Office referrals

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I’ve repeatedly said what a privilege it was to start my teaching career where I did. I was surrounded by new and truly great teachers whom I got to grow up with. Some of them are still my closest friends today, and many of them are principals. Even the ones who didn’t go the route of administration, are still great teacher leaders today.

One benefit of entering the profession in this incredible environment is that we had a culture of sharing and cooperation, and it was common to see another teacher or the principal or vice principal visit classrooms. If the VP walked into your room, you didn’t stop teaching, you kept going until a good stopping point. In fact, the VP might even contribute to the lesson.

Another aspect of this is that we barely ever sent anyone to the office. In 9 years at a middle school I can only remember sending 2 students to the office, there might have been more, but like I mentioned in my post, “The 4 ‘D’s leading to office discipline”, I could count my office referrals on one hand. But the point I want to make here was also mentioned in that post but not explicitly discussed.

When you get into administration of a school, one of the most shocking things you’ll encounter is that some teachers use the administration as part of their classroom management strategy. Coming from the environment I did, teachers managed their classroom and something ‘really serious’ had to happen before a student was sent to the office. Other than that, we figured things out.

My first assignment as VP was filled with office referrals that shocked me. I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself, ‘That’s it? That’s all this kid did? And that’s why he’s in my office?’ This was my biggest adjustment, a huge realization of how amazing my first 9 years were at Como Lake Middle School. We had a culture of learning and caring that was significantly above the norm, and so ‘normal’ felt insufficient.

I currently work at schools where I find that not only are office referrals appropriate, but I’ll often get a ‘heads-up’ of a potential issue, and then that issue could still get handled without me. But my first VP job was a shocker. The adjustment I had to make was to not make unhealthy comparisons to my previous experience. Yes, this issue would have been handled differently at Como Lake, but things are different here.

It was a hard transition, to be supportive and not judgmental. Like I said before, “In my eyes, sending a kid to the office was essentially telling the kid, “I cant manage you,” which takes away any leverage I may have the next time this student has any challenging behaviour.”

Now, the complaints I deal with for my online school are often ones where parents are already involved, making the situation a bit more complicated before they get to me. Or at Inquiry Hub, kids are sent to me to solve good problems… they want to do a project that needs special permission or considerations. I love solving problems where my biggest challenge is, how do I get to ‘Yes’? How do I solve this problem so that our students can benefit? These are by far my favourite office referrals… rather than doling out consequences for inappropriate behaviour.

Meditation fail

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I’ve been ‘pretending’ to meditate for years now. I’m not berating myself. I know that meditation is a journey, not a destination, and that the practice itself is as much about bringing your focus back as it is staying focused. I get it. I just haven’t really done it.

My monkey mind doesn’t stay on anything long enough to call it meditation. In a typical meditation I’ll focus on my breath and that won’t last 2 minutes. I’ll do a guided meditation and not too far into it discover that I haven’t been listening for a while. I’ll get to the end of a meditation and realize that I’ve been daydreaming for as long as I can remember trying to meditate.

My mediation time in any given session last as long as the dog’s attention in the movie ‘Up’, where every few seconds he’s distracted by the idea of a squirrel. This isn’t once in a while, this is… Every. Single. Session. And it has gotten worse rather than better.

Meditation time has become distracted time. A pause in my day where I put a meditation on, but my mind doesn’t stay on it. In a 10 minute meditation I might count 6-7 breaths before my mind wanders or wonders. Even if I recognize that I’ve drifted away, I don’t really get back to it. Or my attention is even shorter the next time.

I need to change things up. What I’m currently doing is not working for me, and I’ve been at it way too long to accept that my poor follow through is the best that I can do. I’m not sure what I’m going to change yet, but I can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. And if I’m honest, for the amount of time I’ve put into meditation, I really suck and have seen no improvement. It’s time to take a break and come back to this habit later. Hopefully with a new, more effective approach.

Longer summers days

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Growing up in Barbados, the gap between the longest and shortest day of the year is just over an hour’s difference. Basically, sunrise is shortly after 6am and sunset happens around dinner time.

