Smarties,
Steph and I are ridiculously
excited for you to hear this episode. This
episode is a master class with executive functioning
expert, Mary d Sklar. Mary d is the
founder
of the see my Time program. You can
learn more about it in this episode and
also by going to her website, www.executiveflexdingsuccess
dotcom. There are so many goodies in this
episode that it actually became impossible for us
to write an appropriate
introduction to these next few episodes. Of course,
we plan to just do 1 episode. We've
now split this conversation
into 2 episodes, so you'll hear the first
part this week and the next part next
week in episode 323.
I don't wanna waste any more time, but
I do wanna let you know that we
did do a Patreon extended conversation
with Mary d. We will be releasing that
episode
next week
because you really do need to listen to
the entire conversation before listening to that Patreon.
If you want to hear that extended conversation,
believe me, you do, go ahead
and make sure you are a $5 a
month monthly subscriber.
Obviously, that $5 a month goes to support
the podcast and the work that we're doing
here, and we thank you through these extended
conversations. You can go back as long as
you want. They're all there and other things
that we throw up there for you guys
as well. Again, to become a patron and
listen to our Patreon, go to www.
Patreon.com/learn
smarterpodcast.
And that extended conversation with Mary d will
be live next week. Let's dig in. You
want to learn faster,
but sometimes working harder
is just not the answer. You have to
learn
smarter,
the educational therapy podcast.
Hi, smarties. Welcome to episode 322
of learn smarter, the educational therapy podcast. I'm
Stephanie Pitts. And I'm Rachel Capp. And today
we are
thrilled
to have
executive
functioning
expert,
Mary d Sklar with us. Hi, Mary d.
Hi. Thanks for coming on. This is very
exciting to have you. A treat
for us. Well, it's a treat for me
because educational therapists will help get me get
started. Okay? I saw the value in my
work when before I even had it published.
So I have a soft spot in my
heart for educational therapists.
Well, we both have used your work and
your resources over the years, so we're just
thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with
you. But
why don't you take a second and introduce
yourself to our audience? Explain a little bit
about who you are and what you do.
I am primarily an educator. That was my
background.
I was a classroom teacher in a galaxy
far, far away. That's how I describe myself,
But I became very interested in executive functioning
a long time ago,
really before we even had the term, because
I have a brain that has executive functioning
challenges,
and I did not understand that about myself
and
speech pathologist.
I was running a program
at a local elementary school to teach volunteers
to teach at risk kids how to read.
And I ended up, because of speech pathologist
on campus, taking some training with doctor Ellen
Arber at the University of Portland, who was
also a speech pathologist.
And at the time, that was 1994.
She had a very interesting
concept. She felt that
our behavior
was directly tied to the way our brains
are wired.
But what you guys most of the audience
in the room are too young to understand.
I'll be 71 soon.
That was woo woo
in 94. Okay. Literally it was woo woo.
We didn't have the brain scans. We didn't
understand the brain, anything like we do today.
In fact, her accrediting organization, ASHA, they wanted
to kick her out because she wasn't, you
know, I was like, you're going into a
sphere that has nothing to do with speaking
language. Okay.
But Ellen just have to be brilliant.
Okay? And she was putting together
the brain and behavior differences.
I know this from hindsight. She was really
focusing
on a lot of the the students we
now would call neurodivergent.
We used to say, spectrum
folks. Okay? That was really who was really
intriguing her
at the time, but we didn't have names
for those either. Okay? We just didn't have
terms to
to describe people. Anyway, so I got into
that. She helped me start to understand my
own brain and the connection, which was marvelous
because it took away the guilt and the
shame that I had for years.
I described myself for over 40 years as
an underachieving
procrastinator,
which is a terrible moniker to hang around
your neck. I was always late. I would
scream at the kids that came out the
door in the morning. My house is welcome
to your pile. So I would show up
on the wrong day at the wrong time.
