Monthly Archives: September 2021

Freedom, censorship, and ignorance

This is an interesting time that we live in. I find myself in a position where I need to question my own values. I don’t do this lightly. I don’t pretend that my values have suddenly changed. It’s just that present circumstances put me at odds with my own beliefs around freedom of speech.

I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I think that when a society sensors speech, they are on a dangerous path. I take this to an extreme. Except for slander, threats, and inciting violence, I think people have a right to say and believe what they want. I believe that taking away such freedom puts us on a perilous path where a select few get too much control, and can undermine our freedoms.

An example where I take this to the extreme would be agreeing with Noam Chomsky.

That has been my stance for a very long time. But the spread of misinformation on social media has me second guessing this. There is a fundamental difference between someone standing on a soap box in a town square, and a nut job with a massive audience spreading lies.

So now, even as an ardent defender of free speech, I find myself agreeing with YouTube’s decision to ban vaccine misinformation:

YouTube doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is limited to content that contradicts local health authorities’ or the WHO’s guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.

Two, four, eight, or sixteen years ago when YouTube began, I would have screamed ‘Censorship!’ at the idea of a platform banning free speech. Even now it bothers me. But I think it is necessary. The first problem is that lies and misinformation are too easily shared, and spread too easily. The second problem is that the subject area is one where too many people do not have enough information to discern fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience. The third problem is that any authentic discussion about these topics is unevenly biased towards misinformation. This last point needs explanation.

If I wanted to argue with you that Zeus the Greek God produces lightning and thunder when he is angry, I think everyone today would say that I was stupid to think such a thing. However, if I was given an opportunity to debate a scientist on this in a public forum, what inadvertently happens is that my crazy idea now gets to have an equal amount of airtime with legitimate science. These two sides do not deserve equal airtime in a public, linkable, shareable format that appears to give my opinion an equal footing against scientific evidence.

Now when dealing with something as silly as believing in a thunder god is the topic, this isn’t a huge issue. But when it’s scientific sounding, persuading and fear mongering misinformation that can cause harm, that’s a totally different situation. When a single counter example, say for example a person having adverse effects from a vaccine, becomes a talking point, it’s hard to balance that in an argument with millions of people not having adverse effects and also drastically reducing their risk of a death the vaccine prevented. The one example, one data point, ends up being a scare tactic that works to convince some people hearing the argument that the millions of counter examples don’t matter. And when social media platforms feed similar, unbalanced but misleading information to people over and over again, and the social media algorithms share ‘similar’ next videos, or targeted misinformation, this actually gets dangerous. It threatens our ability to weigh fact from fiction, news from fake news, science from pseudoscience. It feeds and fosters ignorance.

I don’t know how else to fight this than to stop bad ideas from spreading by banning them?

This flies in the face of my beliefs about free speech, but I don’t know any alternative to prevent bad ideas from spreading faster than good ones. And so while I see censorship as inherently evil, it is a lesser evil to allowing ignorance to spread and go viral. And while it potentially opens a door to less freedom, and I have concerns about who makes the decision of what information should be banned, I’d rather see a ban like this attempted, than for us to continue to let really bad ideas spread.

I thought in this day and age common sense would prevail and there would be no need to censor most if not all free speech. However it seems that as a society, we just aren’t smart enough to discern truth from cleverly said fiction. So we need to stop the spread of bad ideas, even if that means less freedom to say anything we want.

TJ’s Story

Today we will wear our orange shirts. At Inquiry Hub, students will be wearing ones with a design by one of our students with indigenous heritage, Madison D.

On Orange Shirt Day 3 years ago, I shared this on Facebook:

Tomorrow will be the first Truth and Reconciliation Day holiday. We are moving forward, and people will remember.

Death by a thousand paper cuts

This is the term I use when too many small things come my way. I then spend my entire day successfully getting two-thirds of those things done, and creating an unruly ‘to do’ list for the next day, after staying at work a little longer than I hoped.

I haven’t done it yet this school year, but today I’m blocking some time in my calendar for a project I’m hoping to get done in the coming weeks. It was a September goal that never happened.

It’s quite apparent to me that unless I slot time in for visioning and projects that move my schools forward, the paper cut tasks win me over and consume my day. Blocking this time off won’t magically create more time in my calendar. I’m not going to suddenly have less little things to do… but I’m not going to go home feeling like I spent the day getting paper cuts. I’ll feel more like I had a productive day rather than just a busy day.

I know that when I do these things that I want to get done, (which I know are good for my school), then I don’t go home feeling like I want to describe my day as ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’. I know that I will feel a lot more like my day accomplished something beyond the many little (but important) things land on my desk.

The Learning Cliff

Everyone has heard of the Learning Curve. When you try something new and challenging, it is said that this has a ‘steep learning curve’. When new staff, teachers and secretaries, join my online school, I always tell them that they are going to experience a learning cliff. That is to say, there is so much to learn that you literally won’t remember how to do something shortly after you’ve tried to internalize it. You will hit a cliff or a barrier where you feel frustrated and think, “I already asked about this, I should know this.”

