[00:00:00] Danny Rubin: They all say the same thing. Students come out of school with tremendous technical skills. Their soft skills are poor. What industry is looking for is they’ll say all the time, “We’ll train you with what we do, but we got another person that we’re bringing on.” Even though these skills have fallen out of favor or they’re lost to the decades, that makes them 100 times more valuable.

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[00:00:29] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe, and I am so excited today to welcome Danny Rubin. We had the opportunity to meet last summer at a homeschool conference, and that was a serendipity come to life for me because I have been looking for someone in the home education space to do exactly what Rubin is doing. Danny, will you please introduce yourself, and let’s get started?

[00:00:56] Danny: Of course. Thank you, Gretchen, so much for having me. Yes, I think when we bumped into each other at the conference this summer, it was like we were meant to have this conversation, and you see so clearly what’s often called the soft skills gap in America and how, with each successive generation, we lose skills that, for some of us, just come naturally. We just know how to handle ourselves in social situations, professional situations. Those skills are falling away, but those skills still matter very much.

In fact, we can talk about it as we go, in this new era of AI, these soft skills will matter 10 times more than they already do. It’s a great moment, an opportunity to commit ourselves to learning and teaching those old-school skills that have truly never gone away. My name is Danny Rubin. I’m the founder of an educational company called Rubin. We are based in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

We provide online resources, curriculum and videos and assessments to school environments of all kinds to help students learn how to conduct themselves professionally and with etiquette and with decorum so that they can be taken seriously for the next opportunity that they want, whether it’s a job, an internship, a job shadow, college, a scholarship. Whatever they’re going for, they’re being judged not only on their technical skills and their classroom achievements, but on those people skills and how they handle themselves in an email, in a phone call, in a Zoom, in in-person, on the phone, over text.

Wherever the communication takes place, the person on the other end is, often silently, judging that student. Opportunities often make or break, not just because of your transcript or your test scores or all those hard skills, but how you handle dealing with other people, and if the person wants to deal with you at all or further. That’s what we focus on. I’m a former TV news reporter. I worked for CBS as a TV reporter. I also worked as a producer for a show on NBC called Meet the Press, which is a political show. It’s been on for decades.

I also worked in a field called public relations, where we help customers, companies, executives with messaging, with how they position themselves, sometimes dealing with bad news, promoting good news, all about reputation. What I have done, and now through my team, we’ve taken the skills from industry—that’s what every educator wants to do, is to share with students what do industry professionals use.

We are taking those skills that are tried and true and used in industry, used in journalism, used in PR, and bringing those lessons into the classroom, into curriculum in small, bite-sized, digestible ways, so students as early as elementary school can start to practice these social skills and these soft skills, so that as they grow older, like so many of us who have already come through adolescence, “Oh, yes, I know how to do that. I’ve always known how to do that.” Whatever that is, it’s no longer a given that you’ll just, through osmosis, pick it up. We have to be intentional of how we teach it, and that’s what we do.

[00:04:47] Gretchen: Yes. I think one of the things that I think is vital in talking about this is the fact it starts as simply as we don’t have a phone that hangs on the wall in the kitchen anymore. All of us were acculturated that you had to learn to answer the phone, and you knew, if you didn’t answer it politely and properly, your mama was going to come after you because, being raised in the South, you better do it right the first time. That doesn’t happen anymore, and that is the first place often where kids get to interact with someone they’re not related to.

[00:05:25] Danny: That’s right. That’s a great point. Talking to the parent–

[00:05:27] Gretchen: We have to be able to do that.

[00:05:30] Danny: “Good evening, Mrs. So-and-so, is Johnny there?” That has gone away.

[00:05:36] Gretchen: Yes, it has. Technology moves on, but I think the skills that were presented in that microcosm right there still need to be taught. I’m amazed at the number of– As a high school swim coach, I had swimmers who would go to exorbitant lengths to answer a text message, but wouldn’t pick up the phone and get the same information in a 2-minute phone call. [laughs] It’s amazing to me.

[00:06:10] Danny: Inefficient on some level.

[00:06:11] Gretchen: It takes so much longer. [laughs]

[00:06:13] Danny: I know. It does. What is reassuring or reaffirming is, in all the conversations that I have, not just with educators, but with industry professionals, employers, and everybody at that intersection, career counselors, and HR, they all say the same thing. Students come out of school with tremendous technical skills. Their soft skills are poor. It comes up every time in every conversation. What industry is looking for is they’ll say all the time, “We’ll train you with what we do, but we got another person that we’re bringing on.”

