Monthly Archives: February 2021

Cruise ships and education

It’s going to be a long time before cruise ships are going to reintegrated into people’s holiday schedules. Covid-19 has probably hit their market as hard as any other market. I actually had my first cruise planned through the Mediterranean last summer, but with that cancelled and refunded, I have no plans to ‘do’ a cruse any time soon.

The pandemic has also massively disrupted schools… but I fear that things will be business as usual soon, and kids will be ‘doing’ school just like they used to.

What was learned from remote learning and altered schedules?

What skills became more important?

What skills and competencies should we focus on?

What can students do at school besides going to block after block of classes?

I hope that we don’t just jump back into the way things used to be. Just as many will be cautious about getting on a cruise ship any time soon, we should also be cautious about heading back to school like it was in 2019.

Rewind

A year ago we were heading towards the March break and, at the end of February, had no idea that we would return from the break doing remote learning. I was recovering from breaking my kneecap, and not mentioning Covid-19 or physical distancing yet here on my Daily-Ink. That changed in March.

What a year it has been! Part of me wants to call it a rollercoaster ride, part of me wants to call it a long straight drive on a deserted road through the prairies. No matter how you look at this past year, it is nothing any of us expected a year ago.

Rewind to the end of February 2011, I was a principal in China, and found out I’d be coming back to BC to be vice principal of the adult learning centre. This would lead me to my current position both with Coquitlam Open Learning and co-founding Inquiry Hub.

Rewind to February 2001 and my wife and I had a 1 year old who completely changed our lives. February 2002 our second was born.

Rewind to 1991 and I had not graduated on time from university and went to a different university to finish my degree, choosing this school so that I could play varsity water polo. This brought me back home and I ended up lifeguarding and coaching at a high school. I wouldn’t be a teacher today if I hadn’t made this move and got experience working with and coaching students.

How will I look at February 2021 a decade from now? Will it be a blur in the covid years, or will it be stepping out into a post-covid frontier? Maybe that’s going to be February 2022… I think we will have to keep driving the long prairie road for a while, and look forward to slow and gradual changes in the coming year.

Headspace

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day inside my own head. I don’t know if I’m the only one that experiences this sensation (or rather lack of sensation) or if it’s a quirk of the human condition we all experience? I was able to do my job, and I could interact with others, but I felt more like an observer than a participant. I wasn’t fully present.

This isn’t a headspace that I particularly enjoy. It is one where I don’t feel fully engaged in the world. I feel like a visitor in a foreign land, a stranger that vaguely understands my surroundings. I have to work to stay focused on a conversation because my thinking is too loud but not terribly interesting. I feel somewhat disengaged, not just from others but from myself.

Thankfully, the feeling is gone this morning. I don’t like to spend too much time ‘there’. It’s like the world outside my head is a movie that I must watch, but don’t really want to. Reading this now I feel like this should be titled head-case rather than headspace and wonder if someone reading this will recommend psychotherapy… but I also suspect that others will fully understand this experience. Is it really just me, or do others have these moments too?

I imagine for some people this can feel scary. For others, comfortable. For some they can put themselves here, for others they can’t leave. For me it is infrequent, it is not something I can talk my way out of, and it seldom lasts more than a day. It’s just a headspace that I sometimes get into… a mode of observing my own participation in the world around me, yet not feeling present.

Cold shower

Unexpected snow has delayed my Daily-Ink today… Shovelling the driveway is taking priority and I’ll get this out tonight. But this is connected to the idea of the post, because I really bundle up just to do something like clearing that white, fluffy, frigid stuff off of my driveway.

Cold showers:

I hate the cold. Can’t stand feeling a chill. I blame it on being born in the Caribbean. In Barbados as a kid, when I was at the beach and it started to rain, tourists would get into the water, since they are getting wet anyway. I’d get out of the water because without the sun shining, the water was too cold for me.

