The Making of a Great Teacher

This podcast is brought to you by Ascension. To discover even more free Catholic podcasts, videos, and resources to help you live your faith every day, visit AscensionPress.com. You can have a good curriculum, but curriculum doesn't form the student, to be a whole and complete person, right? A person forms a student, and the curriculum is a tool in that person's hands. Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Every Me Shall Value Weekly Catholic Podcast on Evangelization and Discipleship. My name is Mike Gomer-Gormley and I am joined as always, quote unquote, with Dave De Magistro Van Vickel. How you doing? I'm doing well. I'm the teacher. Not really. You are the teacher. I mean, I prefer tutor. Yeah. You're a fine Oxford tutor. Do you know what happened to me the other day? It's annoying. Another knife fight? No. It's annoying about being in the son of Gomp Michael Gormley. And by that I mean, like, you know, the brightness of your son. Yeah. Go on. It's like the Pittsburgh men's conferences this weekend. Oh. And I'm speaking at it. That's a great conference. And I mean, I'm a local. Everyone knows, like, no, I shouldn't say that. But people know me. I've been everywhere at this, in this diocese. Yeah, especially that crowd. Right. Especially that crowd. And the guy was like, I'm really glad that we got you, you know, Gomer really speaks highly of you. And I want to be like, are you joking? Gomer came and spoke highly of me. That's why you hired me. Like, I'm a known quantity here. You are a known quantity. And it always helps to have a de-list Catholic celebrity, give them a lot of tourists and tourists. No, you've been frat a bunch of times. You're up there now. Would it shock you to hear that every episode of Pines with Aquinas that I've ever done? I routinely check how many views it has. No, this doesn't shock me. And then compare myself to all the other people. No, that doesn't shock me. I mean, I don't really know myself for a long time. I went on last week. All these people are like, man, that was such a great episode. Such a great episode that I'd go on. I was like, it was really that great. It would have more than 40,000 views. That's funny. Gabe Castillo got 500,000 views and he just talked about the rosary. I talked about AI. You know, what people don't understand is that I think people think that you're rich because of how much you're out there. And I think it's funny. Isn't it funny? And I have to tell people, I don't think you understand the margins here. They're not that great. The funny thing, the funny thing, I think of when you said that there was this event for Catholic social media influencers kind of thing. It wasn't exactly that. It was like media creation, whatever. That's cool. Catholic creatives. Oh, yeah. And I was invited to it and I was super excited and I'm walking in. It's in downtown Chicago or cool area, Chicago. And the first person that sees me, I'm going to say, we'll remain anonymous. But this person, she is very well known. She makes a beeline up to me and she is like, what the heck is your problem? And I was like, whoa, what? Like, I was seeing you in a while. Hello. And she goes, oh, yes. Hello. Anywho, what is your problem? I charge so little for your talks that you are bringing down the market. And I go, you're a famous person. I'm trying to, and I still want to get access to like smaller churches, like what are you talking about? Right. And they all said they, what I charge for a weekend is what they charge per talk. Yeah. And I was like, oh. Oh, yeah, I know. But it's, I don't know. It gets weird then. Do you know how it is? I mean, we've talked about this a million times. Yes. It gets weird right now. We have talked about this. It does get very weird. Whenever you see a Catholic speaker who can buy their own first class ticket, that's the thing. I don't mind getting bumped up because I got mileage and status. But buying my own, I would never, I would, yeah, I could never imagine paying that extra money. No. Because it's like when you're buying your ticket, it's like $600 more. Yeah. I know. No. I can never do that. Okay. Anywho. Dave, I'm so excited to have you. Sorting at 620 in the morning to make this happen before you up on a plane. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to make this work. This is going to be an episode probably a little toy to it than some of our little episodes. But yeah. So what I wanted to do today is talk about the role of the teacher in the classroom. Right. Well, have you ever taught like formally, like lesson plan week after week in the classroom? I mean, occasionally. Sure. But only at the university level, like I've done like a semester long course. Yeah. That was, that was it. But I used to fill in often, but you know, I'm surrounded by teachers, all my sisters or teachers, Amber had her master's in education. I'm marrying a teacher. So I'm, you know, yeah, but also not only that, but like I very much attribute much of my life to my teachers, like I really do give them a lot of credit for who I am right now. So tell me about that. I mean, I, I think you knew like a lot of the, the situation I grew up in, it was a very poor charismatic school. And for years, it was staffed by Franciscan University students or University of Dallas students. And they were incredible. I mean, they were there to save our soul. So there's no question in my mind. And they were just amazing young people who brought us into their lives and, you know, things like that. And then when I was in high school, it switched to classical. And we had all teachers from Thomas Kwanis College there. And they were very impactful to me. And then I actually switched schools