Our eyes deceive us

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Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. We’ve all heard the term, “Your eyes deceive you,” and the reality is that there’s a lot more to this saying than we think… because our eyes are always deceiving us.

We don’t see the same range of colours as other species of animals. We don’t see bands of light such as infra red. We have a blind spot that our minds fill in. We see a version of the world around us, and while it’s a fairly accurate perception of the world, it’s still only a rendering of what’s there.

So there are many things that we are unaware of. Things that happen too fast for us to fully see. Even our frame rate for seeing things affects what we see as and interpret. We don’t see a hummingbird’s wings in flight. Do hummingbirds?

We can’t see as far as a hawk. Nor are we as aware of movement in our peripheral vision as hawks. Birds wouldn’t be very good flying hunters if they only had the eyes of a human.

On top of our eyes naturally deceiving us, our mood and disposition further skews what we see. We see half of a glass of water and some consider it half empty while others see it as half full. Different observers can see two people conversing and can feel curiosity, jealousy, or even no interest in the conversation. Each of these perspectives alters the meaning behind what we’ve observed, and ultimately colours the experience for us… changes what we think we see.

I find it an interesting thing to think about. Our visual impression of the world is just that, an impression. It’s a form of deception. We have a specific lens of the world that is not true as much as it is interpreted. And, it is interpreted based on a reasonable facsimile of the world, not a true view of reality.

We are observers with imperfect observation tools, which while deceiving us also gives us a good enough grasp of reality that we can share our experiences… and others find what we experience to be congruent enough with us that we walk around believing we see the world as it is. But really we don’t. We are constantly being deceived by the limitations of our eyes. And for the most part we believe that the world we see is the world that actually exists, not just our limited but effective interpretation.

Nature bathing

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We have a small ravine behind our school. There is a well kept trail through this tiny piece of nature surrounded by a school, industrial buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday after work I went for a walk around the very short trail. After 12+ years in this building I’m realizing how rarely I visit this space. I have a little piece of nature nestled right against my school and I almost never take advantage of it.

There is power in nature bathing, in surrounding yourself in trees and getting away from the noise of the city. Getting away from the digital calendar, and email, meetings, and all those ‘other duties as assigned’.

Don’t believe me? Just turn up the volume and listen to this recording for 20 seconds.

Did you hear the birds or just the water? Listen again. Think about what 5 minutes of this could do for your day.

I’m going to find myself on this trail a little more frequently in the last few weeks of school.

The School Experience

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I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence? There are some key elements of school that are completely undermined by tools that do the work faster and more effectively than students. Here are three examples:

  1. Homework. If you are sending homework such as an essay home, it’s not a question of whether or not a student uses AI, it’s a question of how much AI is being used. Math homework? That’s just practice for AI, not the student.
  2. Note taking. From recording and dictating words to photographing slides and having them automatically transcribed, if a traditional lecture is the format, AI is going to outperform any physical note taking.
  3. Textbook work? Or questions about what happened in a novel? This hunt-and-peck style assignment used to check to see if a student did the reading, but unless it’s a supervised test situation, a kid can get a perfect score without reading a single page.

So what do we want students to do at school? Ultimately it’s about creating experiences. Give them a task that doesn’t involve taking the project home. Give them a task where they need to problem solve in teams. Engage in content with them then have them debate perspectives… even provide them with opportunities to deepen their perspectives with AI before the debate.

Class time is about engaging in and with the content, with each other, and with tools that help students understand and make meaning.. Class isn’t consumption of content, it’s engaging with content, it’s engaging in collaborative challenges, it’s time to be creative problem-solvers.

Don’t mistake the classroom experience with entertaining students, it’s not about replacing the content or the learning with Bill Nye the Science Guy sound bites of content… it’s about creating experiences where students are challenged, while in the class, to solve problems that engage them. And this doesn’t mean avoiding AI, it does mean that it is used or not used with intentionality and purpose.

We need to examine what the school experience looks like in an era when technology makes traditional schooling obsolete. We didn’t keep scribing books after the printing press. Blacksmiths didn’t keep making hand-forged nails after we could mass produce them. Yet AI can efficiently and effectively produce the traditional work we ask for in schools and somehow we want students to mass produce the work the old way?

How do we transform the school experience so that it is meaningful and engaging for students… not AI?

