The last grad

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I wrote my last Principal’s grad address last night and I’m delivering it tonight. I’m proud to say that since we started our first grad ceremony in 2026, every speech I’ve given has been uniquely written. Nothing is rinsed and recycled. This one is about where we put our attention, and while it’s a bit more preachy than in the past, it is also very much about praising our grads and our school community.

I’m looking forward to my final grad, and I’m happy to say that nothing in this speech is about me. I’ve had my retirement parties and celebrations, and they have been wonderful. Tonight is about our grads at our tiny, unique school, and they deserve all the attention to be on them.

I’ll miss this. I think of all the nostalgic feeling I may have about retiring, the grad is the thing I’ll miss the most. Seeing the culminating event of awkward, young grade 9’s blossoming into amazing young adults is something I cherish every year, and it’s going to be sad seeing the last one end. I honestly haven’t said that about anything else related to retirement. I feel ready to retire and to close this chapter, but I’m really, really going to miss grad.

Fortunately, I know that I’ll be invited back to watch, and I’d love to do so for at least 3 more years (when the current Grade 9’s graduate). Knowing that I’ll have a chance to be in the audience at future grads makes this transition a lot easier.

hand-phone meld

A stark contrast

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Today is Father’s Day. My father-in-law wanted to go to White Spot, a very BC, Canada restaurant, and so my wife, her sister and brother-in-law, and her parents went for lunch. I couldn’t help but notice families at two other tables, which offered a stark contrast in dynamics. Both tables had a person who looked like they were in their 50’s. The woman at one table was with her father, the man at the other table was with both elderly parents.

The woman was fully invested in conversation with her dad. She kept eye contact on him and leaned forward again and again to hear what her father was saying. The conversation seemed to flow, and they looked like they were having a wonderful meal.

The man at the other table was on his phone. He didn’t let it go, it was an extension of his left hand. Even when he spoke to his parents, he did not look away from it. He was typing full paragraphs into it at times, and he scrolled. And he scrolled and typed, scrolled and typed. Food arrived and he occasionally shovelled food into his mouth but his phone stayed glued to his left hand. I wasn’t watching all the time, but at no time when I looked did I see him making eye contact with his parents. The woman at the other table was always looking at her dad.

Back at the doom-scroller’s table, parents had finished their meal and their son was only about half finished his meal, still typing and scrolling as his parents waited. I had to get up to let my brother-in-law head to the bathroom and I looked over at this man’s phone. He was on Instagram. After desert his parents pulled their phones out as well, but I didn’t really pay attention for how long they had their phones out too. I can say with certainty the man never once let go of his phone during the meal. The last time I looked over, his dad was paying for the meal.

It was so stark that I had to make sure that I was paying attention to my own table, not to be too distracted by the entertainment of seeing this contrast play out in front of me. Put your phones away at meal time, if you struggle with this, don’t take your phone to the table. Your family deserves more.

Happy Father’s Day!

Greater in scope than I thought

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It was my buddy Dave’s idea, ‘Let’s Everest the Crunch’… climb a nearby power line trail that we’ve been doing together since January 2021, 37 times to reach the height of Mount Everest. We decided we’ll give it a go over a 48 hours span on August 21st and 22nd of this year, and that we will only be going up, and getting rides back down. We started to increase our volume at the end of last year and then I had to pause for injury recovery.

Last weekend we did 6 times up and we both struggled a bit. We didn’t hydrate enough and while we were eating protein bars, we really didn’t add any carbs to sustain us. Today was different. We were very prepared and we did 10x up (before our traditional last walk down at the end), and it was easier than the 6 we did last weekend. That said it was still challenging and looking at the stats, I can see why.

All along, I’ve been thinking of this in terms of altitude. We’re going up the Coquitlam Crunch 37 times, which slightly exceeds the height of Everest. After doing 10 today, I looked at some other stats and a simple multiplication (x3.7) gets me to the totals for Everesting the Crunch in August.

Today we did over a vertical half marathon and that will mean we will be doing just over 2 uphill marathons in less than 48 hours. We will be walking up hill for at least 19 hours in those two days. And we will be walking over 100,000 steps… again almost all uphill.

