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Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

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Greg Ludwa: Good morning and good afternoon, I guess it is right now. Let me start the PowerPoint here.

OK, so my name is Greg Ludwa, I'm a senior teacher at the Monterey County Office of Education. I am sort of in charge-- not the administrator, but I'm in charge of the adult education program for the California Adult Education Program. And Maribel Hernandez is here with me. She's a paraprofessional three and a teacher for our workforce readiness at the Monterey County Jail with me. We both also have independent study students.

And along with us is also Jocelyn Rios, our educational liaison at the Monterey County Office of Education. Our administrator was not able to be here today because he's at a parent conference for his daughter. So let's just get started here and go on.

So what I want to talk about is what we're going to look at during this presentation. And what I'm thinking about is I want to go over the 21st century skills and competencies which inform our high set and high school diploma program. I'm going to focus mostly on the high set because I have been teaching math for 38 years at different-- and seven years here at the County Office of Education.

But currently, mostly teaching the math and teaching the high school diploma for the Cape program with incarcerated adults. So I've taught incarcerated juveniles, incarcerated juveniles who are on what I would call moderate term incarceration. And then we took over the Monterey County Jail educational program in 2017. So I'm going to tell how we're incorporating the Hi-SET prep for both our incarcerated adults and our non-incarcerated adults.

I did present during the pandemic at the TDLS in 2021, and we're going to go over some of the same things but not focus so much on the distance learning part of it today, as on how we actually-- we are successful preparing people for the Hi-SET. And we will talk a little bit about technology. And I'd like you to be engaged and answer the questions as you see fit. And if you have questions, Maribel will be monitoring the chat for us.

So as I said, my name is Greg Ludwa. I've been around for a while, getting a little bit long in the tooth here. And Maribel Hernandez is my paraprofessional three at the Monterey County Jail. And she was also the workforce readiness teacher. She is taking charge of the workforce readiness with us in the jail.

So I just wanted to look at what they call the 4C's of the 21st century skills, which inform the common core standards and then our adult education standards also. The College and Career Readiness Standards, which are derived from the common core standards.

Since most of my time has been spent in the K-12 environment or actually seven to 12 environment, I'm pretty informed on the common core. Critical thinking is one of our important ideas in preparing students for the Hi-SET, and it's also one of the 4C's of the 21st century skills. Communication, also very important for us because we work one-on-one individually with students. I am trying to inform them to communicate with me when they are going to have to postpone, reschedule, or when they will come on.

Collaboration working together as a team, of course, very important in the 21st century. And then also creativity. Particularly creativity in the area of problem solving when we come to the Hi-SET.

So we worked pretty much with this group from New Zealand, and what we're talking about when we're talking about four dimensional education is first of all, knowledge. What we know and what we understand. Skills, how are we going to be able to use what we know. And this, again, is very important for our Hi-SET preparation program and our high school diploma program for adults. Character, how we behave and engage in the world. Certainly something that comes up in our national politics at this time.

And then also, we're very involved in the mental learning of our adults and how they reflect and adapt to new environments, how they are resilient, and how they come together and solve problems for themselves. So the 21st century education involves all four of these issues, not just knowledge as I may have learned when I was in school during the 1960s.

So looking at this four dimensional education, there's components of it. So what we're talking about when we know and understand, we're talking about interdisciplinary studies, how they interconnect with each other. Again, very important concept in the Hi-SET because one area depends on another area.

We also talk about our traditional courses in mathematics, ELA. I have developed my own mathematics course for adults because I don't think that the K-12 mathematics is appropriate for them. Entrepreneurship, having to do things with climate change, looking at what's going on in the world. And of course, the themes of global literacy. Very important, of course, is this idea of what's going on in climate change in the world and how it will affect our families and children.

In the skills area, when we're talking about what we know and what we know, we're talking about the creativity, the critical thinking, the communication, and the collaboration, those 4C's of the common core and the college career readiness standards.

As far as character, very important how we're behaving in the world, our mindfulness, our curiosity about what's going on, our courage, our resilience, our ethics, and leadership. And we see that resilience in our students as adults of I have a woman who's couch surfing now because she can't afford an apartment in Monterey County for herself and her kids. So she's living with her parents.

