Monthly Archives: September 2019

Work and Flow

Today was busy, but I never got into a good workflow. It’s the nature of being a principal. I had several meetings, and they all went well: an admin meeting, a parent meeting, a teacher meeting, and several meetings with students… some planned, some not. I had to organize a lunch, and I had to problem solve an issue with secretaries. I had a phone call with a vice principal about a student, and had another student visited to share work his class had done.

Another unplanned meeting with a student and parent after school went really well, but also took away some key time I had scheduled to create a form that I need to share with some online teachers in all our high schools. That form will be completed tonight or tomorrow morning before this is posted. It was the main thing on my ‘to do’ list today. That ‘to do’ list of 7 items was only down to 6 items when I left for the day. I had more unread email at the end of the day than the start of the day. Tomorrow morning the list will only be down to 5 items after I get that form done, the email will be a bit lower.

Some days you can get into a flow and check off things that need to get done, one after the next. Other days can be consumed productively yet productivity is low. The biggest challenge for me is to not let too many days like this pile up.

Buyer Beware!

Do you shop online? If you do, you probably rely on customer reviews to help you vet the quality and reliability of a product, and the company selling the product. However, those reviews are being gamed in a number of ways!

I’ve always known that some reviews are fake. Click on a profile of a reviewer and you see that they have recommended 15 products. Check those reviews out and it turns out that most of them are for the same product under different listings. Does that person really need 12-15 of the same product when you need only one? Are they buying, for example, 14 Bluetooth headphones and rotating through them daily for 2 weeks, then reviewing each one, but only bothering to do that for this one product? Unlikely.

However, I just came across an entire product line search on Amazon where the vast majority of products, iPhone headphone jacks, didn’t only have fake reviews, the items being sold had reviews for completely different products!

What made this worse was that some of these were ‘sponsored’ and one of them was marked ‘Amazon’s Choice’.

Looking at the first 8 reviews on display for this product, 7 of them are high ratings for a computer hard drive, and the one actual review for the product was a 1-star review saying the product stopped working after a couple weeks.

I don’t always go to the reviews when I see high star ratings by many reviewers, but the price seemed way too low to be good. This is definitely a case of buyer beware! The scammers are gaming Amazon, and I’m sure they are gaming other sites as well… don’t get ‘star struck’ and be sure to read a few of the reviews.

Stretching and flexibility

Right now, I’m sitting in an upright position on the floor, with my legs at about a 60° angle, my knees straight, and I’m trying to lean my body forward as I speak into my phone and doing voice to text for this post. I’m not very flexible and to do this I actually have to arch my back to keep me from falling backwards. For me flexibility in my hips and hamstrings has always been a major issue resulting in at the very least daily discomfort, and often pain in my lower back. And even though I know that stretching is extremely important, in my mind the discomfort of stretching sits on the pain continuum rather than on the discomfort continuum. I hate it. But at my age it’s a choice of doing it or losing even more flexibility and suffering more pain in my later years. So here I am, stretching the very muscles I hate to stretch, after warming up with some cardio on the treadmill for 20 minutes.

I was thinking about my distaste for physical stretching and flexibility and it made me wonder, where else in my life am I inflexible? Where else do I need to stretch? I can think of a few patterns in my communication that are ineffective. But I also think I’m blind to the areas I probably need to stretch more. Unlike my back pain that tells me I must physically stretch, the pain points in other areas of my life aren’t big enough to make me see them.

I think human nature makes us more likely to get defensive about our more inflexible areas of our personality, rather than openly seeing them as areas to stretch and grow. It hurts to admit our non-physical flaws, flaws we can’t see. But these flaws that we hide from ourselves, and get defensive about, are the flaws where we probably need to stretch ourselves the most.

What are the pain points that you experience? Are you stretching yourself in those areas?

Flawed message

I’ve seen this post a few times now and while it has a message that will get a lot of ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ on social media, it completely misses the points it should want to make.

