Monthly Archives: January 2020

No longer tool agnostic?

I wrote and believe that we should be ‘tool agnostic‘ in schools,

“We should ensure every student has a good tool available to them, and we should ensure we use these tools when it benefits to have the whole class on the same tool. However we should also give students choice when we can, and be tool agnostic… as long as the tool they use does not hinder their ability to accomplish the tasks they want or need to do.”

I still believe this, but I’m noticing that the suite of tools we are providing are locking kids in to a degree. If I am in a Microsoft district and I’m going to collaborate on a presentation, I’m going to find it easier to use PowerPoint since everyone already has collaboration accounts. Likewise with Google and their slide presentation tool.

A Microsoft using teacher doesn’t have to leave OneNote to mark and give feedback to a PowerPoint, but does need to for Google slides. A Google school might also be a Chromebook school, reducing choice of tools even further.

It’s one thing to say we are tool agnostic, and yet another to realize we are pushing students into using common tools for ease of use for both students and teachers.

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, it provides equity with ever improving tools, but I am recognizing that we are moving students away from being tool agnostic and it’s something to think about.

The Kindness of Strangers

Imagine you are walking with your kid in a foreign country. You’ve just flown in and arrived downtown by public transportation, suitcases in tow, and you are a 5 block walk away from your hotel. Your kid steps of a curb incorrectly, you hear a pop, and a scream, and there is your kid, buckled just off the edge of the curb, ankle in hand, crying. Any movement of the ankle results in a scream of agony.

You move off the road and a few people have gathered to help. They tell you there is a hospital just 3 blocks away, and point in the opposite direction of the hotel. You realize that you need to carry your kid and there is no way you can also carry all of your suitcases.

You look up at one of the strangers around you and say, “Can you please do me a favour? Here is my business card, can you please take my bags to our hotel and ask them to store them until we get there?” The person agrees. They head to the hotel, suitcases in tow, you head the other way to the hospital holding your kid.

What are the chances that your bags will be at the hotel when you return from the hospital?

– – –

I was listening to The Tim Ferriss Podcast with his guest, magician Penn Jillette, and Penn had some interesting insights into the kindness of strangers.

He said he doesn’t believe in evil, and that if you look at the vast majority of people in the world they are good and kind.

If someone seeks you out to ‘help you’, their motives might need more scrutiny… but if you get to randomly choose someone, anyone, to help you, then the odds are unbelievably high that this stranger will be good.

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Going back to the scenario:

What are the chances that your bags will be at the hotel when you return from the hospital?

I’d guess pretty close to a hundred percent, what about you?

What does your answer tell you about the kind of world you believe we live in? What experiences have you had to prove or disprove the belief in an inherent kindness of strangers?

Dear me, take my advice, it’s free!

I’ve been writing my daily posts for over 6 months now and some of them come off as if I’m writing some sort of advice column… like yesterday’s post on Undermining Self-Sabotage.

I say things like,

It’s the small thing that you can do today that move you to a bigger goal. Small, repeatable things that become habits. These small things undermine self-sabotage. When you surround yourself with small positive, incremental changes, your trajectory changes, and the people around you notice.

But despite addressing the writing to you, admittedly, I’m talking to myself. The book I shared in yesterday’s post, Atomic Habits by James Clear, was very influential to me. I read it at a time when I was making some really positive changes in some areas of my life, but not in others. I still have more work to do.

If I come off as preachy, or like I’m sharing some sagely advice, please know that I’m doing it from a position where I’m trying to take my own advice too. Atomic Habits is one of many great books I listened to last year. If I don’t actively reflect and write about what I’m learning, I won’t really have learned anything. And if I change the pronouns in the quote above to I/me/myself then to me my writing sounds self-centered, and even pretentious.

By the very nature of writing a public journal, I find myself talking to you, the reader, and you get to share my journey. So, when I give it, please feel free to take my advice, or to take my advice with a grain of salt. In reality, I’m talking to myself, and sharing it in the open. Free advice from me, to me, and as it turns out, for you too… if you find it useful.

– – –

Oh, and by the way, if you think some of the things I say are full of crap, please let me know! It’s bound to happen. When I’m trying to pump out a different idea every day, at some point(s) I’ll be deluding myself in some way, but I’m probably too close to the idea to see the error in my thinking. That’s when I would most appreciate a comment or a question to help me learn and grow.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from James Clear,

“I didn’t start out as a writer. I became one through my habits“

Thank you for joining me in the practice of this daily habit.

