Dr. Diane's Adventures in Learning
Are you ready for an adventure in learning? Need some STEMspiration in your life? Each episode brings a new adventure as we talk with fascinating guests about connecting real world experiences, multicultural children's literature, and engaged STEM/STEAM learning -- with a little joy sprinkled in for good measure! Dr. Diane Jackson Schnoor travels the world in search of the coolest authors, illustrators, educators, adventurers, and STEM thought leaders to share their stories and inspire the WOW for early childhood and elementary educators, librarians, and families!
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Dr. Diane's Adventures in Learning
Choose Your Own Adventure: Wayne David Hubbard
Soar into a world where aviation, chess, and poetry combine! Meet Wayne David Hubbard, a true Renaissance man, and follow his adventure in learning from his first flight in middle school to helping thousands of kids discover a love of STEM. There are also links to books we discuss, including his two volumes of poetry, as well as a special section dedicated to meteorologist Archie Williams. Full show notes and pictures.
[04:02] David's life has a "choose your own adventure" flair. We learn about the books that influenced his journey as a kid, including How Things Work by David Macauley and Hawaiian Computer Mystery. Some other wonderful "choose your own adventure books" that may connect with readers today include: Time Travel Inn (Choose Your Own Adventure) by Bart King and Endlessly Ever After: Pick YOUR Path to Countless Fairy Tale Endings by Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat.
[07:06] "Choose your own adventure, wow, that is a philosophy in and of itself." Today, David works for the Federal Aviation Administration at the Air Traffic Control Systems Command Center. At [08:23], David discusses the nonlinear path that got him there, including time in the Marine Corps and working in meteorology.
[11:00] Meteorology took us to Archie Williams, an African American who won a gold medal in the 400-meter dash in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and served as a meteorologist during World War II and the Korean War. Click through the gallery for an overview of the incredible life of Archie Williams. And follow artist Mark Fiore for more.
[14:22] We learn about David's passion for inspiring kids to dream about and engage in STEM activities through the chess clubs he's founded and the Aviation Career Education camps he's led. Over the years, thousands of kids have benefitted from his commitment to mentoring and giving back.
[23:36] Poetry, STEM, and the stars. We learn about David's books, including Mobius: Meditations on Home, which addresses the question how do you know when you are home? Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe will be published by Atmosphere Press in October 2022. "The themes of these poems, many of which are written over about a ten year period, are time, place and love. And also there is quite a bit of science w
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[00:01] Dr Diane: Wonder, curiosity, connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr. Diane and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures and Learning. Welcome to the adventures and learning, podcast. I am so excited to welcome David Hubbard to the show today. I've known David for many years now, through the chess club and through aviation clubs here in Winchester, but also through his new role as a poet. He's a little bit of a Renaissance man, and we're going to get to know him better now. So David, welcome to the show.
[00:37] David: Hi, Diane. Thank you so much for having me. So good to talk to you.
[00:40] Dr Diane: Well, I'm so glad you're here. So I'm going to open with a question that I ask everybody, which is what did you want to be when you were a kid and why?
[00:49] David: The first thing I wanted to be was a firefighter.
[00:52] Dr Diane: Me too
[00:53] David: And I realized very quickly that I was terrified of fire. So that did not work. Next, I wanted to be a stockbroker. I had a classmate’s friend's father came to our classroom when I was in the fifth grade. He worked on Wall Street. And it all sounds fascinating, economics, and so I remember reading a lot about that and I thought that would be my path. Then in middle school, I got very interested in aviation. And I'm not exactly sure how airplanes flight really stood out to me. No one in my family flew. It was just something that really caught my attention. And I was able to be involved in a flight program for young people at an early age. And that really got me going. And I've been in aviation ever since.
[01:53] Dr Diane: So tell me about that very first flight. What was it like?
