot of students who I saw. And I had kind of forgotten what it was like to be a student who wanted to be cooler than I wanted to be smart. And I was like, what's going on here?

And it wasn't until I just decided that either I'm leaving teaching because I'm failing. I'm doing a horrible job. If smart kids are failing my class and I think I'm smart, like, why are we creating failures? So the vision was I was going to leave, but I was like trying one last thing. I mean, I went back to school to do this profession that I thought was calling me, and I'm doing bad at it. And I think other teachers were like, well, you'll get good at it. Just give it a couple of years.

I'm like, wait, you mean I got to be broke and a failure for a couple of years? I mean, I knew I was going to sign up to be broke, you know, but I didn't sign up to be a failure. And that's how it all started. And so I invited them out to lunch. I said, look, I'll buy you lunch once a week. In exchange for lunch,uring those lunch sessions, I want you to teach me how to be a better teacher. Like, what am I doing wrong? Like, let's let's let's learn about each other.

But also I want you to figure out, help me figure out how I can make school better for you, because it doesn't make sense that you're not doing well. Now, some of the students in our club, they weren't all failing classes. Some of them, just their social capital was challenged. So they were great academically, but socially they were either in a shell or they were like shot. Like whatever it was, I just saw something amazing in those young men. And so that's how it all started.

So that was 2004. You know, this is our 20th year anniversary. I'll fast forward you really far to 2015. We were featured in a documentary called The Mask You Live In. And the reason I'm fast forwarding there's a lot more in between there, but just to name it. What I didn't know in the beginning, when I started the documentary filmed us, was that I was talking about the masks, you know, back in 2004, but I just wasn't using the metaphor of a mask.

I knew there was something going on with those students that were like showing this thing on the outside, but there was more going on on the inside. And I think it took, you know, that first 11 years to kind of like come to a place of being able to explain it in a clean, clear, concise way of what I was seeing. And that's how it all happened.

You came to Big Ideas Fest some years ago and did this amazing session for us on taking off the Mask, and I've since experienced it in other venues and know that you've been doing this around the world. And so maybe tell us a little bit more really about the masks and what that what that is. You just alluded to it, but tell us what it means to take off the mask and a little bit about about what you do in that.

Yeah. So what I have been seeing over those 11 years of what I was doing at Everforward, let's say I saw smart young men not showing how smart they were before, ever before it started. I had forgotten that I used to do that in middle school. When I got to high school, I was already on track. So when I'm teaching these students and I'm like, dude, why are you, why are you, why would you rather have a fight with me or an argument with me than just to let me support you? I'm not your enemy.

Maybe you have enemies out here. Maybe there's enemies in your community. But I'm not one of them. I want you to be your best. And I think what I saw in them was, there's a certain way I have to show up in life. And I think the mask is like, you put on this mask. There's what the character is in that mask. If you've ever been in a theater class, maybe they even practice with masks. They say, hey, take this mask and act like this character. And you just you get to put on this persona.

It's what I want people to see about me. It's what I let people see. And when you think about Behind the mask, it's the things I don't let people see. I don't talk about. There's one mask that most people won't be able to see it, but I'm going to have you describe it. So basically it's a circle with a smiley face. And then there's four words on the front of the mask. It says happy, smart, outgoing and caring. That's what this young man This is from a young man.

Shows on the front of the mask is anonymous. I don't know who it belongs to, but I will never forget it. When I first opened it up and I saw it. And on the back of this mask, if you look, there's a bunch of words written in the same word, written 18 times. And that word is anger.

Anger. Yeah Anger. And when I saw this, it not only, like, stopped me in my tracks, I literally just stared at it for a long time and realized how many of our young men are walking around happy, smart, outgoing and caring on the outside. Yet what they're not talking about, what they're not showing, is that they're carrying around a load of anger, or replace that word with any other emotion you can think of. And I think that that is what I began to see happening in schools.

I began to see also, what happens in schools is a context of like, if I am in a certain school environment and let's say I go to the office and I tell the somebody in the office. They say office people who are there doing their job, they're busy. They're just navigating the day. I come in and say, hey, I'm feeling sad, worried and stressed. And they're like, well, maybe, you know, just don't worry so much. Don't stress so much, don't think so much and go back to class, right.

Because our schools are designed or they may, like somebody in the office may say, you know what, actually we have a counselor over here. Now, let's say you go see the counselor. There's another scenario. Oh, do you have insurance? Go have your parents fill out this paperwork so then we can talk, because now there's a there's a thing that's in the way of this. And maybe I can't tell my parents because my parents don't believe in that. So therefore, now I'm stuck.

