Hillbrook School Podcast
Intentional growth of educators at Hillbrook and beyond
5 months ago

S7E5 - Bringing Student Dreams to Life

Transcript
Speaker A:

Hello, and welcome back to the Hillbrook School podcast. My name is Bill Selleck. I'm our director of technology, and we are having a one on one talk with Martine. Martine, how are you doing?

Speaker B:

Pretty good. How are you?

Speaker A:

I'm doing great. So tell us, who are you? What do you do here at Hillbrook? All the things.

Speaker B:

All the things. All right, so my name is Martine, as you all know, and I work in the hub. I'm the design and making teacher and pretty much help kids get their dreams out and creatively make stuff and push the envelope in what they're doing. And I love how casual you are.

Speaker A:

You're like, I just help kids get their dreams out. That is not something just like, that's amazing. That's extraordinary. And with the pressure teachers feel to pack in every minute of school as a learning minute and a curriculum minute and covering the curriculum, there's so much pressure for that. Just to hear you casually say, like, just help kids get their dreams out in the world, that just made my week. That is a beautiful thing, and that is more rare than I think you understand.

Speaker B:

I didn't even know that. Yeah, for me, it's a lot of work. Mentally, you have the stresses of all the teacher stuff that we do. But, yeah, for some reason, I think I've nailed down the process of helping them get along and punching that out.

Speaker A:

That's awesome. Well, and part of, like, I'll kind of wear more the teacher hat in this part. Paths to working at Hillbrook look pretty different. And that's one of the things I love about Hillbrook school. You didn't go through and get a teaching credential. And, like, I want to teach something. I wonder what I want to have. You're like a craftsman. You're a deep maker. Let's talk about that. You make these wallets that are.

Speaker B:

Oh, thank you, Bill. Yeah. So let me give you a little bit of a background on that, actually. So I'm going to go a little bit far back, but yes, do it. Since I was a kid in kindergarten, first grade, I always said when I grow up, I want to be a designer. And through the years, I didn't really quite understand what design was or what being a designer is. And later on in years when I was, like, in college, I thought it was engineering. Interesting. They shifted me into mechanical engineering, and I was like, oh, I'm going to go take these classes and I'm going to get to design. Well, I was in mechanical engineering, and it turns out it was too much math. And I didn't understand what I was doing, and I was really bored and really dissatisfied with where I was in life. And one day I went into the counseling office at mission college, which is where I was doing all the classes, and I talked to the counselor. I'm like, yeah, I thought engineering was design, like drawing or planning and stuff. And he's like, it is, but it's more like getting technicalities out. It's more like technical. And I was like, no, that's not what I really want to do. And they said, well, he's like, describe what you want to. Yeah, like, design products make things. And he's like, oh, let me look that up and see what I can find. And San Jose state had the industrial design program, which was quite small, and I was trying to figure out, do I go there? But, I mean, it fit the bill. So, of course Bill and I went, and it took me four years to get a bachelor's in industrial design. And I will say that I had a lot of fun doing that. It really brought back a lot of my growing up. So I grew up in Santa Cruz, and I was always, like, outdoorsy and stuff. And it was actually the first time that I felt like I had found my path and I had aligned with what I was meant to do. And I was very successful in school. Like, I developed my own style. Teachers knew if I drew something or they saw a drawing, they knew that was mine. It was very distinct. And when I graduated, I did a wallet for a project that it was the class, I think was, like, making it or something. That's what it was called. And we had to develop a product, figure out how it was made, learn about the process of how much it cost. How much would I have to sell it to make some money? And from there, I really delved into the idea that I could make something and sell it instead of just going, graduating and going straight into a corporate job. And as I did that, it was quite. How do I describe it? I felt like I could, I don't know, eat the world. I could conquer the world. And I was full of dreams, and. And somewhere along the way, I realized it wasn't all just the beautiful things you see on tv or movies where you make a product and you think it's going to be successful and you're going to make big name for yourself and all that. It turned out I learned that the hard way, and it really impacted me as far as how I started to make things. And it kind of made me look at it, like, it had to be profitable, but it had to look good and at the same time be affordable for everyone. Because what I realized was that a lot of the more expensive products were unreachable to many.

Speaker A:

That's really interesting.