Ethics, see it all the time in our national politics. Leadership, taking leadership roles. And of course in the meta learning of our metacognition and the importance of a growth mindset that we can learn more today than we did yesterday, and we'll know more tomorrow than we do today. That we're always moving forward.

So Fadel Bialek-- Fadel from Harvard University, Bialek, and Trilling wrote that in the classroom, these four dimensions are all intertwined. Effective learning is a rich blend of the elements from all of them. In fact, the best learning experiences in schools around the world already integrate all these different learning aspects without necessarily referring to them explicitly.

And what they use typically is this sort of a Venn diagram, where the knowledge, skills, and character all interact for the 21st century education. But we're also overall overarching is this meta learning, how we reflect and adapt, how we are very resilient, how we learn learn, we understand what we're learning, and developing a growth mindset that we move forward with this.

So we worked, as I mentioned, with the group from New Zealand, Brian Annan and Mary Wooten. And one of the things that we did previously with them, they have a website called infinity learning map, where they work with the prisons in Australia and New Zealand primarily but also in other countries.

And if you reflect on what you are learning and living and make little adjustments along the ways, you would develop positive ways to survive and thrive as you move into the future. If you skip making those little adjustments, you are likely to fall behind, to struggle, and to possibly join negative networks that take you down pathways that are not good for you. And of course, working with incarcerated adults, this is exactly what we're seeing.

Anecdotally, in the last five years working-- because we individually interview each adult that we work with. What I found anecdotally is for men and for males, it seems like 44 is a critical year for men of going back and reflecting on where they are and where they've been. I had 144-year-old man telling me he had been either in prison or in jail for 19 of the last 20 some years. So and he wanted to make a change.

49 is another big one for men, it seems. More and more men come to me all the time talking about how they need to make a change, get their high school diploma, get their Hi-SET in their 40s.

Women, it seems, is about 15 years earlier. 29 seems to be one of the critical moments for women and into their early and mid-30s. And that has to do a lot with the fact that they all talk about their children and being an example for their children. So this idea of making adjustments is very important in our education with these incarcerated adults.

This is one of the graphic-- let me get Ms Fellow in the midst. Of how these metacognition influence our local learning agendas in the different areas. This presentation is also in a link in a Google Drive, which I will show you at the end. So you can go back and use it if you'd like as a PDF form.

Also, we have-- just another way of looking at it. One of the things that we found out here in California, of course, through the research, through Stanford University, et cetera, is that about 80% of teachers in the K-12 schools are audio linguistic learners. However, somewhere around 85% of our students are not. And of course, the students that thrive in the environment tend to be learners who learn in the same way that their teachers are teaching us.

I particularly am not an audio linguistic learner, I am more of a visual learner. So I focus a lot on kinesthetic and verbal and visual learning in my working with students, because that's the way that I learn, and many of them are much the same way as me.

So let's go to the Hi-SET. So we used the online and paper-- we've used both an online and a paper-based curriculum. As I said, we took over the jail program in 2018 but by the time we actually got into the classroom-- in 2017, actually gotten to the classroom, it's 2018. And then of course, we were doing distance learning during the pandemic starting in 2020. And we were on lockdown, we were off lockdown, it's been a mess. We have finally gotten back into in-person instruction for both men and for women in August of 2022 was the first time we were able to get back into the classroom.

We do the Hi-SET high school diploma. We have our requirements are 170 credits for adults now. We got it approved by the Board of Education. We also do the high school equivalency, but we only do the Hi-SET. We do not do the GED anymore, we stopped doing that in about 2014. And we would use online curriculum of Edgenuity, which we also use with our K-12 programs. And we also have a open door charter, which focuses only on high school diploma for adults 16 through 99.

So my big idea here with working with Hi-SET adults is to focus on a few questions. First of all, what skills do adults in the Hi-SET and high school diploma program really need? What are the things that these skills that make these adults successful-- referring back to what Brian and Mary said about how to make adjustments and be resilient in their future lives.

And I personally do not think it's the same skill that we want the nine to 12 students to learn, because I think the skill set needs to be different. There are different needs. And then finally, what is really the difference between adult needs for learning and high school students' needs for learning?