I've been successful in my life, but I
always felt like everything was gonna come crashing
down. You know? There was no sense of
of centeredness or self esteem connected to what
I was doing in the world.
So I got into it because of my
own brain, and then my son had challenges.
And Ellen helped me think about time very
differently.
She told me,
after spending a whole week with her and
one of the seminar things, I had gone
up to her and I said, Ellen, I
came here to teach kids how to learn
to read. That's what I was looking for.
It was information about brain and reading. Right.
And I said, but you've given me this
glamour of insight into my own behavior connected
to time. I'll pay you anything. You know,
just anything.
And,
so she had me draw, she said, oh,
I've confused you enough for this week. I
will,
give you a free hour. But what I
want you to do is to bring with
you
a drawing of a picture
of what you need to do in that
following 7 days. Basically, a plan for your
week. K. And so I drew this picture,
which, since this is all audio, I'm just
gonna have to describe it to you. I
drew this picture that took me 2 hours
to draw, and it looks like total chaos.
It's just like you know, it's got some
images in it, but it's lots of words
and it's I mean, it's just a mess.
And Ellen took one look at it, and
she said, oh, dear.
Yeah. Oh, dear. It's what your brain felt
like. That's exactly I show that picture all
the time to people. Yes. And they just
nod their heads going, yeah. Yeah. That's my
brain. It's relatable. That's what that's happens to
me. So she had given me this advice
at the end of an hour. We refined
what it took to, draw a picture for
the week
rather than have it be chaos
and take me 2 hours. But at the
end of the hour, I said, Ellen,
wait a minute. There's way more to my
problem than drawing a picture.
I read every time management book, planning book,
calendar system, you name it. I was brought
home a book from the library, the time
on the spine. I came home and my
husband looked at it and he goes, honey,
why did you bring this home? I said,
it's about time. And he goes, honey, it
has to do with, like, you know, physics,
you know, like deep space physics.
And I said, really? I mean, I'm I
hadn't read the subs subtitle. I just grabbed
it because it's had time on it. Okay.
Sounds familiar. Yeah. Yeah. And so she said,
gave me this advice, and I want everybody,
you included and all the people in the
audience to wrap your lovely minds around this.
This is her advice. She whips out her
finger. That's kinda who Ellen is. She's a
brilliant woman.
But she kinda boom in her face boom.
She goes out her finger. She goes, go
home.
Take care of yourself
in time
and space, and come back and see me.
Got that?
Cool. Take yourself in time and space, and
we'll talk.
And so I felt like I'd gone to
see the guru, and I got a Buddhist
conundrum. You know?
How do I what does that mean? And
it was you
know, time and space, time and space, time
and space over and over again because I
forget things that people said to me pretty
fast. And then my car was a long
way from her office when I parked. Yeah.
So you're just repeating it to yourself. This
is the day you put cell phones. You
know? Put it together enough to write it
down. Right? You know? It's just like it
was time and space time and space. And
even if you had written it down, you
would have lost the paper anyway. So, like,
you could.
It would never have made the half a
mile to the car. Yeah. So time and
space, time and space.
It took me a year to figure it
out.
She gave me the clues of time and
space, and she gave me the clues that
it was all connected to my brain
And that my brain
her theory back then I don't know how
I haven't worked with her for quite a
number of years.
She described me as having a visual language
system.
Okay?
Not visual learner. It's a different thing. Okay?
It's more how you hold your interior language.
And so I don't store things auditorially
well at all. I just don't. If you
do if you have a sound brain or
a picture brain, as I would describe it
in my program, I am so far on
the picture side, I have no sound. It's
like I can't
sing any songs. I don't know the words
to songs. If you start singing next to
me, I can match pitches,
but I can't sing any of the Beatles
songs or the Beach Boys songs that I
listen to. Interesting.
I can't remember them. Okay.
The only songs I remember are some Girl
Scout songs that I sang over and over
and over and over and over again. At
an early age. Uh-huh. Very early age. Other
than that, nothing sticks. Okay.
