Monthly Archives: September 2021

Dropped calls

I live in an old house, and rather than traditional drywall, we have plaster with wire mesh in it. This makes our house a bit like a Faraday cage. Some days when reception is bad, I have to find a spot that works and stay still to keep the call from fading in and out, and sometimes I even have to go outside.

But I notice it’s not just at home. I have bad zones in my school too, and will even tell someone I’m talking to on the phone, ‘You might lose me for a couple seconds as I walk through this hallway.’

My running joke is: iPhones are amazing, they can do so much, it’s too bad they don’t make good phones.

I do find it odd that I’m better off on a Zoom call or WhatsApp, streaming a video call on wifi, than I am making a simple phone call. As the world slowly moves towards global wifi, I think we might see an end to traditional phone calls. We’ll still carry phones with us (one way or another), we just won’t be tied to a phone network and locked into phone company contracts. And we won’t be dropping as many calls.

Time keeps ticking

It’s wonderful when you get to spend a weekend with family. I enjoy my work, but I have to say that I’d love a 4-day week with 3-day weekends. Time seems to be going by so quickly.

As I get older, I seem to be more and more fascinated by time… and the time we have with our family of different generations.

Here is a video to help you really think about this.

Being a good listener

A quick post to help me reflect out loud.

Recently I think I’ve been a poor listener. It’s not that I don’t listen, it’s that my listening has been filled with my own interjections and relevant stories. I realized this a few days ago when a colleague was sharing an experience they had on the weekend. I immediately shared a similar experience, then asked more about their’s.

That sounds polite but it isn’t. I didn’t just relate, I stole their thunder. I took away from a moment of someone sharing their experience, so that I could share mine… the story became mine, with theirs being a footnote.

I’ve reflected and realized that I’ve engaged with others like this too often in the past few weeks. I need to listen more in order to listen, not to ‘add to’, not to ‘fix’, not to ‘steal’. Just to listen, ask, encourage, celebrate others, and be present.

Here comes the rain

It’s dumping outside this morning. That will happen when you live on the edge of a rain forest. It will happen a lot more as we creep into November, which is probably the wettest month in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, or maybe that’s February? The point is, we are heading into a whole lot of wet in the next while.

But today I have a walk up the Coquitlam Crunch trail planned with a friend, and we have a goal to do this trail once a week, at least 34 times, this school year. Today will be #3.

That will mean a lot of hikes in the rain. While it’s less than 30 minutes to the top, it’s almost an hour long. That’s long enough that if you aren’t dressed appropriately you are going to get soggy and cold. And I hate being cold!

So, I’ll bundle up, get sweaty in too many layers, and be happy to be outside with my buddy. Because when you live where we live, you either go outside and get wet, or you coop yourself up inside for several months of the year. It’s time to get wet…

Leading or in a leadership role?

As the September crunch hits, this is something I think about. Am I leading my team or am I just in a leadership role? When I have days like yesterday, when I’m consumed with stuff that needs to get done and the tasks that keep coming at me have me pinned to my desk… I feel more like a manager than any kind of leader. I know it’s a balance, I know this work needs to get done, but it seems to me that the required management tasks have a way of increasing and multiplying over time.

So, the role of both leader and manager starts to feel less like something you can do simultaneously, and more like an inverse relationship. Spend more time on leadership, the management aspect suffers, spend more time on management and you’ve got less time to lead.

Knowing this and feeling like the management role has grown over the years is tough. Distributing the leadership helps a lot, but that is a delicate balance as well. There is a difference between authentically sharing leadership and delegating work and tasks. Sometimes the difference is simply in interpretation, sometimes the intent seems to have motive. I guess that too is a challenge of leadership. How do you share the leadership such that you can get more of everything done?

Do this well, get more done. Do this poorly, your team suffers, and so do you. I’m not going to bother with trying to draw another image, but essentially the goal is to move the entire line to the right… you are getting more done with both aspects, but the relationship is still inverted.

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All this said, it has been a smoother startup than last year. It feels like it’s going to be a great year ahead. Metaphorically, I feel like a juggler and I’ve got all the balls in the air… and I’m making it work, but hoping no one throws another ball my way.

Like it was yesterday

April 5, 2007

Yesterday, I was in a meeting with a parent and one of my students, (why do teachers have parent meetings about a teenage student’s education and not have the student there too?)

The parent observantly noted that although her son could be physically in a room, he could often ‘disconnect’ and be elsewhere in his mind. For him to be more successful, he would need to engage more in what was going on. I told him, with all honesty, that I too had that problem to the point that my parents worried that I might have been on drugs (I wasn’t). It took until my Grade 13 year (Ontario, Canada) to recognize that I needed to be a participant in the classroom in order to ‘stay connected’.

As I was talking my student interrupted and said, “I just had a flash of insight, I’m a mop not a sponge!”

He got it! And today he proved it. He was a fully engaged participant in my Math lesson. I can hear myself in upcoming classes, “Remember to be the mop”.