One of the things that I'd like to mention is when I started working in alternative education in 1997, I was working with Steve Johnson from Santa Clara University. He was kind of the guru of alternative education in Northern California, in Central California.

And one of the things that he said is the difference between college students that he works with and the adult students, which were of course, mostly teachers at that time or educational staff, was that for the adult learners, it needs to be relevant to what they're doing. They're not interested in learning just for the sake of learning and experiencing the most varied curriculum as possible, it needs to be applicable to what they need in their own lives. And I think this is very true for all the adults that we work with.

So my skills focus and our skills focus in the Hi-SET and the high school diploma are first of all problem-solving skills. How do we as adults solve our problems? And not only the educational problems. How do we develop critical thinking skills in adults that allow them to look critically at things that are going on around them and in their lives and in their jobs and moving forward with their children and whatever's going on in their lives?

Critically important, I also think, is data analysis. And this is also from Joe Boehler, who's on the Board of Education for the State of California. Statistical information skills, how do we see and understand our statistical information that is bombarded on us all the time? And of course, during the pandemic, we saw that there was a lot of misinformation that was sent out. How do we evaluate that misinformation?

And then general knowledge skills are also part of the ideas, is just the general background knowledge of how we interact with ourselves, our governments, and our community. And then finally, the metacognition. Our reflecting and our adapting to our environment and to available information so that we can be resilient and move forward with our lives.

So these are kind of the skills areas that we focus on in our adult education program. How does this work though?

So when we're talking about problem solving skills, I'm sort of thinking about, how do we approach a problem, especially for the Hi-SET, to help us foster an understanding of what the problem is actually about and what it's asking us? Then how does close reading apply to our understanding of the problem?

Because if you look at the Hi-SET curriculum, the Hi-SET test, your reading, your social studies, and your science, and to a certain extent, your math, and certainly, your writing, all use the same basic approach of having some kind of a reading, content area is different, information is different, asking problems about that reading or having problems about that reading, and looking at the information that is in the reading and having a close reading so you can understand what you're looking for and where to look for the answers.

So let's take a look at-- so one of the things that we use when we started in the jail program, I bought a 2000 version of Mometrix Hi-SET secrets in order to work with the adults in the jail. So this problem is specifically from the 2018 version of Mometrix. I cannot give you the problems because it's copyrighted, but you can go online. There's a link at the end that you could go online and you can buy it if you'd like to and buy a copy, online copy. We also have a 2014 version, which is quite similar, but we have the paper-based copy at that time.

So this is the first problem of the Mometrix secrets in social studies. Important dates of the International slave trade. This is the problem that I have to use with all my students and go over information about how they should approach this test. 1517, Spain begins regular slave trading. 1592, Britain begins regular slave trading. Of course, we're missing 1619 for the United States.

1792, Denmark abolishes the slave trade. 1794, we've got France. 1807, Britain abolishes the slave trade. 1834, Britain abolishes slave in all the colonies. 1865, United States abolished slavery. And 1888, Brazil abolishes slavery. So this is the chart that's given at the beginning of the three problems that have applied to this that we're going to look at right now.

What we see is that the first question is, which nation was the first to abolish slavery? If we go back to the chart, what our students are seeing is they're seeing abolish slavery. So I had one of my 44-year-old students who I work independently with, he actually had the right answer, but then he looked at this abolish slavery, he went back and he changed his answer. Because what they're looking at here is they're looking at the literal meanings of the words.

We've got this chart, and what they're seeing is they're seeing abolishes slavery. They're not seeing that when you abolish the slave trade, you effectively are abolishing slavery. So they will often answer that 1834 or even 1865 we were the first country to abolish slavery, when in fact, the answer is 1792, Denmark was the first country to abolish the slave trade as far as the chart goes.

So very important that they look at, they read closely, and they understand the meaning of the words and the phrases. And this is what we emphasize with our students as far as learning through the close reading and understanding the information that's given to them.

Second question for this part is if the United States had not won the Revolutionary War, when would slavery have been outlawed? Of course, the main issue here is, do they know that the United States was a colony of Great Britain prior to our Revolutionary War in our Declaration of Independence in 1776? And so this is the background knowledge that we have to foster and part of that general knowledge of understanding that, yes, in fact, we were a colony of Britain. And when we look back at that chart, it says that Britain abolishes slavery in all the colonies in 1834.

