Welcome to From the Front porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by America's government teacher Sharon McMahon.

Sharon is the mastermind behind the Instagram account Sharon says so, where she reports on the day's news and calmly answers questions about everything from the secession of Texas to which see creature is best.

For me, it's the manatee, obviously. Today Sharon and I are tackling how best to read to understand how fiction and nonfiction help cultivate empathy and why becoming a lifelong learner is so important.

Hi Sharon. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad you're here. This is really an honor for me. So thank you for joining me. My pleasure.

So I have been following along with Sharon says so the accounts on Instagram since probably the latter part of 2020. I think I found you I want to say right before the 2020 election. I was just drawn to your calm presence on the internet.

You also we tease in my family watching Sharon is like watching Annie. I'm an INTJ. My husband Jordan who is a lawyer and an any a gram three. And then my cousin Ashley who occasionally is on the podcast who loves the animals.

So it's like watching a member of our family. And I mean that in the best possible.

I love it. So for listeners who may not be familiar with your work or your Instagram account. I'm curious what your elevator pitch is kind of when you're meeting people for the first time.

And maybe what was the impetus behind the Instagram account because I'm not sure I fully know.

Sure. Well, you know, I'm a teacher. I'm not a political pundit. I'm not somebody who is, you know, I don't work for some big corporation. I don't work for the government.

I'm just a government and law teacher. And so my my mission or my thinking behind this account is that it is really hard to form educated opinions when you have no education.

You know what I think it's really like there's many topics on which I don't have an educated opinion because I have no education on that topic.

You know, like if you said if you asked me which which type of rocket booster we should use to send this spacecraft to Mars. I have no idea.

I'm not opinion on that. I have no education on that topic. You know what I mean.

So I really started noticing an incredible amount of misinformation floating around the internet about things like how the government works.

What the Constitution actually says? What is what's possible? What's not possible? What's likely? What is unlikely?

I started noticing a lot of a lot of that last year. And I just decided, you know what I'm going to do is instead of arguing what strangers on the internet.

Which turns out does not work well. Very few people's minds are like, well, thank you stranger. I have now changed my opinion.

I decided instead of arguing with strangers that I would just make some little explainer videos and just be like, actually here is how the electoral college works.

Here is what a contingent election is. You know, just little short five minute videos and the rest as they say is history.

...