Even though these skills have fallen out of favor or they’re lost to the decades, that makes them 100 times more valuable if you have them. When you get into the workforce, you need to use these skills. The fact that they’re not used or cool anymore for teens, I understand that, but when you get to a job, you’re doing them anyway. Whether you think they’re cool or not, or needed or not, they’re going to be thrust into a phone conversation, a board meeting, all these moments where you have to be on with your eye contact and the handshake, and Mr. and Ms., and all these things, suddenly it comes flying at you.

If you haven’t had any practice, it’ll be trial by fire, and you’ll probably miss out on some early opportunities because you had to learn it the hard way. We all learn things the hard way, but you can certainly benefit from practice. That’s what being in school is all about.

[00:07:58] Gretchen: Right. As a parent of six, I wanted the playing field to be more than level. One of the ways I believe that it was level for them is because we practice these kinds of skills in my household. I used to leave the back door, come around to the front of the house, and ring the doorbell. Whoever was on deck had to answer the door and have a conversation with me. They laugh now.

My kids are ranging in age from 20 to 40, but they laugh because they never knew what I was going to present to them as a scenario. They had to be ready for whatever I was going to say.

[00:08:38] Danny: That’s amazing. They’re very lucky. People say it starts at home, and that’s always true. Either you’re getting it at home or you’re not. It still starts at home. You were intentional, and you put them in those situations. I try to be the same with my kids, making them shake hands and talk to adults and be comfortable, but that’s not the norm. What we’re doing is, gently, but intentionally, bringing these lessons back into the classroom setting so that we make sure you’re eating your vegetables here.

It’s a small percentage today that will get these etiquette lessons at home. The majority won’t get it at all. The fact is they’ll lose out on opportunities. They’re just going to lose out. They’re going to be further behind. The people who know how to move through a room, they will go further and faster. It’s just how it goes. As I said, with AI, and we see AI wiping out jobs now that are a lot of technical or routine tasks, the jobs of tomorrow will lean heavily on the ability to be comfortable managing other people, using critical thinking skills, using good writing, and good synthesizing information to make decisions, and presenting that information, articulating an information in a way that is clearly understood.

We, in some ways, are returning to an era where this is all we did. It’s funny that way. One example of that is now, when students are asked to write essays, many times schools and any educational setting, they are saying, “You have to do the essay writing in class time with paper and pencil, because, otherwise, you’re going to use ChatGPT. You’re going to use AI to write for you or research for you.”

That right there, a classroom, a group of students, or even working at home and doing it devoid of technology, that hearkens back to how many decades ago? 40? 50? We are returning to an era where we have to lean on these old-school skills. For me, and what our company does, I’m thrilled because this is what we’ve always believed in and fought for. Now the world is angling back and saying, “No, these skills matter, and they matter even more.”

[00:11:08] Gretchen: It’s interesting because, last week, I had a guest. He’s a software engineer, but primarily now involved in recruiting. I did not anticipate that this was where our conversation was going, but he said, I can teach you the hard skills of whatever it is I need you to do, but given two people with the same set of skills, I’m always going to choose the one that I think knows how to play on a team better than the one who does not.

[00:11:40] Danny: That’s it. This is what I’m saying. This is echoed by employers, business owners. We work in very large cities, lots of students, and this is the demand. It’s a directive back to educators, of all stripes, to say, “Don’t send me students that cannot walk through that door. Don’t do it. I don’t want them. I can’t deal with them. I can’t give them an email address and have them interact with my customers.”

This is the thing, and it’s hard for students to understand. Once you get into a job, you work for somebody else, and suddenly, there’s reputation and there’s money on the line. If they can’t trust that you can confidently speak to a customer or send a message to a customer, or interact in a store with a customer, they don’t want you there because you’re going to hurt their bottom line.

That’s why these skills will never go away, because these skills are connected to making money. Until they’re not connected to making money, they’re always going to be front and center. For me, as a business owner, it makes you nervous.

[00:12:56] Gretchen: I remember, 20-plus years ago, going to work for a company in a public relations capacity, and the very first task I was given was a manila folder full of their email correspondence. My assignment was to read through all of their correspondence and learn their voice, how they spoke to the customer, which was amazing. It was a wonderful experience for me because I would eventually have cottoned to it, but making that explicit in the very beginning was a fantastic way to educate me in knowing how that business interacted with their clientele.