Here are my 2 biggest issues with the post:

1. It pits the school against parents, saying ‘these are the things you are responsible for’ rather than, we need to work together to instil these things in our children’. The approach is an attack rather than saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. No, instead of that it says, “you do your part, let us do ours”… “You teach manners and etiquette, we will do that teaching thing.”

2. Here is the teaching thing shared in the poster,

“Here at school, on the other hand, we teach language, math, history, geography, physics, sciences, and physical education. We only reinforce the education that children receive at home from their parents.”

This is extremely problematic thinking about what a school does or should do. It says, ‘we are about teaching subjects, not students’. It says content and subjects are the purpose of school, rather than helping to create critical thinkers, and problem solvers, and compassionate, educated citizens.

Signs like this water down what a good school should be doing, while taking a jab at parents… Parents who we should see as partners, rather than blaming them for not making perfectly polite and compliant little learners, so teachers can focus on ‘subject matter’.

Waving a disapproving finger at parents accomplishes nothing. Sharing a poster like this also accomplishes nothing, because the ideas it supports are flawed.

The Vampire Rule for Email

I apply a key vampire rule to give my staff a break from work emails.

After 6 PM staff only get emails from me if the email is invited in. In other words, if they have asked me a question and want an answer, then a response has been invited. But if that invitation for a response isn’t there, I delay email delivery until the next morning.

So like a vampire at the front door, I can’t enter (with email) if I have something to share that is not initiated (and therefore invited in) by my staff. New topics are set to be delivered early the next morning.

From dinner time on, and on weekends, the vampire invitation rule applies for my outgoing emails to staff.

Likes, likes, and more likes

I am fascinated by the whole process of ‘Liking’ something on social media. So many people use it in different ways. For a long time, my ‘liking’ habits looked like this:

  • Facebook: Family, a few friends, ignore everything else.
  • Instagram: I love the photo for it’s artistic qualities, or ‘No like for you!’
  • LinkedIn: Great article, a like will probably also get a share and/or a comment too.
  • Twitter: I really like what you said and want to ‘keep’ it, or someone shared something of mine and I want to thank them.

But that has evolved… or rather devolved. Now a ‘Like’ is just an acknowledgement. I shifted to this unconsciously as I’ve watched others do the same. It wasn’t intentional or thought out at all. I miss being a lurker on Facebook, not caring if others knew I came to visit things they shared or not. I miss seeing my favorites on Instagram only being wonderful photographs. I miss going to my ‘Likes’ on Twitter and only seeing things worth reading again.  I’m still not that much of a ‘liker’ but I definitely ‘like’ far more than I used to.

I’m not sure I’m going to change my habits back? It feels rude. Isn’t that interesting? I feel an obligation to be more generous, more ‘like’-able. I share an anniversary photo on Facebook, someone takes the time to send us well-wishes, I guess I should like their comment. I share something on Twitter and someone responds. I don’t have a response in return, so I should like their tweet as my response/acknowledgement. Someone shares a wonderful family moment on Instagram, I should be nice and like it, after all, they liked my family photo. And so suddenly my habits above became watered down to things I should do to be polite on social media.

We have moved to a world of likes, likes, and more likes… and I’m not sure I like it?

Reducing email

Here is something that I’ve done the past couple years with my staff, to help reduce email.

I have a slide that I present to (all 3 of) my schools in one of the few meetings I have with them all together. This slide, and my description of it, breaks down how to connect with me:

1. Can it wait for a face-to-face meeting? If so, no need to do any of the items below.

2. Call me. I get a phone call, it means come now! This doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

3. Text me. I’m trying to reduce this with #4, but if you need an answer, or would like me to come, without it being an emergency, a text is fine.

4. Microsoft Teams. No more ‘reply-all’ discussions in email! Teams has 2 key benefits to email. First, the conversations are contextualized – I have no idea what’s coming in for email, but when I have a notification in one of my teams, I know the group and topic of the message. Secondly, my teams get priority over the most recent email.

Also, rather that texts, @message me on Teams… I’m going to look here first, before email, to deal with my teams first.

5. Email. Really only used to follow up on emails from outside the teams, such as a parent asking a question or sharing something to be shared with me.