and went to a really great liberal arts, great book school. It was the relationships with teachers that really like, I knew that they were good people. They were, they were a perfect witness to what they were teaching. And so that, you know, that helped just immensely. You know, I was just thinking we should have, I should reach out to Father Paul Koska. Yeah. I was thinking that too. He was on my list. Oh, good. Because he's the chaplain for, you know, that, that school organization. Yeah. That's why I wanted to have him on. So he built this organization to help support the Catholic commission of Catholic schools. And I gave a brief talk one day right before I, it was funny. I flew in, drove straight to the University of St. Thomas, gave this talk with his, his group after a big education conference. And then I drove to a rice village, which feeds into rice university, I drove to rice village and then drone to bunch of roofs. I was like, my life is so weird. Yeah. I'm coming back from a trip, doing a talk and I didn't even go home, you know, I can't just realize that he was, he was the founder. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's him and a handful of people that are like, how cool, it's a big deal now, like schools from all over the country go. Yes. And schools that Franciscan University, like back when we were in the school, like new schools being built, like cool Catholic schools from the ground up that are conceived within this framework of, how can we make saints? What's it called? I cannot remember right now. It's coming up. It's at the end of the month. It's coming up. It's called the, we'll remember. It'll come up. What's his name? Is it named after like an encyclical or something like that? Like, it's like, I want to say it's like the fetus at Rotsio group, but it's not that. So any who, they, to sit around and I'm surrounded by teachers and principals, mostly principals and half the room are people who are in established Catholic schools who are trying to turn the Catholic identity. And the other half of the room are Catholics from the ground up new schools. And as we were talking, oh my goodness, I just said, all I want you to do because I didn't have a talk planned. I said, I just want you to share, if you are trying to recapture the Catholic identity, what that has been like. And it was so powerful to hear the insane drama that they have to deal with in order, like this one nun took over and she didn't even say like, I'm going to change everything. She didn't do anything like that. She hadn't been to the school. She just signed by her religious order, but they knew that the religious order was pretty conservative. And I think the previous two principals, even though it's run by this religious order, have not weren't the religious sisters and Catholic identity completely collapsed. So she comes out, she arrives a month before school starts and eight teachers resigned in protest. Wow. Like why? I mean, the previous principal wasn't forced out. She retired. Like it was not like this, and she's like, ever since then, it has been a wild uphill battle. So I do want to give a shout out to Guardian Angels Catholic School out in West Point, Nebraska. I was just heard there. Such great things. I heard three. Okay. So I was there in January, Suasponte of my own accord doing my own, you know, stuff there, the phenomenal group, wonderful people. And then I get assigned there through Sophia Institute for their curriculum and they put on these things and I partner with them and give talks and stuff. And I'm like, wait a second, I'm going back to West Point because I'm clue, I'm a big dumb animal. One other people book all my travel and all I have to do is show up at the airport. Sometimes I don't even know where I'm going. And I look at I'm like, I'm going to West Point. This is great. It was just there. And I walk in, I see familiar faces from when I was there last time, but I sat near the coaches. and I'm listening to them talk, and this is the fundamental thing that I think is so important. Everyone there that I met knew and loved their Catholic Bay. - Yeah, it's so rare. - To sit near the coaches and to listen to them. - Right. - Like in their funny coach way of just talking about like one coach, he said something like, "Yeah, the piece of the annunciation. Come on, you know when this date is." And the guy other guy was like, "I don't know. I'm a new calf," like he's like, "Think about it. Nine months before December 25th. March 25th. Come on, piece of the annunciation." And I just sat there and I'm like, "I have gone to so many schools where I, especially the coaches, the coaches are just there to do the football team stuff and the basketball team stuff. And to hear them all basically articulate the faith, even to the like the awareness of the feast days or stuff. I immediately put my pen down and I was like, "Today is going to be a good day." - Yeah, right, right. It's phenomenal. - Right, right. And people, I think people take this for granted. I really do. You know, I've told you this before that there was one time a diocese contracted me to do retreats for every Catholic school for their staff. And it was the worst year of my life. It truly was the worst year of my life. I mean, to the point where people were standing up and walking out or yelling at me, and all, I mean, I'm not, I wasn't talking about anything controversial. It was like, "God loves you, has a plan for your life," right? Like that kind of thing. And I think people take for granted that it's just because someone teaches in a Catholic organization or works in a Catholic organization that they're on the same page discipleship wise. It's, that's just not the case. By the