[00:13:43] Danny: I love that. Also, broader than that, it’s imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, being thoughtful about the audiences you interact with, empathetic to audiences. Really, what students struggle with because we’re in this social media era is struggle to think outside of themselves. They’re not the only game in town. They’re not the star of the show. None of us are. We exist, and we provide value to others. We live in this ecosystem, and people only hire us or pay us if we provide value to someone else. It’s hard for students to understand that today, and I get that. The more we can pepper in lessons that reinforce these ideas, like anything, it builds on itself. It builds a foundation. You’re not going to get it all in one bite, but it’s about a steady diet of thinking outside yourself, practicing how to interact with other people, and having a baseline of saying, “What is appropriate and what is inappropriate?”

That’s what we’ve tried very hard in our materials to give clear examples. Inappropriate, appropriate. Let’s observe both. Now, your turn to practice. That’s how we do it so they know what not to do as much as what to do.

[00:15:08] Gretchen: Danny, tell me, because this is such a brilliant idea, how did you get from journalism to here? I understand, having begun my college career as a journalism major at the University of Georgia, there’s a certain attitude you have to bring into that realm. How did you see this as something that would be viable, that would become Rubin?

[00:15:42] Danny: Like any entrepreneurial path, there’s no straight lines. It’s like a pinball machine. For me, the story in 60 seconds or less—work in journalism, work in PR, always felt a calling to teach, but was never formally in the classroom. Started a blog, covering, ultimately providing examples of writing and email templates and other resume templates, and just things that I knew how to write and I know my friends struggled with. Put a bunch of stuff out there. Recognize that people really liked the templates. They were Google searching. This is long before AI could write something for you in lickety-split, even though I like my examples better, but that’s one man’s opinion.

Long before that, people started coming to the website organically, Google searching for these templates. I had over a million views through 6 months, and I’m like, “Wow, there’s really an appetite to help people with their writing.” I didn’t know that. Initially, I was trying to throw spaghetti against the wall, as they say, see what people wanted. Then I took all the examples and I turned it into a book of email templates called Wait, How Do I Write This Email?

This goes back almost 10 years. I wrote a book and got it so far. For about a year, it was in every FedEx office store in the country, in their productivity section. I was trying really hard to be an author. Learned very quickly, you got to sell a lot of books to be an author. Month over month. People often they’ll buy the book and then they don’t need you anymore. I started to say, “What if there’s some sort of application with education?” I never was in the classroom. I didn’t have much knowledge, but I took the book to the superintendent of Virginia Beach Schools, who I knew.

He, in turn, took it and gave it to the Office of Vocational Instruction. They got back to me and said, “This is a cool resource. We can use it in some of our vocational classes.” Then I peeked behind the curtain and saw this whole national landscape of vocational instruction at all levels: post-secondary, secondary. I said, “Whoa, there’s a whole massive nationwide audience where this material could be useful alongside the learning to do HVAC, learning to do manufacturing, culinary, family, early childhood, whatever the class, healthcare.”

These skills are right there, too. That sent me down this road towards education, where I started the company working with K-12, and we still do, and started working with some of the largest school districts in the country, including Miami, Florida, and Philadelphia, and Fairfax County, Virginia, which are top 10, 15-size districts in America. Then I’ve started since then to pivot out into other educational spaces like the homeschool community, private schools, charter schools, because this is a need everywhere.

The short of it is I started as a blog, to a book, to ultimately turning the book into curriculum and now working with schools. This is over 10 years. If you had tapped me on the shoulder in 2015 and said, “You know what you should do?” When I’m starting a blog for $20 and writing whatever I wanted to write, and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You know what, you should actually create an online learning platform for vocational classes,” I’d be like, “What does that even mean? What does that sentence even mean? I have no idea.”

The number of pivots between a personal blog into a full-blown educational learning platform delivering at scale to thousands and thousands of students, there’s a huge golf there and a million turns when things didn’t quite the way I wanted. I had to continue to pivot to align. This is really important, and I want students to hear this. I have changed my business model many times, but I have never changed what I believe in. I have been trying to teach these skills since the start, it’s just the medium in which I do it changes to reach more people and to, frankly, be a profitable business.