Recently I’ve been turning the hot water off at the end of my showers. I let the water hit the top of my head and wait for it to go cold. Then I move so the water hits my chest and I turn in a circle, getting the water first to hit my core, then down my arms and legs.

By my first turn, my breath is taken away. I actually feel like it’s hard to breathe. I only do this for about 15 seconds but it feels longer. Even after I turn the water off my breathing is shallow and takes a moment to recover.

Then two things happen, first, I feel a tingling sensation and I feel wide awake. This feeling is better than my first coffee! Next, I open my shower curtain and grab my towel. Usually when I do this I feel an uncomfortable chill, but instead the air feels comfortable. So rather than getting a chill from the contrast of hot water to cold air, I feel comfortable.

Fifteen seconds of chilly agony, followed by a huge payoff. I’m going to keep doing this, but I might end up taking slightly longer showers as I convince myself to turn the hot water off.

I’ve got a friend who asks me to join him for a polar bear swim each new year. I’m a step closer, but it might still be a few years before I am willing to take the plunge… if I ever do!

Face-to-face Conferences

While I’m looking forward to our Professional Development Day this coming Friday, I wouldn’t be being honest if I said that I wasn’t missing conferences. I’ll be attending from my laptop, alone in my office. I won’t be going to a large auditorium for a keynote, sitting next to friends, making lunch plans, geeking out in conversations with people I don’t usually get to see, making podcasts between sessions… there is a lot of appeal to engaging with connections beyond the sessions you go to at a conference.

For me, it usually includes meeting ‘digital friends’, people that I know from online/Twitter, whom I’ve never met before face-to-face or whom I have met, but less times than I can count on one hand. These connections invariably make the conference great for me. And not only do I get to meet these wonderful people, they tend to be people that like geeking out with me about what we’ve learned. If I go to a mediocre session, no problem, I can chat with someone who went to a better one. Go to a great session, and now I’ve got someone to share it with out loud, to help me solidify what I’ve learned.

But beyond the learning, there is the human connection. There is the opportunity to be with people I don’t get to see often but I enjoy their company. It’s about being with my tribe. I’ll enjoy the sessions on Friday, but I really look forward to a time in the future when I can once again go to a conference, pick up my swag, and connect with people that make the whole conference experience great!

Tracking My Heart Rate

I’ve always had a slow pulse. When I was in my last year of high school I was in a pool training for water polo 10 to 12 times a week. When I took my pulse in the morning, it was usually between 32 and 35 beats per second. Now when I take my pulse, usually after my morning meditation, it tends to sit between 49 and 43 beats per minute.

It’s healthy to have a nice slow resting heart rate, but sometimes it can hinder me too. Sometimes, when I’m not active, I can feel tired and lazy. Especially after I eat a big meal. I think it’s because while my body focuses on digestion, my slow pulse doesn’t feed the rest of me enough to keep me going when I’m sedentary. So, I tend to move around a lot after lunch, because I’m not too productive sitting at my desk just after a meal.

I’ve recently been tracking my heart rate with my phone. As I mentioned, the first time is resting, after my meditation, the second time during my workout. The App works by putting my finger over the camera, with the light on. The problem is that I just had to switch phones and this new phone uses a camera that’s farther away from the light than my previous phone, and my measurement during or usually just after activity tends to fail and force a retry. This can happen several times and my heart rate is slowing while I do this.

I shouldn’t let this bug me. I can calculate my pulse without the App, but I like having it track my progress and it bugs me that I can’t get it to work easily. I’m going to have to try a new app, one that works for me, rather than fight me. I like tools to track my progress, that’s why my sticker chart works so well. So I need to find a new tracker, and surrender the fact that I paid for this App… which, while a nominal fee, wasn’t enough to keep my feeling frustrated on a regular basis. Our tools need to work for us, not against us.