way, that organization is called Duke and Altum. - Yeah, that's the Duke and Altum. - The Duke and Altum. Yeah, I highly recommend it to anyone. But flipping a school is unbelievably hard when it comes to personnel and stuff like that. - Yeah. - Because that's really what sets the culture. And you know, you bring up coaches. I say this all the time. In fact, I said it several times to the principal at my kids school that sports culture is usually the culture of the school. So you've got to get control of the sports culture because it often is the culture that takes over. You know, especially if you have a football team or some big sport like that, it's difficult. - Yeah, yeah. - I think that the awareness of where formation happens, right? That's the primary thing. - Great, great point. That's a great point. You can have a good curriculum, but curriculum doesn't form the student. - Sure. - And that's the thing with the whole AI initiative and all that stuff in schools. And I think Alpha School is trying to be very intentional about it, but I think there's a very real way that this fails, which is you can have the best curriculum in the world. That doesn't mean the student is going to be formed to be a whole and complete person, right? A person forms a student and the curriculum is a tool in that person's hands, right? - Yeah. - And formation is always within this environment of shared, back and forth, lived witness and all that stuff. I remember I was talking with someone and they were upset at a literature class. And they said, you know, there's not any Catholic literature in here. It's just, you know, the great books, you know, the sampling of great books for this year. And I said, yeah, that's fine. And they're like, what do you mean that's fine? I'm like, that's totally fine, because the books themselves form them. And these are the things that we want them formed in. - Right. - I don't think people understand that. Like, you can read the Iliad and the Odyssey and be formed as a person towards Christ because the teacher is the one that does the connected, you know, it's the fascia. It's the connecting tissue that connects all of these things. - Yeah. And what we don't want is utility to take over, right? Like the utilitarianism of religion is the saddest form ever with, right? Like, like, I mean, particularly when we talk about art, right? So like, you talk about art. Use a beautiful painting was a Catholic painting, right? Because it communicated beauty. And now it has to be like a very dramatic emotional picture of the sake of her. Jesus, which is beautiful. And I have them all over. But, but that's not, it doesn't have to have to be that to be Catholic, right? Like, yeah. Yeah. And I think it's similar with the great, with the great books. Like, the great books had a enormous impact on the Catholic church. As we know it, likely if you're a practicing intentional disciple, you were probably influenced by someone who encountered the great books, you know, and had that formation in their life. - Yeah. And, you know, I always come back to this quote from Chesterton, which is the oldest things ought to be taught to the youngest people, right? That line. - Yeah, right. - Some, I mean, so his argument is we have educational theories that are younger than the pupils it claims to form. And we have this today. Like, we're looking at Common Core. We're looking at all these different things. And we realize, have you heard of the, I think it's called the Southern Miracle, or the Alabama Miracle. Have you heard of this? - No. - Okay. So, like the Mag states, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, they like have like the worst education in America, maybe not Georgia. Yeah. And it's like consistently, I think, I think I want to say, let's just say it's Mississippi. It's like 49th out of 50 states. - Right. - It's been, and it's been that way for like a long time. So the governor and the Board of Education, I guess, or whoever's responsible in the state decided, okay, we have to flip this. This is so terrible. And it's our reputation as being like the dumbest state. So what can we do to change it? And they went, they took like half a billion dollars of the state's income, and they invested it in their teachers. And they said, we are getting rid of sight word, whole word, approach to reading, and we're going to phonics. - To phonics, yeah. - And they went hardcore back to phonics, but almost none of the teachers in the entire state were trained in phonics. So all of the majority of the money was spent on re-educating their teachers how to teach phonics. And I think the stat is within one year of the full implementation of this new curricula. They had, I'm going to give you the direct stats, but the shock of their test scores, reading scores. So for instance, Massachusetts is one of the like elite left-wing progressive, you know, it's like the, and it has been, the funny thing is, Massachusetts has been an educational cutting-edge progressive thing since the like Puritans were there. - Right. - All like they, it's always. - And minority students, especially black American students who have always been on the lower end, are now in mid, I want to say it's Mississippi, are, have reading levels higher than the same students, similar demographics in Massachusetts. - That's amazing. - Yeah. - Yeah, I, you know, you said the quote from Chesterton edipists, like the edipist cycle had a deep effect on me when I was a kid. And this was without without a teacher. My mom had just given it to me and, and I have a quote, I still to this day, a quote that I lived by, like that I think about all the time is I am pleasing those I know I should please most, which is when