So, anyway, time and space got it figured
out. And then my son had issues.
His teacher 4th grader's teacher said he's being
a complete flake, not turning anything
in. Bright kid. No production.
So he and I worked on paper management
because,
my son was one of those kids who
was walking around a black hole. It's like
he lost everything. You know? It didn't matter
what it was, jackets, shoes, books. He couldn't
hold on to a piece of paper from
his desk to the teacher's desk. You know?
It was not impossible.
And so I worked on it from the
point of view of what his brain needed
to see.
Okay?
And put together a little system. And after
a few weeks, I said, Josh, is this
helping you any?
And he paused. He was a very thoughtful
little 4th grade kid. Now he's a very
thoughtful 39 year old. Mhmm. He he said,
yeah. I'm not so stressful. I'm not getting
trouble for not turning on my work. You
know? And, so then I ended up starting
to work with my friends' kids where they're
all hitting middle school,
and, they've been
reasonably successful in elementary school, most of them,
because the elementary school teachers give a lot
of support. Yep. And you have one teacher?
One teacher, one system to understand.
And when they hit middle school, boom, you
know, the wheels fell. Yep. So that's who
I thought I was gonna work with,
and
people just started showing up on my doorstep,
literally.
It was all word-of-mouth. I never advertised for
15 years. I had a private practice of
working with, I was a dyslexia specialist working
with dyslexia,
making math real,
and, other language stuff I had learned from
Ellen, help supporting written language. So I was
being net doing that after school. But these
kids and these families,
started showing up who were getting things done.
And back then, we called it
poor study skills. I mean, that was the
only that was the only phrase that they
kind of onto that behavior.
So these people showed up, these kids. Initially,
I just showed worked with the kids.
But then I went and heard a behavioral,
pediatrician speak,
and he talked about the brain and adolescent
behavior.
And that was my first, like, brain piece
of it. I'm like, oh,
that's why the kids have it sitting in
my room with me because they look like
they've got it right. But when they go
home, they don't transfer it. Right. Until it
all falls apart. So at that juncture, I
made a decision, which I've stuck to all
these years, is I never work with kids
by themselves if they are living at home.
I won't do it. K. 1 or more
parents have to come there. They have to
be part of the picture.
Because from a developmental perspective,
those brains you can teach teach in quotation
marks. You can talk to them all you
want about strategies,
but their brains, because of development,
it's not gonna stick. You know? It's a
long term process, these executive functioning skills. And
so these brains need
support for all the transition points when things
change.
When they go from middle school to high
school, high school to college, college to work,
if somebody's not there helping them to scaffold
that transition,
their brains do not necessarily
transfer
the strategies that worked in situation a to
the new situation
b. It's very interesting. Some pulled off, other
ones really, really can't. Okay. So you have
to have parents involved because parents
don't even realize that they need to be
that kind of support, and the apple isn't
far far from the tree. Mhmm. Have you
listened to our podcast before?
And, you know, so the parents come and
so, anyway, for 15 years, people showed up.
And I created the program that I now
teach, which is called seeing my time.
And now how do I teach these people?
What do I understand about time and space?
Because you see, my approach to executive functioning
is somewhat unique, unless people have been exposed
to some of my work. Okay? Right. It's
that I'm an
educator. I'm a reading specialist.
I know how to teach
in a very carefully
scaffolded step by step program
so that learning happens.
It's hands on, multisensory
so that learning happens.
You know? And most
people miss that.
Okay? They don't get it. It was like
a couple years ago, I was a keynote
speaker at an event for a private school
consortium.
And a couple of teachers, bless their hearts,
were talking about executive functioning. And I thought,
I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. Because if
they had got it,
I
can
retire.
I could be done. You know? Yeah. And
I sat there listening to them, and I
just put my head in my hands, and
I'm like, oh, I don't have it. You're
you're like, you can't retire. Sure. Just kidding.
They're doing the same old stuff wrong.
