#47 Virtual School for Gen Alpha Digital Nomads with Noam Gerstein

In this episode of Why Distance Learning?, hosts Seth Fleischauer, Allyson Mitchell, and Tami Moehring welcome Noam Gerstein, CEO of the Bina School and a leading expert in precision education. Noam shares her journey of creating a global, digitally native school that reimagines how education serves young learners, blending emotional connection, cultural diversity, and innovative uses of live virtual learning. The episode explores Bina School’s unique approach to play-based, personalized learning for students aged 4 to 12, with a focus on fostering global awareness and nurturing emotionally safe, collaborative learning environments.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The importance of emotionally held learning spaces in live virtual education.
• How Bina School uses thematic biomes and SDG projects to create meaningful learning experiences.
• The role of adaptive content generation in balancing personalization and standardization.
• Building a global community for young learners and redefining what a school can be.

Guest Bio: Noam Gerstein is the CEO of the Bina School, a pioneer in precision education and a thought leader in the field. With a background in history, technology, and social innovation, Noam has spent years researching global education systems and building solutions to meet the needs of Gen Alpha learners. She is a frequent speaker at education conferences and a passionate advocate for blending cultural diversity with cutting-edge technology.

Host Links:

1. Discover more virtual learning opportunities and resources at CILC.org with Tami Moehring and Allyson Mitchell.
2. Seth Fleischauer’s Banyan Global Learning provides meaningful global learning experiences that prepare students across the globe for success in an interconnected world.

Episode Links:

• Bina School - thebinaschool.com
• Contact Noam Gerstein: [e-mail]

Creators & Guests

Host

Allyson Mitchell

SF

Host

Seth Fleischauer

TM

Host

Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

The Why Distance Learning? Podcast explores the transformative power of live virtual learning and its role in shaping the future of education. Hosted by three seasoned distance learning experts, this podcast delivers insights, promising practices, and inspiration for educators, content providers, and education leaders integrating live virtual experiences into teaching and learning. Each episode features interviews with content creators, industry professionals, field experts, and innovative educators who are driving engagement, equity, and innovation through distance learning. By challenging common perceptions and uncovering the realities of live virtual education, Why Distance Learning highlights its true impact and explores how it continues to evolve in an ever-changing educational landscape.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration.

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.825)
Hello everyone and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for educators who are engaged with live virtual learning experiences, whether they be content providers who produce and facilitate or educators who want to complement their curriculum and learn more about the medium. We interview content providers, industry professionals, field experts and educators who love and use live virtual learning. And today our guest is Noam Gerstein. Noam, thank you so much for being here.

Noam (00:19.545)
Thank you so much for having me. What a delight.

Okay.

Allyson (00:27.448)
You

Seth Fleischauer (00:27.705)
All the way from Berlin, our first guest, I think, located in Germany, maybe even in all of Europe. We've had Australia on the podcast before, mostly the US, so we're very happy to have you from the other side of this day. I'm in my morning, you are in your evening. Thank you. Tammy, could you take a moment to please introduce Noam?

Allyson (00:41.272)
You

Tami Moehring (00:48.771)
I would be happy to. Noam is the CEO of the Bina School, is a leading expert in precision education. Noam is shaping a new category of schooling crafted to educate Gen A, utilizing today's wonders. She focuses on impactful learning for students, educators, and families worldwide, drawing on insights from her extensive global research and interviews. Noam is a frequent speaker at education conferences and a published thought leader.

Noam (01:01.685)
Sure. With pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Tami Moehring (01:17.615)
She's honored to be a life stewardess to two quadlingual children. Thank you for joining us.

Allyson (01:28.566)
Yay!

Noam (01:30.477)
They speak English, Russian, Hebrew and German. So to my utter dismay, educating the perfect spies for the 27th century.

Seth Fleischauer (01:33.305)
Which which four languages?

Allyson (01:46.006)
Yes.

Seth Fleischauer (01:47.801)
We'll leave that right there and move on to education. Thank you so much for being here.

Tami Moehring (01:50.501)
How did, I was just gonna ask, how did you decide those four languages? god.

Noam (01:55.861)
I didn't. was born into that. Like they were born into them. So, I mean, I do think that by the way, like if we're on the multilingual theme, it is not a bad idea to speak to your child in your native language. And in their household, there were two native languages, which were not the same one. And then we, between us, communicated in English and happened to live in Germany. So.

Tami Moehring (02:04.805)
Okay.

Seth Fleischauer (02:29.977)
I imagine that that is the story of how many kids end up speaking four languages. That exact dynamic, right?