Digital, collectible assets

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are assets that have value because they have a finite number in existence, and people see value in them. Like money Bitcoins are fungible meaning just like a $20 bill can be replaced with any other $20, a Bitcoin (or 1/20th or 1/50th of a Bitcoin) can be swapped out with another Bitcoin (or portion there of). Some people say Bitcoin will continue to rise in value, and become the gold standard of currencies, because unlike other paper/non-digital currencies where more bills can be printed by governments, Bitcoin has a finite number of coins that, while equal in value to each other, can not be duplicated or added to.

There are other kinds of digital assets that we will start to see emerge, and these are Non Fungible Tokens (NFT’s).

A NFT (non-fungible token) is a special cryptographically-generated token that uses blockchain technology to link with a unique digital asset that cannot be replicated. 

Non-fungible tokens differ from popular cryptocurrencies such as Ether (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero (XMR), which are fungible; for example, you can exchange one Bitcoin for any other Bitcoin. ~ CoinMarketCap.com

One of the first popular examples of this was a craze over CryptoKitties. One-of-a-kind digital cartoon cats, that can be bred to create more new individual CryptoKitties, but no individual CryptoKitties could be duplicated. This one key thing is what makes them non-fungible, they are unique and not interchangeable. Essentially they are like an original piece of art. I can find a replication of the Mona Lisa, but there is only one original. NFT’s are each originals, and even though they are digital, they are unique and more originals can not be made… they have a specific fingerprint in a blockchain that can prove they are the original.

While CryptoKitties were a silly craze in 2017, they were also an excellent proof of concept that essentially showed that digital collectables can have and hold value, if you can prove that they are unique. NFT’s allow artists to create art that holds a digital signature to say, ‘this one is an original’. Besides art, this will be useful in:

• Gaming – imagine being able to trade a unique tool or weapon outside of an online game, without any chance that this rare object can be duplicated.

• Concert tickets – counterfeit tickets are made and sold, ripping off potential customers, but if a concert ticket is an NFT, it’s easy to confirm it is the original that you are buying.

• Identification – from credentialing to medical information, you can be in control of your own data and take it with you.

Unique digital assets are something that will have many valuable use cases and we will see them rise in popularity. And while some people will laugh and scoff at the idea of CryptoKitties of any kind holding any real value, non fungible Tokens and digital assists are something that will both hold value, and grow significantly in real use cases in the very near future.

Documenting progress through journaling

When I restarted archery last December, I was told by my coach that I should be journaling after each practice. I don’t know why, but I decided that I’d do this using pen and paper. So when I come home from practice, I open my paper notebook and I reflect and journal. Then I take a photo of this and add it to an archery album on my phone, where I also add photos of my score cards.

At Inquiry Hub we are always telling students to document their journey. For some this is a natural thing that they do, for others it’s a challenge. I remember doing a presentation at a local conference, and I took along a few soon-to-be grads from our first year with iHub grads. An educator asked one of the grads, ‘What would you tell your younger self if you were to start back at Inquiry Hub all over again. (A great question.) One of my grads said, without missing a beat. “Oh that’s easy, I’d say, ‘document, document, document’.”

This student and his twin brother had done some amazing inquiries, however they didn’t journal along the way nearly as much as they should have. For example they assembled a very finicky 3D printer, and watched many amateur user videos to trouble shoot, but they didn’t make their own videos when they came up with clever fixes and hacks. Graduating and looking back, they could see what they missed out on.

Students can learn so much from regularly reflecting on both successes and failures. So too can adults. My journal today didn’t look at the frustration I had tuning my new bow. Instead I capitalized on the idea that, while my site and rest are still off, and I’m adjusting as I go, I can still focus on my shot process and do that well.

I know that keeping a learning journal has helped me with my progress as an archer. For some reason, I also feel that literally putting ‘pen to paper’ has helped me anchor in the lessons that a digital journal wouldn’t. And yet, I tend to look at the journal more because it is also available digitally on my phone. All this to say, that as part of a learning process, reflection and journaling are very effective.

