Monthly Archives: October 2022

How important is…

I met an old friend yesterday. He helped me out a lot when I moved to BC. That was back in 1993, and we spent a fair bit of time together for about a month after my move. I remember him asking me a bunch of questions one day about relationships. I don’t remember what came first, but they were a series of questions regarding how important parts of relationships were: How important is money? How important is intimacy/sex? How important is good communication?

I don’t remember my initial answer, but when he got to his third or fourth question I came up with a general answer for all of them.

When you are in a bad relationship, these things can be insurmountable problems that break the relationship up. When you are in a good relationship none of these things matter unless they are very deficient… in a good relationship, you can weather a financial storm but if money is always a problem then it becomes very important. You can struggle with intimacy, but if it’s long term, then it becomes important. You can communicate poorly sometimes, but if it’s more frequent, then it becomes important.

Basically, when things are going well, none of these concerns are overly important, it’s only when there is a long term mismatch or struggle that any of these relationship challenges becomes important. I think his line of questioning was to help him figure out what was the most important part of a relationship and my response was the part that isn’t working becomes the most important, and then needs to be dealt with.

I’m pleased to report that my friend is still happily married. I’m not saying it was thanks to my advice, I’m just stating this because it could be easy to assume he was asking those questions because his relationship was on the rocks. It wasn’t. Rather it was just two guys in their mid 20’s trying to figure out relationships.

My grandfather used to say, “Kill a snake when it’s small.” It wasn’t intended as such but I think that’s good relationship advice. When concerns arise, deal with them quick, because if they grow too large, they become important problems that are bigger and harder to deal with… and they could potentially become the most important part of the relationship.

Pizza sandwich

I’m not a big fan of sandwiches for lunch. Part of the reasoning is that I prefer hot to cold food. Another is that I ate sandwiches all through school, and I feel like just because I work at a school now doesn’t mean I should still have to bag a sandwich for lunch every day. But sometimes I don’t bring a lunch, and when that happens I will often go to the neighbouring pizza place for a couple slices… and make a sandwich out of them!

I pick two different slices, request banana peppers added, then I put them together top face onto top face, with the peppers in between. I love the taste of all the toppings and peppers together. I like the double layer of cheese, and I especially like how easy it is to eat like this. I also like that it’s hot. I have to say that of all the sandwiches I eat, this one is my favourite.

Oh, and note the way I fold the paper plate around it. This serves two purposes: It helps hold the sandwich together, and if there’s any sauce dripping out, this catches it before it lands on my shirt or pants.

Try a pizza sandwich… you won’t regret it!

Food and fuel insecurity

Since the pandemic started we’ve seen shortages in both consumable items and merchandise, which we haven’t seen before in my lifetime. I recently paid over $2.40 per litre of gas, and can remember being upset at having to pay over $2 not that long ago. Early in the pandemic it was toilet paper that was scarce to find, but that was driven by fear of shortages. More recently I’ve seen the back of empty shelves where I have not seen them before, ranging from items in the butcher section, to baking items, to well known products that usually seem to have an endless supply.

And I think things will get worse before they get better.

Parts of Europe are being deforested by concerned citizens collecting firewood, by people uncertain if they will be able to afford heating fuel in the coming winter. Food banks are reporting record number of people needing their service. And certain items including basic food items will be both in short supply and more expensive than ever before.

This is not fear mongering, and it’s also not all doom and gloom, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, but life in general is going to get more expensive with less purchasing power and choice for a while.

How will this pan out over the next few years? It’s hard to guess because the issues of inflation, money devaluation, questions of war, and a shaky stock market are far beyond my understanding. What I suspect is that this global economic downturn is not something we will just have to deal with this winter, but something that we will deal with through all of 2023 and beyond.

We can live without our favourite brand of cereal in our grocery stores. We can wait longer than we hoped for an appliance or a new car to arrive after ordering it. What we can’t do is sustain gas and food prices that make it impossible for lower-middle class and poorer families to sustain themselves on their inflation-diminishing salaries for an extended period of time… while grocery stores and oil companies generate record quarters of profits. At what point do large corporations recognize that their record profits will fall when a significant part of the population has no buying power?

My fear is that it has to get a lot worse before significant system change will happen. In the mean time, prepare to watch your purchasing power fall over the next year and beyond.

The happiness scale

Imagine a happiness scale from Depressed at the bottom to exhilarated at the top:

– Exhilarated

– Very Happy

– Happy

– Content

– Wanting

– Bored

– Unhappy

– Depressed

I think too many people get stuck expecting most of life to be spent on the high end of that scale and so when everyday life doesn’t meet that expectation, they end up unhappier than they should be… and this can spiral into disappointment and depression.

If you aren’t content with everyday events, then you are left wanting more. If your hobbies and interests only bring you joy when you accomplish something, and not in all aspects of the experience, including the challenges, or prep work, or practice, then the joy is fleeting.

In this TikTok, David Bederman describes ‘the surfer’s mentality‘:

Some people only find joy when riding the wave, and not also the paddling out to catch the wave. Some people compare their daily life to the best life of others shared on Facebook and Instagram. Some people don’t consider a chat with a friend, a laugh at a social media post, or an hour spent lost in an engaging activity as happy times. They perceive happiness as more than that. Happiness is fleeting.