Here in southern BC, Canada, I’m writing this at 7:40pm and it’s still very bright out. The sun will still be above the horizon for another hour. If there is one thing I’ve loved about moving to Canada, it’s long, bright summer nights. This is especially great on the west coast. I don’t really enjoy it in places with mountains to the west.

For example, my wife grew up in Nelson BC, and when I used to visit there, the sun would go behind the mountains and it would be dusk for what felt like hours. I find that time of day tiring. I find that my eyes struggle to focus and I quickly feel drained. In Barbados dusk lasts about 10 minutes. You see the sun set below the horizon and moments later you have darkness. To me dusk is meant to be a fleeting moment, not a dragged-out eternity. Back here on the west coast, dusk isn’t as quick as Barbados, but it’s not nearly as bad as Nelson.

The slightly longer period of dusk is worth it here to enjoy a few more hours of summer daylight. I love having dinner and still feeling like there is a lot of the day left… it makes the summer seem longer in the best possible way.

Outside spaces

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This weekend I planted some annual flowers with my wife and I washed our deck. It’s that time of year again when we extend our lives into outside spaces.

These spaces make our homes feel larger. They let us extend more of our lives outdoors. Our back yard becomes another room to spend time in… or rather, out.

We have the whole summer to appreciate the effort we put in to getting our garden and deck ready this weekend.

Just fish in a pond

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Last night I was looking at some koi in a pond and I had a little epiphany. I was watching them swimming around and I realized that they are probably aware that there is a world beyond their pool, but they have no idea how big that world is? That’s when I realized… We are all just fish in a giant pond.

We are blissfully unaware of so many things beyond what our senses show us. As an example, there are frequencies of light and sound we can not see or hear. Our eyes have blind spots, and there are animals that can react to danger far faster than we can to the world around us.

Beyond of our limited hardware, there is the issue that we can’t find where in that hardware our consciousness lives? Far further beyond that, we live in an expanding universe and we’ll never get to know what lies beyond the visible universe.

Our pond is bigger than a koi pond, but the unknowns ‘out there’, beyond the metaphorical pond we are aware of, is significant. And while scientists discover things what we can see and touch, we really are just like the koi… living in a world that we know has so much more than what we are limited to observing by our hardware and our perspective.

The grief metaphor

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This morning at the gym my buddy shared a metaphor about grief that I hadn’t heard before. He said that grief is like a heavy rock that you carry around with you in your pocket. Over time it doesn’t get any lighter but you grow stronger carrying it, and so it doesn’t feel as heavy over time… but you don’t let go of the rock.

This reminded me of hearing Scott Galloway on the Diary of a CEO podcast. Steven Bartlett said to Scott, “You said that you are a middle-aged man who hasn’t gotten over the loss of his mother. Is there a way to?”

Scott replied, “I don’t want to. I think the receipts for love is grief. I hope my boys feel the same way about me. It hasn’t gotten in the way of my life. Makes me be more bold with my emotions.”

Rocks. Receipts for love. Heavy stuff… but important to hold, as long as they don’t get in the way of living. And perhaps we can be stronger in many ways because we choose to hold them.

Truly Student Powered

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For the second year in a row, our Inquiry Hub team has won the SFU Canadian Coding League Nationals. Three years ago, in their first attempt, they came in second. That’s a pretty amazing track record. What makes this record even more impressive: Our teacher who supports this student team doesn’t know how to code. He literally has no background in coding and everything the students do is above his capabilities.

Our students go up against schools with coding classes, and teachers who understand how to both code and teach coding. Our teachers teach students how to work as a SCRUM team, to take on leadership roles, and to distribute the work load among the team… And then our students do all the work.

Our teacher was actually surprised the team won again. He knew their project was good, but figured they probably wouldn’t give first place to the same team two years in a row. They won anyways. When I congratulated the teacher, he said he literally didn’t do anything, it was the team of students that deserve all the accolades.

I’m not going to say that winning isn’t important. The students put a lot of personal time into this challenge, and deserve the accolades. However, I will say that I’d still be very proud of them even if they didn’t win. I just love that our teachers create an environment where students can be so competitive leading themselves. This is a great example of a truly student powered project.

Here is their game.

