Monthly Archives: August 2020

Getting back in gear

We had an incredible holiday planned this summer before COVID-19 hit the world. A trip to Barcelona, a cruise with stops in Spain and Italy, and a week in Portugal. This didn’t happen, but we still had a wonderful summer with BC based destinations. I had my email vacation auto reply set up, and for the first time in years I really ‘let go’ of work.

This week we’ve already had a few virtual meetings and I have one more today and tomorrow, before kicking it into high gear next week. But I have to admit that these meetings, where we are planning for September, have my mind racing as I think about the new school year.

The biggest things in my mind are:

1. For Coquitlam Open Learning – how do we maximize support and appropriately staff for an unknown influx of students?

2. For Inquiry Hub Secondary – how do we maximize the learning experience while focusing on safety, and also considering possible changes in phases?

In the end, much decision-making is out of individual control as our district makes a concerted effort to meet the needs of all learners. But unlike other schools, COL and iHub are different, and need special attention and considerations.

I don’t have answers to many questions yet, but I’m getting more comfortable in not having immediate answers, in living with ambiguity. But as High MacLeod says, “‘Learn to live with ambiguity’, but do not live in it.”

As we get into gear planning the new school year, I’m sure we are bound to find ourselves with more questions than answers. Patience, thoughtful questions, and priorities around care and safety of our students will help us find a good, supportive path for our schools and our learning communities.

Disrupting higher education

Universities and colleges are going to be around for a while, but two things are disrupting the need for many students to attend an expensive school for four or more years;

1. Targeted Certification

2. Coronavirus

Tackling the second one first, students are questioning the value of what they are paying to go to school, when suddenly most or all of their courses are online due to COVID-19. The interesting thing is that not all of them are going to head back to class and think that the experience is still worth it. Smaller universities are already struggling and if things don’t bounce back, the cost of doing business on a smaller scale are going to force costs to rise. Lower enrolment and higher costs are a double edged sword that some universities won’t survive.

As mentioned, targeted certification is another blow to the modern university. Have a look at this article Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree. For the cost of textbooks for a semester, Google is providing certification, in just 6 months, in fields where students can come out to decent paying jobs.

A few years back my nephew took an 18-month comprehensive course that cost a lot of money. The program could be paid up front, or by giving up a percentage of salary for the first 2 years after graduation. The skills training was so good and in demand, that most students took the expensive choice of paying up front, knowing they were likely going to land a 6-figure (or close to 6-figure) salary when they came out. It was a hard 18 months, but my nephew (who lives in California) landed a job with a Silicon Valley start-up soon after finishing this program.

Engineers, doctors and nurses, and other professions that require comprehensive certification will still require a university degree for quite some time now, but there is going to be a big shift to certifications and polytechnical schools.

I’m happy to have started higher education with a general arts degree that took me longer than 4 years to get. It was an amazing time. But I was able to get that degree with under $10,000 debt to my name. Many students today leave their first 4-year degree with much much more debt, and only the promise of more schooling before they can find a job and start paying back their debt.

Universities are becoming the place to either get professional degrees, or places for the affluent to spend a few years growing up, or a place for less affluent students to start accumulating debt. Meanwhile, job specific skills training and certification programs are sprouting up and challenging the need for many to go to university. This disruption is coming fast, and I think we are going to see many universities struggle to transition what they look like for a lot of students who will opt out of this path of higher education.

Back to time restricted eating

Other than about 6 weeks of Keto a couple years ago, and a few training diets more than half a life ago, I’ve never really dieted. That said, for over a year and a half now, I’ve tried to practice time restricted eating (also called Intermittent Fasting) five days a week – Sunday to Thursday night.

I have only been doing 14 hours fasting and much of that was sleeping. What it primarily does is restrict my unhealthy snacking after dinner, and delays breakfast, which I’ve never enjoyed preparing and eating.

Covid has messed up my schedule, summer made it worse. My good eating habits that I developed with restricting my eating window have all disappeared. So, along with my wife, we’ve decided to set a strict 5-hour window for eating for the next few weeks. We have only water, and a morning black coffee during our 19 hour no-eating restriction. When school starts I will move to 16-8, increasing my eating window to 8 hours.

It was weird to start this on a holiday to Kelowna. It limited our schedule of wine and cider tasting tours, but we filled our days with hikes and visits to the beach, and neither of us struggled with hunger after day 2. The only oddity was doing a long drive with no snacks.

There is a lot of research being done on the benefits of time restricted eating. I won’t go into it now, but I will say that it has three really positive affects for me:

1. It cuts out unhealthy snacking.

2. It stops me from getting ‘hangry’ – angry when I’m hungry. My sugar levels seem to stay in check and food (or lack of it) doesn’t come with mood swings.

3. It eliminates breakfast, which I don’t enjoy eating. (Breakfast is breaking the night’s fast, it’s not a morning meal time… technically I’m having breakfast whenever I choose to start eating after sleeping.)

