Are Students Tiny Capitalists? Swapping Tickets, Limes, and Squirrels with School Kids

Anna Mae Duane  00:03

Welcome to the Children's Table Podcast dedicated to the idea that young people have always been participants in history, and literature and art and in politics.

Victoria Ford Smith  00:13

As three professors have spent our careers studying the history and culture of childhood, we want to share the questions we have about how adults have imagined what childhood means, and how those ideas have shaped the lives of children, for better and for worse.

Kate Capshaw  00:28

Along the way, we will share the stories of some brilliant, brave and groundbreaking young people we've gotten to know.

Victoria Ford Smith  00:36

I'm Victoria, 

Anna Mae Duane  00:38

I'm Anna Mae.

00:39

I'm Kate. And let's head to the children's table. We've talked about how we imagine children through the lessons we feel they need to learn. In this episode, we're thinking about another part of the schooling process; how to get children to do the work, we've decided it's important for them to do whatever it is. Systems for motivating children reveal what adults think children want. What children do within those systems sometimes tells us something quite different. Anna Mae, there is a model that kids are basically motivated by the same thing adults are: money

01:20

Right? So this is Lancasterarian education, which I am obsessed with. It's basically kind of the Chucky Cheese model. So this is a series of schools that were popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the US in England, and actually throughout South America. And his idea was that we needed to motivate kids and so they would get tickets that you could cash in for prizes. So it is really literally Chucky Cheese, right? This is the forerunner of Chucky Cheese. If you look at the records, so two tickets was worth a paper kite. Three, you could cash it in for a ball, four worth of wooden horse, which I think is a pretty good deal. I mean, you know, whole wooden horse for four tickets? The downside? Right when you were  . . . when you misbehaved, you had to give your tickets back. So you basically had to pay a fine with your tickets. And if you didn't have any tickets to pay, right, if you didn't have any currency to pay your fines, right, your parking ticket or whatever it was for being a truant or being late or not having your homework done, you had to pay in other ways, the most benign of which would be sitting in a corner with a dunce cap. Lancaster was super into shame. There's also some accounts of corporal punishment. So if you didn't have the cash, basically, to pay off the teacher, you were in for some unpleasantness. And the the fines are pretty high, if you were talking, it was four tickets. So that's the price of a wooden horse.

Victoria Ford Smith  02:54

(Laughter) You lose your horse, if you talk.

02:57

Yeah! I wonder about a lot of things about how this worked in practice. But yeah, would you take the spanking and keep your tickets for the horse? Right, that's an option a kid might have? Disobedience was eight tickets, truancy? 20 tickets. So basically, you just could not be truant. And if you were fighting 50 tickets, so you're just in trouble. I don't think anyone had the cash for fighting. So what do you guys think of this model? Right? In some ways, it's kind of very different from what we do now with grades. But there is right is that the same thing? Like it's a made up currency that we imagine kids would benefit from?

Victoria Ford Smith  03:39

Me, it does remind me of things from when I was in school, like you get like a star on the board, or like a mark on the board if you're bad. And if you get too many, then something bad happens to you, like you lose recess. There's like, I feel like there's sort of equivalents today that aren't quite as explicitly capitalist. Right?

Kate Capshaw  04:03

Yeah, that's the thing that's disturbing, right? You're turning them into little consumers where they're obsessed with their tickets. And then I'm, I'm worried about thievery, as well. (Laughter) Let's say you had 50 tickets sitting there in your desk or something like that. I mean, that's a lot. That's a lot of horses a lot.

Victoria Ford Smith  04:21

And also, like I notice, like, it's better to not be there than to fight. Because if you're not there, you lose 20 tickets, but if you're there and fighting, you use 50. So they just want to get the kids who are a problem out of the room.

Anna Mae Duane  04:40

Right 50 tickets is no one could have unless. .  . right. you were the bully? And you stole everyone's tickets. 

Kate Capshaw  04:47

Exactly.

