Transcript: Dr. Yoder on History, Hoops, and the Heart of Great Teaching

Good morning, and welcome back to the show. We are here with history teacher, 7th grade basketball coach, and published author, Dr. Tyler Yoder. How are you, Dr.

Yoder? I'm doing well today. Thanks, Charlie. We're grateful to have you on.

You know, let's start at the beginning. Can you tell us kind of about where you grew up, and what were you like as a kid, especially in school? Were you already kind of like the history-loving type back then, or did that passion kind of come later on? That's a great question.

Yeah, so I grew up in Worcester. Ohio in a small town just outside of the city of Worcester. And I really started loving history as a kid, but it was not formalized. I grew up loving to read and my reading led me to all sorts of questions.

And I loved reading about people who lived before me, the lives they lived, that they faced. And those experiences as a reader prompted me to explore. And so deep seated within me as a kid were all sorts of questions about where I came from, where I would be going, what was the point of living and how I could benefit from hearing other stories that we figured out some of these questions. Over time, It was a process.

It was really towards the end of my college career that I fell in love with the ancient world. And I really just sort of started going sort of back in time, closer and closer to the things that I really found most exciting. I think I started off, I actually changed my major maybe five or six times as an undergraduate. I was education for a while.

I was psychology for a while. I was eventually a history major. And I focused on European history in college. But I had a few classes, a history of Islam class.

I had some histories of Christianity and Western civilization. really ignited an interest in me in things that were further back in time. And so as I graduated college, I was as hungry as I ever was to keep exploring. And the only way to really do that is to go to graduate school. And so long story short, I end up heading into the next 10 years really, figure out where I really want to end up with the questions I'm asking.

So I'll leave it there for now. You know, what's one of those like earliest moments when you knew that history kind of was your thing? Like did younger Dr. Yoder have like a moment in a history museum or maybe a history book that you still remember?

Yeah, that's a great question too. There are, there is a moment when I remember defending my undergraduate thesis when I was going for the faculty that I was working with, my advisors. I was also open to the student body and faculty, but my dad showed up. And you would think that, okay, if a parent's going to be there, they're there for support.

But my dad was there with questions to grill me with. senior thesis defense. And I'll never forget that moment because it really was one of those, like, and it's funny because he was the only one in the entire crowd that had any legitimate questions for me. And they were all like very critical questions of the work that I had done from my own father. It was a really formative moment for me that helped, I think, as someone who loved asking questions and could stand on his own two feet, doing his own research, sort of accounting for work he had done and wanted to have those kinds of conversations.

He wanted to have discussions that were meaningful. He wanted people to push back against his ideas and he wanted to probe further into topics. And so it was from that point forward that I knew I really wanted to go to graduate school. I wanted to learn a lot more.

I wanted to ask a lot more questions, And I was open to people pushing back against my own ideas because that was going to help sharpen my own understanding. Yeah, that's a great story. Well, many of us now know you as both a teacher and a coach. When you were in high school, were you involved in sports or extracurriculars?

And how did those experiences help you become a coach and into a teacher today? Yeah, I was involved in sports for most of my life. I loved competing. I loved winning. like losing.

And so I was driven to sharpen my own craft by playing anything that I could that was competitive. My parents were not necessarily into the sports that I was. My dad had grown up playing rugby and cricket and he wrestled. And I wasn't really, I had no access to cricket, first of all, in Worcester, Ohio.

Nor did I rugby. But I developed a love for football and for basketball very early on in my life. And I remember spending long hours on evenings when the sun had gone down and the lights were out, turning the spotlight on in the backyard to keep shooting at night. important ways to be someone who realized the importance of committing to a task, not giving up when it's hard and pushing through in order to improve, even if that improvement is smaller than you expect. And, um, not always being sure what's on the other end without clear guarantees about, you know, you do this thing for so long and you hope to be given certain rewards, but you don't know it'll play out that way. for competing and a love for trying to get better at whatever I was doing.

And sports was an easy way for me to do those things. And then I believe you went on to play college basketball. So how'd you do that and pursue your academic interests? Yeah.

So I wanted to play college sports. I had a decision to make between football and basketball when I was ready to graduate high school. The interesting story with football was that the high school I went to was a very basketball, focused school. We had a tradition that ran really deep.

We had won 12 straight conference championships in a row. And the coach that I played for is now in the Ohio Hall of Fame. And he had convinced me after my freshman year that if I was going to be any good in basketball, I needed to relinquish other commitments. And one of those was football.