Finding happiness in your everyday life is a way to tip the scale in your favour. A way to spend more time on the upper end of the scale, to not measure yourself as less than happy, wanting more, and feeling like less. Expectation of more than this leads to seeking greater peaks, like holidays, adrenaline rides, and unsustainable nights out of entertainment to pull yourself out of wanting more.

Are you waiting for special moments to be happy, or are you looking for happiness in every day life? Are you comparing yourself to others and what they share publicly, or are you seeking moments in the now that can move your daily life to being content with happy moments interspersed throughout the day?

Because the happiness scale isn’t sustainable if you always desire to move up the scale, that expectation leads you further down the scale more often than not. Instead, the happiness scale is sustainable when you find ways to simply be content, and let happiness find you when you are doing the small things that make life interesting, challenging, enjoyable, playful, and fulfilling.

Update

I found this: Why Having Fun Is the Secret to a Healthier Life | Catherine Price | TED

And I was reminded of this recent post: Big lessons from little ones

Field trip

Yesterday our school went on a field trip to a nearby lake. As part of the day we offered the opportunity for kids to go on a short canoe trip. The route we take is quite shallow and students get to paddle between tree stumps and under a small walking bridge. The whole trip lasts 45 minutes to an hour depending on how good the students are canoeing.

Before we go, we get life jackets on and do a short safety chat, followed by a few instructions. We also ask students about their background both paddling and steering a canoe, and make sure the more inexperienced paddlers are put in the front of the canoe, and the more experienced paddlers steering in the back.

I’m always amazed how some kids overestimate their abilities. They confidently get into the back of a canoe, and then the canoe starts meandering off in any direction except straight ahead. We had to switch out people a couple different times, because there would be no way for that canoe to safely stay in sight of the other canoes.

We also had one student insist that it would be too embarrassing to be moved, and took an extra 20 minutes longer than everyone else. The other teacher remained close and when we were around the last bend he and I took the rest of the canoes in, then got in the same canoe and went back out to be with this canoe.

This was fine with us because it was before lunch and so we weren’t delaying another group going out, and also the person in the front of the canoe was a friend who wasn’t seeing this as a bad situation in any way. They both had fun and when they were done even joked that they were first back because no one else was at the beach.

It seems like all of the kids really enjoy the trip. It’s fun giving them a few tips and watching them weave through the section that has tree stumps, and ducking way lower than they need to in order to get under the walking bridge. It’s also wonderful to see them appreciate being out in nature and enjoying the scenery. On top of everything we had absolutely gorgeous weather, with warm sunshine and hardly a breeze… that’s not always the case in early October. It felt like a beautiful summer day.

We haven’t done a field trip like this in almost 3 years, and the day could not have been better. Some students fished, some went on a hike, some played card games or tossed around a frisbee, and many played capture the flag to end the day. So often on field trips everyone is corralled into specific activities and the entire day is planned for them, but this trip is about connecting as a community and letting kids… be kids. Sometimes it’s good to allow students choice, and to give them the time to play, to choose their own activities, and to connect with each other organically. I’m already looking forward to doing this trip again next year.

A piece of living history

Yesterday Jowi Taylor brought his Six String Nation presentation to Inquiry Hub. The guitar named The Voyageur is built with 64 unique pieces of Canadian heritage, and Jowi’s storytelling brings some of those pieces to life.

I first met Jowi, and Voyageur, a decade ago on a retreat to an ‘Unplugd‘ conference near Algonquin Park in Ontario.

In my ‘Thank you’ to Jowi at the end of his performance yesterday, I shared that he and I had met at this conference and that the first time I heard The Voyageur played was by Bryan Jackson, a teacher and now Vice Principal here in Coquitlam. Bryan sang an original song about a profound piece of graffiti written on a wall in Winnipeg. I shared how uniquely Canadian this was, and that the thing I love most about what Jowi has created is that the guitar is a piece of living history.

For many, history is in books, and places to visit, and items you can’t touch in museums. The Voyageur guitar brings Canadian history into schools and communities, it creates special memories for the people who touch and play it. It brings history to life. My student, Trevor, will always remember getting to play this guitar that has been touched by so many famous Canadians, and played by Canadian music legends across the country.

And like me, there will be students and adults in the audience that will remember the stories told by Jowi about how this amazing guitar was brought to life.

Here is my first memory of Bryan Jackson playing The Voyageur at Unplugd, back in the summer of 2012: “Graffiti”

Learn more about Jowi’s Six String Nation here.

Press Pause

Ever wish life had a pause button… Wish that you could just pause the entire world and step away for a bit… then come back refreshed, and ready to deal with the day.

Just hit pause and go for a nap, catch up on email, take a long walk, add a half day to your weekend.

Would you rather a pause button or would you prefer a rewind option? Mess up an conversation with someone? Just rewind and try again. Maybe pause first, then rewind.

There are no dress rehearsals for life. No pause button. But we can still carve out time for the things we care about. We can find moments to pause; moments for pause.