So they need they need the permission from their parents to to be able to talk to the school counselor. That's right. The rule that school has in place. But let's say because no one in the office is there, let me just have a chat with you and see how you're doing. I mean, if you told me that if somebody told me that a friend of mine told me, I'm like, hey, what's on your mind?

I would ask that question, but if you're in a school where you got hundreds of kids running around and some kids comes in, if you're not careful, you can go through the rigid process and miss the heart. And let's say that same kid two days later punches some kid in PE because he talked about him. He said something to them, did something to them. That kid comes back to the office now.

That kid now has done an act that we know what to do with schools, know what to do with a kid who has physically assaulted another kid, because we have a rule book and it says: you hit somebody, it can be this consequence or this consequence or this consequence up to a suspension for multiple days. Now, the kid who came in two days ago telling you they was worried and stressed, we had nothing for them necessarily when that was what it was.

But now that I've done something, now we got a consequence. And the consequence is not getting you support about the worry and stress that you were feeling already is to just deal with the symptom of what you have now expressed on the outside. And I think that what I saw in ever forward with the mask was sometimes young people don't even know how to ask for help when they're feeling stressed, worried and sad. We have some work to do around that social emotional development in young people.

And so that's why that's why we created the mask activity. It's anonymous. Right. It's like but if we can get a litmus test to say, oh, this is what's happening. There are students at this school who are walking around writing angry 18 times on the back of this idea of a mask. We probably should talk about anger. Anger. How do you how do you navigate anger? How do you navigate stress? How do you navigate sadness? How do you when do schools teach those classes? It almost rarely ever happens.

Right, so tell me how this work of taking off the mask was integrated? Was it started actually within the Ever Forward club. And then how has it evolved over time? This work just seems so phenomenally important to what we're seeing today, and it's hard to believe that every school wouldn't want a program like this. Yeah, I think that one of the things I saw is that when we did the activity that first time in the documentary, I didn't know it was going to work.

I was working with a group of young men at Fremont High School in Oakland who were struggling, and I had tried all of my best activities with them. You know, I had been doing ever forward, you know, almost nine years by that time, ten years. And I'm like, okay, let's do this activity and that activity and that. And nothing was working with these young men. I mean, they were resistant. Anything that had to do with talking about feelings was a barrier. And I was like, what is going on?

Now I'm the dean that year, so I'm dealing with students, when they get kicked out of class, I'm dealing with them. When they're cutting class in the hallway, I'm dealing with them when they're caught smoking over there behind the gym. I'm I'm dealing with all this stuff. But they weren't talking about what they were really going through. And what I realized right away was my job as an educator was like, learn the deeper what

was happening. So when they asked me to be a part of this documentary, I said, look, these young men in this club, they don't open up. Like I began building a club there, but it was not our official program. It was a little it was a hybrid of what our normal club was. What I what I began to see when I asked these young men to not talk about it, just to write it. Don't put your name on it.

Anonymous. When we did that activity in the documentary, like when I'm in the room with him, I'm literally waiting for an argument to start because anytime we ask them about how they feel, somebody is going to start doing something to distract the room because they had a fear or a barrier or some kind of a built in rule system that said, don't talk about feelings. And so they resisted.

And what I found was that when they when they took these pieces of paper and they balled them up and they threw them at each other, and when they opened up, they got a new one and they opened it up. It wasn't their paper, it was somebody else's in that room paper. And they realized, oh, wow. When they heard the words of the young men in that room hearing what's on the front and what's on the back, they were like the room dropped into a place I had never seen before.

And I think that is the opportunity. And it was a clarity like, oh, okay, now I was in the room when it first happened, but it wasn't almost until and I started making masks with people on a smaller scale. But when I went to the documentary to see it, The Mask You Live In, and sat in that chair and watched it, that's when I saw it, right? Like I had been experiencing it.

But it was another thing when I was sitting in that chair and I'm literally like, I, I cried in there because I saw things in the room that I didn't see where I was sitting from my vantage point, and I was like, oh my goodness. And I was clear at that point that this is exactly where we're going next. The just the giving it a name, a metaphor, giving it a room. Anonymous. Giving it space to talk about it and not having to like feel like the light is

on me. Made it so much easier for young men to be able to talk about it, and made it easier for people to be able to say, oh yeah, I get that. Oh man, I experienced that too. And so that's the the tagline. There's more to me than you can see. You know, there's more to you than I can see by looking at you. And so when we can be, when we can hold that context. I think more people need to be aware of that context, but hold that context. I think we can do so much more. You know.