I’m less than a week in, and I’m not sure this 5-hour eating window will be enough when I start pushing myself on my morning workouts again… but I’m really happy to have restarted my time restricted eating.

Nostalgic for Twitter of the past

I’m a huge fan of Twitter. I love it enough that I wrote an ebook about how to get started with it. I use it as a learning tool. I connect with amazing people on the platform, and I have made some wonderful friends along the way.

But recently I’ve struggled to stay engaged. It seems that anger is ever present. Fear is a persistent theme. Teachers with limited resources are asking others to help #clearthelist of teaching resources and items they want others to purchase for them on Amazon. I can’t even begin to talk about the vile that surfaces in political tweets.

I’m lucky that I’ve taken the time to create a great Twitter List of people I most enjoy conversing with and learning from. This reduces the distractions of things I don’t enjoy. But I just can’t help but wonder where tools like Twitter are heading, compared to where it came from?

Beyond sticking to my closed list, and ignoring the rest, I’m not sure how I will engage with Twitter going forward? I used to use it to fill me in on news, but the things that trend upward seem too negative. I used to go to my timeline to find engaging articles to read, now I spend more time editing my choices to focus on, rather than actually reading any links.

Maybe I lived in a safe bubble in the early days of Twitter, shielded from everything except my interests in education and learning? Maybe I allowed too much in? Maybe the tool itself is inviting the wrong kind of engagement? Maybe it’s time to take another break?

The Twitter of old was a really special place, and after spending some time on the tool this morning, I’m feeling nostalgic about what it used to mean to me.

Making time for great conversations

In the last year and a half I’ve been making time for an almost daily workout, and daily writes (here) as well as daily meditations. (See: My healthy living goals year-end reflection, with 5 key tips.)

On Tuesday I recorded a podcast with Valerie Irvine on Zoom, which I finally posted today. This was my first podcast since sharing my conversation about learning at home during the pandemic, with Dave Sands in April. I would like to podcast weekly because I love the conversations and they help me think more, and more deeply, about education and learning. However, I’ve got to figure out a schedule that works and is consistent. I’m someone that needs my routines in order to make things work. I’m not a multitasker, and I know this about myself.

I watch things like this and think that maybe I have ADHD tendencies. 😉

@heygudeI forget what I was supposed to be doing when I decided to make this ##adhd ##attentiondeficitdisorder ##add ##attentiondeficienthyperactivitydisorder

♬ original sound – erikgude

My point is, (while I still remember it), that I have to create uninterrupted time to have these conversations, and also to produce and share the podcasts. I’m on holidays now and trying to produce the recording in 15-20 minute chunks made the process twice as long. It won’t get easier when school starts. But I love having these conversations and want to have the regularly. Here are three more of my favourites podcasts from the archives:

Remi Kalir on educator agency, Josh Abrams on Meridian Academy, and Shelly Sanchez Terrell on bringing passions into reality.

There aren’t any I’ve done so far that I haven’t listened to after the fact at least twice. I’m going to figure out a schedule, probably all done on the weekends, and make this as routine as I have my other goals that I track. I need to make regular time for more of these great conversations.

Foot operated buttons

Crosswalks, elevators, doors, and kiosks are examples of things that we operate with our hands. They are frequently used contact points that can spread coronavirus. We see people using their elbows, car keys, or the bottom of their shirts to shield from directly touching these high use contact points. Soon we will see the level of these contact points lowered so that we can operate them with our feet.

It’s easy to push a door, door latch, or a button with your shoe. It makes sense that we use our covered feet rather than our uncovered hands to do this. I’m not sure if we will see hand-level options removed, or just foot level options added. To accommodate wheelchair use or impaired vision, it would help to have both options.

Also, design of these lower, foot-powered options will require significant durability improvements, people are far more likely to kick a button much harder than they would press one with their finger. And these buttons or push bars will need to be larger than the options for fingers and hands. But I think we will see these options, and automatically opening doors far more frequently in the coming year.

Water fountains are an example where this already started to happen and it makes sense that we will see this trend amplified.

What else will we see being foot operated in the future?

How do we get to ‘YES’?

I watched this Peter Hutton TEDx talk tonight and more than one part struck a very familiar chord with me and the things we do at Inquiry Hub.

The part of the talk I want to discus is this one:

“We have a saying that ‘Yes is the default’. So, the firth thing about that is if any staff, student, or parent has a suggestion or a request, the answer has to be ‘Yes’. Unless it would take too much time, too much money, or negatively impact on somebody else.” ~ Peter Hutton

My mantra over the last 8 years at Inquiry Hub has been:

“How do we get to ‘Yes’?”

The reality is that at our school the teachers are always trying to say ‘Yes’ already. Or, they are trying to guide students to a path where ‘Yes’ can happen. If it gets to me, there is already a reason for it to be a ‘No’, and it’s my job to figure out how do we get to ‘Yes’ when a teacher already couldn’t get there?