his daughter goes to bury, you know, when they say they can't bury this criminal and she goes to bury them because she says, like, I'm going to please the gods rather than please the men. And that's, you have something that really has like, you know, been a part of me, been a part of me. It's, I mean, such a Catholic thing to say, you know. - Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking about teachers. So when I was on that points with the coiners episode, we were talking about AI and all this stuff. And I asked Fred what makes a good teacher. I come back to this all the time because I feel like it clarifies a lot of things like, what makes a good teacher? And I was referencing my friend, Julie, who lives down in Sugar Land. She's awesome. All these people kept sending her the, because that was one of the first things that was clipped out. And like all these people started sending that. Gormally talking about you. So I said, what makes a good teacher? Like if all the teachers you had that were good, what makes a good teacher? Well, you already mentioned some of them. You said, you know, obviously these Franciskins and the University of Dallas students who were focused on the salvation of souls, right? Like that's absolutely important. The other side of it is, and I just lay this out, a teacher to be great has to love the subject they teach. Right. Right. And that comes through in the teaching. Yeah. No question. Yeah. Right. Number two has to love the students. Right. Right. I think that's a huge component. Like the students need to know when they walk in the door that they are known and loved. Right. Then so love the subject matter, love of the students, and then they have to love, I think, teaching itself as a profession, as a practice, as a way of engaging the world. They have to love it. So you have to have like, you have, you can't just love students and love your subject matter. And then not like I tend to do this, like not be good at the even the shallow work of teaching with like grading papers and all this stuff. Yeah. I put it off until way too late. And I miss my week grades that were due. I'm a terrible person. But like to be a great teacher, it involves like understanding competencies in being a teacher. Yeah. And those are things like the technique side that can be trained in a lot of different ways. And you can level up your skills and all that stuff. But to then to to to love bring a teacher to love you, you know, you talking this way, I had a teacher in high school for one year. His name was James Chastick and he's out there somewhere. He's he was a young guy and I'm not kidding you. I mean, this, I can't tell you the impact he had on my life just intellectually and spiritually. He taught us the Iliad and he taught us Plato's apology and I don't know if I've ever met anyone who loved the subject matter more than this guy and it communicated it. I mean, it was incredible. I don't I could never do it justice unless you were in a classroom with him and to understand the drama that he was because of how much he loved the Iliad and how it came alive and how I mean, he was incredible. He was absolutely incredible and that was it's like he said it was the love. He loved it. I mean, he knew he could have said the Iliad probably without reading. You know what I mean, just yeah, that's how much he was in the text. I mean, and think about what that does for the students where they come every every student the majority of them come with a certain apathy because school is forced upon them. You know, the St. Augustine is a great line. The the fruit is great but the roots are bitter on education, right? And it's very easy to understand like kids there are so many others especially as I get older so many other things they could be doing rather than reading a book that they didn't want to read and do all that stuff and blah blah blah and think deeply about it. But to have someone be entirely in love with the subject matter makes it very difficult to not to not have your apathy overcome. Yep. Yeah. Right. No question. So hard. So hard. Yeah, there's no question to remain apathetic of that environment. Yeah, I kind of think. If you ever do you ever hear Jordan Peterson talk about how one of the jobs of a parent is to make your child likeable? Yes. Yeah. You know, I won't kind of wonder if it's getting harder and harder. Do you know what I mean for teachers? Because I think kids are it is almost to the point now where like you know when you're talking to kids, it's like let me hold up my iPhone and catch their attention and then poke my head out from behind it and try to teach them something, you know, yeah, it's it's just so hard, you know, and and you're going to have to yell louder and love harder. I mean, that's going to be the way it works. Yell louder and love harder. The Dave Van Vickell story. But you know, this you know, this teacher, Mr. Chastic, we should I should try and find him for this for this season actually. I bet I could find him. This was not a fancy school. I will never forget him for the rest of my life. And he was amazing even amongst the TAC guys. They're all very impressive. But even amongst those men, he was I mean, it's it wasn't it was incredible really. For those of you don't know TAC, Thomas Aquinas College out in St. Palo, California is a Catholic. It's like St. John's College. It is holy dedicated to the great books and we talk about a lot, but neither of us went there. Yeah, right. A bunch of a connection there even. Yeah. I have the the the people running the classical school. Okay. Maria, she I believe she went there and that's where she met her husband and a handful of people. They all went there and you can tell in