I'd love to hear a little more about this project in action and its impact on the young men you work with. Yeah, I have seen this concept provide space and room for young men and all students because now it's a global campaign. I work originally began with just young men, but what I've seen it do is create space for people to just get clear that it's not just me. Now, that's easy to say. You're not alone, right? That's a tagline. It's a hashtag. It's t shirts. It's. You're not alone, right?

It's all the things that you're not alone fits under in the world. But there's a deeper place of, like, really seeing it, feeling it, hearing it, understanding it. And I think what we see in the work with the masks, like the first workshop that we did when the movement began to grow. So when I started realizing that this activity was the activity that we were going to, like, put out in the world, we got invited to a conference.

One of my team members, a young man who has been a part of our work, we go to this hotel in Burlingame. We're getting ready for the workshop at 7:00 in the morning, getting everything ready. Hey, where are the masks? Because in the documentary, I make copies of these masks. So I have made copies of a bunch of these masks. And we get to the hotel. There's no mask. Now, he and I had a longer talk, but I'll just say right now he had two jobs. Markers and masks. Markers and masks.

And there's no mask. I'm like how how are we going to do a mask workshop with no masks? And so in this moment, I'm like, I'll go down to the copy center. I don't know if you've ever been to too many hotels, copy centers. Most times they're average at best. This one had no copy machine that was working. They said you can make two copies or five copies. Whatever it was, it was not going to be 80 that I needed. And I'm like oh my God, there's no Kinko's place, there's no print shop nearby.

And my brain is like, okay, we got invited to do this workshop. We're we're what are we going to do? So that was the first day I went to the front desk. I said, do you have any paper? Can I have some paper? That's how the drawing started. That's how the drawing started, because originally I had just in the documentary, I printed masks. It was just a random mask online.

I just printed it and then I was like, she said, well, we can't give you any of these paper because we need it for these machines. But I can give you this big paper. I'm like, I'll take whatever you can give me. So she gave me this 11 by 17 paper. I have them still here somewhere. This is this is 2014. I think it was. I don't remember how what year, but 2014 around. She hands me these big 11 by 17 pieces of paper and I'm like, we gotta work with it.

And literally I remember, you know, there's a snowball fight happens after they ball these pieces of paper. These were like snow globes, people. I said, listen, these are the biggest pieces of paper we've ever worked with. So please don't don't hurt nobody. Right. But it was like, that's the first time. And when I went home that night and I opened all these pieces of paper up and I smashed them down and I was like, this is amazing.

And that's when I knew that it wasn't going to be any more of me ever printing masks. It was going to be me giving people just permission and the space to draw their own mask. We're we're at about 80. We have it's called the Million Mask Movie. We have a long way to go. We're at about 80 plus thousand right now, and it's been just a amazing journey of watching what gets drawn. So tell me about the Million Mask Movement. So you have 80,000. We're going to get to a million.

How's that going to happen? And what's going to happen in our communities as we're doing this? Yeah. You know, now that I'm starting to see that we're going to start telling the story along the way. So we get this first research paper coming out. We're going to ideally produce two more research papers in the summer. Really looking at the data that we're learning. This first one is about two sophomore classes at two different schools, a private school and a public school.

And looking at those masks, the next one will probably be about young men and you know, I don't we haven't figured out the young men are going to help create the topic. Like, who are we going to look at? And then we're going to do probably one more this summer. So we're going to start telling some of the stories we're learning.

We've been sharing masks on social media, but I think even sharing masks, people aren't they're not it's not as compelling as I thought it would be, even though the images are very compelling to me. So we're really always we're constantly just testing the water, like, what is what message needs to be out there? And since most of our work is in education, we're going to start sharing who's struggling in our schools.

We know that our young men, our boys are struggling, and not that the only ones struggling, but they are struggling. And so we're going to start really kind of like honing in on some of those, you know, middle aged boys, middle school, high school, and maybe start with a middle school group, you know, 11 to 14 and then 14 and 18 or those groups are like, what are we seeing? What are they telling us? Because they're putting compelling words on those cards. And so that's the next step.