Anna Mae Duane  04:49

Which is what happened actually! So this is a quote from the records. The plan was quote "found to produce unhappy results for while it stimulated to exertion on the one hand, it promoted rivalry and mutual jealousy on the other. And moreover discouraged the unsuccessful," right, because if you are accruing this huge debt, you can't get out of it, "creating in them feelings of enmity and dislike towards their own fellows, even their teacher." So you have like, this is supposed to be a meritocracy. But you've got sort of income disparity here, right? The kid who has no tickets is so jealous of the kid who's good at math and has, you know, has four horses. (Laughter) The horses outside, you know, the teacher, which already is such a powerful position now, like can literally dispense toys, right, the currency that young kids care about. And again, the kids who are in these schools, pretty much from about seven to 14. So that's what you were invested in. And, and these schools were often aimed at children of immigrants, children who couldn't pay for school, you know, basically lower income students. So getting that wooden horse meant a lot. The bullies did, as you would imagine, right? This is the equivalent of lunch money that in the words of another observer, I think this is such an interesting depiction, "the rewards fell into the hands of the strong and the cunning, rather than the meritorious," right. So they like the bully would get those 50 tickets and then fight and then just pay off his crime. In some ways, it is capitalism, if you can accrue enough cash, you get out of jail, 

Victoria Ford Smith  06:40

I like the ticket mafia, it is even operating according to the rules it's supposed to.

Kate Capshaw  06:49

It' so humiliating, I would think for a kid, even if, you know, even if you just played it straight, and you're like, Okay, you have all the tickets, because you're good at math versus you. I mean, it's very conspicuous, like outing acoustic seeds in the traditional schooling. But then if it goes south like this, you're a victim, and you have no tickets. And it's really upsetting. Don't like that.

Anna Mae Duane  07:11

And I mean, I do think that the connections to capitalism is so important, these schools are often compared to factories in other ways, like, the children would have tasks to do on a timed basis, that would have to move around from different parts of the schoolroom, there were like signals to make sure that they weren't sort of operating according to a very particular schedule. So you sort of have these jobs. And the idea was to sort of train them to work in factories. And just like, what happened to a lot of people in the industrial revolution, right, some people would do really well at these jobs, and have access to things that your average worker bee didn't, right. So for instance, if you were promoted to assistant teacher, you got eight tickets a week, right, you've got sort of performance pay. So I mean, it really does, it has both the advantages, but the disadvantages of paying someone money, and I do remember, I was thinking of analogies. . .  My son went to a computer camp, I don't know, three or four years ago, and it was a fairly sort of, you know, felt themselves very advanced, and they had a similar ticket regime, and I forget what you had to do to get them but basically finish your program or whatever it was. And the idea was that once someone 100 tickets at the end of the summer, then you would get to like put a pie in the face of the counselor, you know, you get to humiliate it the counselor. And of course, all the kids pooled their tickets. (laughter0 Like on the second week and pied that counselor things just like the most charismatic kid was like, I've got a plan. And he talked everyone into handing over their tickets. So I mean, it's also a way right, you sort of have this Mutual Aid Society, at least in the computer camp where kids might be able to help each other. Doesn't sound like it's what happened in this particular case. But you could see that you could also sort of subvert this, if you decided to pool your resources. 

Victoria Ford Smith  09:09

It feels like that's because of the reward at the end, too, right? Like if the Lancasterian system was like, if you get 100 tickets, you can throw a pie in the face of the teacher, that encourages students to collaborate against the power, right? Like, but instead it's like you get a paper ball, which is just for you. 

Anna Mae Duane  09:29

Yes. 

09:30

I love the system where it's like, if you play into the teacher system, you can pie the teacher like it's a weird power play.

Kate Capshaw  09:39

That's a better reward. Really. That's all your own. It's true.

Anna Mae Duane  09:45

I mean, I do think you know, in some ways, it's so objectionable, but it is sort of this effective way of teaching children what capitalism looks like, right? It's going to be: you need to accrue your own resources and compete with others. Because even if you do get in trouble, you want to have the tickets to get you out of it.

Kate Capshaw  10:04

I feel like too, it just brings into relief, you know, the social systems that are already present in middle school in particular, you know who's on top and who's on bottom

Anna Mae Duane  10:13

Yes!

Kate Capshaw  10:14

It's, yeah, I'm having flashbacks. Forgive me. (Laughter) I had no dollars.

10:22

Yeah, I mean, this you had a wooden horse, you had the right pair of jeans. 

Kate Capshaw  10:26

Right. Right. 

Anna Mae Duane  10:27

As we're sort of thinking for the next segment. I'm wondering what other kind of currencies schoolchildren have used sort of with each other? How have they gamed the system? Or how sort of how have systems  just reproduced what adults think students will be doing?