And so I ended up dropping out of football my sophomore year of high school and my junior year as well to focus on basketball. And I remember that freshman year, he said, Yoder, I need you to make 20,000 threes this summer because your shot stinks. And I did 20,000 threes. And I got a little better as a result of that.

But he ended up leaving the summer before my senior year to take a different job. And when he left, I'd always had this inner yearning to get back to football. I loved playing football. I missed football.

And I ended up playing my senior year and had the time of my life. It was sort of carefree. I wasn't expected to do much. But at the end of that season, I had a decision to make because it went so well.

I had some opportunities to play at the small college level in both sports. And I wasn't sure what to do. I spent most of my life playing basketball. time that senior year, but I was loving it. I ended up choosing basketball and I went to a small school that had a great tradition, but I wasn't really guaranteed to have a prominent role on the team.

And that was based on a number of different factors. It was a school that my dad went to. And so there's some pressure there to end up at that school. But it was also a challenge that, and I've always sort of sought out challenges in my life for whatever reason. probably said something about my personality.

If we had a psychologist here, they could probably explain why that is. But I knew that it'd be hard because I was going against players that were a lot taller and more talented than I was. And I wasn't given a guarantee about playing time when I arrived. And I ended up playing all four years.

I registered my first year. I had a fifth year that was a possibility, but I ended up graduating early. But I played the next three years after that redshirt, and it wasn't until my senior year that I cracked the rotation. And so I was strictly a bench player for my second and third years where I was playing in college.

But my senior year was really special. And we had a fantastic season. We went to the Elite Eight at the national tournament. And I had a small, very small role to play in that. many ways was vindicating because you put a lot of work into this thing for a long time.

And again, going back to sort of an earlier point that I mentioned, life is so full of unpredictability and moments where you have decisions to make, but you don't know exactly how to play out. I invested a lot of time into a sport that if you look at my career as a college athlete, I played very few minutes overall. many stories behind what you do see of sweats, of work, of time to get with my teammates at night, at practice, on the weekends, traveling. And I would not take any of that away. I'm so thankful for those moments together with him.

You know, around the time that you were finishing at Cedarville, what kind of plans were forming in your mind? to graduate school or were you considering into maybe seeing whether or not testing your luck at basketball or even just going straight into teaching was your plan? Yeah, so I figured out somewhere between the beginning of my college career and the end of my college career that I wanted to teach in some way. And I wasn't sure exactly how. So at a certain point, one of my majors was secondary ed.

I'd be going into a public school situation, getting licensed, and that would be it. It didn't last very long and eventually declared as a history major because I felt that graduate school was in my future. And to clarify a little bit, so I have always loved history, I've always loved exploring the past because I think that the past has so much to teach us about the present. You know, I was just talking with my students actually last class about the fact that even though We're looking at the exploration of, quote unquote, the new world by Spanish conquistadors and thinking about the many ways that the world has changed in the last 400 years, technologically in particular.

But in the midst of all that change, there are so many things that have not changed within us. And some of the same questions, some of the same struggles, some of the same faults that we see in humanity, years ago continue to manifest in our own world, which reflect the importance of philosophy and history and the humanities today. But I knew I wanted to go into teaching and doing things like talking about what I'm talking about right now. I didn't know what that looked like or what that entailed necessarily.

Sometimes you have to sort of figure it out. You have to take the step to learn about what you can do with that. And so I didn't have it all mapped out early on. I didn't have very much of it mapped out at all. in certain things.

And history was definitely one of those things. I was also developing a love for language. And language and history sort of have gone hand in hand for me over the course of my adult life. And it was in my junior and senior year where I was taking language courses.

I was studying Greek and Hebrew and really loving those experiences and wanting more of that. When I studied Hebrew for the first time that I realized, I did not even really know this, that there were all sorts of other dead ancient languages that were just so full of opportunity to learn. And so little had been done still. And so I was looking at graduate school opportunities to learn some of those languages that would take me deeper into history.

And that's what I spent the rest of my next 10 years or so doing, studying those languages and the ancient world in the Middle East. spent a lot of time learning ancient languages, Hebrew, Acadian, Aramaic, and so on. But can you share a bit about the process of learning those languages? Because I imagine they're not like your everyday Spanish or French classes. Yeah, one of the downsides is that unlike Spanish and French, you can't speak in these languages anymore.