Noam (02:31.677)
Yeah, it's like it's that's how it rolls. But now they're learning Japanese and I'm like.

Allyson (02:39.448)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (02:39.585)
Yeah, yeah.

Noam (02:42.568)
one that my youngest is learning Japanese and my eldest is learning Spanish.

Allyson (02:42.744)
was just going to ask what would be the next language that they might be learning.

Allyson (02:52.145)
Nice. What's nice is that they're taking a different, then they can teach each other the languages that they're both exploring now, and you and all of your family.

Seth Fleischauer (02:52.313)
Wow. Amazing.

Noam (02:55.716)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (03:04.193)
Sorry.

Noam (03:04.81)
Yeah. No, it's just, I mean, I think it's a nice segue to our topic as well, but languages and different cultures are clearly different lenses to look at the world. And so it's not only our ability to communicate with people from a different culture, but also have a different view on what's out there.

Seth Fleischauer (03:08.729)
feel like there's a tiny bit of a delay that's like cutting off our, yeah, you go, you go. Jump in.

Allyson (03:08.76)
You

Seth Fleischauer (03:33.433)
Absolutely. I love the way that different languages, depending on the specific vocabulary differences that they have, the different grammar structures they can imply or influence a worldview, a way of thinking about the world that is often surprising when you are venturing between them and learning like, wow, so this way that they conjugate verbs in Chinese is consistent with a collectivist worldview. That's interesting, right?

Noam (03:52.615)
It's one of those what you you see so many kinds of snow. I see one. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (04:03.235)
Very cool.

Allyson (04:07.416)
Hahaha!

Seth Fleischauer (04:07.513)
Exactly. this podcast is called Wide Distance Learning. You run a virtual school that relies on live synchronous learning, which is something that is somewhat unusual. Many virtual schools have asynchronous learning as their kind of linchpin, but you make sure that the live component is a central part of the experience for the students.

Noam (04:11.435)
Mm-hmm.

Noam (04:29.524)
So.

Seth Fleischauer (04:36.345)
I'd love to dig into that with you, but I want to back up a little bit first. Like what led you to start this? Was it the fact that your kids spoke four languages? You know, what is the story of the Bina School and how it all works?

Noam (04:48.363)
I'm not a Eureka type of person. so it's not that I had an idea and I wanted to pursue it. I'm a sturdess of ideas of many, many people that I've interviewed throughout many years. So I can contextualize myself for like a minute if you'd like, but I'm a Jerusalemite originally. I went to the university way too early for everyone's sake.

Allyson (04:57.845)
You

Seth Fleischauer (05:13.337)
Please.

Noam (05:15.459)
I was 15, studied history and philosophy of science and technology. Always very interested in the ways technology crafts how humans interact with each other. So that's fascinating to me and has always been. I worked with physicians for human rights at the time. I did some work in the very bloody area where I'm from. And one of the things I

Allyson (05:20.151)
You

Noam (05:45.151)
built from scratch or helped build from scratch. So I was in the big team. It was not me, but, but is what they call the open clinic kind of working on no questions asked, no bills delivered. We'll take care of you no matter what for people with no medical rights where I come from. Did ops and philanthropic fundraising, which was, and worked daily in clinic, which was wonderful and absolutely horrible. So I needed a break.

I moved to London, continued my studies there, came back to Israel, opened my first business, sold it when I was 26, found myself utterly surprised. And so, and obviously I'll never open a business ever again, bad thing. then, but I, was several things were clear to me. One was that I am incredibly privileged. I can convince a lot of people to do things together. And I think...

Allyson (06:15.651)
You

Allyson (06:25.862)
You

Noam (06:40.454)
Every privilege comes with a set of responsibilities. And for me that is to build things that people absolutely need. And I have a fascination with massive industries that when you look at the ways that they are built, namely their business models actually, and you kind of think about how resource allocation happens for that industry, you go, wait, what?

And so one of those industries is primary education. And so was like, this is really interesting. Let's go and sit and talk to little humans and their adults to see what's up. And so I did that for a very long time. I lived nomadically for almost seven years, spent a lot of time in classrooms, changed my location once every two weeks.

Allyson (07:13.738)
You

Noam (07:38.564)
and with the goal to try and understand the differences and the similarities between the systems and whether we could potentially think about some form of system upgrade. education is there to... mean, think effective education reflects the life of the society. And you can look at this throughout history and definitely throughout geographies.

And the education we offer right now doesn't really reflect how we live. And so it has immense inefficiencies and there's a lot to do and could be very fun. So spend the last year of this, been talking to educational professors and people from the business and developmental psychologists and technologists to see if the ideas that I was again, the sturdest of are maybe possible and positive, which is a big one.