—

My final point, I describe a couple very specific circumstances to ‘double-dip’ (such as texting me to deal with a very sensitive email communication that I should address quickly). But, in general I emphasize that double-dipping shouldn’t happen. Choose one means of communication for a specific issue.

What I’m hoping to achieve isn’t less communication with my team, but rather more focussed and timely communication with them. This does not happen when their communication is buried in my email.

Potential

This time of year, the word ‘potential’ resonates with me. There is so much potential in a new school year! What will be accomplished? What surprises await?

What questions can we ask to maximize the potential we and our students have? Here are a few that might be worth asking:

What will I do to build a good culture in my school and my classroom?

What can I do to inspire my students to go beyond the curriculum?

What can I do to support open communication between myself, my students, and their parents/caregivers?

How can I extend the learning beyond the walls of my classroom?

How can I connect my school and my classroom to the community?

What questions and challenges can I give my students to help them become more resilient problem solvers?

The questions we ask help to define the directions we go in, and the goals we want to achieve.

What questions would help you and your students meet or even exceed their potential?

Pocket Watches

My wife owns an Apple Watch. She loves it. I won’t get one because I already feel too tied to my phone, and I don’t want the added distraction. Before getting one, my wife would carry her phone and wear a watch, now they are one and the same.

I have reverted back to the era of pocket watches. No, I don’t own an old-style pocket watch, I just have my phone. But, I haven’t worn a watch in years, and I tell the time by my phone… which I keep in my pocket. I store my ‘timekeeper’ in my pocket.

I’m sure there is still a market for wrist (and even pocket) watches, but excluding phones and phone accessories, that has to be a dying market compared to sales in the last century.

What about in the next century? Surely we won’t be keeping our phones in our pockets, and we won’t be using these phones to tell time. There won’t be any pocket watches of any kind but for novelty. So what will we have in place of these tools?

Will the technology be embedded into us? Will we be wearing contacts that display the time with a simple motion of our eyes, or even by a thought? Will we look at our bare wrist or open palm and ‘see’ data there? And if we achieve this, what other things will become trivially redundant like the pocket watch?

I don’t feel nostalgia when I think of these things. I’m excited about the possibilities, but I do wonder how these tools will adjust our behaviour? After all, I’m not one of those people that just jumped at the idea of putting my phone on my wrist. As we adopt and accept technology into our lives, we do need to think about the unintended consequences. A person only took their pocket watch out of their pocket to tell the time. People looked at their wrists only to tell time. That’s no longer the case. People look at their phones far more than to make phone calls And tell time.

I’m writing this on my phone now. I’m blogging from my phone. I’ve also got headphones on, listening to music from the same phone. Will this glorified phone and pocket watch be something people use 20, 40 or 100 years from now? I don’t think so. It will likely not be a tool we put in our pocket. How will this change our behaviour? I’m sure it will be more convenient, but what unintended consequences will come with these new tools?

Clouded Vision

I have come to realize that very often I see things differently than others. I’m a big picture, rather than detail oriented, person. Yet even when I talk to other big picture thinkers, my perspective seems different… I’m tempted to say off-kilter. The more I learn, the more I realize I’m somewhat clouded in my perspective; somewhat idiosyncratic; somewhat full of shit. 🤪

I am confident, yet part of me wonders why anyone would give someone like me so much responsibility? I am contemplative, yet my thoughts are often scattered. I am decisive, yet I often question my decision-making.

I don’t think I’m the only one that is like this. Many people have clouded vision. When we are angry we are ‘seeing red’ and when we are optimistic we are seeing things through ‘Rose-coloured glasses’. Hmmm.

I’m not sitting here thinking I’m delusional and in need of help. I’m a pretty confident person, rational, and pretty smart too. But I’ve started to realize that my observations of the real world are cloudier than I may have thought. Or at least my ability to observe the same world as others is a greater challenge than I thought. And I think it’s healthy to question how clear we see things, at least in relationship to how others see those same things.

How clear is your vision?