So we look at that, and this is where the answer comes up again. But knowing that information that we were a colony of Britain is critically important prior to our independence.

Then last question is kind of interesting, because this is one that we can delve a lot more into as a combination of world history and US history. So which of the following conclusions is valid based on your prior knowledge and the information from the chart above? More slaves worked in Brazil than in any other nation. France realized its ideals of independence sooner than the United States. Denmark was the largest slaveholding country in Europe. And Britain freed enslaved peoples only after losing the nations of the British empire.

So my question to you, and you could answer in the chart or however OTAN lets you answer, is approximately how many slaves were in the US in 1863 at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation? So who would like to give me an answer for this? Maybe-- somebody raised their hand or-- Anybody? Come on, we're all over the 1619 project. No, I can't see the chat. So do we have anybody in the chat that's given us an answer?

Maribel Hernandez: No, not yet.

Greg Ludwa: Not yet? Oh, my gosh.

Participant In The Room: You did great.

[laughter]

Go ahead and do it.

Participant In The Room: According to library of Congress, I guess it was 3,952,000.

Greg Ludwa: OK, so yeah, my information is that there were approximately a million. Yeah. OK, good. Thank you very much. I have to change answer, what I told the students. So yeah, over a million slaves definitely in the United States at the time of 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation was. But the question is, were more slaves worked in Brazil than any other nation? That information is not given in the chart.

So my second question is then, here's the question, and approximately how many slaves were in Brazil in 1888 at the end of slavery? Any ideas?

It was approximately 10 times as many as in the United States. So the general number that I've come seeing is about 10 million. So Brazil was the largest slave owning company or slavery-- I don't know how to put it even. Country in the Americas in the 19th century. But do we know that more slaves worked in Brazil than any other nation? No, we don't, because we don't have that information. We do know that there were a lot and it was more than the United States, but we don't know where that is in relation to the rest of the world. Not based on the information that they gave us here or our background information.

So listen, these are kind of important ideas about where we are and where we've been and where we're going, right? Secondly, let's take a look at this. So it said, Britain's freed enslaved people only after losing the Asian nations of the British empire. Most of our students don't know when the Asian nations of the British empire became independent but when was that?

Participant In The Room: [ INAUDIBLE ]

It was in 1948.

Participant In The Room: After the World War two.

Greg Ludwa: Well, yeah, it was in the 20th century, right? Significantly after Britain outlawed slavery and after the United States Civil War and all the other things of the 19th century that were on that list, the 18th and 19th century. So that, obviously, is not wealth.

We also know from our geography, and our students should know this from the geography part of the test, is Denmark likely was not the largest slaveholding country in Europe because it's extremely small country, and it was the first country to outlaw slavery. So that doesn't make sense. So the only reasonable answer is that France realized its ideals of independence sooner than the United States.

And does anyone have an idea of what the motto of France is of the revolution in France?

Participant In The Room: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Greg Ludwa: Ah, beautiful. Yes.

Participant In The Room: Does he get a gold star?

Greg Ludwa: He's a gold star. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And of course, our Spanish-speaking students will automatically know what these words are. English speaking students also, most of them will know. That really liberty, equality of brotherhood were the motto of the French Revolution and are the motto of France today.

So since they freed their slaves in 1794, I think it was, the revolution was 1789, they realized their ideas of independence sooner than we did. Because we didn't free our slaves until almost 184 score in seven years after the Declaration of Independence. OK, good. Very good, gold star.

OK, this is a problem that my co teacher, George, who's a social study says, what the fuck are they talking about here? This doesn't make any sense. This comes from an ETFs of free tests from 2013. The question looks like this. Although the numbers are not included on either axis, it is possible to determine from the shape and location that the equation y equals negative 1.2x plus 4 corresponds to which graph? Any ideas?

Participant In The Room: T and R.

Participant In The Room: It's only negatives.