I was worried for a long time, like, why is it taking so long to get to a million? Like, isn't this an amazing idea? That's what people say about their ideas, right? This is an amazing idea. But I realized that okay, we're going to get there eventually. Right now, let's start telling the stories of what we're learning. And I didn't think about that in the beginning because I wasn't creating it with

the end in mind. I was creating it for what I was, what I was serving right here in the present moment, you know? Yeah. I think the story is about what you're learning are are so important to understand now because you're really trying to educate people, right? Educators and other young people about how our young people in need, and our at risk students, how they're trying to navigate this world that they're experiencing.

Right. So you're trying to create this, this human conversation among people. And it seems like when they're in those groups, that's when they're really having

that connection. Maybe it doesn't surprise me as much as it's harder than you thought on social media, although I don't know how much you've done with TikTok or something like that, but certainly just posting a picture of a mask is not the same experience of actually, you know, being in a room and having this human connection and and taking your mask and crumpling it in a little ball and then having a snowball fight with them

across, you know, across a room, across a classroom, across a ballroom, whatever it is. So I can see how this next step really has to be about telling, showing the data, telling the stories. What have you learned? How are you going to do that differently now? What are you thinking? Yeah, well, one of the things I think as we're in this next phase, as we're telling more of the stories, is as we share masks, as we invite young people to be a part of it. So we're building out our young men's core.

That's going to be starting this summer. That'll be the first group that will go through this social Emotional Leadership academy this summer. They're part of their job is going to be they'll be on 3 or 4 teams and one of the teams. Their job is to figure out what do we need to do, not only to encourage more young people to participate, but what do we need to do to engage the communities in this tool? So we're we're going to put it in the hands of youth.

Right. I've been using my old ideas, my old ideas for all this time. And now it's like, okay, we need to get the young people involved. One thing we're really excited about, we had three sets of our young men who went with us to South by Southwest for this pop up that we had, we had our big booth. It was a beautiful experience. Those young men, their role was to be a part of this mental health action day, which was last week. Four of them ignited pop ups at their school events.

Actually five, five, five and one is still in the process because he's going to do it between now and the end of the year. So it was an opportunity for them to like, take it and have the have the positive experience or even the challenging experience of what does it look like for me to go out into the world to then deliver this thing that I know about, I understand it, how do I talk to other young people? And I think through their experience of this, it is going to help them.

And they at South by Southwest, they were amazing, but they were talking to a lot of adults. I think it's sometimes easier for young people to talk to adults relatively, than to talk to their own peers. And so when they can find out the best words to encourage their peers to take this anonymous tool. Three steps, six words, it's easy to say no to this. Why do you want me to do that? It's easy to say no because if. But how do you help them be able to find the words to explain to their peers?

So then their peers gets the chance to be a part of what we grow out of it. So I'm super excited. I think that that's the next step is getting the young people involved. But also as I'm as a, you know, a leader of this movement and trying to really raise the funds for it and raise awareness about it. You know. You just said a phrase a little while back, and we haven't said it directly, but this work is really about mental wellness, right? It's about mental health.

And I don't know that you started that way, but maybe it's just because now we have social emotional learning as as words that we understand stand in our education systems. I mean, that really seems to be the crux of what you're talking about. And yet there seems to still be a stigma about about mental health. And maybe you could talk a little bit about that so we understand that better. Yeah. So this this topic is personal to me in lots of ways.

And I'll say the first way is personal to me is I have a brother who has paranoid schizophrenia. We didn't know about it growing up. He had ear infections. He had he had tubes in his ears. He had a lot of some health issues. He was taking a lot of medicine growing up. He had seizures. And so he got he grew up, and he ended up getting himself in trouble. He ended up in jail for something kind of small. But then he began in jail. He began to do all these ridiculous behaviors in jail.

So he kept getting more time, like something that should have been six months turned into years and years and years. And it was a behaviors that was happening in there. But he was in general population. He wasn't tested. No one had tested him. But my brother has a mental health disability. And and it wasn't until they got him tested that figured out he had schizophrenia. Then. Then they moved him to the the right place, a place that the men's colony in

Atascadero. That's the place where folks with mental illness usually get the support, so they not only get the medicine they need, but they get the support they need while they do whatever sentence they have. And my brother should have been out of jail way longer before that, but he was never diagnosed. I'm naming that context because. So when I found out that it happened with my brother, I was like, okay, well, how do we get him the support he needs? Right. And it's so it's hard.