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*I used AI (Copilot) to suggest the production of nails as being a redundant item no longer created by blacksmiths. I also use AI to create most of the images on my blog, including the one with this post, with a prompt that took a couple attempts until Copilot offered, “Here comes a fresh take! A Rube Goldberg-style school, where the entire structure itself is a fantastical machine, churning out students like a whimsical knowledge factory.”

Empty nesters

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My youngest is off on an adventure for the next 3 and a half months, and so my wife and I will be on our own in our big house from now until the day I return to work after the summer. I have to say that it feels a bit weird after 25+ years. The longest we’ve gone before this with both kids out of the house has been about 5 weeks.

My daughter will return from the trip and be back with us. Our oldest might be coming back as well depending on the school she selects for her next degree. So, we aren’t really empty nesters yet, and may not be for a while yet… but this is a wonderful first test of what’s to come.

Frankly, I’m perfectly ok with this being for just a few months and I’m happy to have our adult daughters who don’t mind being under our roof. In this era of soaring rent and house prices I imagine we aren’t the only ones who will see our kids staying with, and returning to, their parents for a large part of their 20’s. And although it will be nice to see what empty nest life will be like, there is no rush to get there on a full time basis.

Small gains

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I’ve been trying to put on some weight. Five pounds to be exact. I’m actually at my long term goal weight, but I want to be this weight 10 years from now… and at age 57 I recognize that it’s going to be hard to both gain and maintain healthy weight in the next decade.

So, a few months back I decided that I’d shoot for another 5 pounds of muscle by the end of this year. And for these past few months I’ve moved from floating just between 5-6 pounds from my goal weight to floating between 4-5 pounds from my goal weight. Not a significant change.

However, I need to remember my journey here. I have spent almost 6 and a half years working on my current fitness journey. I’ve seen incremental changes through that journey. I dropped over 27 pounds of unwanted weight and have then added 12 good pounds. I’ve had less back pain (other than a herniated disk in my neck, unrelated to my training or my usual lower back pain). My back still aches daily, but my days of actual pain have diminished considerably. And I’m at least as strong as I was in my 20’s and stronger (and more flexible) in most areas.

And no, I have not really seen any gains in the last few months, but that’s ok. I feel them coming. I know I’m on the verge of another small jump. The only problem is the gains now are too small to see. But they are here. I just bench pressed my personal best since I was in teacher’s college back in ‘97-‘98, and I’ve been pushing my leg workouts more than I ever have in the past.

Small gains are being made. More gains are around the corner. And if I stay focused on doing my best instead of worrying about my current progress, I’m sure I’ll hit, and maybe even surpass, my goal by the end of the year.

Robot dogs on wheels

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We seem to have a fascination with robots being more and more like humans. We are training them to imitate the way we walk, pick things up, and even gesture. But I think the thing most people aren’t realizing is how much better than humans robots will be (very soon).

The light bulb went on for me a few months back when a saw a video of a humanoid robot lying on the floor. It bent it’s knees completely backwards, placing it’s feet on either side of it’s hips and lifted itself to standing from close to it’s center of gravity. Then it walked backwards a few steps before rotating it’s body 180º to the direction it was walking. 

I was again reminded of this recently when I saw a robotic dog going over rugged terrain, and when it reached level ground, instead of running it just started to roll on wheels. The wheels were locked into position when the terrain was rougher, and it made more sense to be a dog-like quadruped to maximize mobility. 

There is no reason for a robot to have a knee with the same limited mobility as our knees. A hand might have more functionality with 3 fingers and a thumb, or 4 fingers and 2 opposable thumbs on either side of the fingers. Furthermore, this ‘updated’ hand can have the dexterity to pick something up using either side of it’s hand. It would be like if the hand had two palms, simply articulating finger digits to go the opposite way when it is practical. Beyond fully dexterous hands, we can start to use our imagination: heads that rotate to any direction, a third arm, the ability to run on all-fours, incredible jumping ability, moving faster, being stronger, and viewing everything with 360º cameras that have the ability to magnify an object far beyond human eyesight capabilities. All the while processing more information than we can hold in our brains at once. 

Robot dogs on wheels are just the first step in creating robots that don’t just replicate the mobility and agility of living things, but actually far exceed any currently abilities that we can think of. Limitations to these robots of the near future are only going to be a result of our lack of imagination… human imaginations, because we can’t even know what an AI will think of in 20-30 years. We don’t need to worry about human-like robots, but we really do need to worry about robots that will be capable of things we currently think are impossible… And I think we’ll start to see these in the very near future. The question is, will they help humanity or will they be used in nefarious ways? Are we going to see gun wielding robot dogs or robots performing precision surgery and saving lives? I think both, but hopefully we’ll see more of these amazing robots helping humanity be more human.  