Here are 3 concrete examples:

  1. Students wanted to put our garden onto the concrete and not just in our courtyard. They were told ‘No’ by the district, because it would be in the way of maintenance vehicles. I had the students go back to the district and ask how far out it could go and not still be in the way? They didn’t get what they wanted, but the small encroachment onto the pavement was a win for them.
  2. In our second year one of our students wanted to grow hemp in our garden. We were a young school, still not fully developed, and our courtyard has no fencing, and is open to the public. I could only see bad (misinformed) publicity coming from this. I suggested a couple indoor plants and the student wasn’t interested. In the end, I could see a lot of downside beyond the project, and felt I had to say ‘No’.
  3. A student wanted to bring his Jeep engine block into the school to work on it. He had his own hoist and equipment. We don’t have the supervision and it would be completely unsafe, and would break all kinds of rules put in place to protect students. This was a hard ‘No’. So, we invited him to bring in anything he could lift without a hoist, and he could work on it with hand tools, or electric tools with supervision. We did have to have a few conversations about flushing gas/oil smells out of the parts he worked on before they came to school. But overall it worked out. We simply couldn’t bring items big enough to crush someone, or their finger or foot, into the school to be worked on.

Our default tends to be ‘Yes’, but that default doesn’t always work. When we can’t get it to work, then next question is, “How do we get to ‘Yes’? The answer isn’t always ideal, but it means something to our community for staff and students to know that we are all at least trying to get to ‘Yes’.

~ Also Shared on Pair-a-Dimes For Your Thoughts.

 

A step behind

I asked my daughter if she saw this new way of cutting a mango?

“Dad, you are so behind on your Tik Tok trends, I saw that ages ago.”

Yes, I’m behind. We all are in different areas of our lives. There is always a new tool, a new approach, a new technique that you will bump into.

The iPhone did everything with one button, now the new ones don’t have a button. People try to put gas in Teslas. Light switches you touch instead of toggle. Apps update, move things around, and add features you need to stumble on to know they are there. And now even the rules for social engagement keep changing.

No one is ‘caught up’, everyone is a step behind somewhere. These days, that’s normal. Things change quickly. Some would say too quickly. But things change, and we catch up.

We just need to give ourselves a little time. We just need to accept some ambiguity and unknown. We need to be unafraid to ask questions. We need to know that it’s ok to feel a little behind… as long as we aren’t stagnating, we are moving forward.

Fasting test

For a while now, I’ve been practicing time restricted eating, and it has really helped me control the amount of junk food I eat. It has also really helped me control my mood. I used to get ‘hangry‘… angry/upset when I’m hungry. It was so obvious, my secretary would tell me that I need to eat… she’d know if I missed lunch. Time restrictions forced me to find balance that I lacked, and this helped me level my mood.

I have not been doing time restricted eating over the summer and my eating has been out of whack! This has left me feeling low energy and lazy. I’ve been dealing with an upset stomach for quite a while. It had to stop. So yesterday afternoon I decided to try a longer fast, and I only had lemon and chilli powder water last night and today, other than small servings of maple syrup in my drink for dinner and lunch. Fasting with this drink wasn’t hard, and I’m breaking the fast tomorrow morning… but today my mood definitely went to hangry. My wife let me know that she really noticed it came back.

Now I need to cut out the junk and get myself back on track. I think after tomorrow I’ll stop eating breakfast. Or rather, I will break my fast later in the day. That’s what works to balance me during the school year, I’m sure that I can continue to enjoy my summer, and have delicious food, just start later in the day.

I won’t make long fasts like this a regular thing, but it has been a great kickstart to get me back into a healthy routine.

The energy of the sun

I’m sitting in the morning sun, feeling the rays warm my shoulders and back. I love this feeling. It’s not so hot that I feel I need suntan location, and yet it’s warm enough to bring the heat to my attention.

While energy can’t be created or destroyed, we know it can be transformed from one form to another. The rays of the sun initiate the process of photosynthesis, which creates sugars and gives us the mass of trees. What an amazing thing! But going further, when we say that energy can’t be destroyed, it certainly can be tapped and taken advantage of. There is an incredible abundance of energy in our world. While in a closed system the amount of energy stays constant, we do not live in a closed system.

We live about 150 million kilometres away from our sun, a blazing ball of energy that constantly sends a massive amount of energy our way. It actually sends that energy out in every direction and we get in the way of a infinitesimally small amount of it as the earth sits within gravitational equilibrium of this glowing fireball of power.

It is the earth’s battery, and it is the ultimate provider of light, energy, and life. We’ve only just begun to understand how to tap this power, and one day we will learn to store it in such a way that energy will be almost completely free. How different will our world be then?

On a small yet very significant scale, the poor will have light without kerosene, and formerly forested areas in places that now have scarcely enough wood could be allowed to grow again, without the needy scrounging for firewood. On a large scale, industry could pollute far less with the lack of need of fossil fuels to run machinery.

Imagine a world where energy is literally created out of thin air? Tapped from the power of our sun, and shared wherever needed. It would be a very different world!