[01:57] David: The first flight that I had was incredible. And it was a really unique story. Word got around to family and friends that David wants to be a pilot. And I was probably maybe about 12, maybe 13 years old. The word got around the church that I grew up in and there was someone there that was a pilot. So one Sunday afternoon, my father, myself and this gentleman went to Lincoln Park Airport in New Jersey and we took off on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon and headed east towards the Hudson River. And then we turned south and started flying along the Manhattan skyline. And I remember so vividly, so clearly turning my head left and looking to see that I was at eye level with the Twin Towers. And I thought, this is the most incredible thing ever. Do you mean you get to do this any time you want? And I just knew that aviation, it was it for me. I decided right then.
[03:05] Dr Diane: That's incredible. So did you grow up to be a pilot?
[03:10] David: Yes and no. I did continue in my aviation training through my years as a teenager. I went through every training module and requirement up to the final ride that you do to get your license with the flight inspector. So it was a bit of one of those things. Being young, I took a hard right turn and my path went in a different direction, but it still stayed close to aviation. But even as an adult, I've always been around pilots, always working with the pilot community. I've recently been back into ground school, starting the process again. So it's taking me a bit of a lengthy time, but I can still get up in the air when I choose to.
[04:02] Dr Diane: So what prompted that love of airplanes? Like, where there books that you read as a kid? Where there things that influenced you to want to follow the stars? What led to that?
[04:14] David: That's a great question. I grew up close to Newark Airport in East Orange, New Jersey. And back in the day, we didn’t have noise abatement procedures like you do today. The planes were noisy and they seemed to go right over the house. And I always remember when I was in the backyard playing baseball or basketball, I would always look up and wonder, where on earth are these planes coming from and where are they going to? And so it was definitely a lot of curiosity around flight itself that prompted me to just keep asking questions and just keep exploring. As far as books are concerned, one book that I really loved was How Things Work by David Macauley. And it was filled with illustrations of things like an alarm clock and watching the gears on the inside or maybe an escalator and seeing that inside view of all the pullies and the mechanics. And so I remember reading that book from cover to cover, back to front, and I always enjoy just knowing how things work, taking things apart, putting it back together again, or attempting to. And that's how it went for me.
[05:37] Dr Diane: So it sounds like nonfiction was something that you were really attracted to as a kid.
[05:42] David: Yes, I did read everything, fiction as well. In fact, there's another book that stood out to me. It's called the Hawaiian Computer Mystery. In fact, I still have this book. I have it right here, actually.
[05:56] Dr Diane: Oh, I love it.
[05:59] David: This book was published in 1985, and it’s a choose your own adventure book. And so the plot begins with you are a computer programmer gamer. You win this international competition to fly to Hawaii, Honolulu, and you're going to compete against some other top developers to get that big contract. But the moment that you land, a stranger comes up to you and says, hey, kid, we need some help with a totally different project. And then next thing, one thing leads to another, and then you're trying to escape a volcano about to blow, or you're jumping in a helicopter, or you're diving under the water. And there's about 30 different endings in this book, but I don't even feel like I've read them all. Actually, I still read the book even though it's been about 30 years.
[06:53] Dr Diane: I love it, and I actually feel like you've done a little bit of that choose your own adventure in your lifetime. So that segues beautifully into my question about describe your adventures in learning, like what do you do today and how did you get there.
[07:06] David: Choose your own adventure, wow, that is a philosophy in and of itself. What I do now, I work for the Federal Aviation Administration at a facility called the Air Traffic Control Systems Command Center, where we essentially manage all the flights in the United States — United States airspace and in the United States. So a lot of the high altitude 10,000 ft and above, from coast to coast, and oceanic. We also do space operations, military, you name it, anything that flies. And I work with a team of traffic managers, air traffic controllers, engineers, you name it, to keep the system moving, keeping people moving from point A to point B. Often, especially this time of year being summer, there's thunderstorms. There's things that we need to avoid and route people around. So I'm deeply involved in making those plans and helping to facilitate the movement of aircraft.
[08:11] Dr Diane: So you said you made a hard right turn at 17 from wanting to fly a plane, and you're now working for the FAA in terms of directing them. Did you go directly or what happened to get you there?