Greg Ludwa: OK, so yes, so T and Q are exponential equations, they're inverses of each other. Q is as a positive and T is probably a fractional exponential. U is x equals some number, in this case, it happens to be 2, about 2. S has a positive slope, so R is the only one that is possible. And this is a very important concept on the math Hi-SET.

Probably the most important equation or function that you see on the Hi-SET is to understand the formula y equals mx plus b. And in this case, m equals negative 1.2, so the slope is negative. And that would be R. It's also if you notice that S, even if they guessed S because it's a straight line, the y-intercept would not be a positive number, would be a negative number. And the y-intercept in this case is 4.

So we spend a lot of time on problems like this to build our understanding of how we recognize what the functions look like and what information we can gather just by knowing a few basic steps of what it means, the function means, and the equation means.

Maribel Hernandez: And Brian got it right, Mr Ludwa.

Greg Ludwa: Brian got it right, yes.

[laughter]

So how do we approach the problem to foster understanding or deeper understanding of what they're actually trying to ask us? So one of the big ideas that we have is that we connect the problem to our learned experience. So this is a problem from EPS again. The map below shows Gogola, a large island that is divided into two independent nations Braga and Matsuo. High mountain range extends North and South, about 50 miles from Braga's Western coast. And you see a picture of the map there. And I can't see my notes because I have the apps in the way.

But how do we interpret this map? How do we understand what's going on with this map? But this map is a map of California, basically. So if we look at this map, 2013, sorry. Yeah, that's right. So the question is, if the prevailing winds come from the West, which of the following statements about rainfall in Braga must be likely true?

Well, if we look at the map of Braga, what do we have? We have winds coming from the West, over the Western sea like that. Let's take a look at it. So here's our connection to the problem. Here's our map. A closer look at the map, what do we got? The Western sea is our Pacific Ocean. There's the Monterey Bay and the Monterey Peninsula. We've got the Santa Lucia mountains on the coastal range.

Now remember, we're in Salinas, so we are in Monterey County. Big Sur Southern part of the Santa Lucia South of the Monterey Peninsula. And what's on the other side of the mountains? There we go, the Salinas Valley. So we've got an exact replica of Monterey County in the country of Braga, which you're talking about. Where does the rainfall? Well, the mountains catch the rain, so it falls on the coast.

Consequently, Big Sur is considered a temperate rain forest with about 36 inches of average rain a year. The Monterey Peninsula gets about 17 inches, and the Salinas Valley gets rain also, but from the mountains along the Eastern Valley running down the slopes, which is where the pinnacles monument is and Fremont Peak is. But it's almost an exact replica of what Monterey County looks like. And it's connecting that idea to our own learned experience of yes, this is where we live. What is going on in our own place? How do we apply it to this information that they're asking us about?

So the correct answer would be, yeah, the rain falls along the coast because the mountains are catching the clouds and dropping the rain on Big Sur. And the Southern coast of Monterey County, San Luis Obispo County, et cetera.

So this idea of being able to connect it, we had a student who graduated last year, and she was reading a Wuthering Heights for us. And it describes the trees in Wuthering Heights, how they're stunted because of the wind off of the North Sea, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I asked her, did she ever notice what the trees looked like along the coast in Monterey or in that area?

And I took a few pictures of actually a pine tree and a cypress tree, which is in my backyard and my neighbor's backyard, and the pine tree is completely bare on the North Face, where the wind comes off of the Bay. And it's an exact description of what is described in Wuthering Heights. So this idea of connecting our problem to our own learned experience and how we can understand it.

So there's the answer. So the answer in this case was there will be more rainfall along the than and in the areas East of the mountains. That would be the answer for D. Just like it is in Monterey County and along the coast of much of California.

Look at that critical thinking skills. Again, what background knowledge can I apply to the problem that will help me to understand how to solve it and what the answer is? Is this question supported by the data and information and the readings? And then finally, does it make sense from a rational, scientific, or logical standpoint?

And of course in our national politics since 2020, a lot of what has been published and put forward neither makes sense either from a rational, scientific, or logical standpoint. And so we need to be able to critically think of what we are evaluating and how this helps us then to have high success.