I can't quit. Okay? So I'm still working.
We're still educating teachers.
But so I got into it that way.
That was my history.
And to my utter surprise,
here I am today. It was a therapist
and speech pathologist
who knew my work, who were sending me
people, neuropsych sent all kinds of people sent
me people, and they all wanted me to
publish the work. And I was like, who'd
buy it? All of them. Was like, who
made this around my dining room table? You
know, I'm not a PhD person from some
university. You know?
But I was really doing research, and I
was applying what I understood from a learning
perspective.
And I'm also a learner.
I'm always learning. Okay. So I turn over
every rock possible to expand my personal knowledge
and spent
a lot of years and a lot of
money educating myself about the brain and executive
functioning and all you know, I've hung out
with all the big names and, you know,
done training with them and everything else.
And so what my brain is good at,
it has executive functioning challenges, but
it's a very creative brain, and it is
a brain that synthesizes well. Yeah. It, like,
takes concepts
from very different domains
and pulls them together, which I know is
why saying my time is as successful as
it is. Yeah.
So yeah. So I just ended up here
kind of by totally by accident. I didn't
think I would ever be an entrepreneur of
sorts. We train people now around the world
teaching, say, my time. We have programs for
educators. We have programs for parents. We do
distance. We do local. We do groups. We
do, planners.
You know, all kinds of things that
I never imagined happening, but all makes sense
as I look back over the back. So
that's a quick dip into the whole thing,
but I just I love my work, and
I'm still doing it because I have satisfaction.
And now I primarily work with adults myself
because I don't have the energy to deal
with teenagers and parents after 3 Yeah. In
the afternoon.
I just can't do it anymore. I put
in my time. Now it's up to the
rest of us.
So I guess my first sort of question
for you is, what do you wish
people and that can be parents,
teachers, a therapist, learning specialist,
whoever you wanna make that people be. What
do you wish people understood
about time? Well, go back to the concept
that Arvin said about time and space.
People think
time is stretchy.
K?
That sometimes it seems to go slow and
sometimes it seems to go fast. You know,
we've got all the circumstances where it slows
down and it goes Yeah. Where did the
time go? Boom. Gone. Yeah. It doesn't. It's
just heartbeats.
Okay.
So time doesn't stretch, so you can do
more, after dinner, I'll finish it. This weekend,
I'll get it all done. You know?
It's not gonna stretch for you. Everything takes
a certain amount of heartbeats.
K? You can't be, like, superficial. You can't
multitask and make it all better.
No. It's finite. It's very, very finite.
And there are 3 truths of time in
my program,
seeing my time. And the third one is
the way you use your time equals your
life. Yep. Heavy. Right? Yeah. Wow.
Okay. What it is, okay, is that our
choices we make every day about how we
use our time
equals the total sum of our lives. You
know? So knowing that time takes up space,
that it is the most valuable,
most valuable asset you have in your life,
and you have no idea how much of
it you've got. Yeah. K. We don't choose
how much time we get to be here.
K.
So that would be my time thing is
that people are unrealistic
about what they can do in a given
space of time. So you have to teach
them how to figure out how long things
take to do.
But then the other component
that was not in my mind
when I originally wrote Seeing My Time.
For many years, I didn't really understand this.
But the more and more I learned about
the brain, the more I realized
that when people wanna talk about time management,
which is kind of what's under, like, tell
me about time. It's connected to time management.
How do I get everything done? How can
I juggle this stuff?
You'll never get good at time management unless
you understand your brain
and you understand
the impact of your emotional brain, your limbic
system,
because your emotional brain,
it controls everything. We are not logical thinking
people. Okay? We are actually emotional. All information
enters our brain through our limbic system, all
sensory information.
And if our
brain is at peace and calm
and the world seems safe, then the amygdala,
which we're gonna focus on in the brain,
and the limbic system, that's like the security
guard. It's evaluating everything that comes in. Am
I safe or not?