[08:23] David: The path certainly was not linear, so I joined the Marine Corps versus going to the Air Force and Naval Academy, which was probably the expected move, and I wanted to do air traffic control. However, I ended up in avionics and then eventually ended up in meteorology as a technician working on Doppler radar, satellite receivers and communication networks, the whole nine. And the idea was we would take this advanced weather capability, go out into the middle of nowhere, and we would set up and be able to give weather info to the pilots, the ground units, and things of that nature. So it was an amazing experience that would serve me later. At the time, the Marine Corps would often send me to places that were hot and sunny, desert, 110 degrees in clear skies most of the days. So I wasn't really enthused about the meteorology and computer programming and things like that. So I got out of the Marine Corps in 2005 and decided to get back to air traffic control. I went to school at Vaughn College of Aeronautics near LaGuardia Airport in New York City, and I got a degree in airport management and also air traffic control. In 2008, I was hired by the FAA, moved to Virginia and started my career doing ATC.
[09:54] Dr Diane: Okay, excellent. Well, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to take a dive into the ways that you've influenced kids’ lives when it comes to STEM and STEAM.
[10:20] Sponsor AD — Professional Development www.drdianeadventures.com
[11:00] Dr Diane: So, welcome back. While we were on break, I was thinking about your connections to meteorology and wondering, do you know Archie Williams?
[11:26] David: No?
[11:28] Dr Diane: So Archie Williams, he was the first black meteorologist in the United States. And what I think is really cool about him is in 1936, he was on the same Olympics team as Jesse Owens. In fact, I want to say there were 18 African Americans on that team, which, when you think about Hitler's Germany, that was absolutely phenomenal. And they won 14 medals, and I want to say eight of them were gold. One of those gold medals was Archie's, and he won the gold medal in the 400 meters. He had a degree in mechanical engineering, but because we were in the throes of Jim Crow, when he came back, he couldn't get a job. And so he wound up working at an airfield because he loved planes so much. And that was where your story sort of reminded me of his. He loved the planes so much that he hung out around the airfield and actually took a job cleaning so that he could be near the planes. World War II breaks out, and he's too old for the Tuskegee Airmen, but they said, we'll send you to UCLA and you can get a degree in meteorology. So he got that degree and wound up supporting the Tuskegee Airmen as they were doing their work, kind of like you were talking about you did in the Marine Corps. He did get to fly eventually. He stayed with the army, and he was in the army until the mid 1960s, and he flew over Korea, and he got to fly in some other places. And then he retired. But he didn't retire. He went on and taught kids for another 20 years. And then when he died, he was at a school called Sir Francis Drake High School. And just this last year, they renamed it the Archie Williams High School. So I found this out when I was doing some research for a program I did for kids about weather a while back, and I thought this was just the coolest story. And why don't more people know about Archie Williams?
[13:22] David: Oh, wow. I didn't know about this gentleman that you mentioned, and I'm definitely going to read up a lot more about his life. Sounds like an incredible human being who just kept learning and kept doing…
[13:31] Dr Diane: Yeah I feel like there needs to be a book about him. Kids need to know about Archie Williams. This is the kind of history that I find super exciting, because these are the stories that didn't get told. But they're so valuable in understanding the way our country works, I think.
[13:48] David: Yeah. And also, like, the human spirit. I mean, to be an Olympian, that would be an achievement in and of itself, if nothing else.
[13:56] Dr Diane: And that team was stacked with some incredible human beings. Like Jackie Robinson's brother was on that team.
[14:03] David: I didn't know that.
[14:05] Dr Diane: And another man who went on to become a congressman. I mean, I read about this team and I thought, how is it that we don't know more about these other humans who were on that team with Jesse?
[14:16] David: It's like the first Dream Team, if you think about it.
[14:22] Dr Diane: So speaking of Dream Teams, I've had the honor of being able to watch you work with kids and adults over the last six or seven years. I've seen you run chess clubs at our libraries. I've seen you run chess club at the museum where I was. You even graciously came out for a Harry Potter day and played chess. I've seen you take kids and teach them all about airplanes and what you do as an FAA officer to sort of get them to understand that there are more careers in aviation than just being the one who's in the pilot seat. What motivates you in working with kids?