So let's take a look here at another problem. Now, a lot of students don't have a lot of experience with the genetic makeup or what we call the Punnett square. So the alleles are different forms of a gene of a trait. For a certain dog, the long hair allele is dominant, the short hair allele is recessive. They should be able to understand that the dominant is always going to come out. And for this breed, the genes are the two parents, and the possible gene combination of their offspring are shown in the chart below.

So you got the female parent that has short hair, the male parent has long hair because the male parent has the dominant gene for long hair. So when we look at it, which of the following best describes the hair of the two parents? Pretty straightforward question. The male parent has long hair, the female parent has short hair because the male has the dominant trait for long hair. And the female has two recessive genes, right? So that's pretty clear.

But what about this idea, if the female parent had one long hair allele, what would be the expected percent of the offspring with long hair? Well, how does the student solve that problem? So what we could talk to them about is you've got this breed, right? There's our short-haired female, long haired male. And when we're looking at number seven, what we're going to encourage them to do is to duplicate that Punnett square with the information that's given.

In other words, you've got the female with dominant long hair and a recessive short hair, the male with a dominant long hair and recessive short hair. What do we end up with? We end up with two dominant long hair and a dominant recessive short hair and then one dominant in both sides of the other one. Three out of four of the offspring will likely have long hair. 3/4, that $0.75. 3/4 of $1 is $0.75. The answer is clearly then 75%.

Connecting money, the idea of money to percentages is an important concept that I've been teaching in math for 38 years because our kids and our adults all know about money, a little bit about money from the time they were-- my three-year-old granddaughter knows how much a nickel is worth and how much a quarter is worth. And that it's better to have a quarter than it is to have a nickel, right?

So they've been using it for a long time. Using that idea again, that 75%, 100 cents to the dollar, connecting it to the idea of percents because all kids hate percents in middle school, but they are important to learning and succeeding as an adult. So trying to bring those ideas together and make it important in information.

So here's something else. I'm going to go over a way that I teach writing for the Hi-SET. This is an example from one of the 2013 ETFs. It's a very easy example to show students how to organize their thoughts into a coherent essay.

Staying physically fit involves practicing habits such as exercising regularly, eating well, and getting enough sleep. Remember that the most important part of the essay is the organization. Can I take what's up in my brain, put it on paper, so that when you read it, you understand what I'm trying to say. And does it follow some kind of a logical pattern?

Research has shown that people who are physically fit perform better at school and work. Your employer is printing a special newsletter informing employees about the important ways they can practice staying physically fit. And then a persuasive essay. Now, all the essays on the Hi-SET are almost all persuasive essays, and there are about eight different ways that you can persuade somebody to do something.

I never remember all eight of them but we can talk about things like quoting an expert. Now, you want to quote a reasonable expert or an expert that applies to the situation. For instance, we know Einstein is an expert, but he's probably not an expert on physical fitness. So we wouldn't want to necessarily quote Einstein as a specialist on physical fitness, but we might quote our former governor. And I'm not talking about Jerry Brown, I'm talking about Schwarzenegger, of course, on physical fitness.

But we could quote it, we can do something like-- it's general knowledge that being physically fit makes you healthier. You can do general knowledge, you can do opinion, you can do things like our teenage kids have done to us when they want to go to a party on Friday night and we ask them if their homework's done, and they say, no. But mom, everybody's going to be at that party. I have to go to it. Everybody knows this to be true. So we can use those ideas.

So here's how I would teach the students to form this essay. We're looking for a five-paragraph essay. Remember, that's what they're looking for on the Hi-SET. You will pass with a three-paragraph, a well-written three-paragraph essay. You will not pass with a one-paragraph or two-paragraph essay. So we're going to write a five-paragraph essay really quickly.

Paragraph one, we're write a topic sentence about what staying physically fit means. We're going to write one sentence about exercise, we're going to write one sentence about healthy eating, we're going to write one sentence about getting enough sleep, and we're going to write one concluding sentence about how our employer will support these good habits. Five sentences in my first paragraph.

What happens next? We're still talking about physical fitness, we're talking about exercise, we're talking about sleep. My paragraph two, what happens in paragraph two? I'm going to write a topic sentence about exercise now. I'm going to reword the sentence from my first paragraph to make it a topic sentence. I'm going to write one supporting sentence with evidence, a second supporting sentence about exercise, a third supporting sentence about exercise, and at least one and a conclusion again how the employer is going to support these three ideas that we just talked about exercise.