And when you speak, you can actually work out your understanding in ways that are really helpful as a learner of a language. language, but the upside is that there is, well, one upside is that there's all sorts of information that we are still learning about. And it is also another upside that I consider upside at least is that it's inherently comparative. In order to understand a language from which we know very little, we're going to have to use other similar languages to help us figure out what we don't know. opportunities to learn. So here's language A and we know something about this, but we don't know other things that language B will help us fill in some of those gaps for language A.

And so I just fell in love. I had been studying French as a high school student. I really enjoyed France. I love traveling.

I love trying to use my French, even as a high school students. And I found that studying these other languages from the ancient world was just as, if not more exciting. invested myself fully into the process of trying to figure out what I could gain and how I could use these languages to help sort of unpack some of the questions that I had that were so important to me. You know, you defended your dissertation in 2015. How did it feel kind of when you finally finished and became Dr.

Yoder? Could you kind of remember what was going through your mind at your dissertation defense or right after it was approved? And what was that whole process like? Yeah, so I remember it very distinctly.

My daughter was born just, our second child out of three was born just a few months earlier. And I had been spending the last year committed to this major project. In fact, I had been given, been granted an opportunity to focus just on this project with some funding that allowed me to step away from, I had been teaching while I was a graduate student at Ohio State. I was able just to write, just to research and write.

And starting the previous May, so I defended it in March, March of 2015. And in May of the previous year, I started fully committing to the writing process after an extensive research process building up to this dissertation. And for one month at a time, I was producing a chapter. Chapter one was in May.

Chapter two was in June. Chapter three was in July. And there was a process that was pretty cool that worked out. So I would send a chapter to my doctoral advisor and he would take about a month to get back to me.

And while I'm waiting for him to get back to me on chapter one, I'm writing chapter two. And so he would get back to my chapter one. I would do the revision and editing for chapter one. And then he has chapter two now to work on.

And then I would start working on chapter three and so on. book and on the day of the dissertation i was as you can probably imagine super nervous and you know this topic really really well you invested you know a year or more into this very specific thing and there are only so many people in the world that can really enter into this conversation and have a thoughtful conversation about it and the people who can do that are in the room with you because they've read through your work including your advisor and the one thing that really stands out well a couple things actually one One is that my advisor, who is one of my closest friends still today, has been an incredible mentor for me before that time, during that time, after that time, up to the present. I'm so thankful for his role in my life, Dr. Sam Meyer. He pulled sort of a Jekyll and Hyde, and he laughs about this because he doesn't remember it to this day.

But everything I expected from him, the supportive, there with me, person in that room was not the case. And he was there to test me. And this reminds me of my dad showing up at my undergraduate thesis. But he was there to figure out precisely what I knew, the limit of what I knew, and when I began to start not knowing things.

What is the limit of what you know on this topic? And he pressed me so hard that day. sweating bullets as I was answering his questions that were coming seemingly from left field at times. After the defense, the committee will leave the room and you're sitting there by yourself and you're just like waiting it out to hear what the decision will be. And they come back in the room and my advisor, who has always been Dr.

Meyer to me, comes back in with a smile on his face and he extends his right hand and he says, Sam from this point forward. And so it was a really cool moment for me and one that I'll never forget. That's really cool. And you recently just published a book, which congratulations, by the way, I believe it was on the Armana letters, which are ancient cuneiform tablets and your translation of those.

But I think you mentioned in our class that it was an extension in some way of your work. Can you explain that? Yeah. So the dissertation that I just mentioned a second ago, that eventually I worked on and turned into a book for him.

And so that was the first sort of book project, but there wasn't a lot of extra work to do because I had prepared it to be ready to publish after the dissertation. And the year after that, so actually not even a year, about six months after the defense, I ended up taking a research position. It was a temporary research position in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University, where I was hired to help digitize a corpus letters from the late Bronze Age. So we're talking like 1300s BCE, a long time ago.

And these letters have been translated and said in the past, but they had never been made accessible to the public. And so the goal was to get it up online so that anyone could use these letters in an open access format. They could use the website and they could cite these letters and it would be available to the public. In the midst of that process, I realized that the most recent, what they call an edition, it's like a critical study of a set of texts.

The edition of the Amarna letters, these letters in the late Bronze Age, was done by a really impressive scholar who devoted his entire life to these letters. But he unfortunately had passed away before his edition was finished. the work that he had done. It was a significant portion of the work. It was very quickly put into print.