[15:03] David: That's an amazing question. The path was —I think we're going to say the word nonlinear quite a bit. Working with kids is not necessarily something I woke up one morning and said, “Oh, this is what I should be doing, the thing that I must be doing.” It definitely started with the chess club. And when I originally started with the chess club, I was thinking it would just be adults for a few years in the beginning. And there was one night, specifically after we had gotten a good rhythm with the chess club, where there was a young kid sitting at the table and he was ready to go, and he gave me this look like, are you just going to sit there or are you going to teach me? And I remember that being one moment where I started to step into this role of being more of a mentor and a coach.
And then before, you knew it, we were doing youth chess tournaments. I really enjoyed, of course, the game of chess, but also I didn't have a club when I was a kid. I learned through books and through computers. So being able to have a club experience and to facilitate that for others who wanted to learn was very meaningful.
Shortly after starting the chess club, I was able to connect with a friend who was in the flight training program that I grew up in and who is now the executive director. And he said, “Oh, we need to do a summer ACE camp, Aviation Career Education camp.” I said, “Well, I know some people, you know some people. Let's get together and see what happens.” And we put together a two week program of bringing kids to the airport. We went to LaGuardia. We went to Teterborough. We went to the research and development labs for the FAA, put them in full scale simulators. And many of the things were so cool to us as adults, we were jealous of the kids just because it was just a phenomenal experience. And the crowning moment of many of these aviation camps is that first flight or that flight experience. And to see kids get into the airplane, much like when I was a kid, and take that first flight, see the world from above, and come back down, and just like, the joy and the excitement, enthusiasm, really brought it around full circle for me. And that's when it really started to click. Okay, this is what this is about. Let's do more of this kind of engagement and give them that passion that I was so fortunate to give myself.
[17:46] Dr Diane: I think it is all about the connections. I remember seeing that passion when you brought together all of these experts at our local airport to give kids a one day taste of it. And even though they couldn't go up in the airplanes, they got to sit in them for just that brief moment. And I remember just seeing the faces on these kids who were like, this is incredible. And there were kids who hadn't thought about a career in aviation or maybe even a career in STEM before that. And so I think it was just a wonderful chance to open their eyes to another world.
[18:18] David: Yeah, it's all there at the local airport, too. That's really the gateway. And you mentioned Archie Williams sitting at the airport. There's an unwritten rule in the aviation community that a kid at the airport that sticks around long enough, a pilot's going to come around and say, “Hey, kid, you want to fly?” And so that's really where it's at. We're very fortunate in the Winchester area. It's a public airport. It's just like a park or anywhere else open to the public. And the aviation community is very welcoming to bring people into that space and to show them, hey, this is available just like anything else. Of course, there's processes and there's training, but it's right there. You don't really have to go that far.
[19:05] Dr Diane: That's awesome. So in terms of the chess club, how many kids have gone through that in the time that you've run it?
[19:13] David: That's a very good question. The first club we did was in 2013, and then before the Pandemic, we were doing two to three meetings a week at two libraries and then often working with another organization. We have a volunteer group going into schools, teaching, doing tournaments, the whole nine. So we're very active and took a team to the Virginia State Championship in Arlington for the first time, which was a lot of fun.
[19:49] Dr Diane: That's amazing
[19:51] David: Yeah. We were averaging about 30, 35, 40 people a meeting. I don't have an exact count, but it's definitely been thousands of people through the years. In the Winchester area. We would go out to Woodstock, we would go to Capon Bridge, anything to bring people together on chess. We are getting back to a normal schedule now, at least on Saturdays with the Bowman Library. We're very happy with it, and I think we're going to start ramping back up again.
[20:20] Dr Diane: Oh, that's wonderful. What is the best advice you would give to these kids if they're looking to enter the STEM field like you?