Paragraph three, what are we going to talk about now? We're going to talk about healthy eating. How are we going to reword that first paragraph sentence about eating into a topic sentence? Supporting evidence, sentence two. Supporting evidence, sentence three. Supporting evidence, sentence four. And a conclusion about how the employer is going to support these things in the workplace for us.

Paragraph four, what do you think it's going to be about? It's going to be about sleep. Why do employees not get enough sleep? Primarily because of their kids and school schedules. Trying to get their kids to school schedules, daycare, working around all those things. We're going to follow that same basic pattern with sleep and say how we're going to do that. We've now got four paragraphs, 20 sentences maximum, and all we have to do is write our fifth paragraph.

So our fifth paragraph, what are we going to do? We're going to restate our topic sentence about staying fit from our first paragraph as a conclusion. We're going to rework our concluding sentence from paragraph two about exercise, we're going to reword our concluding sentence from paragraph three about eating healthy, we're going to rework our concluding sentence from paragraph four about getting enough sleep. And we're going to write one final concluding paragraph or sentence, excuse me, to wrap up the essay, tie it off in a bright-colored bowl and hand that essay in for a score of four or five.

Straightforward, very clear, how to organize the essay so that it ties together, the pieces all tie together and are organized to one supporting the other going through it. Very easy way to write an essay, teach the students to write an essay for the Hi-SET exam. And this is a very easy question to answer as long as you're connecting it to the employer.

Now, the big idea that I try to get through my students head is that-- they're not kids, they're adults. But is that you don't want to think of your employer being the mom and pop grocery store down on the corner. What you want to think of is, what would a company like Google, Meta, one of the big companies, tech companies with a lot of money be able to do to support their employees and practicing these habits that we just talked about?

How do they do things where they got the money and unlimited amounts of money to give the employees these opportunities that we would not necessarily get from a small shop on the corner or a very small local employer?

So we really want them to think big and think outside of the box and think of what would be the best thing that they could do about this? OK, any questions so far about that or comments? You guys are so quiet, it must be Friday afternoon.

So again, when I'm talking about data and statistical analysis, what is the data and the information telling me? Can I make sense of the information by using easy numbers? And I didn't actually get a slide in for this, I forgot about it. But anyway, I'll explain it to you. And where is the data and the information coming from? Is it a reliable source?

We just had Rupert Murdoch go on and say in court that he knew that the information that Fox News was presenting was false, and he just let it go anyway because it kept the people viewing the information. And then how does the reading support this understanding of the data?

So when we're looking at this data, here's an example from ETFs 2017 showing the 10 most populous in US cities from 1800 to 2000. So we look at 1800, we see-- actually, the first thing I think I most of the students see is that New York is the biggest city all the way from 1800 to 2000. It's on the East Coast, first big city in the United States.

But when we look down the column now, we see that every one of the cities in 1800 is on the East Coast or in Eastern State. In other words, where's our immigration coming from? Where is our development coming from? It's coming across the Atlantic, right? It's coming from the East going West, right?

By 1850, what do we have? We still got New York, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia. What do we know about New Orleans, though? It's not on the East Coast however, it is a port on the Gulf of Mexico. So we've now have information and transports coming in from the Gulf of Mexico into the ports of the South.

Cincinnati, Ohio, where's Cincinnati? It's on a river. We've got movement in 1850 going up and down the rivers. Saint Louis, Missouri, is on the Mississippi. Albany, New York, and the Hudson. These are all the big cities, are all river cities or port cities still in 1850. So the movement is by ship, is over water, right?

By 1900, all a sudden, Chicago shows up. Where's Chicago? On the Great Lakes. Saint Louis has moved up now on the Mississippi. We still got Baltimore coming in, Cleveland, another one on the river, Ohio River. Buffalo, New York, and the Hudson, and Lake Erie. But now we've got San Francisco on the West Coast. It's also a port city on the West Coast and by 1900. And of course, our students all have a pretty good idea of what the 49ers and the immigration and that time period around 1849 and 1850 is happening in California.