I hadn’t realized the magnitude of what we were attempting until I saw today’s stats. Dave has run a marathon and has done a few ultras. Before today, my longest distance was a half marathon, and today I broke that distance record. Over those 2 days in August I have to add an additional 60 kilometres!

It’s definitely going to be a challenge!

Other duties as assigned

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One of my favourite running jokes is that the biggest part of a Principal’s job is ‘Other duties as assigned’. The funniest part is that none of them are actually assigned. They are the jobs that spring up unexpectedly, and don’t really belong to anyone, and so they are either something a principal does themselves or something the principal has to delegate, which in itself is a task to do.

It can be as gross as clearing dog poop off of a field between custodial shifts. As industrious as assembling shelving that you thought would come pre-assembled. As mundane as scheduling staff at a special event to ensure appropriate supervision. Or as glorious as getting duck taped to a wall or getting a face full of whipping cream. It’s 1001 other duties ‘as assigned’… or it can be the many wonderful things I shared in my post called ‘Role of the Principal’ back when I was in China in 2010.

It’s really all the ‘other’ duties that makes a principal a principal.

Reverberations

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about endings and closure. An endings can suggest a finality while closure has a more positive sense to it, like when you finish a puzzle.

This is a frame that really works for me… for the most part.

Yesterday I had a reminder about something that I had a different kind of closure around. The closure that comes with healing and forgiveness. There is the well known saying that ‘time heals all wounds’, but the lesser known counterpart to that is ‘time wounds all heals’. Sometimes healing comes with reverberations… tiny haunts that can surface in the real world, in the mind, or both.

This kind of closure isn’t the celebratory kind, it’s the kind that lets you move on, hopefully with a previously unknown strength. The reverberations are just a reminder that there wasn’t an ending, but rather an acceptance, a sense of moving on.

The challenge with reverberations such as this is that they are often out of your control. Guitar strings starting to vibrate as a tuning fork is brought close to them do not choose to vibrate. And so it is with reverberations long after what you thought was closure.

Do reverberations upset the healing, or are they part of healing? I don’t have an answer to that question. Is it better to metaphorically feel the full vibrations or push the tuning fork away? I don’t have an answer for this question either. Time will heal, until the next reverberation and then time will wound again… hopefully with a dullness that allows for greater closure when the vibrations settle down.

If it hurts…

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I had sciatic pain from about December to March. It got bad enough that my doctor requested a pain specialist appointment for me, and I had it yesterday. Despite the fact that I’m no longer in pain, I kept the appointment so that I can learn more about my disc issues and maybe figure out some preventative measures to ensure I don’t end up in 4 months of pain again.

Have you ever seen that joke where a patient is talking to a doctor and says, “Doctor, when I poke right here, it hurts.” And the doctor replies, “Well then don’t poke there.” That’s essentially the advice I got.

The specialist said that I’m getting old, (it wasn’t intended as an insult, he told me we are the same age), and that the wear-and-tear that my back shows is typical for active people my age. He then said that of course I should stay active and keep doing what I’m doing. Then came the punchline: “If you do something and it hurts, then stop doing it.”

That’s what I waited months to hear. He told me that he used to do a lot of running until he had a knee replaced and now he walks. I asked him if I should stop using a weighted vest to workout, something I was doing before the pain, but haven’t tried since. His response you can guess, “Try it. If it hurts, stop.”

“But if it hurts, the pain might come back for a while.”

“Oh yeah, it could be two to three months.”

It ended with him joking that he could write me a note to give to my wife to get out of doing dishes for a while. I wasn’t amused.

I don’t know exactly what I was looking for, but it wasn’t this. I suppose I’ll just keep doing my physio exercises, keep going to the gym, and if something hurts, I guess I just stop doing that thing.

Pedagogy and Activity

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“Here’s a great tool to help you…”

What inevitably comes next is a description of an activity devoid of pedagogy and purpose. As technology has crept into education, time and again I’ve seen the focus be on activity and ‘engagement’ but the so-called engagement is more about keeping a student’s attention rather than focusing on the learning intention; on the intended learning outcomes.

