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BN: And then I wanted to mention, you received a couple of pretty prestigious awards for your speaking. Can you tell us about those?

SM: Well, the first one and probably the most important is an association of history teachers in the country, it's called National Council for History Education, NCHE. And I gave a couple of talks at their national conferences, and they gave me an award called the Paul Ganon prize. Paul Ganon was one of the founders of the organization. He was the creator of the history department at University of Massachusetts in Boston, and he created the prize and he started the funding for the prize money. And so every year they announced who was the prize winner. And they asked for nominations, so I just threw my name in the bucket, they asked what do I do? Most teachers talk about the specialty topic they teach. I said, "I don't do that. I teach to thousands of teachers, and here's what I do and here's what I've done." And so they selected me that one year, 2018. The other award was the JACL Biennium Award, and that was a very nice gesture, it was a staff under David Inoue who suggested it might be appropriate for me, and so we developed a summary of what I've done, and I was selected this year for the Biennium award and that worked out well. Real, real nice presentation at Las Vegas.

BN: And then what did you do during the pandemic when you couldn't do these live talks anymore?

SM: Oh, well, yeah, that's another interesting story. That's when virtual systems started really getting really into its peak, it was driven by the pandemic, became more and more popular. So I started finding out a lot of schools would like to have me, but they can't physically so can I do Zoom. And that's how I learned how to Zoom and all the forms of the same system. And that's when I learned how to do it virtually. And right now, I'm at about maybe eighty percent virtual and twenty percent in person. It's getting back more toward in person now with the problem starting to go away. So in two weeks I'll be in South Carolina, January I'll be in the Midwest, Chicago, then I'll be in Philadelphia, Washington, New York, I'll be all over the country. I enjoy it. In person really is more effective, I think. People tend to remember if I talk personally.

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