Speaker B:

So for me, I focused a lot on aesthetics, and it seems that the style that I developed in school I brought forth in my wallets, which are actually kind of unique in that I mix wood and leather and sometimes metal. So it kind of set the tone for the brand. So the brand's called ostri.

Speaker A:

Give a shout out. How do people find it?

Speaker B:

Austristudio.com or at Austria studio on Instagram.

Speaker A:

Yeah, and it's ostri.

Speaker B:

Ostri.

Speaker A:

It's a great follow on Instagram.

Speaker B:

And the thing is that the name actually came out of the word ostrich.

Speaker A:

Oh, interesting. Tell me more.

Speaker B:

So before I started Ostri, I was thinking when I was in school, trying to find out what I was going to do right after I graduated, I was like, I'm going to design shirts, and ostriches are cool, and I'm going to make them funky, and they're going to be like these little, I don't know, little drawings that you put on a shirt and it's going to sell, which is funny. I got some negative backlash on that at school from friends. But see, this is the thing where I think if you believe in something and you don't let all that noise kind of trap you and you push forward with it.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

Then everything else doesn't matter. And I think dreams and working towards what you want, a lot of people were a little bit negative with that, and I pushed through and I did what I did, and I think I'm happy where I am now and how I got to Hillbrook. Which leads me to another thing where.

Speaker A:

Well, before we do, like, it's fascinating, I never got to hear the full martine backstory. So much of that informs the teacher you are and the facilitator you are in the hub. And we're going to get to that when we talk about help, the Hillbrook engineering learning program and when we jump into your version of Shark Tank with students, because this has got to be like the pull quote from the episode. You're like, what did you say? You're like, I just help kids make.

Speaker B:

Their dreams come true.

Speaker A:

No big deal. Just help kids make their dreams come true. And that is such a beautiful thing. And I can see how you've gotten to this point. I just texted you a screenshot what you were really describing is, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation on. It's a japanese word, ikigai. Have you heard of this?

Speaker B:

Oh, no.

Speaker A:

So take a look at that. I'm going to explain to the listeners while you look at this. I'm just throwing this at you cold. It's a ven diagram with four circles. And the idea is that ikigai is in the center of it. And so depending on if you google this, it's I-K-I-G-A-I. Depending on which diagram you're looking at, it's some version of here's the four buckets. What you love, what you're good at, what you can get paid for, and what the world needs. And if you can find those four things, I think it's easy to find what you can get paid for. But I think a lot of people get stuck on that and then get afraid. Particularly living and working in California, it's hard to make ends meet. Right. Finding what you love. I think a lot of people dance around that. And then partially through high school, partially through just being an adult, I think that kind of gets beaten out of you a little bit. And you're like, oh, well, I shouldn't be my full self.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

This is what being an adult looks like and sounds like.

Speaker B:

Correct.

Speaker A:

And so I think a lot of what makes each human special kind of gets dulled down to kind of fit in to be like, this is adult built. And I heard of some of that kind of through your stories, like, you found this style, you found what you loved, and if we look at that image, you found what you loved, you found what you're good at. And then what you were describing, you're like, and I think this is kind of what the world needs. And then you were dancing around with your wallets around what you can get paid for or not, and that kind of what you thought it would be and then what it really is. Right? Yeah, it's fascinating. And I see that pop up, particularly around design and making in the hub in our maker space. It's a space where I think more than anywhere else on campus, kids are expected to fail.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

And that's really what learning is. Right? Like, you fail and fail and fail, and then you get it. And then ideally, you start practicing the getting it part. I think one of the lessons I've learned with music is that so many people practice until they get it right. And they're like, cool, let's move on. It's like, no, you've gotten it right once. Right now. Let's practice it again and again and again. And I think there's so much expectation, particularly for us as adults with kids, of like, this is how I learned. This is what learning looks like, that you have to get it right. And if you get it wrong, that's bad. And that's a lot of the problems with traditional grading is that you get graded on your attempts, on your learning, you learn it. The goal of learning is you don't know it, and the goal is to learn it and then practice knowing it. And this is what I love with our upper school, that it's competency based grading. You're not getting letter grades. You're demonstrating your learning. And the expectation built into grading is that you're going to start off knowing almost nothing about it, and you're slowly going to get Brett better. And as you get better, you're demonstrating that again and again and again, and then you've got it right. That's the beauty of competency based grading. And I think that so tightly aligns with the type of learning that you're facilitating in the hub.