And then I got a micro grant to only do methodology testing. only education, education only. So no tech yet. And then in 2021 started Bina. So what we do, we operate a global digital native full school for kids aged four to 12. So we have kids in over 30 countries right now studying together every day. So from the very north to the very south of several time zones.

Kids get together in very small groups of up to seven kids with amazing educators and go through educational experiences that cover, let's say the anglosphere's standards, but do it in a completely new way. So does that answer your question?

Noam (09:28.798)
Give it.

Seth Fleischauer (09:29.849)
Yeah, it just leads to like 37 more questions. I hope that's okay. So what I mean, one of the things I'm interested in, so you use the word Anglosphere at the very end there is something that struck me is that like you you were looking for the similarities and differences between these different styles of people that you were talking to. It seems like for the most part, you were sticking with Europe as the people. No, no. Okay. Okay.

Allyson (09:29.964)
Yeah.

Noam (09:50.652)
no, no, no, no, no, None of that. No, no. So first of all, mean, the school is not European centric. So we have kids in Euro Africa and also in in the eastern of the Americas right now when we're opening Pacific in January. So we have kids in over 30 countries, not in Europe. Actually, Europe is actually a tricky one for us. And we can talk about that if we want a little bit later. But

Seth Fleischauer (10:16.397)
Got it, okay.

Seth Fleischauer (10:22.201)
Interesting. So what it leads my question to though is that you were saying that a school should reflect the values, the customs of a given society, but what you're aiming for is a global society, right?

Noam (10:32.863)
So what I said was it should reflect the ways people live, which I think is close enough, but not exactly the same. Right. There are, there are trends of how humans live today that span globally. And I think I'm not aiming for global society. I'm claiming that there is one.

Seth Fleischauer (10:43.916)
Okay.

Seth Fleischauer (10:49.1)
Okay.

Noam (11:00.646)
and that we should think about that mindfully and nurture that.

Allyson (11:09.666)
I think that that was always the most exciting thing when we first met that I held on to was us talking about how really the technology, it reflects the society. We talked about how Reed Declay is a technology and the different ways that became important to help grow in different aspects. And I see how with the model of your school that you have and the way that you've set up your program to think culturally as well as being able to utilize.

Seth Fleischauer (11:09.859)
So then.

Noam (11:16.842)
Thank

Allyson (11:36.534)
the tools, the actual tools that can bring education, change, conversation to become really familiar at a young age, I think is really, really amazing. And when you look at virtual academies, we don't really often see that model. It's much more, they're so amazing. It's just a different form of online learning experiences. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more, like kind of on the same conversation that you were having, how your

Noam (12:04.798)
I mean, I think like we can talk later on why educate digitally or we can even maybe start with F if you'd like. in terms of like how it actually works, which is a relatively easy one to note.

Allyson (12:04.832)
schedule and how you use technology really helps reflect that.

Noam (12:21.342)
So basically it's a year-round comprehensive program that operates everywhere. And that means we have five hours daily, Mondays through Fridays, eight intakes. we kids actually join throughout the year with 200 learning days a year. So kind of like a school, right? We educate again, four to 12 year olds. We have up to seven kids in a group.

Those classes are small and wisely matched, which is really, really cool because when you have many kids, you can really think about how to match them emotionally and academically in a way that really fits who they are and where they are today. We have two educators per group and each child has kind of a bi-weekly one-on-one with their teachers. And so we really think about building new education in a 360 manner in the sense that it takes into account

all the players or all the stakeholders. So basically we do a lot of work around family support where families get concierge quality service with direct feedback through always on messaging. basically you have like a parental aid in your pocket, real time progress reports. So it continuously, we do continuous evaluation. It's a global community, which is, just, I just spoke to a mom the other day and she says, yeah.

People around here ask me, why do I send my kids to PINA? I mean, can obviously, they live in Brazil. I can obviously send her to local school. And she's like, and I tell them, you don't understand. My child has a global network from the age of five. Like, go compete with that. And so that's, and we do a lot of parental learning opportunities because we were not educated to educate this way. And parents today need support. And we think that's our job.

Allyson (13:54.84)
You

Allyson (14:02.252)
Yeah.

Noam (14:11.834)
And then for educators, it's digitally native. So you can teach from Bali and not have gum in your hair, which is awesome. people, our team works from different places. A lot of them move around in the world. So that's very fun for them. We have teachers and co-teacher roles and the salary is medium European, which is super nice. So that's kind of how it works. And what we're building is something that doesn't exist yet.

