All right. Hello. Thank you for listening to I'm speaking with Elizabeth West. I am your host, and today I'm going to be talking with Punam Sexena, and we are going to be talking about a few things. Punam, if you can introduce yourself, let us know more of who you are, what you do, and who you do it for.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for having me on. I'm super excited to be here. My name is Punam Saxena. I am a speaker, a TEDx speaker, two time author. And what I work on is connecting parents and their schools and creating opportunities to build relationships and increase communication skills between the parents and schools so that we can work for the child as a cohesive team. And what I found is that when we do that, our students feel more confident, they feel more excited about going to school, and they also know that they have a support team that's on the same page. So often, we feel like we are antagonistic, and we're really not. We're all working in the same direction for the same goal.

We just need to get in the same boat and rode the same way. So that's what my job is, and.

I love that, too. And I did some more research. I actually saw your TEDx Talk, and so it was really great.

Thank you.

And it hit the nail on the head because it's very true. It's like you're like, it's not the curricula, it's not this. It's the parents. That's the difference of as far as education.

Yes.

Students retaining. Yeah.

Students always succeed when they know that they have people on their side. And the difficulty is that a lot of these kids go to school, and they're like, oh, my gosh, the teacher, they just want me to learn all this stuff, but I don't know any of this stuff. And they come home. And the parents don't really understand the education system. And you don't have to know every single minute detail of it. But you do need to know enough about what's going on in your child's school so that you can send an email or connect with the teachers or administrators so that you've got a touch point and you can ask questions. And, Elizabeth, I know you can appreciate know it's all in our tone. It's how we choose to approach these relationships.

And it's no different than any other relationship in our lives, whether it's a professional relationship or a personal relationship. This is just one that includes educators. And so we have to foster them as friendships and business partners and team members. And that's how we change that dynamic. And when we start to change that dynamic, our students start to succeed. And I'm not saying every kid needs to be the valedictorian, because there can only be one, but every child can reach their full potential. And if they're a C student and that is their best, you got to be really excited about that, because without that cohesive support, they may be a D or F student, or they may just quit when they get to high school because there are more lucrative opportunities out there. So that is what I wholeheartedly believe is the way to change how we're going to be seen in our future generations.

We're going to be judged on it.