Speaker B:

Pretty much, yeah. If I told you that the many times I failed getting to where I'm at and just even doing the business, failure. A lot of the times is looked down on. Even if you mess up once, you can't do that idea right. And many of the kids that come into the hub, I kind of give them that environment where I want you to explore, and I want you to fail, and I want you to see things that many other people would have turned away from because you fail. And let's say I have an idea and I fail at that idea, they're automatically like, no, that idea is out. There's nothing there.

Speaker A:

Interesting.

Speaker B:

Keep going. And I tend to keep looking at it and trying to make that idea work, and then other ideas pop out of that failure that people considered a failure. And you get to go to these really cool conceptual places.

Speaker A:

And for kids, you're describing a journey.

Speaker B:

Yeah, it's a journey. Yeah. It's incredible how much of these journeys we do with designer making something that we just kind of shut out the bad ideas or what other people tell us are bad ideas, and we're like, oh, well, yeah, maybe he's right. I shouldn't pursue this because it's not going to work. But I think the challenge in that is, how can you make that work? And I think that's where I really kick in, where even in school, it was kind of looked at a little bit of not the right process like, when you start out in the design process, you're supposed to research, then make stuff. I go in with a blank mind, like, let's say design. I don't know, design spoon or something. And then I wouldn't start right away with the research. I would start away with, okay, what does the word mean to me? What do I think a spoon looks like? Maybe it could be used this way, it could be held this other way. Once I have my ideas out, like, I kind of just let everything out based on the word or what I'm supposed to make. Then I delve into the research, because then I understand, okay, this is why some of these ideas were kicked out. And now I can really pinpoint where I want to go with the ideas that I think are conceptual and trying to tie them in and bring them into reality. And I think that's a very hard thing to do. A lot of people just have a hard time grasping that idea. But it's like if a kid draws a fridge and it has eyes, which they have.

Speaker A:

Wait, fridge have eyes?

Speaker B:

Yeah, they draw monster fridges.

Speaker A:

Great. I thought you were saying that fridges do have eyes.

Speaker B:

And it's like you look at the drawing, and they draw this fridge, and it's a monster and it eats stuff. Okay, you put food in it, right? But then it's like, okay, why does it have eyes? Why does this drawing have eyes? And how do we translate that into the real world? Maybe this fridge has eyes because it wants to see you. You're coming at it, and you're going to get some sort of food out of ice cream or something, and it needs to chill it down or prepare it. This would translate in the real world to maybe we use cameras. Camera c. Oh, interesting. So these drawings that are very, like, conceptual monsters or whatever, it just turned into a fridge with a camera. What can we do with a camera? It can see you approaching the fridge. It can chill down the ice cream as you're approaching. That's an idea in itself. That's something that's viable and can be done.

Speaker A:

Well. That's the kind of thing you and I could riff on this for the next hour, like a very boring podcast, 45 minutes in, but you could. And so the idea of taking that kernel and being like, what if? Instead of just being like, no. I also think this is really the challenge of getting away from learn by textbook. So I don't know that you and I have ever talked about it. My first years of college, I was a materials engineer, and it got to the point where I kept asking, keep asking. It made it sound like I was such, like a creative student. In some ways I was, but that's not the point. It was just like, I never understood what the point of it was. And you talked about this in your mechanical engineering journey. And so much of the reason I would get either implied or directly was, well, that's the next page in the textbook. That's a really bad motivation for me. We're learning this because it's the next page.

Speaker B:

It's the next chapter.