Allyson (14:23.172)
You

Noam (14:40.964)
And that's incredibly exciting. I can tell you a little bit about how kind of we build educational content if you're interested. Like how does that? go ahead. Yeah.

Allyson (14:48.184)
You

Seth Fleischauer (14:59.405)
I want to ask a follow-up question first, because I just want to be clear on this. So you said that we're building something that doesn't exist yet. The parent in Brazil said that, you know, why do I send my kids there? It's because they have a global community at the age of five. Is that what you're building? The fact that it's a school?

Noam (15:08.176)
No, that's what we're already doing. Let's talk about what we're doing still, I guess. In terms of content, you can ask, okay, so wait a second, you have kids in different places in the world, so how do you decide, like, whose literature or what history or which geography when you educate?

Allyson (15:16.565)
Yeah. It's just coming up next.

Seth Fleischauer (15:17.217)
Okay, so what are you building? What is the thing that doesn't exist?

Noam (15:36.144)
The way we're thinking about it is the following. Our units are a month and a half of different biomes. So we teach thematically and every month and a half the entire school moves from one biome to another. So right now they move from forest to tundra. And all their learning has to do with that theme. So their math, their history, the...

the narrative that they, the stories that they read are in through those voices. And throughout every month and a half, each child works on a project that is there to showcase their learning. And that project is related to an SDG, a social development goal, where they find what they want to explore or to solve and kind of weave their learning through it.

showcase it at the end of that month and a half. So that's part of how our learning is constructed. And so now we can start talking about why educate digitally at all. Like what is the point? And we can start, go ahead Seth, you want to say something?

Seth Fleischauer (17:03.979)
Yeah, I, sorry, I just, I just so you don't forget, I do want to get back to that. What exactly are you building that, doesn't exist yet, but I think that we're getting to it through the course of you describing all of it together. but I do want to bring that back in the end because I think that that point like crystallizes is very important. but keep going. So, so, so you were saying like, you know, why, why do we do this digitally? Is that where you're going?

Noam (17:12.574)
Thank you.

Noam (17:20.909)
So why do you want to educate digitally? And you have several reasons. Okay. One is, of course, like you want to reflect life today. A lot of people, you know, don't go to half day jails. They, they work in different places. So work is a set of activities, not a place. And a school should reflect that. Right. And so when we think about what that set of activity, what those sets of activities can look like, if you, I mean, I think, yes, a lot of people think that.

digital learning is, you know, is a compromise if you're stuck because of reason. And in the world where

If you live in the world where I and I'm sure you do live, physical learning is a compromise for a variety of reasons. Because in the digital realm, you can do things that you cannot do in the physical realm. For example, you can do the impossible and you can do the dangerous. You can do the impractical.

Seth Fleischauer (18:03.107)
We battle that all the time here on this podcast.

Noam (18:27.052)
And you can do the expensive because of course we all want to fly the plane today and please crash it. Right. And so that's one aspect of why educate digitally. And the second aspect of why educate digitally is we can do very deep and super interesting work around how do we do and how do we think about assessment, evaluation and content generation. So,

Once upon a time in old schools, they used to do periodic assessment. We call it tests. What we're building does continuous evaluation where every engagement a child has with their learning is counted for their learning portfolio.

Allyson (19:10.652)
Hahaha

Noam (19:25.462)
Once upon a time, educators used to spend half their days writing lesson plans in advance. Not that they really know how the class is going to go, and not that they can actually collaborate on that because each one does for their own class, so in silos. So once upon a time, predetermined lesson. And what we can start looking now is...

adaptive content generation, which is super exciting. So just imagine, and this is not in the very far future, have you, let's say that, have you ever watched the Magic School Bus?

Allyson (20:12.288)
Yes, my gosh, Ms. Frizzle, I used to be a museum educator and that's what we do at CILC as you know. So Ms. Frizzle, that was a big, I was like yeah, yes, love Ms. Frizzle.

Noam (20:14.307)
Bye.

Seth Fleischauer (20:16.946)
my gosh, are Miss Frizzle, Allison. My god.

Noam (20:18.414)
Okay. So what is exciting beyond the impossible, dangerous, impractical and expensive that she does is that she can react to her students, right? With content creation. Right. And you can do that balancing personalization and standardization. And this is the work that we're headed towards basically in the not so far future.

Seth Fleischauer (20:22.701)
You

Noam (20:47.551)
You can, you would be able to with your class, let's say you're immersed underwater now for a month and a half and your project is save the octopus. Okay. For example. and so you will be able to go talk to an octopus that would tell you different myths around octopus like creatures. Okay. And then maybe if you're really nice or if you solve some really awesome math.