I have never contorted myself to fit in with the times or to try it. I have held the line. I have always taught the same things over and over and over again. I just change how it’s delivered. Now I’m gratified that I feel like we’re moving back towards an era where these skills are prized even more. I’ve never changed my tune.

[00:20:33] Gretchen: I think that is amazing, the fact that you were so forward-thinking. I also think that this has applications far beyond just vocational applications. Just because you have the capacity to go to college, even on a full-ride scholarship, you still need the soft skills to get a job after you have that lumpy degree in your hand.

[00:21:00] Danny: 100%. It’s a doorway in.

[00:21:02] Gretchen: How does a student access what you do?

[00:21:06] Danny: Sorry?

[00:21:06] Gretchen: How does a student access what you do?

[00:21:10] Danny: This piece of the business model has taken a long time to understand. What I’ll show you here, it’s so nice and neat and tidy right now, but it has been a journey because, when I started this, there’s a very popular learning platform called Canvas. It’s used widely in K-12.

[00:21:35] Gretchen: We use it here, yes.

[00:21:37] Danny: There’s a steep learning curve to try to deliver instructional content at scale without me coming from the outside, having no idea even what was going on in the classroom, to then having to understand the tools teachers use. I take the Amazon mindset; they make purchasing so easy. I’m like, “How can I make this learning process as easy as possible? I want to cut out clicks. I want to cut out steps. I want to make this seamless so teachers start using it, educators use it, and they become part of their routine, and that’s it.”

This is a subscription model business. This is like annual subscription. We have to prove ourselves year 1. Again, this is just showing you the number of– For any student or parent who’s thinking about starting a business, the answer is you should, but you have to expect that it’s going to be really hard and there’s going to be a million little pivots and stages of learning about things you don’t know and to just embrace the unknown.

A lot of people tiptoe around the edges because they don’t know where to start. The answer is you just go in headfirst, crash in, and then you’re going to figure it out because there’s no other way. What we did, first of all, I wrote the book, and then I was like, “Books don’t really sell that well. Nobody wants books anymore anyway.” It’s like, “I got to make these into online lessons,” so I built a whole curriculum off the book. It’s always like, “Okay, is that enough? Is that good enough?”

It’s never good enough because I’m like, “Okay, I did a book. Is that good? No. Okay, I made the online learning platform. Is that good? Well, no, because right now, I’m still making everyone log in,” and that is a choke point. That’s friction. Nobody likes logging in. Schools and kids, they have millions of apps and all these things, and it’s like, “Don’t give them one more password. It’s going to fall.”

The first year, I tried the curriculum side, probably picked up 20 customers, lost them all. Why? Because I was making them log in, and the process to use the material was laborious and wasn’t smooth. Learn the hard way because it’s like you think, “Oh, I built this whole platform, took hundreds of hours, thousands of hours. Did I do it? No, I didn’t do it.” Okay, so how do I do it? Well, and then I started to learn. There are three dominant learning management systems used today: Google Classroom, Canvas, and Schoology.

Those three take up 98% of the available market, as I see it, dealing with this every day. How do I deliver in these platforms? Well, I went and found a really smart freelancer who has worked for a major educational provider for many years, and he understood the game on a level that I did not. We took all of the activities we’ve done around email skills, phone skills, resume, everything we’ve done, and we put it in a big module. In Canvas, they’re called modules, like a big cluster.

This is the same approach for all three learning management systems. Now, if you see, we have a unit called Email Etiquette Beginner. We have all these little lessons on how to write an email properly. I won’t even go through. This list is almost 500 items. We give the teachers all the items in Canvas or in Google Classroom. Everything’s here. This is the experience. Let’s say they want to give out our pre-test on Email Etiquette. All they have to do now is put this link in their class and then have the student click on it. Then you’ll ask them to load in a new window. We do that just for the widest possible screen size.

Then what happens is it delivers the student directly to the page. What I just showed you here seems very minor, but this is our whole business. The fact that we can go, they’re already logged into Canvas or Google Classroom or Schoology. We can put a lesson in their class, and they can get to it without a password. That’s the difference between keeping a customer and losing a customer. When you talk about delivering for a class of two kids or a school of 100,000 more, that’s the difference between keeping them and losing them.

More than that, not selfishly for me, but for the lesson to be learned or not, the lesson to be absorbed and reachable, what I just showed you here seems so like, “Oh, that makes sense.” That’s nice. Just to get the knowledge to even understand this was possible, and then build it, and then deliver it. Months, more than years. Nobody’s walking up to me on the street.