Speaker A:

And I remember I ended up getting through calculus four. I loved the idea of math. I could really figure out the next page in the book. I was very good at that style of learning, which is most of school, most of traditional school. And the professor said, we're going to spend about a month working on one problem, and this can't exist in the real world. But if it could, and it can't, but if it could, what would the answer be? And I was just like, I am out. This is ridiculous. This is before, as my kids would call it. This is in the 19 hundreds. Just barely, but it is in the 19 hundreds before. Like, I mean, laptops were like, brand new. The idea that you would have a computer in your pocket forever, or that you could design an app, the idea of designing your own application was so far out of the scope of possibility that there was no connection. But I wish they had said in the 19 hundreds to be technical and fair and accurate. This actually helps you develop computer programs or something. You could actually take an idea and use this math to develop, like, a really complicated or tailored computer program. And even that I would have been like, that's so far outside the scope of possibility. I might have just been like, I'm out of it. And that's why I switched to music, because I knew why I practiced, why I learned the thing. It was, like, immediately applicable. And I think that's part of why I continue to be drawn to the hub, is because there's a lesson and it's tangible. You can see or hear or interact with the thing in a way that a one month long math problem admittedly didn't exist, could not exist in the world.

Speaker B:

Right?

Speaker A:

It's so wild. So let's jump into shark Tank. Give us a quick overview of what shark Tank is. I think most people understand the basic scheme. How does that apply to a maker space?

Speaker B:

So Shark Tank was brought about because a lot of kids the year before were coming in and they had these great ideas that they would pitch to me and they're like, oh, can I make this in class? Can I make this? I'm like, yeah, come in during open hub. And this year open hub is like.

Speaker A:

You can come into the maker space. You can make a thing pretty much during lunch, after school.

Speaker B:

Pretty much, yeah. So I would help them develop it or help them make it, and this year I was like, okay, well, what would be a good club? And I'm like, okay, well, I looked at shark Tank and I was looking at an episode, and I'm like, oh, this would be a great idea for kids to really just make something and pitch it and kind of see if it's a viable thing. And it's weird. I had a mixed group of kids for the club. It was like fifth up to 8th graders. And when I introduced the idea, I told them, pretty much, watch an episode of Shark Tank. Develop. Invent something and you're going to pitch it, and we're going to see how much fake money you can get from these judges right here or something, right?

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

And it really divided the class, which I was a little bit surprised because a lot of the younger kids had that imagination, like, creativity just flowing out of them. They just wanted to do something and the idea was fun and all that. The older kids were a little bit more kind of closed off, which is like, I didn't expect that. I thought they would be a little.

Speaker A:

Bit more like, they're not down to pitch the idea.

Speaker B:

Yeah, they really were like, oh, I'll be a judge, or, I don't think I have anything to contribute. And, yeah, all the little kids were, like, ecstatic. They would come in and just like, oh, yeah, let me build this thing and I'm going to pitch it and I'm going to make a million dollars. I'm like, okay, go right at it. One kid invented a little survival box and you would turn the crank and it would power on all these little things on it for, like, if you were out stuck in the wilderness, there was another one which was just a simple iPad holder for your bed. And I told him, I think there's some out there. Take a look at what's out there and see how you can make yours different or how can you innovate it.

Speaker A:

This already exists. This is not new.

Speaker B:

So I was like, yeah, check them out and make it better. You could do that. The other one was, which, by the.

Speaker A:

Way, is great feedback. Like, great idea already exists. Make it better, make it better.

Speaker B:

It's like the sponge, right? Like, what is it? The Godaddy sponges. There were a million sponges already.

Speaker A:

Okay. I don't know these. Godaddy's the.

Speaker B:

Oh, godaddy is the website.

Speaker A:

Wait, they used to have the deeply sexist, it's okay.

Speaker B:

But there's scrub daddy.

Speaker A:

Scrub daddy. There's a different sponge.

Speaker B:

Yeah. I think cold water, it gets a rougher texture, and if you add hot water, it softens up. So you could clean different plates and all that. And I told him, I'm like, look, the sponge has been around for ages, and no one thought you could reinvent the idea of a sponge. And they did. And I showed them that clip on shark tank, and they were like, oh, really? You could make something better? I'm like, yeah, exactly. You could take something that already exists, make it better. And, yeah, they went at it. They did all that. And I realized along the way that it wasn't as ideal for a club simply because of the time that we had kind of. This is where help comes in.

Speaker A:

Yeah, that's an acronym.

Speaker B:

So it's the Hillbrook engineering learning program. There it is. See, I should have known that.

Speaker A:

You always call it help.