And as a result, there were a lot of different issues that needed to be worked out still. So what should have been like the final study or one of the standard studies of these letters did not end up serving that particular purpose because of some of the errors that were there, because of the problems with this. not his fault at all. It was an unfortunate result of circumstances. But as I was going through the study myself, I realized that there's still a need for a standard edition of these letters.

And so I worked with my principal investigator, they call the PI, who had hired me for this project. And we said, you know, why don't we turn this into a book? a digitization or sort of digitization of these letters ends up becoming a full-fledged multi-volume book project and for the last 10 years so i was there in baltimore for just that single year and then after that year i was hired on full-time for my first teaching position at the secondary level at a boarding school and as i was doing that i was at night on the weekends summer break working with up with this project that comes to fruition just in the last month so the first volume was published and is going to be available in print next month and it covers there are 380 letters that were essentially thrown into a trash dump by Pharaoh in Egypt these letters are written from all over the Middle East they come from towns like you have the city of Ashkelon which is just north of Gaza Strip today and the king of Ashkelon's writing Pharaoh. But you also have big kings like the king of Babylon or the king of Assyria or the king of the Hittites. And they are also writing to Pharaoh.

They have all sorts of different things they're mentioning based on who they are and where they are. And essentially, Pharaoh dumps these into a garbage can. And archaeologists, 140 years or so ago, they uncover these tablets. And they remain some of our best sources for understanding life in this part of the world during the 14th century BC.

So the first volume is out and these cover all of the letters in the Levant, which is the word basically for the geography from what is modern day Turkey on down through Gaza along the Mediterranean shoreline and somewhat inland. the next volume, which are much longer letters that come from what we call the Great Powers Correspondents. So like the big kings of Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, and the island of Cyprus. And so that would be volume two, which would be our next phase of the project, the next few years coming out, hopefully. It's amazing.

You know, during this whole process, you wrote this book, but you also were teaching, you kind of quickly mentioned you were teaching at Culver, right? When you first started teaching, were there kind of any amusing moments or funny moments when you're trying to manage all these different things at the same time. And kind of when that continued to, when you came to US, did you have any of those funny moments where trying to balance coaching basketball, writing a book and teaching all at the same time just became too much? Yeah, there weren't moments where I was exhausted and I needed to step away.

And my wife has been really helpful. My wife, Kathy, has been helpful in the process of sort of reminding me of balance and moderation. And so, yes, it has been a process figuring out how to manage these different responsibilities. But as I look back on my life and you guys asked earlier on about how I grew up and what I was interested in, I and as I get older, as I age, I realize that more and more that our life is a product of what we pay attention to, the sum of what we pay attention to.

And I want the things that I pay attention to. to be things that matter to me. And I'm not always going to get it right. In fact, I have not always got it right. But I want that to be sort of my North Star.

The things I spend my time doing, the investments that I make in my life, I want them to be things that matter to me, related to the values that I hold dear. And teaching at the secondary level is not necessarily conducive robust writing and research career. You go into typically into higher ed for that purpose because there is time often set aside to research and write. You teach a few classes, but you also have lots of space to explore your own research agenda.

The secondary teaching experience is not really like that. And so days are very full where we are here at US. You guys know that. Your schedules are very full with one thing after the next. one of those things you're doing right now.

And because of that, it makes the windows of opportunity all the more limited. But I am built in a certain way that is sort of hardwired to keep asking questions and to keep wanting to explore. And I've been given certain skills. I've been trained in certain ways in graduate school to learn certain languages that are rare. that are not easily accessible.

And I want to lose them. As you guys know from your own study of languages, if you don't keep up with it, it deteriorates over time. And that's why you have to regularly practice. And there are things that I have gained over the course of my life, unique opportunities that I've had, and I don't want to lose those skills.

And I love the opportunity to keep asking questions because I think that the past has so much to teach us So it matters to me to be able to maintain, to keep these skills up to a certain point of being able to use them and of practical nature with these skills. And so I'm one of the sort of rare, you don't find very often, graduate students who go on to teach at the secondary level who still want to publish. to research and write. And I don't know how long it'll last for me, but for this season of life, it's still possible. And a lot of people have sacrificed along the way, including my family.

And I'm so thankful for those sacrifices and for the opportunity to do things that I really enjoy doing. And you mentioned being intentional with what you do and what you pay attention to. I think that kind of defines your classes of being intentional, you know, the relationships you form with students, how you teach. learned over time? Or did you always go into teaching with, I want to be intentional with each relationship with the students?