[00:26:35] Gretchen: Yes, I can certainly understand. [chuckles]

[00:26:38] Danny: No one’s telling me, on the street, “Hey, you know what you need to do? Canvas has a thing where you can do this, this, and this.” Nobody tells me these things. I got to go find these answers from just crawling in the dark until it reaches a point where it is useful. The teacher’s like, “This is what I need. Thank you very much.” Then they use it, and they come back the next year, and they use it. There’s probably more iterations than this. We just haven’t gotten there yet, but this is where it is today. We’ve reduced it down to one click from your LMS, and you’re in.

[00:27:11] Gretchen: I think you’ve made it doable for families as well, because there’s nothing that an individual educator hates more than trying to figure out, “Okay, how do I navigate this particular enterprise to make it a successful experience for my student?”

[00:27:29] Danny: We met actually with a homeschool parent yesterday who’s using us. They don’t have a learning management system. They log into our site directly. Of course, we still do that. We’ve just worked hard to remove passwords wherever we can, because we know that that is a huge problem with students is they constantly don’t know their password, and it makes the educator not want to use the product. If they don’t have a learning management system, and many homeschool families don’t, that’s fine.

It’s much more manageable in a room of 2, 3, 4 students than 120 kids across 6 sections, and it’s like, “Ah.” The point is we’re catering to whatever situation they find themselves in, and that’s the best we can do because everyone’s got their own thing going on. We have worked extremely hard to deliver this as smoothly as we can. I think, frankly, we’re even better at delivering than a lot of larger players because, even from Canvas, they’d make you integrate to their homepage. We’re integrating you straight to the exact item you want. You don’t even have to go to the main menu and find it. We’re just like, “Zoop.”

[00:28:49] Gretchen: You’re also creating an environment where it can be self-driven by the student, which is really terrific.

[00:28:56] Danny: That, we’re giving them the ability to explore, and we’re just putting a ton of resource in educators’ hands. Could they go to ChatGPT and whip something up? Yes, they could, but we have topics they wouldn’t use.

[00:29:08] Gretchen: Yes, but time is money. [laughs]

[00:29:10] Danny: Time is money, and they wouldn’t even think to create half the stuff we’ve already made. We’ve delivered it in their LMS, connected to student rosters, and we even have the ability to send the grade they get from our stuff back to their own gradebook.

[00:29:25] Gretchen: That’s awesome.

[00:29:26] Danny: I’m trying to just overwhelm them with customer service and product features so that there wouldn’t be a time where they’re like, “Well, we don’t need this anymore. Everyone’s going to make their own stuff.” At some point, you want to go to–

[00:29:40] Gretchen: No one has time to make their own stuff in this day and age. That does lead me to a question for you. If I’m a parent, and I hear what you’re saying as far as the necessity to cultivate the soft skill enterprise with my student, and I visit Rubin, where do I begin? How do I figure this out? What is the highest priority of where would I begin? Would it be learning how to craft an appropriate email?

[00:30:14] Danny: I do think that is the best place to start, and that’s where most educators start when they get into our program, because we cover many topics beyond that: public speaking and project management and interview skills and networking, but the first place to start is to write a basic email and use the phone.

[00:30:34] Gretchen: I think it’s really important, though, to recognize that these are skill sets that you need, whether you have ambitions of college or trade school, or you’re going into daddy’s business when you graduate high school. It doesn’t really matter.

[00:30:49] Danny: No. This is just the everyday nuts and bolts. Also, outside of our business, we interview professionals across different fields, and we provide those conversations also inside of Canvas or Google Classroom. We are careful to ask everybody we talk to how they use communication skills in their job. We’ve talked to a neurosurgeon and a lawyer and a sports agent who have advanced degrees, and you’d think, “Oh, they have to be the most up-to-date with these skills.”

We’ve talked to an automotive technician, an HVAC technician, a welder, who tell us the exact same thing. They write every day. They use the phone every day. They need to show positive behavior, etiquette on the job. It is the exact same; I don’t care what you do.

[00:31:48] Gretchen: Now you’re playing into my hands a little bit because, when I speak from stage at homeschool conferences and I tell parents, “It doesn’t matter whether your child has college ambitions or not, they need to learn to write to an audience under a time constraint,” parents look at me like, “But no, you don’t understand. My child is going to become–” I’ll use a personal example, my youngest is a third-year journeyman electrician.