Okay. If they make those as I'm safe,
then that information goes into your brain and
you can make good choices because you're accessing
what I call your wise brain, your prefrontal
cortex.
But if there's something in the environment
that
sets off the amygdala, then it becomes what
I call the bullying in the brain. Some
people call it the watch dog or something
like that. There's different names for it.
I call it the bully because it activates
a chemical response in your brain that shuts
down communication
between the neurons in your brain to get
access to your prefrontal cortex.
So you're operating out of fight or flight,
okay,
on a freeze component,
and this is one nobody talks about, desire.
I want to. I don't want to.
Yeah. Nobody talks about that. Okay. So you
have to get past
Because if you can't get out of that,
if you're only acting out of that, you'll
never get good with time management. You have
to be able to understand your brain.
So at this point in time, when I'm
working with people, like, we're always telling, I
just give you strategies, a, to understand your
brain.
Because when I teach saying my time, it's
a typically a 10 hour course.
And the first three hours, I don't even
talk about time. We're always talking about the
brain, the why you act the way that
you act. And then I'm giving them ways
of thinking about their behavior, thinking about their
choices,
understanding their brain. I have to lay the
foundation,
and that's what people skip.
They skip the foundation. Let's go to the
strategies here. Use this timer. Make this list.
Use this planner. You know, it'll all work.
No.
Because you're dealing with brains that are wounded.
If you end up with somebody
who is struggling, who has been struggling in
school
presently or in their past, struggling with work,
and these are neurodivergent
folks of the whole gamut. Okay? Those people
are wounded, and the reason they're wounded is
that they have an integrity issue.
They have failed.
They have let themselves down, and they've let
the people around them down. They haven't met
expectations,
and so they're very defensive.
And if they stay in defensive
mode,
that's in their emotional brain,
they cannot change.
It's fascinating. They cannot change.
And my work because I'm not a therapist,
but what I'm doing is a kind of
cognitive behavioral therapy where it's like, you have
to get them past that stuck point.
Mhmm. You have to get them to this
little space of time where they get a
glimmer of
hope of hope. I can get better.
Mhmm. And it's pretty miraculous
when that happens.
I have an adult client right now. Oh
my gosh.
This gentleman and his intake form, it says,
you know, other diagnoses.
You know, what what do you got? Yeah.
You have to look up one of them
because I'd never seen that. I'd never seen
those letter combinations before. What is that? K.
This poor man, he let him he says,
I'm just broken. I'm broken. I can't be
fixed. And he's, like, 54 or something like
that.
Brilliant.
Okay. Such a wonderful mind,
but no self-concept
of being able to be capable
because he was always told, you're not living
up to your potential.
You know, you're being lazy. What blah blah
blah blah. So it's been really interesting.
Little by little, I'm getting him
to to I had him smile. Mhmm. You
know? I hope you're alright. But little by
little, he's beginning to adapt and believe. It's
a tiny thing. But he's using metacognition because
you have to change people's way of thinking.
That's the other thing about this time thing.
Yeah. I can't change you. You know? I
can't change anybody.
And this is for the educators out there,
for the ed therapist.
Folks, step off your pedestal. You don't change
anybody. Okay? Yep. They change themselves.
Mhmm. You set up the situation
and help them
develop that metacognition.
That's thinking about your thinking. You've thinking about,
you know, why am I making these choices?
You help them start to analyze it, and
then you give them the the wings. It's
like I said, you know, I like to
send them out the door and and they're
gone. They're flying at that point. You know?
It's tentatively, you know, you don't get fixed
overnight, but you've given them the underlying skills.
So time is really complicated. It's invisible,
so you have to make it concrete and
real spatial. You have to help people think
of it spatially. So you have to make
it concrete and visible when you're talking about
it, when you're working with it. And then
you have to have to understand that their
emotional brain gets in the way of their
decision making
when it comes to their choices. Complex stuff.
I have a can you say that again?