When achievement sneaks in, it’s not about student comprehension, but rather on improving test scores, a proxy for measuring success that is far from perfect. Again, this does not help with the practice of good teaching,

17 years ago I wrote that ‘Best Practice is still Practice’, and said, “What we don’t need is a bunch of processes labeled as ‘best practice’ to limit us from seeking something that is yet more effective.  Best practice is still just practice.” We also don’t need a lot of flashy new tools that pretend to be about our practice when really they are just activities that keep student engaged and occupied. Activities that don’t really focus on meaningfully engaging students as learners on a learning journey.

What’s the pedagogy behind the activity?

Closure rather than ending

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Maybe it’s just semantics but I think the word choices we make are important. Our words frame our understanding of the world.

I’ve been having a lot of ‘lasts’ recently as I head into retirement. My last interview for a hire, my last field trip, my last principal’s breakfast meeting, etc. For a while I was seeing these as endings, kind of a shutting of a door never to be opened again, with a sense of finality. But I’ve had a shift recently.

Now I think of these endings more like closure. It’s not about an ending as much as a sense of completion. Like putting the last piece of a puzzle in. When a performance ends, the show is over, it’s time to go home. When a puzzle is completed there isn’t an instant finality to it. Closure in this sense invites time to admire what was accomplished.

It’s a small shift in language, but a large shift in perspective. It’s not an ending, it’s closure.

It’s going to be tough

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A while ago my buddy, also named Dave, and I decided that we were going to Everest the Crunch: Travel 37 times up the Coquitlam Crunch, which is equivalent to the height of Mount Everest, in 48 hours. We’ve been doing the crunch regularly since January 2021, and today was number 239 since then.

Today was also a day when we went up the Crunch 6 times, and then walked down once (we only count it as 1 crunch because we only went down it a single time). We organized rides and drove our own cars up at the start and after 3 trips up, so that we could drive down as well.

Six is the most trips up we’ve done. We did 5 a while back then had a several week slowdown thanks to m sciatic pain that I was dealing with. The pain is gone, but it did set us back a fair bit. Today I realized just how much it set us back. We are just under 10 weeks away from our attempt to do 37 trips up this hill, and as of today the most we’ve done is 6… and the 6 took a lot out of me!

Like I shared in a video, we didn’t hydrate well enough.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZlCR2ykv9e/?igsh=ZGZvZGZocWRicnc1

Also, I think we ate too much protein and not enough carbs. But even fixing that next time, going 6 times up, just under 1/6th of what we’ll be doing in August, took more out of me than expected.

I think Dave and I will succeed with this challenge, but I’ll openly admit that it’s going to be a lot harder than I originally thought.

Odds and ends

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I spent a good part of the afternoon figuring out how I’m going to set up the new solar heaters I purchased for our above ground pool. I used to have 4 large panels that I laid across our garage roof, but I’m not going up on the roof anymore.

This was a decision I made at the start of last summer, deciding that it would be my last season using the roof panels. The process of pulling large plastic solar panels up on a roof and fastening them both together and to the roof is a bit challenging: Completely doable, but challenging. I could probably do it for another 10 years. But I don’t want to play the odds and so I’m putting an end to going on the roof.

The odds that I don’t want to play with are the fact that for older men over 50% of serious injuries and accidental deaths are from falls. The higher the fall, the great odds of it leading to death. A roof is a very high place to fall from. So at the start of pool season last year I decided that I was no longer going up on the roof. I don’t have a fear of heights, I don’t feel unstable. I just know that it’s easier to overestimate my capabilities as I get older, and I’d rather go up on the roof a few less times than possible rather than 1 more time than I should have.

I made a similar decision last summer. My buddy and I took scooters on a 10 minute ride from his house to a pizza place, where I had a couple beers with my pizza. Before heading home, I apologized to him and said I wanted to Uber home because I’m a lightweight with my alcohol and I didn’t want to ride the scooter home feeling a little inebriated.

Essentially, I’m reducing my injury risk, recognizing that even a small fall would mean significant recovery time at my age. This doesn’t mean that I’m living a life of minimizing the odds of every possible danger, but it does mean that at my age I’m getting smarter about when to end things and reduce the risk of injury.