That's a great question, Jack. I don't really know that I had much of an idea of what kind of teacher I wanted to be until I ended up becoming a teacher. And even then, my first few years of teaching were very much soaking up wisdom and experience from others around me. The more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn.

I'll say that in I language, the more I've learned, the more I've learned that I don't know so much more. And I've wanted then in the process to figure out, okay, how do I fill in these gaps? And so for me, early on as a teacher, I invited teachers into my classroom regularly. I was regularly going to their classrooms to learn from them, to observe, take notes.

What's going well for you? How can I change the way that I do this lesson? What kind of things should I be including in a curriculum? In an independent school, you often have the autonomy, like we hear at U.S., to sort of pick and choose texts.

And I often will say to others that the most important thing that I do as a history teacher is to select what gets into the curriculum and what is not into it. Because history, as you know, is full of things that you could talk about. There are lots of people and places and events. How do you choose? what is the most important thing to include in a classroom.

And again, I have certainly made a lot of mistakes in terms of what gets included and excluded. But I take that responsibility really seriously. And so as a teacher, it was an evolution, it was a process that took place to figure out what mattered to me, what kind of identity I would have in the classroom. And as you sort of alluded to, Jack, one thing that has become a cornerstone for me is approachability. and trustworthiness.

And I hope to be a teacher that conveys information, but also really just facilitates discussion in a way that allows students to feel that they can be themselves. Because if we're not able to be themselves, or if we're not able to be ourselves, and if we are not in a position or in a context where trust is central, we're going to end up simply parroting things we've heard that we think are appropriate in the context, And if we do those things, we're not really able to grow together. And the goal of any class, I think really math or science, languages, especially in the humanities, is that, and this is a personal take perhaps, but I think if we are not doing the humanities in a way that is in some way pointing inward at changing our own lives, at shaping the way that we treat people around us, see others around us, then why are we doing the humanities at all? Why are we reading these books?

Why are we exploring language? Why are we considering big questions if we're not interested in how it applies to how we live? So that trust and trustworthiness, approachability, those have become really important to me as a teacher, among other things. You know, one of the things I remember, Gung, before I even met you as a teacher, I met you as a basketball coach.

And kind of those pregame huddles and those huddles that we had, I remember that approachability and that just willingness to learn how to play basketball because, I mean, it's middle school basketball. You're just trying to get by at that point. And have you found that kind of coaching has ever influenced your teaching style or vice versa? And how do you think that kind of just enhanced what you bring to school every single day?

Yeah, absolutely, Charlie. I see coaching and teaching going hand in hand. To be a coach, I don't mean to be reductionistic here, As I see a coach's role, it is to push a group of players to become the best possible unit in a team sport, especially that they can be to become stronger together than they are individually, but also to push individuals to offer more of what they can in service of the team. And as a coach, and I remember this for a young Charlie Martin on the hardwood, as well as many others along the years, as a coach, you see, more in your players almost regularly, almost each year.

You see more in your players than they see in themselves. So you see potential in them. You see opportunities and possibilities and growth and success that they are not typically aware themselves yet. And so pushing them to become what you see as possible is all part of coaching individually and collectively.

And I think I mentioned probably to you in a class with me that I see the classroom similarly, that I want to put you in a place where you feel that you can be yourself and you feel like you can ask authentic questions. You can feel it's okay to say something and mess up and fail and figure it out and do better the next time because that's part of the learning process, but also a context in which you're going to be challenged to think on your own two feet where you're going to have to form ideas and compare them in a critical manner. We're going to have to work with evidence to evaluate its merits. And I want you in the classroom as out on the court to feel a sense of intellectual sweat so that you are being pushed to become the best possible version of yourself as a reader and as a writer and as a thinker and a speaker.

Speaker. Do you have a favorite memory or kind of proudest moment from coaching? Cause I know middle schoolers can be a handful, but they have lots of energy and enthusiasm. Do you have a favorite memory?

So I've, I've coached, I didn't mention this earlier. After I graduated college, um, I started a GA position right away. And so I've been literally coaching the moment that I stopped playing. I've been coaching since then.

And over the last 15 years, I've coached everything from the college level, down to third grade basketball. And in between, I've coached girls and boys basketball. I've coached other sports as well, including football and soccer. But basketball has been a mainstay for me.