[20:29] David: The best advice that I could possibly think of is to follow your curiosity. The value of following your intuition and your curiosity, I think is the most important driver in this whole process of learning and discovery. It’s like a choosing your own adventure game. But also, I think, as an adult, we know somewhere deep down inside what that thing is that we are really passionate about, that thing that piques our interest, what stands out to us, and sometimes it stands out to us even before we have the language to really articulate what's going on here. And so what's always kind of worked for me is to take that step and just try to get a little bit closer to this thing that you want to learn. And always when you take the next step, the path opens a little bit more and you see a little bit more than you did before. So following your curiosity and just not being afraid to jump in and to explore is definitely a great way to go and you'll start to find that path as you go.
[21:47] Dr Diane: Well, that's a great place to stop and take a break. And when we come back, we're going to explore the continuation of your adventures in learning as we look at what's driven you to become a poet.
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[22:47] Dr Diane: So welcome back. I'm so glad to be able to go into this next part of the conversation. We were talking about choosing your own adventure, and you've lately become a little bit of a renaissance man. You've got a book of poetry out, I think, and there's another one on the way, and I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about your poetry, maybe even read us one of your poems.
[23:36] David: Certainly, yes. The poetry is in a different pursuit, I would say, than aviation and technology, these other things that were definitely so prominent in my life. I think poetry is something that snuck up on me. It wasn't necessarily part of the plan. I began to write while I was a Marine in the desert, most likely Iraq, and sometimes having a lot of time on my hands. So I wasn't aware that I was writing poetry, and I was a little bit embarrassed that I was writing poetry. I had this kind of Marine persona. I was a rock climber, I wanted to fly. I'm just kind of a hard charger. And poetry was definitely like the opposite in my thinking.
However, I always enjoyed writing, journaling, and putting words together. And over the years I began to read more poetry, and slowly but surely it really grew on me. Fast forward to the pandemic in 2020, where we're definitely spending a lot of time at home. I had previously, in 2019, written a manuscript about the subject of homes. My first book is entitled Mobius: Meditations on Home. And the question I was trying to answer is how do you know when you are home? This is a question that was asked to me by a friend out of the blue a little bit, and it was a very profound question that I stumbled over trying to answer. So that summer of 2019, I took the question, wrote it at the top of my paper, and every night I tried to answer the question and what would come out was maybe a poem or maybe a short story about my life, about places that I’ve lived, where I've been ,and how do I define that. And so I find when I ask other people, how do you know where are you from? Some people say, oh, I grew up in California, but I don't consider it at home. Michigan is where I spent the most important years of my life, and that's always where I feel most connected. Or some people go straight to the emotional aspects of home, like wherever my family is or the people that I love, or home is where the heart is. All these aphorisms that we have given the question. But I needed to answer it my own way. I needed it to be in my own words. So when 2020 happened, I had this manuscript about home. Everyone was home, and then it was just like the perfect subject for the perfect moment.
The new book that I have coming out is a collection of poetry and it's entitled Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe. And it will be published by Atmosphere Press in 2022, in October. The themes of these poems, many of which are written over about a ten year period, are time, place and love. And also there is quite a bit of science woven into it as well. My head is always in the clouds. I'm always looking up to see what's going on. I love astronomy. I love the James Webb Telescope. We could talk about that for 45 minutes.
[27:16] Dr Diane: Absolutely.
[27:18] David: We couldn't even touch the beginning of how important and profound just the last month of research has been coming in. So exciting. But a lot of these poems took the shape of looking broader and beyond and references stars and dark matter and all these themes. So it all came together in a very interesting and fun way.
[27:42] Dr Diane: So it sounds like some of the love of science and the universe from your childhood has made its way into your poetry now.
[27:51] David: Yes, to me, I don't think over the years I realized that these ideas were so important to me. However, when I was able to step back and look at the collection, there's quite a bit going on here. So it's been a lot of fun.
[28:08] Dr Diane: So is there a poem you'd be willing to share with us?