Speaker B:

Help.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

What does that stand? So I took shark tank out and kind of wanted more in a class setting, which probably the fourth graders will get to do later this year or next year, since we're pretty close to the end of this year. And it became like, yeah, let's help out around campus. Let's take the creative minds and really put them to the test. Like, here. There's a restriction here where now you have to design for someone else. It's not just for you. Like, oh, let me just invent something.

Speaker A:

And people can request things, right?

Speaker B:

Yeah. So we had, like, I think, 13 requests, and some of the kids right now are working on it every Tuesday.

Speaker A:

During club, and it's an extended lunch. So they get, like, kind of just under an hour to eat food, hang out, and work on a task. Give us some examples.

Speaker B:

So, like, right now, some of them are working on. Well, one of them is making a mailbox for Miss Joan, and they're painting it, they're cutting it out. They planned it out. They're a team. They're working in teams, and they're planning it out. They get the colors, they go talk to the teacher, ask them what their specs is, and they come back, build it, and eventually they're going to deliver the final product, probably either next week. And then there's also just simple like, oh, can I get some pillows? And I got two kids that are working on pillows. And there was also another one. It varies. Like, there's even just helping out at the library. It covers a lot of areas. It doesn't just have to be like, oh, I'm going to build a product for you. But even just clever solutions where some teachers were like, can you design something that I can take with me? Like a sign that when I'm out and sitting on a random table, it could kind of show that I'm available to talk, like counseling? So, yeah, it's been really interesting to see the many ideas that the kids get. They just draw it out and they're just planning it, and they go on about their day and make it.

Speaker A:

I love that. The one thing I continue to be stuck on is that design process with students. To go from like, there's like, what you just described is like, that's a lot for students so often. And this is a story here from a 9th grader. When they were doing their immersives the first two weeks of school, they were out in the city looking at, like, civics in action. So they're interviewing, like, our congressional representative, Zo Lofgren, and then at night, they're making a video reflection about it. And then after two weeks of that, the third week of school for 9th grade, immersives was put it together and either give us like a TED style talk, make a documentary, or make a podcast episode. I was talking with a 9th grader and they were like, this is really hard. This is exhausting. Can we just get a textbook and do like, normal, boring school? That's easy. And they went on to say some version of like, when it's just kind of normal schoolwork, my brain's kind of at 30% capacity, and I can just do the homework and be done with it and get on with my day. But now this is hard. My brain's at 100% and I'm like, deep breath. So I'm like, I'm going to be honest with you. I'll give you the empathetic answer and then the teacher version. Right? That's really hard. Hang in there. We're asking a lot of you, right? And the teacher version is like, yes. To just have this experiential learning ratchet your brain up, whatever. They're all imagined percentages, but, like, triple the amount of brain power required from 30% to 90% or 100 or whatever is amazing. And so what you just described is that type of experiential learning. And if you get a math problem wrong on a worksheet, whatever, that's wrong and a teacher will circle it or correct it or talk with you or whatever. But if you get math wrong when you're laser cutting right, it does not work.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

If you're like a quarter inch off and you're trying to build like a box with finger joints that fit together, it won't fit. It won't work. It's like, this doesn't work. So just getting a prototype that works is extraordinarily challenging and asks so much of students. The part I struggle with is like, that is like the first draft. And if we go back to you looking at your wallets, you're like, you tried different things, and just getting that first draft is so much work. So the very first version of help was, I think, in 2017. Our first hub engineer, Shay Ellerson, came up with the idea and it was her acronym. And we have our tube counter. We spend a lot of effort and focus, not all of us, but a small group of administrators around managing our traffic. This is why we have green participation days, and we're not going to get into that. But as you come into Hillbrook, there's two rubber tubes you go over, right? And so every week I unscrew a cap and plug in a computer and grab the tube data. Well, this cap is really hard to get to. So I'm like, this is a small thing in life, but every week I'm scratching up and cutting up my knuckles and my fingers and that spark where your cuticles are, every week it would get scratched and it hurt. And I was just like, can someone give me a cap extender? And it has little ridges on it that help you twist it off. It's the size just a little bit bigger than a quarter, maybe, but it's like an inch deep. And it needed to be like two or three inches deep because I'm shoving my hand into this metal casing. And so it's like, help. Like, literally help. Hillbreak engineering learning program give me an extension thing. And so I got one and they're like, here you go. Done. And this was at this time, it was an elective. Semester is over. Check the box. And I was like, sweet. And I went to put it in and it was not the right, didn't fit, did not fit, did not fit. And I was like, so thanks, bye. First draft. And they 3d printed it. So just getting a 3d printer to work, a lot of work designing a cap to all those specs, like, a lot of work and effort, but didn't work right. And so this is actually a story our school has told before of, like. Because that learning process, that empathy bit, everything you've described so far, amazing. Asks a lot of students, but it didn't work, right?