It's hard work. It's hard work because he has a mind of his own. He's he's he's brilliant. He's smart. But he also has this these challenges that come up from time to time. And you never know when they're going to show up. Right. And so that's the one way it's personal. And I'll say the second way is personal is my godson. They just found my godson in Los Angeles. He he was unresponsive and he died. And my godson had bipolar disorder and he was going through it. He was young.

I want to say he probably was in his early 20s, 24, maybe 25. And I think that here's what I know is that a person who cares about my brother so much, and watching how the system continues to not be of service to him, I don't have those skills to help my brother with the ways that he needs help, and the system is designed to just kind of like, get you out of their office. All these programs and systems and I say all of them, they're going to name all of them.

And the ones that my brother has found himself a part of are looking for fast answers, quick answers. And then when those don't work, when the person has a little bit of consciousness, I don't want to be, I don't want to medicate myself. I don't want to. Then there's like, there's no answers. And I think what I know with young people is that growing up, we didn't talk about mental health issues. Growing up, there was no therapists. I don't even know when I first heard that word.

I definitely wasn't a teenager. I didn't even know what that meant? There were students who were in a certain set of classes that had classes, but no one talked to us about what was happening in that class. Most times, people got made fun of because of certain exterior behaviors that no one helped educate us on. Oh yeah, be nice. Don't make fun of them. But not contextually. Like, hey, this is what you should learn about these things. And I think this is a lack of education around it.

And I think that now that we're having more conversation, you know, Mental Health Action Day last week that we participated in was this beautiful concept of like, how do we go from a concept of mental health awareness? Oh, there's this thing called mental health thing and we should get help around it. Well, how? Well, if you and your family doesn't believe in it, then where do you get the support?

If your family's not going to sign this document that your school needs in order for you to see a counselor at your school and you know they won't sign it so you don't even take it to them, then what do you do? You just hold on to the stuff by yourself and maybe you hold on to you get 18 or get to college and then you can finally get some help. I have met so many young men who bottled stuff up, even with me, and then I find out later, I'm like, man, why didn't you say something?

And I think there's a deep fear if you if you know your family won't accept it. So you don't tell them, and then you have this mentor and then you're like, well, I don't want you to think differently of me. And so therefore I just don't say anything. And it's like, how can you prove to somebody that you won't think differently of them? How can you, if they're worried about changing how you see them, you see the brilliance in them, you see the amazingness in them.

Then it becomes really challenging for young people who want the support and yet don't know where to go. Because everywhere they go, there's this, there's the roadblocks and barriers. And so one of my young men just recently told me that he had been having some of these ideations, and I was like, how long has this been going on? He's like, for two years. I'm like, oh man, thank you for sharing this with me, I said, and my my heart was like, right there with him, like, man.

And also my heart was like, what did I not do well enough to earn your trust before? I'm so glad that you're still here. I'm glad you finally came to me. But what did I need to have done better? What did I need to have said better? What do I know? Those are all my own things that I'm working through. But I always told him. I said, listen, I'm here for you. And I'm so glad you shared it with me. Now our job is to do the hard work. Now you've now let it go.

You're not carrying it by yourself anymore. Now, how do we begin finding the support? And sometimes that part is even hard. And so I think that with mental health, what we have to do as mentors, as educators, as is say, okay, I don't want to make this worse for you, but sometimes things are going to have to get a little bit messier before they can get cleaner. And so what is, you know, how do we move forward? What is the next opportunity here?

I mean, I'm I'm thinking about what you've just been talking about. It's very it's very deep and it's the crux of so much that is that we're seeing go go south in our in our schools, in our society today. So what is the opportunity here? I mean, something like the Million Masks movement, you know. Yeah. It sounds nice. Million masks movement. Right. It's a it's a great catch phrase. It means a lot. But I think it also could be phenomenal if we really had that kind of

understanding. And here in public education, at least in the US, we have such an opportunity to start something like that to make it happen. Why isn't this the first thing that happens when you walk in the door of that school, as opposed to what happens when you're about to get kicked out? Yeah, thank you for that. What we have to do with schools and education is we have to have quality professional development.

Now, as a teacher for ten years, as an administrator for three, I can name to you maybe five professional developments. I remember in those ten years of teaching and three of them because of how bad they were. What industry? Looks like it did 100 years ago. And yet we would be shocked that it doesn't work. Schools. School. 100 years ago. Two rows of desks. The board in the front. Maybe there's white board now. Not chalk anymore. Maybe there's a whiteboard and an electronic board.