[28:12] David: Yes, in fact, this is a poem that I've written in 2020 as well, and it was published by the Shenandoah Arts Council and its nature themes as well, about the seasons. And the title of the poem is How I Might be Spectacularly Wrong. And it begins: If I leave now, my changes will not be saved but if I stay I may grow forgetful like a fish in the sea still thirsty. If mercy mixed with honey and turmeric tastes something like cloud, how will I know when I've had enough to drink? First I might imagine the slumbering bee swap in frozen nights in clover dreams. Next I might lose the proper question moments before my turn to ask and a thought might bloom of how I might be spectacularly wrong about the nature of flowers, the mystery of nectar or other graces ever arriving ahead of me.
[29:39] Dr Diane: Oh, David, I love that, there’s so much to unpack in it. It gets me thinking about all the connections that we make to nature, to each other, and the ways that we can be wrong as well. Thank you for sharing that.
[29:58] Dr Diane: So you've done it all. I mean, you've done aviation, you've done science, you've done STEM, you've done poetry. What are your top strategies for success?
[30:11] David: Wow. There's still a lot more than I would like to do. So much. There's only one lifetime. The things that I've found through the years that have helped me a lot are there's probably a three pronged approach. The first is look for patterns. I am very big on pattern recognition. I think this comes from several places. Definitely chess, where pattern recognition is a big part. Also in air traffic control. Over the years, I was an air traffic controller. Learning to spot problems and understanding when the picture looks right and when the picture is off is very key to responding and keeping things safe. And where that comes into play, especially when it relates to learning, is when we step outside of the box or we step outside of our comfort zone, trying new things, trying to start a new endeavor. One thing that I've learned to ask myself is, where have I seen this before? Where have I seen something similar? What experience do I have that I can draw on? So even though I'm in a completely different domain, a different context, there are certain elements that are familiar, and I learned to work with that. That really helps me through the ambiguity and start to build a path forward when I'm learning and trying new things. The second prong is to ask for help.
[31:44] Dr Diane: That's the hardest one.
[31:48] David: It gets me all the time, ask for help. Because what I've learned is no matter how many books I read about a topic or how much I can spend an hour Google searching anything, if I turn to the person to the right of me or left of me and say, okay, what do you think about this problem? Or what do you think about this subject? Almost every single time, they blow me away with a different perspective, an angle that I hadn't considered or they know a resource or they have an experience or connection that totally just takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. And so that's one thing that I wish I had learned to trust sooner. But asking for help is the way to go.
And the last thing that is also somewhat of a challenge, but it can be done, is to fail faster. I don't like failure. Yeah, no one likes going through the process of realizing that your magnificent plan is falling to pieces and there's nothing you can do about it. Well, I learned that failure isn't the end of the world. It's really not the end of anything. And what I mean by failing faster is to close the gap and convert those mistakes into learning moments as quickly as possible. That is really the key to setting a new course in a new direction and applying what you just learned. Immediately flipping it, putting into practice, and that really accelerates learning process and experience. For me, also, being an air traffic controller, this is a big one because the perception somewhat of a myth is that air traffic controllers are infallible that we never make mistakes. And of course, the stakes are really high when we do make a bad call. Really what air traffic controllers really do well is recognizing when something's not working and then changing the plan. We're having a plan and then having a plan B and a C and a D. So that when we get into the unknown and we're surprised by things, it's not a showstopper, we can adjust. And the difference between making a mistake, pausing and saying, oh my goodness, well now what do I do? And saying, oh, I made a mistake, I needed to go that way, makes all the difference, especially in our field. But it's a skill. It's a skill that can be used in any context. And so that's why that's what makes it so valuable.
[34:40] Dr Diane: Well, and I think that makes a lot of sense. I think when you and I were kids, failure was not recognized as being a positive thing at all. And I think that as kids are being exposed more to the engineering design process, they're being encouraged to make mistakes and to do exactly what you just said, to learn from those mistakes. So in the situation where you don't have hundreds of lives at stake, so it's a safe situation to learn how to make mistakes. But if you can learn that at eight or nine years old, think what a great human you're going to be at 20.
[35:16] David: Absolutely.
