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But what we can say is this is a flywheel that continues.
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Stressed out kids create a stressed out teacher.
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Stressed out teachers create stressed out kids.
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Education needs people who are truly present, not just in the building.
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I'm Edward DeShazer, and welcome to Homeroom Attendance.
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Your seat is safe.
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What's going on, Pa?
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Welcome back to Homeroom Attendance.
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I'm your host, Edward Shazer.
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And today I'm asking, are you present or are you absent?
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Picture this: a kid in your classroom or in the hallway says something under their breath, or they slam the Chromebook shut.
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Young lady in her class rolls her eyes so hard you can practically hear it.
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And before your brain has a chance to weigh in, your body has already made a decision.
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Face begins to get hot, your voice goes up a notch or two, the jaw tightens, and you hear yourself say something that you are going to replay the entire car ride.
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Today's episode is about those 10 seconds in between.
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And by the end of it, you're going to have some tools that you can use in the middle of class, in the middle of the school day, with all your kids watching to calm your own body down before you respond.
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Neither takes more than a few seconds.
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I know we're busy, and nobody in the room even has to know that you're doing it.
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But before we get into it, if this episode and this podcast has brought you value at all, please give us a review.
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Please like if you're watching on YouTube.
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And those are free ways that you can help support homeroom attendance.
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So there's a word that gets thrown around in schools a lot right now.
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And that word is regulation.
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I talk about regulating students.
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In the classroom, you have calm down corners, you have break passes, you have uh check-in charts for your kids.
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These are all good things.
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But there's a part of the conversation that I think we often skip, or I don't hear enough.
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Kids that have been through a lot of trauma don't learn to calm down by being told to calm down.
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For my married people, I'm gonna give you some breaking news.
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If your spouse is upset or emotions are high, the fastest way to not get them to calm down is by telling them to calm down.
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Kids are no different.
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Kids learn how to calm down by a calm adult who is sitting next to them or who is near them.
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Psychologists call that co-regulation.
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And for the sake of this episode, I want to call it uh borrowing.
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All day long, the kids in our class are borrowing our nervous systems.
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I want you to picture a middle school dance.
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I used to work in the nightlife.
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Um there's a I I I've been familiar with DJing and DJs.
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And when a floor is getting too wild, the DJs don't turn it up by putting another crazier song.
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DJs read the room and they set the tempo of the music based on what they want the room to do, and then the crowd then follows the DJ.
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Our classrooms work the same way.
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When we are running hot, our classrooms run hot.
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When we slow down, our classroom and hallway and school and office has something to slow down with as well.
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This is not something that I'm trying to make someone feel guilty about.
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Because if your body has been running hot lately, there's a reason.
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It's November.
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Conferences probably just ended.
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You're going through data.
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If you're a parent, you may have sick kids at home.
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Shoot, you may be sick.
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The lesson plan that you wrote four times just isn't hitting the way you thought.
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Your nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems do under heavy load.
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What we want to do is we want to give it a better job to do.
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So before I go any further, I want to tell you about something that is close to my heart.
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This episode of Homeroom Attendance is brought to you by Lessons, L-E-S-S-Y-N-S.
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Full transparency lessons is something that my team and I have been building since December of 2025.
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And I wanted to build lessons because I kept meeting teachers at conferences, at events, who were giving everything to their students but had nothing left for themselves.
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That sound like you?
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Well, Lessons is a wellness app that is made for educators by educators.
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We have quick resets, we have check-ins, we have all these things that are built for an educator by an educator who understands the cadence of
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education.
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The call map where they got you meditating at 8 o'clock at night, that doesn't do me any good in 11 a.m.
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when a kid just cussed me out.
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But educators under and I this was built by me as an educator because I understand what educators need in the moment.
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And right now we're in our beta test, and I would love to have you join it.
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If you want to join it, you get free lifetime access.
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And in return, we're just asking for honest feedback.
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Uh, but you can head to www.lessonsl-e-s-s-y-n-s.com, sign up there, download the app today.
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So you sign up there, then you'll get an email to download the app, and you get it free for the rest of your life.
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Nice and simple.
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All right, back to the episode.
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Uh, stress is contagious.
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There's research on that.
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There was a team at British Columbia that did a did research uh with some educators and their students, and they were drawing saliva uh throughout as this was at a school, and they were asking teachers about burnout while also measuring the kids in their classrooms cortisol through saliva uh samples throughout the school day.
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In classrooms where teachers reported more burnout and emotional exhaustion, the students had higher cortisol level readings in the morning.
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Now, what we can say is we don't know which one came first, whether the kids' cortisol was high, then the teachers got stressed, or vice versa.
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But what we can say is this is a flywheel that continues.
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Stressed out kids create a stressed-out teacher.
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Stressed out teachers create stressed out kids.
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So this is a flywheel in education that continues and continues because of the cycle that stress can cause.
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But in classrooms with more burned-out teachers, kids had higher stress hormones in the morning, from according to this study that was done.
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So, as someone that's been in education for 21 years, I've written a book about believing in kids.
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Let me be very honest, I still have moments where my body makes a decision before my heart does.
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There are times where kids do things that irritate the mess out of me.