By 1850, where are we going? We're still kind of the same things. We're bringing in now Detroit, Motor City, Cleveland, Ohio, Saint Louis. Washington DC becomes a bigger city as a center of government. But by 2000, all of a sudden, what do we got? We got Los Angeles moved up to second place, Chicago's in third place. Phoenix is now there, Houston, Texas. Movement is from the East, North, to now the West, and to the Southwest, right? We've got San Diego, we've got San Antonio, we've got Detroit.

These are questions that are going to be asked about this chart, is how does the movement move? Where is it coming from? And why is it coming going the way it is? What's going on here? And this is the kind of understanding of looking deeper into the information that we need our adult students to look at. What is making these changes? How are these changes coming about? And what's causing these changes in our information?

So how do I best learn? We talked a little bit about that. What's our learning style? I have to tell you, I didn't really realize I was a visual kinesthetic learner until probably graduate school, when I had to learn foreign language because I was living in Europe and realize that the only way I could learn the language was by practicing it and visualizing it. I also understood that by that time starting in high school, that the only way I remember something is actually to write it down. I can't sit in the class and listen to the teacher without taking notes and understanding.

So how do I best learn? Very important for them. What is my learning style? So I think this is a great failing of our educational system in high school is not helping students understand what their learning style is. Are they kinesthetic learners? Are they visual learners? Are they graphic learners?

So when I start working with adult students, I often ask them, what would be a typical person that's a kinesthetic learner, that uses their body to learn? And typically, they will come up with the idea that it's a dancer or a sportsperson because they don't think and we don't teach them to think in that way, right? And how do they learn best?

And then, how do I maximize my test-taking strategies to take advantages of my strengths and knowledge? And then also we look at this, and this is an example of one of our incarcerated men. This is actually a science test. P stands for physical science, E stands for Earth science, L stands for life science. And when he took this test, he got-- his first time he took it, he got 13 out of 23 correct, so 57%. Which isn't bad, but it's not exactly Hi-SET ready.

But look at how he answered the question. Now, I understand that this is really a very limited supply, since it's only an example of what he's doing, and I'd like to see much more than this. But if I look at it, I notice that out of the first four questions, he's gotten two wrong. In fact, the first two wrong.

He skipped five and six. But then on question seven, which is life science, which typically is one of the harder sciences for our students, he got everything from seven to 15 except for one question. Then on 16, he got distracted. One, two, three, four out of five wrong again up to 20. And then at the end, he probably was rushing to finish, and he got two of those wrong. What's going on with this kid, with the student, right?

Well, first of all, what I see is that the first part of the test, like me, he wasn't in the testing zone. He wasn't thinking about the testing, he wasn't looking at the information. So when I talk to this student, I'm going to tell him, what do you need to do? You need to leave yourself time at the end of the test to finish the test and go back and look at those first, say, 10 questions or so and see that if you understood what they were actually talking about.

Because at number seven, he apparently-- all of a sudden he's started into what's going on with this test because now, he's showing what he can actually do. He's incarcerated. He probably got distracted between 16 and 20 with something going on.

But it gives us information that we can use to help our students maximize their knowledge and experience and efforts in order to do the best that they can on these. And that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for them to do the best they can. I'm not expecting them to be brilliant, but I'm expecting them to do the best they can.

I would say that general knowledge on the Hi-SET and for the GED since the common core standard is probably the least important component. But you really have to have a basic understanding of what came first and how it affected what comes after it. In other words, this idea of cause and effect. So we're going to take a look a little bit about this.

There's not much world history on the Hi-SET. It more is how the world history interacts with US history. In other words, they're not going to ask us what year Caesar Augustus was emperor of Rome or what happened in ancient Rome or Alexander the Great, but they will be expecting us to understand how world history and US history interact with each other.

So we're going to take a quick look at a little timeline that I tend to do. So typically, the first Industrial Revolution starts around 1770, and they say that it goes to 1830. It's almost exclusively limited to Britain because Britain passed a law that limited the export of machinery in the early 19th century. So it kind of gets stuck. But the two big ideas here is we get the invention of the steam engine. Anybody know when the steam engine was invented, the approximate date?