The reality is, ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ it’s totally understandable that you didn’t take in the answer to this question you have, when you tried to learn 15 other things at the same time. So, it’s perfectly ok to ask a second, third, even fourth time. We all worked through the learning cliff by asking the same questions more than once. We all know what it’s like to have so many new systems added to what we do. We all know it feels dumb asking again. We all appreciated others answering our same questions more than once. We are all happy to do the same for you.

I try to have this conversation in front of my long-time secretaries, because they agree and acknowledge that they heard me say this. And that they both appreciated the freedom to ask, and the welcoming responses to the same questions.

You don’t know that you didn’t learn everything you needed to until you hit the cliff with this feeling of, ‘I’ve been told how to do this already,’ or ‘I know that I did this before, why can’t I figure out how to do it again?’

When the culture is ‘ just ask again’, it turns the cliff back into a curve… there’s still a lot to learn, but the path to greater learning is more gradual and attainable.

Pronouncing words ‘well’

I drew up in Barbados and came to Canada at 9, just before the start of Grade 5. It was challenging because no one understood my accent, and questioned even if I was speaking English. My sister had the same issue, and after 2 notices home, my mom had to go to the school to tell them that she didn’t belong in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes because she only spoke English.

I struggled a lot to be understood, having a ‘I’m not in Kansas’ moment happening in October, after I was moved in a seating plan. I was placed next to the only black kid in the class. This was comforting for me, coming from the Caribbean where most my classmates were black. On the first day sitting together, something happened that I was excited about so I turned to him and blurted out what I wanted to say in my full Bajan accent. He looked back at me, deadpan expression, and said, “I don’t know what the f*** you just said,” and turned to talk to someone else.

I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Oh man, even my brother doesn’t get me. I’m in big trouble!’

That was a big moment, I worked diligently to break my accent after that. I chose a horrible strategy of saying ‘STOP’ in my head after each word I spoke, to prevent me from linking and slurring words together. This did help me say things more clearly, and made it much easier for Canadians to understand me, but it left me in a catatonic state for seconds at a time. My conversation would be so much slower than my mind, that I would literally get lost telling a story.

My mouth would fall 5,6, even 7 sentences behind my mind, behind my regular speech pace, and I’d get lost. I would be saying a sentence and the next sentence in my brain would be 7 sentences later, and I’d forget how I got there, and even why the story was relevant. I’d freeze, on the outside, but inside I was a hot mess as I scrambled to figure out what to say next. I would literally block out everything in this panicked internal state, leaving the external interaction I was having. I can remember my mom saying to me, after a comatose moment, in her Bajan-Trinidadian accent, “Boy, wass-a-matta wit-chu? You on drugs?”

I still sometimes struggle to find words, decades later, and I know it stems from me trying to talk in a way that was completely alien to me. I joke that I am ESL and my second language is also English.

That said, while my parents tell me that my transition to Canada was really challenging and that I struggled a lot. Beyond that not in Kansas moment, my memories of that grade are almost all positive. That’s a testament to the resilience of kids.

Many aren’t as fortunate as me though, and I was not in a situation where I had to try to learn a whole new language. I have so much respect for people who move to another country and have to fully immerse themselves in a language foreign to them, and often they aren’t given the opportunity to engage with many people who are native speakers because those native speakers don’t make half the effort to converse with them that they have to make.

But going back to the idea of English being my first and second language, many people pronounce words ‘wrong’ or ‘not well’ because that’s the way they learned the words. I still have word choices and phrases that I use, that Canadians don’t use. A simple example, I struggle to use the word ‘beer’ without sounding like I’m saying ‘bear’. It makes for a strange offering when a friend comes over.

While that example is just a wrong pronunciation, when an entire group of people say a word a certain way… it’s not wrong. It’s not miss pronounced, it’s an example of how words evolve over time.


We shouldn’t be too quick to make judgements about how different groups use words in different ways than we do. A perfect example would be, imagine going to the southern states and every time someone said, “Y’all” instead of “You all”, you corrected them and told them they were saying it wrong?

There are many words and phrases used today that we should be far more accepting of. Less judgmental of. The words are being pronounced well, just not the way you/we pronounce them.

Making adjustments

This week I was talking to a grade 9 who wanted to do some research on how students perform on video games depending on the kind of music they listen to. We had students do this in our early years, with a driving simulator done in silence, with classical music and heavy rock. It can be a well done experiment, or it can have way too many variables and not truly measure anything or provide meaningful results. It’s hard to measure only the thing you want to measure.