Making them understand
that their behavior is tied
to their emotional brain so that if they
have control over that emotional brain, if they're
aware of their emotional brain,
then they can use metacognition,
thinking about their thinking, to override
that other voice, that negative voice that says
I can't, I don't, I never.
Yeah. Steph, why did you ask her to
repeat that? Because I just thought it was
powerful. Yeah. This is complicated work, you guys,
and I think that's the challenge. I mean,
from my perspective, everybody and their brother is
an executive functioning coach right now. Because 10
years ago, LDA conference in, like,
2010, 11, 12, and put set my little
booth up, my company's executive functioning success, and
I sat there with my books. And I
had people on the LDA board come by
and say, what is this?
You know, it wasn't that long ago, you
guys.
Mm-mm. And 2 years later, it was the
headliner.
Right? Yeah. You know? But what happened historically
is that executive functioning back then, people got
it. It was a bandwagon for a brief
period of time. It was a little band
wagon. You know, education is full of the
buzzwords. Right? Yep. Totally. I'll just get on
this bandwagon. Okay.
It didn't last very long, but it was
set for those kids. Yep. Okay. It was
all about those kids, the kids on IEPs,
the kids up 504s.
Alright. So what changed,
I had created a program
for,
classroom teachers,
a program called building executive function skills in
the classroom.
And talking about labors of love, you know,
you guys are talking about your work being
a labor of love.
I wanted to create a professional development program
that
I could share with classroom teachers of everything
I wish I had known
Mhmm. About the brain and learning before I
ever entered a classroom.
If only I had known that. So I
put my heart and soul on 6 months
of my life into creating this program.
So this was 7, almost 8 years ago
now.
And what happened then?
The bottom fell out of funding for professional
development. It disappeared
from school budgets.
Gone. Around the country, particularly in Oregon, they
took away the requirement for continuing ed
because they were trying to save money because
districts were funding teachers due to professional training,
which is such a tragedy because I learned
so much
always, you know, keeping my credential current for
professional development. Anyway, so I had this beautiful
course,
and a year later, Portland State University didn't
even have a summer professional development program anymore
for teachers.
And I was like, oh, yeah. I was
working to it. So it sat there and
kind of languished. We left it on the
on the website, but, you know, we were
really happy if we got 5 people to
find us. You know? Yep. And then along
came
COVID.
Okay.
And
COVID
really switched things around because
it was so hard on educators,
so hard on families.
Oh my gosh. Those 1st 3 months, I
had parents and kids screaming at each other
and crying all the time. You know what
I mean? It was a mess. And so
it was crazy, all this distance learning, all
the stressors. Well, if you stop and think
about what I'd said earlier about the emotional
brain,
right,
our brains, the world's brains, okay,
were all on high alert thinking we might
die.
And so we forget about it. We're really
good about putting history out of our minds.
We're only interested in the present. Not that
long ago, you know, there were mass graves
in New York City. Okay.
And so
it was this time of just total upheaval.
Everybody was struggling in the education world. Parents
were struggling in the education world.
Then things started to settle down again,
and I got a call from a local
private school that I've done different trainings with
through the years. They called and said, Mary
d, can you come and talk to us
again about executive functioning for a professional development
class?
And it had been a couple of years
since I'd been there. I said, yeah. Sure.
That had to be really close to my
house, and so I was like, I'm willing
to get up and go. You're you're it's
a mile away from my house. And I
got there, and they were almost all the
same teachers.
Okay? And some of those teachers had taken
my courses. What am I gonna tell you
guys? You know, there's nothing earth shatteringly different
about executive functioning and the time span.
They, the audience, was different.
They now saw
that executive functioning impacted all of their students
and impacted them
themselves.
Because what happens it's very interesting. I heard
this at a conference where
anxiety is an emotion. Alright? It's part of
the sympathetic nervous system responses or parasympathetic. Yes.
But, anyway, it's a nerve response.
So anxiety emotion.
When we are under high anxiety,
it has a negative impact on working memory.
Okay. It diminishes our working memory capacity.