If we don’t find those moments, then the days, the weeks, and even the years can disappear. We don’t have a pause button, but every day there are moments that we can seek out or extend. There are moments we can spend intentionally. Moments when we pause to think, to reflect, to laugh, to step away from being busy, so that the day doesn’t just get away from us.

We don’t have a pause button, but we do have reasons in the day to take pause.

Rebuilding culture

Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It’s easy to look back and think about ‘the good old days’, and all the positive things of yesteryear. But trying to rebuild a culture of the past, trying to ‘go back to the way things used to be’ is all but inevitable to fail. You can’t rebuild a culture, you need to build a new and desired culture.

When schools went remote in March of 2019, Inquiry Hub was unintentionally ready for the transition. My teachers barely missed a beat. Students already had a fair bit of independent time, so teachers didn’t need to adapt their teaching to give students time to work independently. Every class was already in Microsoft Teams. And we even joined each other online and had virtual lunches together. I actually saw my staff at lunch more than I normally did. And more importantly, students almost all made positive transitions to working from home.

It was when we got back to face-to-face that things really changed. We used to have students mixing across grades and working collaboratively in hallways, and in any open space or classroom available. Then suddenly they were locked down in single rooms, at single desks, not facing each other in table groups. Two and a half years later, only our Grade 12’s knew what Inquiry Hub used to be, back in the first 2/3’s of their first year. Our Grades 9, 10, and 11 students never experienced our school pre-covid.

I started this year thinking that we need to rebuild the culture of the past, but I realize now that this won’t happen. We have more students who are more used to their classroom being their primary community. We’ve grown by almost 1/3, and classes are now more of a community in size. We aren’t what we used to be. We don’t have the shared history, and efforts to be what we used to be will detract from what we could be.

So how do you build culture? How do you design activities so that they foster the community you want to build… but not force something that isn’t organic and natural? I think you create opportunities for students to connect, but you don’t force it. You show what you value by showing appreciation for positive behaviour and attitudes. You invite people to participate, but don’t force them. You explicitly share your vision and give others a chance to build that vision with you.

You don’t rebuild culture, you build it anew. It won’t be the same, but if you explicitly and cooperatively share a common vision, and take action towards it, the culture you build can look a bit like what it used to be, but it won’t ever be what it was. Nostalgia will keep you from being what you could be while you focus on what was, but never could be again.

Daily coffee routine

Almost 40 years ago, when I got hired as an assistant manager at Starbucks, I spent the first few weeks taste testing coffees and espresso drinks on every break. I’d end up having 5-7 coffees in a shift. Then I’d go home on weekends and by noon on Saturday I’d have a pounding headache… basically my body would be craving caffeine. It took me a while to realize what the problem was. I started taking regular breaks from coffee, and I’d sometimes go a week with no coffee. Then I’d keep to two or less cups when I did drink it.

Now I basically drink one cup a day. Occasionally I have two, but it’s quite seldom, and if I forget a day it’s not usually a big deal. Well yesterday I slept in and didn’t have coffee right away, and sure enough a headache started. It has been a long time since I’ve felt it, but I knew it was a withdrawal headache. It’s amazing how the lack of regular caffeine can have so much power over me.

This makes me think about the many small ‘addictions’ we have. The craving for sugar, for salt, for adrenaline, for exercise, for love, for belonging. When we get these things regularly, we take them for granted, but when we are missing then… in some way we develop a headache.

Our routines, both healthy and unhealthy, help us meet the needs we create.

AI video

If you’ve seen my blog on social media or on my website (as opposed to in your mailbox), you’ve seen images I created in Dall•E 2. Like these, along with my requests that created them:

“A man walking in a forest path and hugging a tree in a pastel drawing”

“A Picasso drawing of a young man walking in a forest surrounded by clocks”

“A small man on a giant piece of paper trying to write with an oversized pen that is bigger than the person”

“A person standing at the intersection of a path that leads to a choice of a dark, loomy forest or a bright open field in a van Gogh style”

“A transparent head with a tree, an ocean wave, cogs, math symbols, a protractor, and science lab equipment inside the brain. ”

“A hand squeezing the film coming out of a reel of film with a movie projector in the background in a vector style”

“A vapourware drawing of a kid running with a kite in his hand. ”

“Headphones in the ear of a dark haired man, in a Kandinsky style ”

—-

I write a description and it gives me 4 options to choose from. I don’t always get exactly what I had in mind, but if it’s too far off from my expectation then I just refine my wording and try again.

Well now Meta AI has come up with Make-A-Video, which creates video clips from descriptions. The examples on the website download onto my phone as images rather than video clips, so you’ll need to visit there to see them.

This is exciting stuff in the field of video creation and soon it will also become so good that you won’t be able to distinguish it from a real video. The creativity that’s possible is exciting. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and soon we’ll see all kinds of fascinating uses for this tool.

Artificial Intelligence is just getting better and better and in the field of creative arts this is going to really change the landscape of what is possible.

(Also, I recognize that there are some scary deep fake implications, but for now I’m just excited to see what people do creatively with this tool.)