I recently received my bow back, and today I shot for only the 3rd time in a while. Nothing feels normal and while my scores aren’t awful, they aren’t where they should be. The challenge is that I’m needing to think of too many things and my thoughts get in my way. I need to be patient, make one adjustment, and then shoot several arrows before making another adjustment. I’m splitting my focus. I’m adjusting too many variables and it’s not helping me. And as a result, I’m not feeling like I’m improving.

It will get better, I just need to shoot 1,000 more arrows… that’s been my archery mantra for a while. The challenge is not making too many adjustments at once along the way. If I keep doing that, it’s going to take a lot more arrows to see the improvements I want to see.

Getting technical

While others see me as tech savvy, I know that I’m not. What I am is patient, and willing to experiment. That’s different than savvy. Why do I say this? Because I struggle. I get lost, I make mistakes. I screw up. A lot!

Whenever I’m doing something technical, I have to go painfully slow, or I have to take one step forward and two steps back. This isn’t about me trying to be humble and under-representing my skills, it’s a reality that I’ve come to accept. This is most evident when I try something new. I’m the guy that misses a step, or tries something that I’m too novice to try.

I can remember when I first tried blogging. I’d play with the HTML and quite literally break my blog. Then I’d spend a couple hours on the back end, going way over my head to try to get something besides an error page to show up. But I figured it out. I muddled through.

Sometimes these trail and error escapades left me pulling my hair out, other times laughing at myself, and sometimes feeling like I wanted to cry (especially if my mistakes cost me money unnecessarily). But I try, and I try, and I try. And unlike the song, I find that my attempts create amazing opportunities to learn… and despite the frustration, my attempts at bring more technical than I am are very satisfying.

If at first you don’t succeed

As the saying goes:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again!”

Working with students, what you sometimes see is:

“If at first you don’t succeed… quit before someone sees you fail.” Or, “If at first you don’t succeed… avoid trying altogether.”

What the saying should say:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, something different.” (Try a different approach, don’t just try the same thing over again in the same way.)

When things aren’t working, students seem to have two main gears: keep moving forward, because curiosity points to getting unstuck. Or ‘Park’ because it’s not worth the effort or embarrassment.

Teaching students that effort matters more than results or that a failing result can still be a learning opportunity, is to teach them to be resilient and to persevere. This doesn’t mean everyone gets a participation badge, this isn’t just about another quote, “If you did your best, that’s all that really matters.”

No, this is about creating an environment where students aren’t afraid to bite off more than they can chew… to be so ambitious about their goals that a failure to achieve them still puts students much farther than if they had set the bar too low and succeeded.

This is about creating opportunities for students to do something epic, rather than just something every other kid is doing, with a sample you share of the expected result… a cookie cutter task where students produce the same round cookies, but get to decide where the pretty sprinkles go to make their cookie look a little different than everyone else’s.

If you want students to really succeed, well then they have to start a task with the real potential for failure. They have to struggle with uncertainty of success. They have to learn that not reaching a perfectly successful goal can be an opportunity to learn more and different things. Because without authentic struggle, learning is shallow and fleeting.

“If at first you do succeed… the task probably wasn’t hard enough to truly learn something new.”

Into darkness

The days are getting shorter now. It’s really noticeable when you get up as early as I do. I’m used to starting in darkness, but with a hint of light that continually gets brighter. Now it just stays dark well after my writing and meditation. This doesn’t bug me now, but it starts to get harder when it’s dark heading to work and also dark coming home.

(As a funny side note, how do flat earth’ers explain the seasons and different length of days at different times of the year?)

Growing up in Barbados, much closer to the equator, the sun was up most days between 5:30 and 6am, and set between 6 and 6:30pm. The days were quite consistent in length all year. And so we didn’t have longer summer days the way we have here in Canada… but we also didn’t have short dark (or cold) winter days.

I can’t imagine living much farther North where the sun only shows for a few hours in the winter. I think I’d go a little stir crazy. As it is, I’ve already noticed the darkness creeping in, and I know that it can affect my mood. The cold does the same. It’s something I need to stay aware of. I use a daylight light at work, and as always, load up on my Vitamin D. And I dress warmer than most to keep the cold out. These are ways for me to keep the darkness outside from creeping in.

Meditation plateau

I’ve hit a flat spot in my meditation. I’m letting my mind slip for long periods, and even nodding off. I can’t seem to stay focussed, and no matter how much I tell myself that refocusing on my breath after distraction is a part of meditation, I find myself frustrated at my lack of ability to focus… although this frustration does come after I’m done, rather than in the moment.

I think I need to find time in my week to extend my meditation past 10 minutes. I think that I’ve created a pattern of 10 minutes of relaxation, not meditation. I need to get past this plateau rather than just get comfortable on it.

I thought after 2 years of consistency I’d feel more accomplished at getting into a meditative state… but this monkey brain seems a bit slow to learn, or rather, a bit too busy to be quieted. Whatever I decide do, it needs to be different than what I’m doing now, if I want to see and feel an improvement.