Kate Capshaw  10:49

Adults have been trying to find ways to motivate students through tokens and prizes for a long time. It seems anime. But I know this from my experience, parenting students have been trading goods amongst themselves for a long time to most of us, of course, have memories of those kinds of markets. My young people some years back, were really into silly bands, and trading silly bands. Anyway, so Victoria, I think you have an even older perspective on this phenomenon.

Victoria Ford Smith  11:18

I do. So apparently the precursor to silly bands were pickled lines, so fans of Louisa May Alcott will remember that and that novel, the youngest March sister, Amy begs for the family's rag money so she can kind of re enter her school's trade in pickled limes. So I was rereading that section of the novel in anticipation of this conversation and the way that Amy March describes how important it is for her to have limes felt so familiar. So in her school, girls trade pickled limes for pencils, bead rings and paper dolls during recess. And it's also kind of what we were talking about before. It's a it's a display of social status to have like a stock of limes. So Amy's teacher thinks about the limes as a nuisance kind of on par with other kind of distracting classroom contraband. He talks about them in terms of forbidden novels, or newspapers or passing notes. And so there's this heartbreaking moment right when Amy is caught with this fresh bag of pickled limes in the teacher forces her to throw them out out the window. It's so sad. And I just have a question for everyone. And that is, what does one do with a pickled lime? Like do you eat it? Is it like a delicacy?

Anna Mae Duane  12:44

Yeah. Is that a candied li,e? Would you even that would be because it's like, you know, like a lemon candy? 

Victoria Ford Smith  12:51

Yeah, I don't know  . . 

Kate Capshaw  12:54

No idea. I sorry, so much green. In that image though.

Anna Mae Duane  12:58

And in the snow? It would be hard to get limes in the 19th century, especially in the winter, you're just not gonna have access. 

Kate Capshaw  13:05

Yes. 

Anna Mae Duane  13:06

And it just strikes me I mean, with like the silly bands or any of these other friendship bracelets. It's kind of the fact that adults don't get why they're important than makes them so important to kids, right? If the adults were like, "Oh, I totally understand what pickled limes are important to you." Then what good are they?

Victoria Ford Smith  13:23

Yeah, it wouldn't be as fun. 

Kate Capshaw  13:25

Yeah. It's almost not even about the objects, but just about having something that your friends think is cool,

Victoria Ford Smith  13:31

but I get the feeling like because you're trading them for like paper dolls and this is like at lunchtime, right? Like, pickled limes are really delicious. And so you get your pickled limes for like, I don't know, a ham sandwich or something. I don't know what people ate for school lunches. You century.

Anna Mae Duane  13:48

 Mutton. (Laughter)

Victoria Ford Smith  13:52

 I don't know how many pickled limes . . . anyway. So, you know, Amy, Amy is a fictional character. But there is. . .  I did some quick research. And there's some really interesting evidence in 19th century periodicals about like these, like student trades and economies, and that they were well known and documented, and that adults were, of course, extremely and disproportionately alarmed that kids were trading in school. So my favorite example is from an 1894 issue of the Sunday School World, which is a compelling magazine, I'm sure.

Anna Mae Duane  13:59

Page-turner! (laughter)

Victoria Ford Smith  14:32

And this is a written by the Reverend Mosley H. Williams. And he warns about "The Boy who is On the Make," whose skills in trading jack knives, which was apparently a very popular pursuit, like there's lots about jack knives . . . that "this boy would rise by quick steps through the small cheatings and eventually escalate into trading horses." Like, so you go from trading knives in school to trading horses and The Reverend Williams warns that "the sharp boy ripens into the tricky man. He may make money, but he loses character."

Kate Capshaw  15:09

That's a great description. I love that. I think I want the Sunday School World! (laughter)

Victoria Ford Smith  15:14

I'm don't think it's in print anymore, unfortunately. Or you could subscribe.

Anna Mae Duane  15:19

Side hustle for you, Kate! 

Kate Capshaw  15:21

"The boy on the make"  with his jackknifes. It's a cool image. I mean, I want to know that kid. (laughter) Alright, that's not the effect that they want! (laughter) .

Victoria Ford Smith  15:29

I don't think that's what what Reverend Williams wants you to think. I mean, I'm wondering like, why are we so afraid? Like, or why is Reverend Williams, so afraid of these kid economies? When we were encouraging it like with the Lancaster system,  right?  Like giving them tickets? So why is this so threatening?