Allyson (21:02.456)
Yeah.

Noam (21:15.063)
problems, it'll let you into their bloodstream so you can check out why it's blue. Okay, so that's the type of experiences we're excited about and building right now. And then, which also means for educators that slowly but surely, the time, the much hated, I can say, time that they spend on report cards,

will be alleviated for deep interactions with their students. And then of course, I can go on and on, like of course, class based lesson plans to dynamic group differentiation. So maybe you are reading a different, maybe we're doing all the read aloud, but Tammy, course, is way better than, she's a bit more advanced than me in reading. And so she'll get a different level of text than me, right?

And then, and I think this is really exciting, this real-time feedback, not only for students, but also for the educators and the families. And so those are some of the things that we're working on now.

Seth Fleischauer (22:33.049)
The subject here seems to be AI. Is there a specific tool or software or technology that you're using in order to do this adaptive content generation or is it something that you're training your teachers to do?

Noam (22:40.586)
No, this is what we're doing right now is definite deep definition work. So basically in the world of prompt engineering and and we're building it's a multiplayer game.

Allyson (22:59.116)
Yes, yes, it's gamification. That is the most exciting part. And especially with the idea of, I feel it, I think I just recently was talking about this, idea of the experience points. So it's just your level. You know what you can achieve and you get there based on your abilities and your ability to construct knowledge, synthesize knowledge, analyze, and have that real-time feedback is so exciting for the students. And I love that you bring the parents into it too, because that support.

Noam (22:59.455)
out.

Seth Fleischauer (23:00.441)
There we go.

Noam (23:10.249)
Yeah. But it's not.

Allyson (23:28.108)
really helps that extended learning outside of what would be a class time period, that you're allowed to continue those conversations and maybe get into the game together to see how you can achieve those different diving into the octopus.

Noam (23:35.946)
What's very important is that it's all real-time, active, collaborative experiences. So it's not about you playing a game and using game mechanics or whatever, like dopamine hits on your own. The idea is that it is about joint experiences and that there's a emotionally held learning space that is there with an adult. So that's kind of a very...

crucial part of the model. And I want to say it's not out yet. Just say we're not done. We're still building.

Seth Fleischauer (24:15.897)
Hehehehehe

Seth Fleischauer (24:20.515)
Well, we'll have to have you back to get a follow up on how it's working. mean, this sounds fascinating.

Noam (24:20.767)
I mean, we're running tests and it's really, really exciting because we're like, okay, day's over, kids be like, nah, we're staying here. We're like, no, no, you're done learning. They're like, no, we're not. We have some more. Yeah. So that's kind of it.

Allyson (24:24.866)
Further release.

Allyson (24:32.865)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (24:32.921)
That's a good sign.

Allyson (24:37.036)
Mmm. Yeah.

Noam (24:37.568)
I would say play-based rather than game-based and I think that that is a distinction.

Seth Fleischauer (24:38.249)
Yeah. So, so is it fair to say that you're essentially creating a game-based, truly multicultural, geographically dispersed magic school bus learning experience? that like, is that the thing that you're making?

Seth Fleischauer (24:54.839)
Okay?

Allyson (24:58.946)
That's such an important distinction too with project-based learning because playing can be such a part of that motivating the critical thinking and the conversation back and forth and playful learning with adults too. Sometimes once you see students at a certain level, they get nervous to engage in more of a playful manner where they think it can only, it has to have certain parameters. So to encourage that and that's what you want to do. Like you said, with professional life, you're going to need that type of

Seth Fleischauer (24:58.968)
Awesome.

Noam (25:03.058)
and then I'll get back to you.

Allyson (25:26.872)
playful energy to come in to problem solve or to just get collaborative and say, let's, what can we build together?

Noam (25:29.872)
Yeah, I mean, think the difference is that games have predetermined rules and play involves more exploration and because we can have the scaffolding

of standards and standards that we build as well. this is super interesting. But the amount of exploration also of like just making mistakes all over again and stuff like that. those are things that play involve in games, like that play kind of promotes and games tend to actually not. And so this is just some of the thinking behind it.

Allyson (25:53.612)
NNNN

Noam (26:09.61)
Two more things that we do and are quite unique right now. So the back end of this takes the UK standards, the US Common Core, the Australian standards and the Canadian standards and kind of builds, we built a comprehensive set of standards. So basically a child that moves away from Bina because we're really about the little ones, like the moment that they hit puberty, they're like someone else's problem. So.