Remember that along your learning journey, it’s a good idea to journal, reflect, and document, document, document.

Broke my bow

On Thursday after work I was shooting my compound bow and stopped for the day. I decided to wax my bow strings, then on a whim thought I’d shoot one more round. With a quick mental lapse, I stood up and put my trigger onto the bow loop, drew back my string and dry shot my bow… I shot the bow without an arrow in it.

When you do that, all the energy intended to push the arrow forward gets returned to the bow. I heard a whip sound that was the volume of a firecracker at close range. Then I felt the sting on my hand. My broken bow string whipped my thumb.

I got ice on it right away, and it’s really just a surface wound, so honestly my ego hurts more. And as it turns out, my bow got hurt even more than that. I took it to the pro shop yesterday and it turns out that I damaged both cams. And unfortunately, it’s an older bow and the bottom cams are no longer available. So I need a new bow.

I’m all for learning from my mistakes, but damn this was an expensive mistake! The only saving grace is that they have a used model upgrade of my bow on sale and, while still expensive, it’s far cheaper than a new replacement of this quality. I’m told it’s a bow that’s been to the world championships, and since I know of only one left-handed shooter of that caliber around here, I think I know the previous owner, who would have treated the bow very well. Today I’m going in to try this new-to-me bow out.

I’m trying to see the silver lining and appreciate that I’m getting a bow upgrade that I probably would not have gotten for a couple more years. Something good has come from this… even if it’s a bit of a financial expense. My goal this year was to shoot at least 100 days this year and I’m way ahead of schedule, so I know I’ll be getting great use out of my new toy… and I’ll be a lot more careful about putting an arrow in it before shooting!

Sharing my posts

I had a meeting yesterday morning where we did small breakout sessions, and we discussed a topic that I’ve talked about a few times here on my Daily-Ink. I wanted to share something I wrote, but decided not to. Then we met a second time but it ended up being me and just one other colleague in the room. We continued the conversation and afterwards, I shared a link to one of the pieces I wrote via email. I got a really positive response, and I’m glad I did share it, but I’m always hesitant to do this.

It’s kind of weird, I write every day, and my post is automatically shared to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my Facebook page, so I obviously don’t mind sharing my work publicly. Yet I always feel like sharing my own writing at work is like shameless self-promotion rather than sharing my thoughts. It feels like I’m trying to show off, or that I’m bragging. Sometimes I’ll use my writing as a reference to what I say, but don’t mention the blog post or share the link.

I think that part of the challenge is that on social media people can choose to read or ignore my posts, and there is no price to pay if someone chooses to ignore the post, However, if I share it directly with someone, well then I’m kind of expecting it to be read. I’m forcing it on someone. This is me just thinking ‘out loud’ about this. I don’t think I’ll change my habits. I think I’ll continue to be overly cautious about sharing my writing in conversations with colleagues.

It’s not that I’m shy, it’s that I’m trying to be respectful. I don’t want to push my writing on people. But sometimes I articulate things better in my writing than I do trying to formulate my thoughts on the spot. I’m a slow processor, a slow thinker, and work through things better through writing than speaking.

That said, I can be quite vocal and no one has ever accused me of not participating in a discussion. Maybe that’s part of issue? I am vocal enough, and spreading or sharing my writing is just ‘over the top’. I’ve spent a few years developing my listening skills, and redirecting my thoughts to what’s being said, rather than what I want to say next. This is a skill that needs to be practiced, especially since I tend to be a lateral thinker that sees connections to things rather than seeing a single track of a conversation. So my brain wants to bounce to related things, off topic things, and maybe something I’ve previously written. But is that thing I wrote truly relevant to the conversation, or is it just relevant to me?

I don’t think I’ll share my posts at work any more than I already do after writing this. I think it’s probably a good thing that I hold back, and I’ll continue to do so.