He has had to write multiple documents in his three years, everything from reviewing change orders on the job and looking for clarity in what is written to communicating back with a customer in the field so that that customer understands what the challenges are with completing their expectations and how my son’s company is going to meet those expectations. It’s not just a one-thing enterprise.

[00:32:47] Danny: No. This is Justin Winter. He is an automotive technician. We asked him, then you see the question, is communication important? Extremely important. You’re working on people’s cars. Not only is it important within your own team to make sure that you’re clearly communicating what you need someone to do on that car, but also to write up the report of what you did on that car, because if that language is incorrect and it ends up in a court case, who knows where it’s going to go.

He’s also constantly calling the customer, “Your car’s ready,” or “We need to do this repair, it’s going to cost this much.” He’s doing all the things that we say, “Oh, you don’t have to do anymore.” He’s not just working on cars. He’s writing and speaking all day.

[00:33:40] Gretchen: Absolutely.

[00:33:42] Danny: It’s important for students to hear from people like this because it’s like, “Oh, all right, I guess it does matter. I didn’t think about that.” I understand why they wouldn’t think about that, but he’s telling you. He’s in his 30s. He’s like, “I’m telling you, every day I write and I speak on the phone. I’m constantly on the phone with people who are sticker shock on what you’re about to tell them it’s going to cost.” You have to have not only phone etiquette, you have to have delicate phone etiquette to drop a number on them and say it’s going to cost $800 to fix such and such. You got to be almost like a therapist on the phone. It’s delicate stuff.

[00:34:22] Gretchen: Yes, a little bit.

[00:34:26] Danny: It comes for us all. Whatever you want to do, you’re going to be thrust into these moments. You’ll learn on the job, but you’ll get a job a lot faster if you can do it ahead of time.

[00:34:37] Gretchen: Danny, in the last couple minutes here, what should I have asked you that I haven’t asked you?

[00:34:44] Danny: You asked me so many spot-on questions. This was not a conversation about entrepreneurship. This is about soft skill development. I would encourage students, especially homeschool students who have that freedom and that flexibility in their learning, pursue what you like to do. Find time to do your thing. Here’s the key. It can’t just be about you. You have to always think, “How do I take what I like to do and how can I use it to make an impact for someone else? How can my skills and my abilities help someone else in their life?”

If you only keep it to yourself, you are falling short of your own potential and the potential that you can make in the world. What I’ve done since I was a kid, I’ve always liked writing. It’s always been my thing, but not writing fiction, not writing poetry. I like writing news. I’m weird. I had a father who was a journalist. I come from this naturally.

[00:35:56] Gretchen: The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, then.

[00:35:59] Danny: Not far at all. I have been determined to say, “How can I take what I like to do and use it to make the greatest impact on the most amount of people?” Had I started on that exact journey in high school, this business would be 10 years further along because I didn’t really come to this until I had worked a little bit and started my own website.

[00:36:29] Gretchen: As we said before we began this conversation, I think you landed in the right space at the right time because it’s like the field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. However, you have to recognize that this is what is needed now. People might not have thought that that were true 10 years ago.

[00:36:52] Danny: That’s a great point. It wouldn’t have been as valued, but now it is. You’re right. There is something cosmic about it. You’re doing it at the time you should be doing it. At the same time, I was always thoughtful about continuing to do what I do and always staying true to myself. There were a lot of opportunities when I was early in my career in journalism. I could have stayed in that path and just covered a bunch of crime and negativity and use those skills in ways that did not make other people better.

I felt that in my soul, in my heart, and I let it go. I said, “This is not who I am, not what I want to do. I’m going to push it away.” Even though I was on TV and people saw me, I let it go.

[00:37:29] Gretchen: I just want to say thank you. You have educated me today. I think this is something that all of us as parents need to take away to recognize that we need to be engaged in this process with our children. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank our audience for joining us today and for being here and listening to what we had to say. I look forward to joining you all in your living rooms again soon. Danny, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

[00:37:56] Danny: Thank you.

[00:37:56] Gretchen: I’ll make sure that our paths cross again. It will be amazing.

[00:38:01] Danny: Thank you for having me. Thank you for what you do and for believing in these skills and being an advocate. I’m grateful.

[00:38:07] Gretchen: Absolutely. Thanks again. Take care. Bye-bye.

[00:38:09] Danny: Thanks, Gretchen.

[00:38:11] Announcer: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

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