The MC playing their game during the competition on YouTube.

And the feedback they received: 

Leadership blindspots

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We all have them, things we don’t see, even when we are looking right at them. We all have things that, over time, we get comfortable with and accept, that we would not accept if our perspective was fresh. We even have good habits that make our team better, but which also leaves us with blindspots because we focus on the progress we are making and miss the (hidden) costs of that progress.

This leaves us with two challenges:

The first being that we don’t know what we don’t know…. We don’t see our blindspots.

The second challenge is that when a blind spot is revealed, it’s often hard to accept. There’s guilt felt in not being aware of it earlier, and there is also the realization that you’ve got to move out of your comfort zone to deal with it… or ignore it and face even more guilt.

It’s an unglamorous aspect of leadership. No one is perfect, there are always things to improve, and whether you see them or not, whether you deal with them are not, you know there are blindspots… and having to face them is not easy.

Unzipping my lips

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After writing my last post, I recognized something that I haven’t thought about in a while. Being in a role as a principal of a public school, I’ve held a responsibility to ‘hold my tongue’. There are many blog post ideas I wanted to share but couldn’t. There are many points of view I would have loved to have expressed that I chose not to. I’ve had a responsibility to my position that has prevented me from being controversial.

Not too long ago I learned that a tiny reference to something that wasn’t even central to the point of a post I wrote was brought to the attention to one of my superiors. That person mentioned it to me, to make me aware, but did not ask me to change my post. I appreciated both the heads-up and the fact that I wasn’t asked to change anything I had written. In fact, I’ve never been asked to change my words on a blog post (though admittedly I was for both a Facebook post and a retweet many years ago).

While I’ve never been asked to change a blog post, I have on this blog, and my Pair-a-Dines blog, written posts that have ‘walked a fine line’, but I don’t think I’ve ever crossed that line. I didn’t cross that line in my last post either, but I did write something that could be interpreted as showing a patronizing attitude of superiority, with no real attempt at being humble. That’s not usually my writing style.

Reflecting now, I recognize that retiring and no longer having a role in a school, and a larger district, I am probably going to be able to be a bit freer in my choice of topics, and the stances I choose. No, I’m not going to be taking my metaphorical gloves off, but I am going to be able to unzip my lips a bit where I might have kept them zipped in the past.

I’m not sure how this will unfold yet, but at this moment I’m looking forward to being a little freer with my thoughts and ideas than I have been in the past… with less concern about my words misrepresenting others whom I might represent. Don’t expect instant controversy, but after retirement don’t be surprised by me being a little more loose lipped about things that I might have been more careful and cautious to share in the past.

Wrong with conviction

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I was going to share a social media post that basically called science a religion and argued that people who ‘believe in science’ are in a cult and so it doesn’t feel like worship, it feels like sanity. I only just decided that I don’t want to bring attention to this post, because when I went back to the post, my comment was gone.

I found it in my activity stream, but on the post itself, it wasn’t there. My comment didn’t fit the narrative so it was deleted. I don’t want to participate in sharing this drivel when it was shared only to promote a biased and grossly misleading narrative, with no intent to stand on its own merit against a disagreeing comment.

Meanwhile the post has over 150,000 views and 10.4K likes. I’m tired of seeing people spew convincing sounding nonsense with conviction, and spreading bad ideas that gain traction. And this is getting worse, not better.

We have access to almost unlimited information, and yet so many people just ride out their biases and beliefs, standing their ground on topics they only have a tiny understanding of… Sharing half truths, misleading ideas, and exaggerated lies that sound as if facts are factored in, but they are not.

We’ve entered an era where being wrong with conviction will gain traction simple because it fits a narrative that is appealing. We are living in a post truth era and I’m struggling to see how we escape this? And there’s no way to say this next part without sounding condescending but I’m going to say it anyway.

I think we’ve reached a point in our civilization where you have to have a certain level of intelligence or you are doomed to get dumber. Either you pass a threshold of intelligence or you succumb to stupidity shared online that simply traps you in the stupidity zone. I used to have faith in humanity but if I use what’s shared on social media as a litmus test then a very, very large number of people are doomed to stay stupid.