In terms of those experiences that stand out, there was, so I had arguably the most talented team I've ever had, at least at this middle school level this past year, where we went undefeated and just had an incredible group of boys who wanted to be pushed, They wanted it to be stretched and they showed up every day hungry, ready to work and ready to get better. And it was a lot of fun because it was less on me and just more on them and finding ways to challenge them to nudge them on to higher and higher levels. So that was great. And it was really fun to see them finish out on an undefeated note.

The first time in my coaching career I've ever had an undefeated season. It's pretty rare in general. Last year's team, though, stands out for a different reason. And it's because we were almost on the other side of the spectrum.

We won, I think, two games all season long. It was a slog at times where kids were starting to get down on themselves. We were, at times, getting beat really handily by other squads. And trying to maintain a sense of investment in what we were doing for the sheer purpose of getting better, of making our best game our last game, was especially challenging for these boys for all the reasons you can expect.

And so we went into the conference tournament with very low expectations last year. And it just so worked out that there were enough teams in our conference that they split the brackets into two. So there was a gold and a silver bracket, and we ended up obviously in the silver brackets. But we ended up winning the silver bracket, beating two teams that beat us during the season at the very end.

So for the last two years, we've won, or we finished the season on a winning note, which has been sort of fun, but very different teams. The team this year, undefeated. We never lost a game by fewer than 10 points. Last year, we may have never won a game by more than 10 points, was a team that stuck together to the very end, and they played their very best basketball at the very end of the season, and were able to walk away with their heads high and proud of the accomplishment that they earned by sticking with it.

You know, one of the classes that you do is called Brain Bias in Behavior here at U.S. Is it the same idea of the Behavior Economics course you actually taught earlier at Culver? I know we're going more back to your teaching, but how do you kind of take shape at university school, new courses or projects that you kind of dream of introducing at US in the future? That's a great question.

So with regard to behavioral economics, this is a fun story. I did not know what behavioral economics was 10 years ago. If you would have asked me that question in a podcast 10 years ago. Were podcasts around 10 years ago?

They were, weren't they? I would not have a good answer to that because I had never thought about that question. But as an adult in the last decade, this topic and have really fallen in love with it. And so the course that I teach does go back to my previous teaching at Culver.

And in that environment, I was in a humanities department. And so we were combining both English and history, but also religion to some extent in those academic spaces. And so we were expected to do all of that in one classroom. And so the course, the previous iteration, of behavioral economics for me was a combination of social science and literature.

When I came to the U.S., I made a number of different modifications to it, and now it is almost exclusively social science. But I'll mention, though, that one of the reasons behavioral economics is such an exciting topic for me is because it cuts to the heart of my humanity. The course is about how the brain functions. mechanisms of the mind in particular that lead us to think the way we do. So the process of cognition.

And based on what we learn about the predictable manner of the brain and the mind more specifically, how we think, we are able to ascertain certain behaviors, patterns, biases that permeate human existence, both in our current state of the world, but also in the past. And we can predict they will continue to be part of the world in the future. And so learning about behavioral economics has been learning about myself as a person, my own blind spots, my own tendencies, the proclivity I have to engage others in the way that I do. And we're all different in our own ways too.

But learning about behavioral economics has been about learning about sort of how I tick and how around me tick and how, perhaps, if we learn about these things, how we can create a better world by creating more efficient systems, by nudging people to more thoughtfully engage others on social media or in face-to-face conversations, by really interrogating and scrutinizing our engagement with the world. this course into the course catalog. And I mean, there are all sorts of other things, as you can probably imagine. I would love to consider courses on this or that. I've always wanted to teach a course on epistemology and sort of like the study of what we know and how we know what we know and what we don't know in the process.

But there are other things as well. A course on the ancient Middle East would obviously be exciting too. But for now, I'm really happy with what I'm doing, teaching world history. in both the ancient and the modern versions of this, as well as our behavioral economics course. And you mentioned thoughtful engagement.

Speaking from experience here, your classes are very open-ended. How do you handle it when a student has maybe a different viewpoint or one that it's unexpected or challenges the group? How do you turn those moments into learning opportunities? Do you have any strategies for that?

Yeah, that's great. I firmly believe that we learn best when we experience differences. And I think that otherwise we are simply preaching to the choir, so to say, and we are not challenging our own presuppositions, our own assumptions and beliefs. And there are moments out of time when you have a rogue comment or one out of the blue, seemingly that really catches you off guard.