Undermining Self-Sabotage

It’s amazing how much people undermine themselves:

  • The dieter with tons of food they shouldn’t eat in the house.
  • The person with a deadline watching one, or two, or three more tv show before getting to work.
  • The victim of bullying seeking negative attention that makes them an easier target.
  • The emotionally struggling person finding friends that needs rescuing and more support than they can healthily give.
  • A perfectionist placing such high demands on themselves that they can do nothing well.
  • The stressed who relate everything they do to stress, so stress is always on their minds.

Here are two quotes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits:

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

And;

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

The things we do, and the plans and systems we put in place, and the habits we develop here and now are what determine the outcomes we are heading towards. Part of self-sabotage is looking forward and not believing we can achieve our goals, so why make the effort? The targets are too big, or too far away.

It’s the small thing that you can do today that move you to a bigger goal. Small, repeatable things that become habits. These small things undermine self-sabotage. When you surround yourself with small positive, incremental changes, your trajectory changes, and the people around you notice. Maybe it’s possible that you can help change the trajectory of others around you as well? Undermine self-sabotage by making small positive changes can be contagious.

Appreciating Art

The saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is one that holds true when it comes to my appreciation of art. I have very particular tastes and it drives my wife crazy.

Whenever we redo a room and look at decorating the walls, my wife focuses on colour. She’ll find a nice painting or photograph and either take a picture of it to send to me, or she buys it she keeps the receipt, knowing full well that I might see it and hate it. This isn’t the most annoying attribute I have, but it certainly ranks high up in the annoying scale. It’s not that my wife is bringing home artwork that is ugly, it’s that I will look at it and instantly see something I don’t like.

I think part of it comes from years of taking photographs. When I look through the lens of a camera, I want there to be balance. Balance of lighting and exposure, balance of composition, balance of colour. That doesn’t mean symmetry and it doesn’t mean colour coordination. In fact, I like when a picture is able to break the rules of photography. For instance, it is best to follow the rule of 3rds in photos, placing key items in the image on the quadrant lines of a photo cut into 9 rectangles, 1/3 lines both horizontally and vertically. But there still has to be balance they way I described above, especially when that rule is broken.

My lack of appreciation for a work of art can be intellectual, where I think the image lacks balance in a specific way, and my lack of appreciation can also be visceral. I can look at a painting and the entire aesthetic bugs me… or in the same way an image can speak to me, and I love it.

That said, I don’t consider myself an art critic and I don’t go around telling friends that their choice of art work is ugly. But at home, I don’t want to look at a painting or photograph that I can’t appreciate and admire.

As I said, I know part of this pickiness comes from taking photos, but I wonder if the aesthetic I appreciate is something that others would agree with or if my art appreciation is strictly in the eye of this beholder?

—

PS. It has taken my wife over 20 years to stop me from buying my own clothes and now I get compliments all the time… that never happened with things I purchased for myself. My pickiness doesn’t make me necessarily think I have good taste. 🙂

Junk food

I’ve been craving sugar recently. I keep finding myself drawn to sweet foods and candy. It starts off as a nibble, and once I’ve made the initial break in discipline, then it becomes easy to keep going.

It’s ok to treat yourself, but this seems different. It seems lazy, it seems as though I am not making a choice. The snacks are choosing me.

So now I’m going to have to change that, but I need to frame it properly in my mind. Cutting out all junk food seems like a punishment, a self-imposed restriction that I must endure. But I’m not sure how else to think about it?

Maybe I just need to buy myself some healthy comfort foods. Maybe I should start drinking berry shakes again in the morning, to get some natural sugars in me. This is an example of something delicious and still quite healthy.

I’m not opposed to having a bit of junk food every now and then, but I like having control over the decision. I also like that decision to be about me making good choices, rather than about me avoiding bad ones.

Going the extra inch

I think this idea came from Terry O’Reilly’s book, ‘This I know’, but I listened to it a couple years ago and am not 100% sure? The idea is to go the extra inch, rather than the extra mile.

The easiest place to see this in customer service. The cashier who takes a little extra care in bagging your items. The waiter who tops up your water glass before you need to ask. The hot dog vendor who asks if you’d like your bun toasted. The hotel front desk clerk who asks if you’d like a city map with local restaurants, or who remembers your name the next time you see them.