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And I have to correct and regulate myself before I can respond, but I feel my body reacting before my words even come out of my mouth.
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And what I've learned to understand is that in those moments, kids don't
always need a speech.
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They need me to lower my heart rate lower than theirs and not raise my heart rate, then they're raised theirs, and now we're just feeding off of each other, getting higher and higher.
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So here's two, two tools that you can use.
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Um, and nobody has to know what you're using them.
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The first one is a breath technique that I that I love.
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That's actually in the Lessons app.
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And this is why the Lessons app, we do things that are scientifically proven because we want to help teachers regulate.
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But researchers at Stanford ran a study comparing different five five-minute daily breathing practices with mindful mindfulness and meditation over an entire month.
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The one that improved people's moods the most was something called cyclic sighing.
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You take two breaths in through your nose, one full one, and then one short one to top it off.
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And then you then you let one long breath out through your mouth, and the exhale is what does the work.
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So this is what it looks like.
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Or I guess you can't see if you're listening, but this is what it sounds like for those that are listening.
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Looks like if you're watching on YouTube.
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Now, this is something that you can do as you're walking to a student's desk.
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You can do it to your with your back to the students while you're writing on the board.
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You can do it as you're logging an infinite campus to document whatever it is.
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Um, but one side is not going to fix everything.
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But what it does do is it buys your brain enough time to catch up with your body.
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And that's where the that's the gap where your best response is going to live.
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We have to regulate, then respond, not respond first.
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Maybe you do this in the parking lot before you get out of your car.
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Maybe you do it between classes.
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Maybe you do it when you get out to the car when you're getting ready to head home, so you can respond better to your family at home.
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So again, two breaths in through your nose, uh, one, and then one top it off, and then run big exhale out through your mouth where it's like.
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All right, second one is your voice.
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When we get activated, our voices get louder and they get faster.
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Most kids will read this as a threat, and kids who have been
through very difficult situations will read it faster than kids who have not.
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So, what I need us to do is do the opposite on purpose.
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When we are having a kid that is struggling, I need us to drop our voice lower than feels natural.
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I need us to slow our words down.
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And if you can, I want you to get beside the student instead of standing over the student.
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So if a student is sitting at their desk, I want you to crouch down at their desk on the side of them versus looking directly at their face.
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This will help a student perceive you much less as a threat, and it will help us not put our students in fight or flight mode right away.
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Now, we're not letting them off the hook.
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We are still going to address the behavior.
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You are just now doing this in a tone and a voice that his or her body can actually hear.
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And if you lead a grade level team, I want you to try modeling this at your next team meeting when things get tense.
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Slow your voice down before responding to that hard comment.
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So your team can also borrow your nervous system.
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So I want to end with a story, but I was trying to model what that should feel like, crouching down and all those things.
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Very rarely should you talk over kids.
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I want you crouching down at their eye level so you they feel on level playing field.
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They don't feel like someone's looming over the top of them.
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January 20, 2009, that flight was taken off from there's a movie about it, from LaGuardia, I believe it was, or JFK in New York.
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And a couple minutes later, it hits a flock of geese.
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Both engines go out.
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Um, you know, the captain, I forget his name, Captain Um, I don't remember his name, Captain's, Captain Sully.
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He has a choice to make and he has only a few minutes to figure out what to do.
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What he ends up doing is he ends up putting that plane down on the Hudson River, 100 to 200, 300 people that were on board of this plane.
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But the part that stuck out with me more than anything, I remember listening to the news some weeks after.
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And when the investigators released the cockpit recordings that were going on with the radio traffic and traffic control, what stood out the most to me was how calm the crew sounded.
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There was no yelling, there was no panic, just clear and steady words, one decision at a time.
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And when he got on the intercom to tell the passengers to brace, he did it in three words.
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And he was so unbelievably calm.
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That calm for Captain Sully didn't show up on accident in those three and a half minutes.
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This captain had decades of experience and practice behind it.
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And that's what I want for you.
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I don't want you to have a perfect classroom.
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Some days your engines are going to go out in second, third, shoot.
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Some days you walk in and your engines are out.
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But you can still be the steadiest voice in your classroom.
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You can still be the steadiest voice in that hallway, in that office, in that cafeteria, in that room, wherever you may be in your school.
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You can be that voice.
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So what I'll leave you with today, tomorrow, if you're listening on Sunday, tomorrow, when one of those students starts to get anxious, when they start to lose it, when they start to do all these things, what will you, how will you respond?
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Will you escalate and get excited and do all this and get animated and tell them I'm told you to sit down over and over and over again, and I told you to sit over there and you wouldn't sit over there?
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Or will you correct your voice, talk slower, crouch down to the kid.
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Now I know whatever you may be feeling in this moment, not telling you not to feel that.
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But what I am telling you is that in my classroom, in my hallway, you know that this is not how we act.
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I expect better from you.
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We're gonna get it together.
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If you need some time to breathe, to collect yourself, I understand.
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Sometimes as an adult, I need that too.
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But now we are teaching our kids how to regulate themselves because they are watching us regulate ourselves.
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You have been present for homeroom attendance.
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Class is dissed.
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Have a good rest of the day, folks.