Well, working memory
is critical
for all of our executive functions.
So when my neuropsych friends put it this
way,
if all of your executive functioning skills, and
I'm talking about things like goal directed persistence,
sustained attention,
time management,
planning an organization.
That's just to name some of them. If
all of those skills are pathways or highways
in your prefrontal cortex, the the part of
your brain behind your forehead, Okay? If those
are pathways,
working memory is the tunnel that all those
pathways, those highways have to use. So if
your working memory capacity is smaller, then not
all the highways can get through. There's conversion
at the block. It's got stuck.
Well, during that COVID time, everybody was experiencing
that high anxiety,
and everybody was struggling. I had my friends
who were good executive functioners
or fallen apart.
And they were like, what happened to me?
I used to be able to do all
this stuff. How come I can't finish a
book? You know? How come I'm showing up
late? How come I can't do x, y,
and z? So that anxiety went way up
and production went down with working memory. So
it's fascinating. So the teachers were sitting there
really relating to the fact that no longer
was it executive functioning about them.
It was about all of us. Yep.
It's about all of our choices
every day.
So what was fascinating to me was that
the enrollment in my courses just went boom.
Okay.
So now we have very full, robust courses
of amazing teachers, okay,
who are applying this
to all subject matters across the curriculums in
different age groups. It's amazing. It's wonderful.
It took a long time for that to
happen. It took years for it to come,
but it's really rewarding because that's what executive
functioning is, is it's part of our choices.
It's all about our choices. And if we
understand our brain, then we have choice.
We can actually have that conversation,
and we can maximize our potential. That's my
mission in life, is to help people
maximize their potential. Each of us have a
unique potential. Each of us have a unique
brain.
And how do you figure out how to
hack it? That's what I tell people. I
say hack your brain. Don't let it get
in the way. Who's in charge? You or
your brain? You know? They look at me
like, what?
Mhmm.
Yeah.
So we talk about
time and not letting it control you, but
you controlling it and production and the ability
to
do what you need to do, when you
need to do it, and how you need
to do it, and Where to do it.
Where to do it. And the difference of
want and need
because that is a lot of when the
parents call and say
the trigger word of lazy that we all
feel is just so
constantly reminding everyone, the parents that I speak
to, that if your child could, they would.
Right. So
I'm sort of interested in when you're talking
to
the teachers
about this, what have you noticed
how they have started
to approach that from your courses?
Well, I have 2 courses. Okay? Okay. And
one course was originally designed. It's called Teaching
Seeing My Time. It goes with the workbook.
Okay? It's a Mhmm. The curriculum, basically.
And the market for that, originally,
I saw as ed therapists.
Okay? And so ed therapists use it, speech
paths use it, OTs use it. There's a
whole bunch of different people who use it,
but I didn't see that in the classroom
too much.
Mhmm. The reason
being, schools don't wanna spend any money on
workbooks.
Right?
And it would be time
in the school schedule is so oppressive to
teachers. They've obviously, all this curriculum, all this
stuff I have to cover. I Yeah. Add
one more weird thing to my life, and
it won't work.
Whereas I'm sitting here going, oh my god.
If you just invested 10 hours upfront in
September, October, your whole school year would go
so much better. Okay? It's front loading a
calendar right there. Just can't do it. It's
really interesting. One of the schools that has
consist a public school, okay, which is rare,
k, because of funding.
The one public school that is consistently
still using Seeing My Time workbooks,
okay,
and my planners,
okay,
is a relatively
poor district. When I came to speak, I
charged them $500,
okay, which is pretty darn low for a
speaking engagement, and I drove to get there.
Okay? Like, an hour halfway. Yeah. When I
got there, I was in the auditorium,
small school, middle school. They had to split.
The the middle school budget had $250,
the principal, and they got 250 from the
superintendent's fund, okay, to come up with $500.
Alright. Mhmm.
The reason why they still use it you
know who was in the room?
The superintendent.