So many people talk about going the extra mile, but really it’s just an extra inch that can make the difference, (or for that matter the extra centimetre). It doesn’t often take much work or effort to make someone’s day, to provide better than average service, or to simply be accommodating to someone you love and care about.

A kind gesture, a simple change in tone, a thoughtful question, a smile. It’s not about going terribly far out of your own way, it’s simply going the extra inch.

What I find interesting is that it’s often easier to do this with strangers rather than those you are around daily. We seem to take advantage of our relationships and not make the extra inch of effort with people we spend time with every day. Instead, we are quicker to snap a response, or to be snide, or just impatient. We feel like the extra inch is actually an extra mile.

It’s not. In this way, life is a game of inches, and it’s much more fun when we are able to see this and just go that extra inch for those that can do the same for us more frequently, because we are around them more often.

Around the global campfire

When I think about sitting around a campfire, I think of camping in the summer with family and friends. No matter the plans for the day, the evening brings everyone together, adults and kids, sitting around a crackling fire, with marshmallows, s’mores, and poking sticks stirring the flames. The fire is a communal event, with laughter and storytelling weaved into light conversations, in a common shared experience.

I came across this quote recently:

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. –Laurie Anderson

Think about how technology has changed our storytelling! Books and movies have captivated our imaginations, and the internet allows us all to share our ideas around a global campfire. We have this amazing ability to communicate with each other now, and how is it being used?

Since we are truly at a stage where we can sit around a global campfire, what stories are we choosing to tell?

Be careful out there

If you want a lesson on overconfidence you need not look farther than Vancouver Lower Mainland drivers in the snow: Speeding, tires spinning, cars fishtailing, passengers pushing… and parked cars stuck on angles or with hazards flashing. A good snowstorm out here means mayhem on the streets.

However, if you ask people if they are a good at driving in the snow, probably 85% will say better than average, and at least half would say they are better than most. Do the math, that’s a lot of cocky, overconfident people! This reminds me of the ‪Dunning-Kruger effect:‬

‪In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.‬ (Wikipedia)

I’m not a perfect driver by any means, but in snow I slow down, I might gear down, and I look around… I’m far more aware of other drivers around me. I’ve hit black ice before, and for those that have never experienced this, it’s scary at any speed. It’s a humbling experience driving a car that you have no control over. It wakes you up to the potential danger.

Today I share a caution. Slow down! Be cautious. Be defensive. A few years ago I lost a dear friend, (who was the safest driver I knew growing up), to a snowstorm accident.

Be careful out there!

In the zone

I am not a natural athlete. A great coach once said to me after a practice, “Dave, there are two kinds of people in the world, the talented and the hard workers… you are a hard worker.” He was right, and I appreciated his honesty.

I played water polo. My first year, Grade 11, I was last off the bench and easily the weakest player. I was always the slowest swimmer on the team and my stroke efficiency was awful. But I worked my butt off!

I’m pretty sure not playing any organized sports before Grade 11 hindered my abilities. I had a lot of catching up to do to transfer pickup soccer and street hockey skills, and make them worthy of competitive team play. I worked hard and got better, but I played with teammates who understood the game, and some who had laser accuracy with their shots, and many who could swim much faster and more efficiently than me.

But sometimes I could get in the zone. Sometimes the game slowed down for me and I could see more action around me. Sometimes I could see the play forming and feel the rhythm of the game. I didn’t have a switch I could turn on, I didn’t know what I could do to put myself in the zone. I didn’t have control of it.

It has been years since I was in a similar athletic situation, but in a pickup basketball game on Friday I felt it again. It was wonderful to remember what it was like to be fully present in a game. It’s a pretty special thing when you can feel yourself in the zone.

I saw it again on Saturday night. I went to a WHL (hockey) game, Vancouver vs Spokane, and in the opening minutes a Spokane player got my attention. I pointed him out to my buddy and said, ‘that one has talent’. He scored 4 points in the game. He was in the zone.

I think the truly talented players know how to get there at will. I’m not sure if it can be trained into you through hard work, if it is a learned skill, or if it is talent? Does thousands of hours of practice help create this, or do you have to be pre-loaded with a natural ability? What do the best athletes do to put themselves in the zone?