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That was from my Pair-a-Dimes blog post, “I’m a mop not a sponge”: Metaphors all the way down. Last night I found out that this young man passed away unexpectedly. It’s so sad to hear news like this about a former student. I immediately remembered this incident, this moment in time when I saw a light bulb light up in a young kid’s mind.

This was my last year as a Grade 8 teacher. There are other memories of this student, but they are more distant, faded… it was over 14 years ago. However this memory, I remember like it was yesterday.

I don’t like the decorations

Before we moved to China, I spent 7 days there meeting the previous principal of the school. One of my tasks was to find an apartment for my family. My future secretary, whose English was pretty good, toured me around 8 or 9 apartments, over 2 days, before we found one that I thought my wife would approve of.

Walking through a few of these places, my secretary remarked, “I don’t like the decorations.”

I thought this was an odd statement, since we would be moving in with our own ‘decorations’. I didn’t understand what she meant until months later. As it turns out, when you buy an apartment in China, the structural walls are the only thing in place. Nothing else. A drain in the kitchen area, and one drain in the bathroom areas.

Almost every apartment I went into in China had a step up to hide the fact that the plumbing for the sink, toilet, and shower all had to be put in after purchase, and had to be directed to a single drain pipe. In fact, there could often be odour issues in bathrooms, with little room for the bathtub drain to have a water trap to protect against gases (and smell) coming up the pipe. When we went on holidays, I’d leave water in our tub and sink to protect against this.

When my secretary talked about not liking the decorations, she was literally talking about the design of the apartment, where the walls and doors were, how the apartment was laid out. You could go into two apartments side-by-side, or even one floor above, in a building and the layout could be completely different.

One apartment we went to had a completely enclosed kitchen with two doors on either end to get to the living room and dining room. Another apartment had a bathroom with access only from the kitchen. I thought I was opening a pantry when I opened the bathroom door. Both of these were places where my secretary didn’t like the decorations. And I didn’t like the layout. Same thing, except what I didn’t know was that the layout was a design (or decoration) feature that the first owner chose, not something the builder did. In this way, the word ‘decorations’ made a lot more sense.

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Related post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog: Slowly by Slowly.

By the numbers

Have a look at this short visual presentation:

Putting COVID-19 Numbers and Vaccinations into Context

It is an insightful, graphic way to look at what has happened to death rates of covid patients since the vaccine was introduced. It helps you understand the scale of this compared to things like yearly deaths by lightning, drowning, and traffic accidents. But these two images really put things into perspective:

Have a look at Covid deaths in the US, especially after vaccine introduction (the box on the right):

And how things would look if vaccines didn’t work, versus the actual statistics:

It’s worth going to the full, short, easy to consume slide show, and grasping all the information shared, by the numbers.

Weekend blues

Sometimes, at the start of the school year, weekends are tough. They are too short, there is work on your mind, and routines are too hard to follow.

This was one of those weekends. It’s not over, and I’m looking forward to my evening plans, but school is on my brain.

It’s moments like these that I feel like a split personality. Part of me longs for a job I don’t bring home. Part of me is so excited about the year to come, filled with potential… and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

I think a 4 day week would be the perfect balance. I’d have a lot less weekend blues. I think my mind would clear more easily, and I’d head back to work fully energized. But that’s not the reality, and I’ll be in bed by 9:30 tonight. And I’ll be ready to start my weekday routine long before the sun rises tomorrow.

Come Together

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Twin Towers falling in New York. I’m guessing everyone over the age of 35 can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they found out about this. I bet they can also describe at least one visual from that incident that clearly sticks out in their minds. A few months later, I got to hear a first-hand story of an educator that was in a nearby building, and what the evacuation was like. Four years ago I visited the museum at ground zero, and what we thought would be an hour-long visit was almost 3 hours.

What strikes me now is not just the horror of what happened, but that this was a defining moment for so many people. It changed their perspective on the world. It made the world a more dangerous place, where just getting on a plane or going to work could cost you your life because of the decision of a few people intent on doing something evil, based on the illusion that they will benefit greatly in the after-life. How many people have died across the world, across the past few hundred years, in the name of a God that wants to punish non-believers.

It was also a time to come together. To feel a common pain, and to support those that needed help. It was a time when political affiliation and religion gave way to being a good samaritan, a good human being.

Why do we need a man-made catastrophe to make us come together? I think now more than any time since 9/11/2001 we could have people find a way to coexist with their neighbours/neighbors in a tolerant and caring way… no matter their political or religious ideologies.

If we don’t come together now, there will be a man-made reckoning soon… because we live in a world where a few crackpots can weaponize and wreak havoc on a scale that will make global news. And so I’d rather we find a way to use tolerance rather than violence to move us out of false dichotomies. I want to see us come together before the under 35 year-olds are put through their own defining 9/11 incident. I fear that if we don’t, the incident might be more divisive rather than unifying, and that scares me.