The next stage…

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Today marks a new era in my life. I’m going to my daughter’s friend’s wedding. This is the first one I’m attending from the next generation. While I don’t foresee my daughters getting married too soon, I recognize that after a long dry spell of not attending any weddings, this is something that will likely happen a bit more frequently in the coming years.

I’m reminded of my Firsts and Lasts post. This is a small first, it’s not my daughter getting married, but it’s a new era, a new stage in my life which I get to celebrate. And while I’ll have to wait a bit longer for one of my daughters to walk down the aisle, I see that this is the start of something new for my wife and I.

The Right Focus

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When I wrote, ‘Google proof vs AI proof‘, I concluded, “We aren’t going to AI proof schoolwork.”

While we were successful in Google proofing assignments by creating questions that were not easily answerable using a Google search, we simply can’t make research based questions that will stump a Large Language Model artificial intelligence.

I’ve also previously said that ‘You can’t police it‘. In that post I stated,

“The first instinct with combating new technology is to ban and/or police it: No cell phones in class, leave them in your lockers; You can’t use Wikipedia as a source; Block Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok on the school wifi. These are all gut reactions to new technologies that frame the problem as policeable… Teachers are not teachers, they aren’t teaching, when they are being police.“

It comes down to a simple premise:

Focus on what we ‘should do’ with AI, not what we ‘shouldn’t do’.

Outside the classroom AI is getting used everywhere by almost everyone. From programming and creating scripts to reduce workload, to writing email responses, to planning vacations, to note taking in meetings, to creating recipes. So the question isn’t whether we should use AI in schools but what we should use it for?

The simple line that I see starts with the question I would ask about using an encyclopedia, a calculator, or a phone in the classroom, “How can I use this tool to foster or enhance thinking, rather than have the tool do the thinking for the student?‘

Because like I said back in 2010,

“A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.”

Ultimately our focus needs to be on what we can and should use any tool for, and AI isn’t an exception.

The trouble with troubleshooting

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Being in a leadership position, I’ve come to realize that a large part of the job is about troubleshooting. Most people don’t want to ask for help, they’d rather deal with issues themselves. But when they can’t, that’s when the trouble comes your way. Sometimes it’s an easy fix, other times you don’t even know where to start. Sometimes it’s conflict resolution, other times it’s technical, and still other times it’s something you haven’t ever dealt with before.

The trouble with troubleshooting is that it’s almost always a new issue, nuanced, and not easily solved with prior knowledge. What I’ve learned along the way about troubleshooting comes down to two things:

  1. Ask more questions before seeking answers.
  2. Seek expertise and help, don’t try to troubleshoot alone.

Simple but very productive advice. It’s hard to solve the problem when you lack information, and you don’t always know what you need to know. Asking for clarification, collecting more data, and truly understanding the problem will save a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth where the problem doesn’t get solved.

Once you have significant information, then it’s easier to know who to ask for help. This is the part of the process that I’ve gotten better at with age. I used to think I had to be the one that did all the troubleshooting, that this was my job. I realize now that when I have enough information, I also often have what I need to recognize who to go to for help… not just someone to pass the problem onto, but someone who has the expertise or resources to fix the issue faster than I can alone.

It seems simple, but so often I’ve found myself knee deep in a troubleshooting scenario where a little more information would have helped speed things up. Or, realizing after the fact that what took me an hour could have taken 5 minutes if I just stopped and thought about who had the knowledge that could have helped me. The real trouble with troubleshooting is all about knowledge… how much do I need to know, and who knows more than me and can help?

Day of meetings

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Being an online school principal means that my position in my district is quite unique. As it turns out, my day-to-day experience has more in common with the other online principals from other districts than it has in common with other principals in my district. And so it’s always great to connect with these distant colleagues who face similar challenges and experiences as me.

Today is a day of meetings with these colleagues. We start the day together, then meet with the Ministry, then continue our meetings. Once done for the day, I have a dinner meeting with the Executive of our online principal’s organization.

While I’m not a fan of being in meetings all day, it’s wonderful to connect with these amazing educators that have similar yet unique jobs across the province. We often meet online as well, and some of our colleagues will be joining us online today, but the chance to connect, to have side conversations about our programs, and to be in the same room with each other, is really wonderful.

I am excited about the day in a way that is counter to how I usually feel about a day of meetings… I’m actually looking forward to it!