the way they raise their kids. I mean, I'm not joking. When you have kids who are very intentionally classically trained with this understanding of like no, no, no, no, no, we read these great books and we talk about them as a family. With my family, sometimes we got the first half, not the second half. Like we don't really talk about it in the Odyssey. Every time I try to, the kids roll their eyes. But then I get sad and I just watch another video about Japanese minimalism. Anyhow, the they talk about these things so that when I'm in the classroom and one of their daughters is in my classroom as an eighth grader, like I said, how many of you saw the the Odyssey movie and none of them did and one raised their hands. She's like, what a travesty. What an absolute travesty. That movie was so great. That makes me so happy. I do want to give some updates real quick. The Mississippi Miracle is what it's called. Everyone should look this up. It's not just phonics. The big thing is how they retrain their teachers. So in 2013, Mississippi's fourth grade reading was 209, which was ranked 49th in the country. And in 2024, the score had bumped up to 219. Now, I don't know exactly what 219 means, but it cut it in, this is how they said, their fourth graders ranked 9th in the nation in reading from 49th to 9th and 16th in math. Adjusted for demographics and poverty, they ranked first nationally in reading in math, according to the urban institute. Like that's you unbelievable. It's unbelievable. 49th? Yeah, 49th to 9th. Like wow, that is wild. So what it did was it took 9.5 million. It's high sub half a billion. Yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about. When the act passed in 2013, funding stayed at the level of 15 million a year since 2014. So 24 to 15 million a year every year, 60% of that goes to coaching and intervention staff goes through K to three K to eight education. It goes through reforming them. Coaches are trained in this, all of this stuff. So 15 million a year, which is 0.2% of the state budget. Isn't that crazy? And think about this, right? If it's focused on reading, why is that so important? Well, because reading is how you learn to learn yourself, right? Yeah. It's how you learn to teach yourself. So yeah, that's why it's so important. Yeah. So when getting back to the notion of the teacher, right? Like this understanding of loving the students, why is that so important? Number one, students know whether you care about that or you just care about a paycheck. Absolutely. And the relationships that teachers form with the individual students, I mean, why not just give them a text or a computer screen and walk away and say, I, we taught the kids. It's because a teacher's guiding hand needs to figure out where the student is in relation to the content they need to master. And I think about this, like I was, I was reflecting on all this stuff within my own, within my own teaching that I do, you know, I teach three classes right now, seventh and eighth grade philosophy and ninth grade theology, tenth grade theology. And I am constantly, like there is an assessment machine running in my head 24/7 when I'm with these kids. I am constantly, all the questions I ask, the type of comments I get back, how eager they are to respond or not eager to respond where they're hesitant, where they're strong. I file all of these things in my head constantly because I want them to grow and I want them to grow rapidly in certain areas and stuff. And knowing that I need to double back is such an important understanding of catching kids up without letting them feel like they're dumb, you know, or they're, they're behind. And it's like, oh, you're missing this component. Let me double down on this. And then if you're missing that and the light chances are pretty likely that the other people in the class might be missing it. And like you're constantly evaluating every single thing, you're doing, saying the stuff you bring, your creativity within the classroom, all of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, no question. I have a question. Did you or have your students ever stood on their desk and said, oh, captain, my captain? At least once a week. And the crazy thing is it's only a weekly school. Yeah. Okay, captain, my captain. Actually, I want to watch the antidote to Dead Poets Society, which is the Warriors Club or the Emperor's Club. I like that movie. Okay, I watch it. I'll watch it. Yeah, I watched that movie a long time ago when it like came out in 2005. And I haven't watched it since. But I remember being like, dude, I freaking love this movie. And I try to get my kids to watch it. But instead we watched 13 hours, which is about the Benghazi attack. Yeah, I remember. Oh, my kids are pretty traumatized. That was a bad idea. I'm my part. That was a bad idea. That's a bad pedagogy. Okay. So St. Thomas Quina, St. Augustine, talk about the importance of the teacher, the role of the teacher. And one of the things that St. Thomas Quina says is when you don't have trust, when you don't have trust between teacher and student, you don't have learning. Why is that day? I mean, I'm not quizzing you on what Thomas said. I'm just saying like as a human remark. No, no, I think the medium is, you know, the medium is the message, right? And I think if you take something as simple as like theology, you're looking to see if it's lived, right? Like if a teacher teaches you something, you want to see if it's lived. And I think that's, that's important. Yeah, you want to see that it's lived. If I don't trust a teacher and they are educating me on things that I do not know, I am going to be super hesitant to believe anything, right? When we think about this, there's