So we obviously work in context and we want to make sure that they can continue their educational career with a lot of success to wherever they want to go. And so we do cover those four sets, but we do add two sets that we have built and are continuously building internally. One is social-emotional learning. So we work on communication skills and active listening and debating and...

talking about our boundaries and talking about our feelings and practicing that. And the second thing that we do is life skills. For example, we teach financial literacy from the age of four and other important things like that. yeah, so that's what's there right now.

Seth Fleischauer (27:28.345)
So throughout all of this, I think something that we mentioned at the beginning and that I think is critical for your experience and also for the inclusion of this on this particular podcast is that this is all live. And the fact that it's play-based, play is obviously a lot more fun when you get immediate feedback, right? As opposed to some sort of asynchronous play.

Noam (27:41.567)
I said, good day. I was like, welcome. You really did. I like, thank you. I'm really excited. I've learned lot of Like, why did I do this live?

Seth Fleischauer (27:56.921)
But I'm wondering did the play did the play based idea drive the live? Learning or did the live learning arrive first like like why did you decide to do this live as opposed to? Asynchronously which is what a lot of virtual schools do

Noam (28:08.287)
I think a lot of virtual schools deal with several reasons. One is most virtual schools deal with kids way older than we do. We take kids when they're four. And so what it would mean if we were a virtual school that does async with a four-year-old is that in fact we're a homeschooling aid. It's not that we give content to parents and it's their job to teach their kids. And we personally believe that

Teaching is a profession, an amazing one that people study, in our case, two degrees for. And it's not for the parents to do, it's our job. So we believe in teachers. We feel very strongly about that. And so obviously second is this idea of emotionally held learning space is a big core concept in Bina. We think that learning is relational.

And to be able to do that with excitement throughout a long period of time, that's big part of it. How you relate to your peers and how you relate to your educators is crucial. And then we serve a variety of families.

to some extent there to say that we may be the most diverse school in the world. I think ensuring what we call attentive education, meaning that every child is heard, seen, and known by people that are professionals is kind of the core of our work and what we do, and we feel very strongly about that. And that can't happen asynchronously.

Noam (30:07.166)
yeah, that's exciting.

Seth Fleischauer (30:09.689)
Yeah, yeah, it's funny that you describe it as perhaps the most diverse school in the world. I was smiling when you were describing your biomes curriculum because I used to work at a school called the Earth School in New York City. It's an incredibly diverse school, both racially SES, but also in terms of where students were from. I think I had like 14 languages in my classroom. And our core curriculum was based on biomes.

Allyson (30:38.168)
Hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (30:39.339)
Yeah, was the, and so all those kids from like, you know, Madagascar and France and Tibet, like everyone was able to bring in their experience with these different biomes. And it was like such a natural way, pun intended, I guess, to get students to relate to each other in like where they had a common theme that they were relating to, but they also had.

Noam (30:41.4)
people.

Allyson (30:57.153)
Hehehe

Seth Fleischauer (31:05.981)
Their own experiences that they were bringing it to and I was really fascinated when you were talking about like how do you define? This global culture right like how do you make it so that everybody is seen and heard and known when you've got people from such vastly different places all coming together from the north of a time zone to the south of a time zone and What better vehicle for that than than Mother Earth this thing this thing we all share. Yeah. No. I love it

Noam (31:22.717)
I also, I honestly think that like if we think about the skills and kind of conceptual grasp that they need, I'm not even talking about their future, just like tomorrow morning, is their personal, social.

Allyson (31:30.647)
Yes.

Heh.

Noam (31:49.38)
and environmental awareness. Like they just need to understand and contextualize, right? This is the best thing that we can give them. And so, so that's the aim. That's it.

Seth Fleischauer (32:06.283)
Yeah, I love it. So a question that we ask here is we ask all of our guests about a golden moment, right? So a time when the vision for what we hoped would happen, leveraging this technology to connect people from different places, it all comes together in a beautiful emblematic moment. I'm wondering, can you tell us a story?

Allyson (32:06.505)
Hahaha

Noam (32:20.381)
It's all complicated.

Noam (32:26.776)
God, from today?

I must admit, it's an incredibly rewarding activity to do what we do, because also little kids, that involves incredible amounts of instant gratification, But I can tell you some that I find particularly moving. For example, we have quite... In the world of incredibly diverse...

Allyson (32:33.272)
Hahaha

Seth Fleischauer (32:34.187)
Hehehehehe

Allyson (32:50.936)
You

Noam (32:58.429)
We also have kids from different sides of war zones being best friends. Active war zones. We have stories of our families that are, that has as different a world views as you can possibly imagine. Spending all their afternoons together and just not getting enough of each other. And so.