[35:17] Dr Diane: And there are so many wonderful books out there that are kind of all about what happens when you make mistakes. And I think that that really helps too. Off the top of my head, I was thinking about there's a book called Boxitechts, where these two girls are competing and they wind up totally not being able to work together. Each one wants to take the project their own way. Mistakes are made, but they learn from the mistakes. And while they don't win the grand prize, they get something better, which is learning how to collaborate the next time and how to fix what they messed up. There's another book called The Most Magnificent Thing where the inventor in that book thinks all the ideas are bad and then in the end comes up with one from the mistakes that solves the problem. And I see more and more of those kinds of books coming out for kids and I think that's a wonderful thing to model what failure can look like.
[36:13] David: Precisely. And that's reality too. That's the reality of science. The technological improvements and things that we enjoy on a daily basis did not start out that way. There's one iteration after another, iteration, one failure and improvement after another that has given us so many of these gifts that we enjoy on a daily basis.
[36:34] Dr Diane: Exactly. Often the things that we use now started as somebody's mistake. So, David, what's something that currently brings you joy?
[36:43] David: Something that brings me joy for certain, and it might be an easy answer, but my two kids bring me a lot of joy. I have a son who is turning 16 soon and a daughter who just turned 13. We have a lot of fun together.
[37:06] Dr Diane: I can't believe they're that old.
[37:08] David: We have a lot of fun together. A lot of the things that I learned and I discovered in my career, these different engagements, actually, I talked to them quite a bit about it, hey, this is what I learned today. This is what happened today. Because I think it gives them kind of an inside track to how learning really works and maybe showing them that I'm still going through the process too, figuring out how to make things successful. But for them, they have their own interests and their own path. My son loves trains. He's loved trains ever since, it was practically one of his first words. And we go out and we go to train museums, and he knows about as much about trains as I do about airplanes. He's, like, off the charts with it, but loves it. And then my daughter, she just joined the Civil Air Patrol and she wants to be a pilot, so she's very excited about beginning her own journey in flight, and I'm very excited to see where it leads for her.
[38:13] Dr Diane: Oh, that's exciting. So one last question. As you look towards the future, what makes you hopeful?
[38:21] David: Well, I find many reasons for hope, and I recognize that for some time now, we've been in very uncharted waters. The pace of technology is just relentless, and as many have predicted, it's just going to continue to accelerate. And both in society and technology and other domains, we're being challenged with a lot of questions, and it can definitely feel frightening and it can feel overwhelming at times. However, I really have a lot of confidence in human beings ability to figure it out and our spirit, like we talked about, Archie Williams, that's an example of a person who just there was no stopping him. The challenges were what they were, and yet it seems like he just was able to show up with his best self and make incredible things happen. And so what makes me excited about the future is not just the individual, one person moving forward with that. We're also able to connect with others who share that same outlook and that same hope. And so, although it seems like the challenges are coming faster and harder, I also feel like we're going to come together and find a way to make it work in ways that we have not thought of before. I think about that quite a bit.
[39:55] Dr Diane: David, thank you for sharing your hope with us today. If people want to get hold of your book or to contact you. What are the best ways to reach you?
[40:04] David: Well, thank you so much for having me today. The fastest way to get in touch with me is through my website. I have a website, waynedavidhubbard.com, and I have information there about my book. Also, I'm on social media @wdavidhubbard. Feel free to reach out to me there. And this fall I'll be doing a book launch at the Winchester Book Gallery on October 8. Also, I look forward to doing readings around Virginia and the DC area and maybe some other places as well. So I'm happy to connect with anyone that has interest in any of the topics that we talked about today.
[40:43] Dr Diane: Well, thank you so much for joining us on tonight's Adventures in Learning. It has been such a joy to catch up with you, David.
[40:50] David: Thank you so much. Diane, this has been incredible fun.
[40:54] Dr Diane: You've been listening to the Adventures in Learning podcast with your host, Dr. Diane. If you love the Adventures in Learning podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a review. We can't wait to see you for our next Adventure in Learning.