Mhmm. He was in the room. So it's
a leadership issue in part. Getting a hold
of them is really hard. Yeah. Okay.
If you guys figure it out, let me
know. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. Because they're the leadership
at the top. Like I said, professional development
training has just plummeted. You know, we used
to be invited to public schools all the
time. I did a lot of training with
lots of people, and the money just dried
up and disappeared, you know, prior to COVID
even.
So I didn't think peach people would come
teachers would end up in teaching Saint My
Time. That has changed
in the last year. I have a lot
of classroom teachers
and learning specialists
Mhmm. Taking that course.
And that is wonderful because, again, that's very
carefully scaffolded.
You know? And it's a program in a
box. You know what I mean? This is
like, follow this. You do this, and it
will work. Okay? You will have results.
So then the other course, the building effect
is functioning skills in the classroom,
that came about because of an educator
who took my previous first course,
and she wanted to put more stuff about
the brain and learning in, which I didn't
really have the background in. So I didn't
feel like at that point in time, I
was able to speak to that. You know,
how would I do that? Mhmm. And she
happened to be a, you know, a Stanford
PhD person.
And she go, oh, Mary d, we can
do this. And she kind of, you know,
took me by the hand and found me
resources.
That course, I designed
thinking
my goal
was to have teachers come away no matter
what subject area they were in
to be able to integrate
teaching executive functioning
into their daily curriculum.
Integrated. Not as a separate thing, but integrated.
And
I wanted to do it by going to
the brain. The whole course at the beginning
is all about brain learning. Yeah. It's great
course. People love it. Okay? They love both
of the courses.
The education
educators and parents who are taking
I signed up for this to help kids,
but, oh my god, this is doing my
life. Yeah. They're helping me. Yeah. You know?
But then so seeing my time, because the
beginning of that whole course is mostly brain
and learning stuff,
very again,
I'm a designer, I'm a creative, and I'm
a teacher. Okay? So all the videos are
short and distinct. You know what I mean?
It's, like, user friendly. It's learner friendly.
So seeing my time then is actually the
concepts
are at the end of that course.
Okay? Because I didn't expect the teachers to
be able to run a course with the
workbook.
But I then help them understand how they
can implement the same core concepts
without the program.
That said, what I always tell everybody is
like, and
figure out a way to communicate with your
parents. Yeah.
Mhmm. That's why I wrote my book, 50
tips to help students succeed
was because
seeing my time was beginning to be used
in schools.
And I had a problem with that because
of the transference
of information.
Parents not understanding brain development, not understanding executive
functioning, get labeling their kids lazy. Mhmm. Yep.
Sending their kids off to private school, thinking
the private school people are gonna fix them.
Okay? Yep. So I wrote that book for
them
because I know you have it, Steph. Mhmm.
It's very carefully written. There's like most of
the tips are 700 words or less.
Why? Because parents don't have time to read
more than that. Okay? Yep. And they're very
targeted. Because there were books written for parents
out there on executive functioning,
most of which I could not get through.
You have to have good executive functioning skills
to get through the EF books. Yeah. Yeah.
And then and then when you get to
the end, they'll say, and now what am
I supposed to do?
Right. What's the takeaway? So I wanted this
book to not be that way, you know.
But it's definitely not. Yeah. It's definitely like
Go to where you need. Go to where
you need. Yeah. I love how it's broken
down and where it's showing up in different
parts of their lives as well. It's not
just getting homework done. So Which guides me
into my next question.
We did do a Patreon
extended conversation
with Mary d. We will be releasing that
episode
next week because you really do need to
listen to the entire conversation before listening to
that Patreon. If you want to hear that
extended conversation, and believe me, you do, go
ahead
and make sure you are a $5 a
month monthly subscriber.
Obviously, that $5 a month goes to support
the podcast and the work that we're doing
here. And we thank you through these extended
conversations. You can go back as long as
you want. They're all there and other things
that we throw up there for you guys
as well.