Those are just some of the things that when you kind of say, okay, I think we're doing some good in the world. That's worth our while. These kids are growing up with agency and with perspectives. mean, just as an example, these two girls from the different time.

Seth Fleischauer (33:42.819)
Yeah.

Noam (33:56.886)
from the different sides of the war zone are working on how can they physically meet just today. Like what would that take? And maybe it can take, and it's a five-year plan, okay? That's moving.

Allyson (34:14.712)
You

Seth Fleischauer (34:22.361)
That's beautiful. I think that, you know, it speaks to not only the types of people who are interested in a program like yours, right? They might be more open to making those types of connections, but obviously you're doing something with the culture that you're building and with the practices that you're instilling that make it so that those families can exist with each other. It feels like the medicine that the world needs right now. We need more of this.

Noam (34:23.068)
There's plenty to do. There's plenty to do right now.

Allyson (34:48.661)
Get

Yeah, yeah. You're building such a community that really has that, you know, you can just see the ripple effect, how that can really make an impact, especially for young children, the younger kids that really need that support as they're growing.

Seth Fleischauer (34:52.748)
Ehh...

Noam (35:07.205)
think, I mean, the thing about building communities that are incredibly diverse is, or at least to my understanding, is that you work, you actively work on listening and allowing people to be who they are with respect. It's not a given. We're not built with

It's something we practice and it's possible to practice from a very young age.

Seth Fleischauer (35:42.979)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (35:51.113)
How do you, I've always been curious about this because I work interculturally as well. And there's this moment when having respect for your culture means giving space to the fact that you may not have respect for me. Do you ever run into that? and, how do you, how do you deal with that?

Noam (35:55.034)
Thank you.

Noam (36:07.837)
I know what you mean. And I think, you know, this is the issue with freedoms generally, right? Like the border of the freedom is where it hits another freedom. And so the questions there are around like,

Seth Fleischauer (36:24.663)
Mm-hmm. Good way to put that.

Noam (36:27.93)
How do we as a group, and this is how you deal with it, this is how we deal with it at least, how do we as a group recognize that there is a clash between my freedom and your freedom and together draw what the borders are?

Noam (36:48.997)
So it is about being awake to the fact that there is a clash and that is two types of freedoms. And then we can discuss, which allows it to also kind of go a bit more meta. We can discuss how do we define that order and so make an agreement on behaviors.

Allyson (37:08.352)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Seth Fleischauer (37:16.065)
Yeah, yeah. And so then it becomes less about what is right for society and more just about this relationship here right now. What are our boundaries? Yeah. Brilliant. Last question is the titular question. It's the question of our podcast, the Noam Gerstein, why distance learning?

Noam (37:29.53)
on Christmas.

Noam (37:33.658)
because you can do things... Well, first of all, I don't know about the distance part, because there is closeness in this medium that we would never get to if we were sitting in the same room.

yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's say all four of us were having coffee. I would not be that close to your face. I would not know how your house looks. I would have very little information on kind of your natural habitat. I would definitely not know what books you are reading right now or if you're doing some sports at home.

Seth Fleischauer (37:52.279)
Hmm. Ooh, can you explain what you mean by that?

Allyson (37:53.575)
Yeah.

Noam (38:19.311)
I would also not know kind of approximately what colors you prefer. But, and in our case, like, you know, in, in, in Venus case, like, we also know that this kid has a pet chicken and its name is Alfred and it comes to class, right? And like, and siblings and other things that are occurring kind of in our, in, in spaces that are very,

Allyson (38:29.548)
You

Seth Fleischauer (38:45.189)
you

Noam (38:48.866)
Small, right? And home, basically. The other thing is in old schools, in great old schools, in rich, rich old schools, there are 25 kids in a class. in this, these mediums allow us because of the business model to create way smaller interactions, which

Allyson (39:05.184)
You

Noam (39:17.088)
definitely for the younger ages, I would claim maybe for humans, but we can leave that aside. But definitely for the younger ages is incredibly beneficial. distance could be many things and that can absolutely happen in physical classrooms and can also not happen in digital ones.

Allyson (39:26.192)
Hahaha!

Seth Fleischauer (39:46.201)
Beautiful answer. I, we, we often talk a lot about like, what is possible in this medium, that is not possible in other places. I think you, you listed off a couple of different, adjectives of like doing what's, what's dangerous, what's impossible, what's expensive, right? Like, the, answer to this question was littered throughout your statements here today. And, I just, I just want to say personally, I've

Noam (39:49.278)
I think you will be able this as a lot of different adjectives of language.