a great line, a quote from, I think it comes from Aristotle. The learner must believe. Yeah. And it's like, you got to believe the teacher. You got to believe the content. If I don't believe in either, I'm not going to learn anything. And I think about that in terms of like building trust, building that relationship within the room. How many kids like when they get in trouble at school and the teacher like, hey, you're, I got a note home from your teacher, blah, blah, blah. And the kids will say this line. Oh, but that teacher hates me. Right. The right now classic standard classic cop outline. Yeah, but what if what if the teacher hated a student? Yeah, of course. It happens. I mean that happens. They're not perfect. Right. They can they can you know, but if the teacher hates the student and the student picks up on that, where's the learning going to happen? There's no trust there. Right. There's no docility and there's no openness. There's no teachability. Someone asked me what do I look for when I like work with like a parish more in depth than just going out and giving talks? And I said, I have to see if the priests and the deacons are teachable. Yeah, right. If they're not teachable, I can't work with them. You're out. And what do I mean by teachable? Hey, this thing that you did that was wildly successful 20 years ago. If you can only bring that up over and over and over again, then you're not teachable because you did like I confer this thing. I invented years ago worked and therefore nothing else can compare. I'm only going to do that one. Right. And usually they're just bringing you in to teach the staff to affirm their thoughts for the staff, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to close out by saying this. If you want to have the biggest impact on your school, if you're a Catholic educator, if you're a diocesan person else, people have copied us or have copied us in emails and sent it to like the head of school, Catholic schools for a diocese that's happened like three or four times now. If you, if these conversations are important and we've gotten tons of feedback people being like I freaking love the series. Let's go. The number one thing in terms of your dollar going far, your return on investment is investing in faculty staff administration in their formation. Yeah. Faculty staff administration in their formation. It's the hardest thing to do. It's the and people will have to be let go because they will refuse the Catholic vision, even though they're in a Catholic school. Well, it's hard to form a lover too. You know, like if you need to hire someone who loves, who just intentionally loves what they're doing, you know. God, man. That's great. It's hard. I mean, I'm thinking about my kids' teachers like that. After them being in my home, I would rather than be at their school. Like in all honesty, like I think that they are loved and nurtured and held in esteem and, you know, at the school that they attend now. And I think about like one thing that constantly strikes me, we have so many Catholic schools that are desperate to win students by appealing number one, ed tech, investing tons of money in technology. They invest tons of money in things that will draw students such as sports equipment facilities and all of that stuff. And then they dump tons of money into becoming like blue ribbon schools or whatever, whatever like stats that matter for to compare themselves with public schools. But to be a teacher at a Catholic school, you're probably at like 80% of what you would make in a public school. Not always. They're very expensive Catholic schools. But by and large, you're making somewhere, I had a principal say that we always try to keep it within 80% of what the public schools are offering. And that's to retain talent and all that stuff. Here's the problem. You're already like people who would take a 20% pay cut to work in a Catholic institution, probably want to work in a Catholic institution. Yeah. So let's make it Catholic. Listen, make it Catholic. And therefore like people will accept a pay cut if it's tied to a mission and it's a good work environment. So if we want to retain teachers doubling down on the Catholic system is not a bug. It's a feature, especially in retaining talent where they feel like, hey, I'm known. I'm loved. I'm respected. I'm encouraged to write all of those things at the same time. You know, they're investing in my faith. But this is a place where the faith is allowed to breathe and to thrive. Every Catholic school needs to be asking that question. And I know that when people always say this, you know, it's easier said than done because retaining teachers and getting new teachers is almost impossible. And it's like, yeah, I get that. I get that. But maybe people like Franciscan University students and Ava and Benedictine and TAC and all this stuff, they are drawn to schools with a mission like that. And maybe they can only do it for three or four or five years. But if you build a pipeline and you're invested in that thing, you're going to get a higher quality teacher who's going to bring the enthusiasm and the joy of the gospel into their job. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all, this has been an episode of every niche about barely scratching the surface on what it means to be good teachers and have good formation. If you want to have us come out and help you, me and Dave just choose an email ekspeedessentialpress.com. And Dave will be happy to be sad doing the work of people walking out on them. I'm going to tell you that God loves you. God doesn't love me. I'm out of here. The formation of teachers, faculty, staff, so very important, so very important. So God bless y'all. [MUSIC]