And so I think it's, you know, case to case by case situation of how you handle it based on what that comment is. comments that would require different kinds of responses. But in general, I want to encourage kids to be willing to say the things that they are wondering and, but also to think before they speak at times. So, you know, not necessarily, I don't necessarily need your unfiltered take, but I would like you to feel comfortable enough to be able to share the question that's burning inside of you or this concern you have that you're not sure how to frame it, but you feel like it should be And even if it goes against the status quo or if it goes against the room at the time, like everyone seems to be going in this direction, but you have a counter to that. There's something really helpful for everyone in that room.

For everyone else who is going in a certain direction, they are going to benefit from having a challenge to the way that they think and perhaps a pushback against groupthink or conformity. So they are able to consider something they may have missed along the way. all sorts of great, um, you know, opportunities for growth as, you know, encourage and in, um, you know, civil discourse and in, um, you know, putting an idea out there that maybe needs tweaks, but has something that is, you know, that deserves merit and that needs to be considered that no one else would have if they didn't do it themselves. Yeah. You know, what do you kind of find is the key to helping students become critical thinkers, especially in history and humanities?

You know, recently you were part of a City Club panel on informational literacy. And in today's world of social media and endless information, kind of what concerns you about how most students are consuming information and how we should make the critical thinkers of our future? challenges of it, I believe. It has all sorts of opportunity that it presents to us for engaging people that we never would have that opportunity to do so with. People across the world, people who are not able to be present or participate in certain events, they now have a voice.

And as exciting as that is, it also has the challenge of preventing us from seeing the very people that we are engaging. And so the nature of social media tends to be such that we isolate when we are doing so. And that isolation can be very problematic. And so for me, social media is an incredible tool that can be used for the good of the world, but also can do the opposite.

And to harness its strengths and its positive potential requires us to understand the nature of the medium itself. And so I am a firm believer in education about the tools that we use for our own benefits. For students to engage social media most effectively, I believe that they should understand the mechanics of social media. And with that, the prospects as well as the pitfalls.

When you are engaging on social media, you may be prone, you may be tempted to say something in a way that you would not if that person were next to you. What does that say about social media? What does that say about the way we engage on social media? We should consider some of these factors.

So going back to the ways we can access information most effectively, Some of these suggestions, they are just in general, I think wise to consider. Multiple sources, not just depending on the same source for everything. Asking questions before we come up with answers. Be willing to modify our perspective based on new evidence.

Considering the way we speak. but also the manner in which our submissions, our posts may be read by others in different ways. There are all sorts of things we can learn and we have to learn still in order to create the better world that I think we all want. Social media is not going to be going away. It is simply how the world is and will be moving forward.

But we have a lot to learn about how we use it more effectively as human beings. the players you've coached, what do you hope your legacy will be in their minds? If years from now, I still remember Dr. Yoder taught me X, or what would you kind of want that X to be? What would you want that lasting kind of moment or idea to be?

I would hope that the people that I come in contact with would see someone who is earnest and authentic. When you're around me, you're talking to me, I want to be, and I don't always succeed at this, I want to be fully myself. And I'd hope that when I am myself, when I am authentic in front of you as a teacher or as a coach or as a friend, that you are encouraged to be yourself in the process. And that secondly, that when I am interacting with you in whatever capacity that is, that you be inspired to explore honestly the world around you, to ask hard questions, And to not be afraid of the possible answers that you may uncover.

And so that together, we may be authentically ourselves and be willing to ask difficult questions and do hard things together. Because when we do so, we will grow stronger as a result. Well, wrapping it up with this question here, which might be the most important question of the entire interview, which we made a tradition of closing it out with, of asking our guests their why. So you've accomplished something for you to. of earning your doctorate, continuing to push yourself even further beyond that.

So in moments of challenge or doubt, which you mentioned you have, what keeps you going and drives you to keep striving, growing, and achieving more? I have only one life to live, as far as I know. I don't have any evidence of beyond the grave. And the stats tell me that I have 40 years or so left of life the average.

And I want the things that I do, the things that I say, the places that I go, the way that I interact with others, I want them to be things that I am proud of and that matter. And I want people to know along the way that I cared for them and I was there for them. So they hopefully are encouraged to care for others and to be there for others. Well, Dr.

Yoder, it's been great having you on the show today. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts, experience, and stories with us. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. And we hope you'll join us next Wednesday for the next episode of Late Start Show.

Thank you, Dr. Yoder. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Jack and Charlie.