Seth Fleischauer (40:15.809)
a ton of respect and admiration for what you are doing, for what you are building. It kind of checks all the boxes of the work that I do as well. And it's just really, really cool to see that there are people who are just nailing this.

Noam (40:27.617)
my god, there's so much more like I don't I don't know that we're nailing it but we're definitely working very hard towards that and that's plenty already, you know That's very important to say like we're not perfect. We're here to learn all of us

Seth Fleischauer (40:37.567)
Yeah, yeah.

Noam (40:46.101)
Yeah, that also may grow, right? But thank you so much.

Seth Fleischauer (40:48.185)
Yeah, I guess nailing the vision. How's that?

Allyson (40:50.968)
You

Allyson (40:56.696)
you

Seth Fleischauer (40:56.759)
Yeah, of course, of course. Allison, any last thoughts?

Allyson (41:03.24)
I'm just so grateful to learn from you. So inspiring every time we get an opportunity to talk. And I really loved the opportunity to learn more about your model, what you're doing now, what's to come, and also just ways that we can help you do the work you're doing. So I can't wait to continue conversations and just appreciate your time today.

Noam (41:08.409)
Thank

Noam (41:13.273)
Likewise, thank you so much both of you and I'm sure there are plenty that we should be doing together.

Noam (41:24.632)
Plenty that should happen together. I also think, by the way, that as a sector, there is so much for us to do. And what we really need to make sure is that we all work, we support each other and all work together on the different problems that we're solving because there's just plenty.

Allyson (41:26.836)
Yes, can't wait to start planning all the things.

Seth Fleischauer (41:33.763)
Absolutely.

Seth Fleischauer (41:57.227)
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on. Well, thank you so much. I am personally going to follow up with you because I feel like I have five more hours just from today. Yeah.

Noam (42:01.785)
yeah, we have plenty to do.

Allyson (42:08.246)
Yeah

Noam (42:08.587)
Yeah. So, for the people that are listening, you, mean, yes, Seth, we are going to play and yes, Alison, we're absolutely going to play and yes, Tammy, we're going to play. But if there are any people that are listening and want to join our party. So families that need our support, please reach out. Educators.

Seth Fleischauer (42:14.201)
You go, and he said

Allyson (42:25.932)
Yeah.

Allyson (42:32.14)
Yes!

Noam (42:36.245)
That's one to teach from Bali, with no gum in your hair. Please reach out. Builders.

Seth Fleischauer (42:43.737)
You

Noam (42:46.379)
yeah, I've just heard it so many, I've interviewed like thousands of educators and that one came up quite a bit. A particular cherry on top that people tend to remember.

Seth Fleischauer (42:47.897)
feel like the gum in your hair is a story maybe. Keep going.

Allyson (42:50.741)
You

Allyson (42:57.676)
Yeah

Noam (43:01.333)
so.

Allyson (43:01.4)
Mmm.

Seth Fleischauer (43:01.581)
Hehehehe... Hehehehehe...

Noam (43:05.163)
Builders, if you want to come build this with us, which is incredibly joyous, don't be shy. Our inbox is always open and we're growing. So please.

Seth Fleischauer (43:07.299)
So families, educators, who else are you calling to action?

Allyson (43:11.736)
Mmm.

Noam (43:24.568)
You can actually go directly to me, which is noam at bina.school. And if you want to do HR, it's exactly the same thing. HR at bina.school. And if you want to go to admissions and want to start your child, if you meet us, the first time we meet you, we obviously walk you through the things. And if you want, we take your child on an adventure.

Seth Fleischauer (43:27.255)
And what is that inbox?

Allyson (43:39.928)
And we'll link your website in the show notes too.

Noam (43:54.135)
And so I warmly welcome everyone to go on that one because it is fun.

Allyson (43:58.39)
Yay!

Allyson (44:04.224)
You

Seth Fleischauer (44:06.069)
Sounds like fun. Well, thank you so much. We will be sure to link all of this in the show notes. If you want to find out more about this podcast, if you liked what you heard today, you can go to cilc.org slash podcast. Thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar. If you'd like to support the podcast, please do follow us, it, leave a review, tell a friend. And if you want to know the answer to the question, why distance learning? Check out the people we highlight here.

Noam (44:11.412)
Thank you.

Allyson (44:22.616)
Thank you.

Seth Fleischauer (44:33.069)
These are the people who are leveraging this amazing technology to truly transform the learning experience. Why distance learning? Because it's accessible and it's awesome. See you next time.

Allyson (44:42.284)
Bye!