But it's the same. I'm gonna tell you some information. In two weeks later, you tell it back to me. I'm gonna grade you based on how well you repeated it back to me. And then we're gonna do the cycle all over again, right? Like the similar cycle over and over again. Maybe you got a table instead of desk. Like all these ways of, like, small little changes of how we have to transform our schools. I believe that professional development is going to be a key one.

And I think helping educators recognize that you're teaching more than a subject. Like I went in to be a math teacher. I was not there to start a club for young men who were failing math. I was going to teach math and most teachers I heard were saying well, hey I taught it, they didn't do the work. That's on them. And I was like, huh. I couldn't hold that context, I didn't believe in that theory process. The one time I told students, hey,

if you don't want to do any work. Go sit in the back. And I'll teach the ones in front who I want to teach. I said it once. I said it. After I said, and you better be back there doing work. Because in my mind that's not a realistic solution. You mean you're going to let him. He's not wanting to do work and you're going to just give him permission not to do work? No, not in this class. In this class, I'm going to move you

to the front. I'm going to have you walk around with me the whole day. So I can be on, witnessing you. All these ways that I saw schools, I think that schools need more of that. The Million Mask Movement, it's an opportunity for schools, like you said, the beginning of school, to say here is what is happening in this building. Of these thousands students, five hundred students, this is what they're saying what is

happening that we can't see. Now, we can begin over this school year, to say look, we've got 24 percent of our students talking about sadness or fear, we have 30 percent kids saying anxiety and stress. What can we be doing weekly on posters around the schools, on announcements in the mornings, on Friday fun days. We're gonna talk about stress management. We're gonna learn how not to be just students of academics, we're

going to learn how to be students of human development and self worth. Because if we don't add those things into schools we're going to continue doing what we do. We're going to see the kids who are going to get their education, get their education. I have plenty of kids when I was a teacher who they didn't need me. The other students. I can deliver their homework to their house in a manila folder with a pencil. And they're not

doing no work. So imagine in the same room, same schools, same class, I'll have a student who will make up his own work if I didn't give him any. And one that no matter if it's delivered to them in their room, in the quiet of the evening, they're not gonna do it. If you're a teacher and you have teach that range of students, good luck that

you're only going to teach math. You have to teach with the understanding that this world matters more, that you matter more than the grade on the paper, but that you can do it if you work hard. And that's the work that matters. So i think it starts with professional development and too many schools don't do professional development. Teachers have to go to a professional development meeting because it's in their

contract but does it have to be quality? Most teachers are at the back of the room grading papers and somewhere in the back folding their arms and saying what the heck is this about. And I've seen it all. And I'm clear that if we don't improve that part of our schools, we are going to continue to think that it's gonna get better because we're hiring poor, or we didn't you know give out any prizes during some holiday. I

think we have to help teachers become better in that way. Speaker 2: I love that. I'm going to envision for you the first day of school where all the students come in and the first thing they do is they do a take off the mask project. In this school, that's the assembly. Maybe the teachers have done it in their pd, in their professional

development, before school started that year. By the way, that's how we get to a million masks and that's how we get into, as you said, into this education system that actually shows us what it means to be human and how we can do that and how we can create that. Ashanti, is there anything else you want to offer or tell us or express before we end this podcast today? Ashanti: Yeah, I was just saying two things. The mask

movement is available to anyone around the world. You can make a mask at millionmask.org. Millionmask.org. And it's anonymous so we invite you to make a mistake, we invite you to share with someone. This summer we are building out a new model so that teachers can use it and have some immediate data that pulls back to them right away. So when you make those masks with your students, you're going to get the data right in the minute so that you'll be like. Wow, this is happening. So

that's happening. And the second thing I will say to people is that there's a quote we use in our work that says this, that says the longest distance that most people travel is the 18 inches between their head and their heart. And our work is not trying to fill people's head with more information. It's to say can you take the journey from your head to your heart and can you realize that there's so much more to you

that anybody can see by looking at you. If you've ever been judged before just know that they're not really judging you. If you've ever judged before just know that you have no idea what you're talking about. And we get a chance to then begin asking more questions, hey what's on your mind? hey what are you feeling? Hey, can you tell me why

you did that, what made you do that? And we can begin learning more about each other because I think our world has become a lot of point fingers and a lot less love and I think we need a lot more love in the world. So that's my invitation to folks. Make a mask. Love yourself, love each other, and take better care of each other. That's it.