Speaker B:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

So then I actually took their design in Tinkercad, tweaked it a little bit, got my first draft, didn't work. Got my second draft, almost worked. But as it turns out, the cap is not a perfect circle. So then I took a heat gun, melted it, shoved it on, and then when it cooled, it stuck. And then I just kind of put, like, rubber cement or, like, I don't know, superglue or something around it, and it's just permanently on there. And so now when I go in, I can untwist that cap, which, again, is, like, a very small thing, but it makes a difference. These are the small things that really, really help. So I wonder, and I don't know if there's an answer, but I wonder what kind of the next step is where we build the stamina for design, where it's like, you do all of that, and I think maybe it's just what school is like. School is like, do the thing, and you're done with the thing. But that's not real life. That's not what you do with your wallets. Right. That's the first step.

Speaker B:

Yeah. I think in the way that I'm trying to teach it, like, even last year, sometimes the design process is a lot like, there's so many steps, there's so many technicalities. There's colors, there's material. There's how materials work with each other.

Speaker A:

And you're describing so many disciplines, too.

Speaker B:

Yeah, you wear a lot of hats. Even just running a business, you wear bajillion hats. But what I've learned, at least even now that I'm trying to teach it, is I let the kids, I kind of hit them really quickly, like, oh, okay, you got to do this. I wrote the steps here. You got to fill it in. Right. They go in. Okay, my name. What am I doing? Okay, what do I need to do? The specs and then the steps that are required to get there. So, like, I need a measuring tape. And what they don't realize, even last year, I had kids making a wallet, and they went on, like, I had them cut out the pattern, and I had them do a branding, come up with a logo, all that. And at the end, close to the end, I sat down with each one of them, and I asked them, like, okay, well, what did you learn? They're like, I don't know. I made a thing, and I'm like, okay, so you think you haven't learned anything. I don't think I've learned anything else. Like, a lot. Right. And then I started going through the process, and I'm like, okay, well, you made a thing. You designed it. You got a color scheme, you got a brand in it. This is what people get paid to do. And you don't realize it because I've disguised it as very lightly. You're having fun learning, but it doesn't hit them until I tell them you did all these things. And, look, you can do it. I didn't have to hold your hand and tell you, do this tomorrow. I need this by next week. I just let them run with the idea and without them knowing they were doing exactly what the design process is. And I think that's one thing where I try to disguise a lot of that so it doesn't come off as we got to do this boring step. Or they're like, oh, I got to take measurements. No, just kind of put it all in there and we scramble it up, we figure it out, and then at the end, we go over the steps. And you went over all these steps without realizing, and you came to an end product, and they're like, oh, yeah, there's one kid that he did that, and it gave him the confidence. Like, over summer, he made his own brand. He does candles.

Speaker A:

Oh, that's so cool.

Speaker B:

He was very inspired, and he wrote me, like, at the beginning of this year, he brought me a candle, and he wrote me a nice note. And he's like, thank you for helping me get inspired to make my own business, because confidence wise, there's a need for us to really push them and let them know you can do it. I did it. I didn't know I was going to make a business. Go ahead. I just gave you the skills that I use, and here you go. And he went and did his candles. They're called manly candles, which is cool. And, yeah, I just bought him one the other day, too, because I was like, support young artists. And like, I told him, you try the ideas. You may fail. You may not. You're going to fail or you're going to fail.

Speaker A:

Yeah. It's how catastrophically, you may fail a tiny bit, right?