Anna Mae Duane  15:47

I think in part because it's coming from the kids. Again, it's the it's the pickled limes, kids among themselves have decided that this thing is valuable, or have decided that they can make money doing something that isn't sanctioned by adults, right?  And it's the sort of the theme of our school days season and the curriculum, like there's just so much invested in what adults think children need to learn and what they see as sort of signs of going in the wrong direction. And in this case, a kid thinking for himself or sort of working on the desires of other kids is really scary. You know, we don't understand why. And I'm sure that like toymakers, spend a lot of money trying to figure out what the next silly band is going to be. But kids make up their own minds about this. And it's sort of out of our control, I think, in some ways. 

Victoria Ford Smith  16:39

And I kind of love the jack knives, too. I mean, jack knives, obviously, we're worried about kids having knives. 

Anna Mae Duane  16:45

Dangerous! 

Victoria Ford Smith  16:45

Fair, but like, it also isn't a toy, right?  Like, I think it's interesting when kids are trading things that are marketed to them as collectible by adults. Like I don't know if I have any other examples immediately. But it's not like they're trading marbles,  right? Which I'm sure they also did. But they're trading jacknives. 

Kate Capshaw  17:05

 That's interesting, because I'm thinking about comic books and how the panic around comic books was really about, you know, adults not having control of reading practices. But then also the idea that there might be adult content in those comic books or horror that was part of the scare too, with these like, transgressive elements and obviously the knife is but you know, yeah, when when kids cross the line, I mean, I think maybe it's okay if they're trading silly bands, because aren't they cute? And they make them themselves but yeah, yeah, knives and violence that? Probably not.

Victoria Ford Smith  17:26

And it just seemed to be like, there's something about owning a knife that  like it makes you a man, right, like, You're the man with his knife. But I think there are more lighthearted accounts of this too. So I also found an 1883 issue of the American children's magazine Wide Awake, includes an entire lecture about both the joys and the heartbreaks of swapping in school. So there's this really great series of trades that the lecturer kind of records.  So it begins with a harmonica and then gum, twine, a screwdriver, a sleigh bell two fiddle strings, a blood orange, a string of tight Bob's, and a bunch of other things, and it soon turns to the poor characters of cheaters and liars who swap without honor. Right, so we've gone from like swapping is bad to like, you can be an honorable swapper or a dishonorable swamper. And then there's also some description of things that are hard to swap, especially living things like rabbits or pollywogs. Or apparently caged squirrels was a thing. . . 

Anna Mae Duane  17:47

 Wow, 

Victoria Ford Smith  17:54

. . . that people traded. Yeah. And sometimes you can actually swap until somehow you end up with nothing, which I feel like you have to be really bad at it for that to happen. 

Anna Mae Duane  19:01

Yeah, well . . .  stock market. 

Victoria Ford Smith  19:06

So the lecturer's  father apparently used to recite a rhyme on the subject, and I'm going to recite it for you right now. Here it goes. "When you begin to swap, you find it hard to stop for when you begin to stop. You think of a thing to swap. And you do not wish to stop. You think you would rather swap."

Anna Mae Duane  19:31

Oh, a tale of addiction. 

Kate Capshaw  19:37

That's not a good poem. (laughter) 

Anna Mae Duane  19:39

I think we need music, we need to put a beat to that.

Kate Capshaw  19:43

I mean, Oh, boy. Yeah.

Victoria Ford Smith  19:45

So this is like nostalgia. Right? This feels like a different . .  a different take on schoolroom trading.

Anna Mae Duane  19:51

Yeah, I mean, it seems kind of harmless.  Though, again, like you try to stop and you can't, right. I'm thinking about all the wories about temperance is all this, these worries about children giving into their desires, but these desires are so harmless.

Kate Capshaw  20:07

And there's something about collecting too, and an obsession over collecting that maybe as part of this, you know, I remember like, I've read about bottle caps and other things that kids will try and you know, trade to get the best, or like Pokemon cards, right? Trade to get the right card, there's a kind of obsession built in, too.