Speaker B:

A little bit. But you could always get back up. Right. And it just depends how quickly you kind of understand what made you fail first and then kind of try to correct it and move on. Just try to disguise all that in how to do design and make stuff that just have the fun process and then we'll recap. And there you go. You did it without really kind of hammering down what you needed to do.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Well, and I wonder if this is maybe where the 8th grade social impact leadership sil project might stem from. Maybe that's one of the answers of my questions of there's all these different designs and projects students have done along the way. And then that big bucket of time in 8th grade is a chance to maybe have a new thing, but also maybe take the one thing like, oh, I designed the candle, I designed the wallet thing. Maybe this is a chance to go deeper into that and see how can I make a thing that I love, that I'm kind of good at, that I'm going to be good at something the world needs and then not necessarily something that makes money, but what does the world need, right?

Speaker B:

Yeah. For me, it's kind of weird saying this. When I started, I never really focused on the profit. I always focused on what I love doing. And then I kind of let the money kind of take care of itself.

Speaker A:

Well, you're a teacher. Yeah.

Speaker B:

And it's kind of like, yeah, it's a little bit weird that later I learned, I'm like, oh, yeah, I need to make a profit. Right. But it's interesting that even now, first thing is what I love doing. Second is I'll figure out how to make a profit.

Speaker A:

I learned when I was doing music full time, I cannot give a CD to pg e and say like, I'm not going to pay you electricity, but here's a song I just wrote. And when people talking like, getting music for free, back when Napster was a thing, well, I just want music for free. It's like, well, I want electricity for free.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

That doesn't was I was similar where I was like, I care about the thing.

Speaker B:

Yeah, but then there's a financial aspect where you have to have it there.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Well, so as we wrap up, where might people find some of these things, like Hillbrook art show? Can they just pop into the hub and see examples of this? Do they wait for their kids to be doing a hub class and then get stuff brought home? How can people learn more?

Speaker B:

Well, we have some examples in the hub and some of the kids projects during elective. I'll probably have it in class till the end of the elective when it ends, and then they'll take it home. But, yeah, really, there's a couple of examples that I have saved still there that people can come in and check out.

Speaker A:

And then they'll pop up in some ways in the Hillbrook art show towards the end of the year.

Speaker B:

Yeah. Some of them last year. Yeah. So look forward to that.

Speaker A:

That's great. Yeah. And then Clara was actually making our hub director has been doing these maker fairs.

Speaker B:

Oh, yes.

Speaker A:

Do we have any more of those coming up? Do we get to plug the future ones or we just talk about what we've already done?

Speaker B:

I think we're going to plug in some for next year, which I'm hoping to do because in quarter four of next year, I'm hoping to do a leather workshop class.

Speaker A:

Very cool.

Speaker B:

Maybe it might shift into a maker.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Also a few Saturdays and Sundays over the last month. We don't get to plug it. This isn't like, I was like, oh, we're going to put the perfect bow on it. And coming up. No, we have already done it. But our students. I know because I have a fifth and 6th grader, and they both went and had a booth and they were selling things. And it went to various nonprofits around the Bay Area, like Veggie, Lucian, and it's by Salton Straw, downtown Los gados. I forget the old town.

Speaker B:

Town something center.

Speaker A:

Yeah, old town center sounds about right. Yeah. So maybe we're coming back there. Maybe you already saw us. That's a great way to see that. Custom puzzles, custom earrings, all kinds of really interesting design things. So that's another place people can maybe see it.

Speaker B:

Yeah, there's a lot to see there. And makers market. That's where I started. I was like, hey, we need to do some. So that all came about.

Speaker A:

Awesome. Well, Martine, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker B:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

All right, I'll see you later.

Speaker A:

I'll see you later.

Episode Notes -

In this episode of the Hillbrook School podcast, host Bill Selak engages in a one-on-one conversation with Martin, the Hub Engineer at Hillbrook. Martin shares his unique journey from aspiring designer to industrial design graduate, highlighting his passion for helping students bring their creative dreams to life. He discusses the challenges and rewards of teaching, emphasizing the importance of failure as a learning tool. Martin also delves into his personal venture of crafting wallets, blending aesthetics with functionality, and the lessons learned from running a business. The episode explores the Hillbrook Engineering Learning program, where students are encouraged to experiment and innovate, and the impact of design thinking in education. Join Bill and Martin for an inspiring discussion on creativity, education, and the power of pursuing one's passions.