Anna Mae Duane  20:26

There is there definitely is and sort of this desire to hoard, which, again, I'm remembering my own. We used to do music together class, and like, you know, they'd have all the instruments out that the little kids could take. And it was just this impulse to just take all the maraccas. (laughter) Because I think because, again, you have so little control over your environment, like, here's your stuff you can acquire, right? You are in charge of, and just the squirrel thing, like, there's so many stories in the 19th century about trying to make a squirrel a pet, and it always always ends in tragedy. Just, I don't like, though, I would like to swap for a caged squirrel and let it go.

Victoria Ford Smith  21:15

So what you're saying is if you're feeling powerless, the answer is not to hoard a bunch of caged squirrels.

Anna Mae Duane  21:23

Well, probably might feel better. If you had this layer of caged squirrels, you were eight years old, you'd feel .. . 

Kate Capshaw  21:31

okay, my kids don't have caged squirrels. But if you go into their room, you can find all of these objects that they've gathered that mean absolutely nothing to me and look like trash. They line them up on their desks, or they have them you know, hidden under their pillow. And, I mean, I go in there, and I just clean, clean, and then they'll come back and say, you know, there was a pencil top, it had like a fuzzy thing on it. Where is it? 

Victoria Ford Smith  21:55

You ruined it, you threw it away? 

Kate Capshaw  21:57

Looks like trash to me, doesn't mean anything to me, but it means a lot to them.

Victoria Ford Smith  22:01

So you threw the pickled limes out into the snow,  Kate.

Kate Capshaw  22:04

I did. I do it all the time.

Anna Mae Duane  22:07

But I mean, I do think the one of the lines between nostalgia and fear, right between the pickled limes and the knives, it's class, maybe gender as well, like some kids, this is sort of harmless and cute. And for other kids, what they desire and what they're trading and what's valuable, is scary to adults, right? But maybe we've lacked in what's useful, right jackknives might have been a useful thing to have in the boy on the make's neighborhood. And he's being very clever, you know, the boys on make, he's going to make it out of right, because he knows what other people want. After the break, we're going to think about more contemporary examples, and administrators in schools trying to think about what kids might want and how that maps onto questions around class and economy. (Music break) So of course, all this talk of currency and capitalism and desire brings us to our current form of distributed student currency, which is of course grades.

Kate Capshaw  23:26

Yeah, I mean, grades, grades and money, right? Grades are very close to money. And people, you know, have talked about abolishing grades for that not for exactly for that reason, for lots of reasons. But there are those who think in terms of grades and money that we should just give kids cash. So they do well in school, right? Just bribe them and then . . 

Anna Mae Duane  23:49

Cut out the middleman. 

Kate Capshaw  23:50

Yeah, I mean, right, they can get rich if they just do what we want, which is get A's. I say that to them all the time. Just do your job. It's your job, get the grades. That's your job. Anyway. So there, there was a person and economist at Harvard University, Roland Fryer, and he did this series of experiments and we just love when, when academics do experiments on children, okay. Anyway, that's another in a series of events. Through the mid 2000s, he paid more than $6 million to 18,000 low income students and cities across the country, Chicago, Dallas, New York, DC, and he was giving them money to try to get them to improve their test performance. I mean, how many ways is this insulting?  Like 1000. Anyway, in that project in New York, so he's got like fourth graders and they are 10 year olds, nine year olds, he's given them $25 for doing well on tests and seventh graders could earn like $50 for each A that they achieved. So all told in a school year, you could earn $500 you'd have to put-- again, here comes paternalism-- half into an account on touchable until they left high school, I find that also to be problematic, and then the other half they could spend. So, I mean, I remember, in my Catholic High School, you know, we had these fundraising campaigns, and you could win a car, things like that. It's not exactly the same thing. But there's, there's an economy around success in schools in the first place. But this idea of paying kids for grades and doing a little experiment to see if it worked.  . . It's just mind blowing to me.

Anna Mae Duane  25:35

Right? As Americans, we take such pride in shielding our children from right, you know, --middle class and upper middle class children, at least--from the labor market, right from having to worry about money, right from having to earn even though we tell children all the time that it's their job to do well in school. Right, right. Don't need to sort of earn money. You're not a breadwinner. But by we're here for low income kids, we're like, well, the the abstraction of grades clearly isn't enough. We need to pay them like workers.

Kate Capshaw  26:08

Right? Yeah. Oh, my gosh, Anna Mae. That makes sense to me. And there's another reason why this whole thing, that's just a mess.

Victoria Ford Smith  26:16

It' gross too because like, what if a child really needs that money? Like, they work really hard? They get the money, and then they put half of it in his account. And they're like, okay, that's greatb ut I need money for like a new pair of tennis shoes, right now?  That just feels like right, yeah, that to me, like you said, that part is also a problem. Super paternalistic.

Kate Capshaw  26:38

Yeah. And guess what, it doesn't work. (laughter) That's what they learned!  Because, I mean, I, you know, we're English professors. We're not mathematicians. If someone said, I'm gonna give you, Kate, like, $100, if you do well, in this high level calculus, (laughter) it's not gonna happen, right? I mean, and I'm not saying that the kids were, you know, involved in this lack stability. But there's just, there's just not the transfer between like money and output. That's not how education should work. Right.

Anna Mae Duane  27:13

Right. It's, if you don't know how to do it, when you need to teach the person how to do it. Exactly. But and it's also just sort of, kind of a basic tenet of education. But right, there's this underlying argument that the kids aren't motivated to learn for their own sake.

Kate Capshaw  27:28

Right, exactly. Right. Like that. Right. They're not trying, so let's bribe them. And, and so you know, the systemic failures of the system of education that's not permitting students to develop or succeed, that's not addressed at all against like, sort of placed on the shoulders of the child. So I find it to be difficult to stomach. Yeah.

Victoria Ford Smith  27:49

And it's also suggesting something that I think a lot of kids already feel, which is that the only reason you're learning this is for this moment, like for this test, or for this grade. And that is not important, right after this, like you're just doing this, so we can give you 50 bucks, and then you're done. Like, no need to remember how to write a sentence correctly, or. . . 

Anna Mae Duane  28:12

 or Yeah. 

Kate Capshaw  28:12

or creatively . . . 

Victoria Ford Smith  28:14

I like how I went to grammar and you went to critical thinking. (laughter) 

Kate Capshaw  28:22

But anyway, yeah. So there, there was an interesting quote about this phenomenon by an educator from Kansas City. And he says, "The key to making incentives work is getting inside your students heads and figuring out what they really want." And I think that's true. I mean, I, I think students want to succeed. And so they need perhaps different kinds of supports to help them succeed, and not being kind of paid off to do it, because it is really transactional in terms of the imagination of the child's investment in education.

Anna Mae Duane  28:56

I mean, what struck me about that quote, is just  . .  implies that we have to figure out what students want. And it's sort of this, you know, deep blackbox mystery, whereas the students are there. Right, we can ask them, What is valuable, what would be useful

Kate Capshaw  29:13

 Right?

Anna Mae Duane  29:13

You know, here in Connecticut, we've just had a change in curriculum, because high school students advocated for different classes to be taught in high school, you know, it's the assumption that kids don't know what they want, or that it's not useful, right? It's it's all you know, pickled limes, (laughter) that, you know, it's not, it's not going to be a useful conversation. That's, again, it's all up to  adults to decide what we think they should want.

Kate Capshaw  29:42

And if things aren't working, it's the kids' fault, right? Because the kid isn't motivated, as opposed to thinking through the actual impediments to student success in school. We'll just pay him off and everything will be fixed. And that's just it's, you know, that's impossible. So, I really like that we've talked about limes and knives, and now this terrible take on children. But yeah, I mean, we could we could think about and we'd love to hear from people about the kinds of currencies that you traded in as young people and what worked and what didn't work and, and listening to kids in terms of what they want in school to go back to Anna Mae's point.

Anna Mae Duane  30:24

Yeah. And I think any of our listeners who might still be in school, I'd really be interested to hear what what is the pickled lime of the moment? What are you trading with your friends?

Victoria Ford Smith  30:35

So if you have ideas, you can send us an email. We would love to hear from you at Children's Table podcast@gmail.com you can tweet us at Children's Table Podcast we are on Instagram at Children's Table Podcast. Please share with us a picture of your caged squirrel but only if you are treating it humanely. Otherwise, I don't want to know.

Anna Mae Duane  31:03

Till next time, thanks for stopping by the Children's Table. The Children's Tables is written by Anna Mae Duane Kate Capshaw, and Victoria Ford Smith. They are grateful for the assistance of Carly Wanner-Hyde, who wears many hats: editor, producer and collaborator and creative genius. Our theme music is by Ken Coleman. The podcast enjoys the support of Green House Studios in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut