Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
I spent most of the day editing a video conversation I created with my uncle. We spent a good 3+ hours today chatting and recording a couple videos, then I started editing one of them. Despite using Descript, a great tool for generating captions and editing out common filler words, I still found myself spending a considerable amount of time doing fine edits.
That’s the nature of my personality. I’ll be a bit too much of a perfectionist, and spend too much time paying attention to small details… and time just slips by. I was recently recorded for a podcast and the host used the same tool. But I could tell that he edited the video much faster than me. That said, there was nothing wrong with the editing.
There were a couple edits that I would have done more carefully, but in all honesty it was good enough… and with the interview running almost an hour it would have taken him way too long to edit to the level that I’m trying to do right now.
The lesson from this should be for me to recognize that I don’t need to spend so long editing. I should shoot for ‘good enough’ and just get this thing done. But I won’t. I’ll slog away, paying attention to too many details. Then I’ll cringe at all the parts I should have done better.
~~
Bed time. The rest of the edits will have to wait. I’m glad tomorrow is a holiday, I want this done before I head back to work!
It’s such a fun concept to sit at a table with a barbecue grill in the center, and be served a plate of raw meat. Hotpot is similar. Food served uncooked, and finished at the table to your liking.
My wife isn’t a fan of meat platters for dinner, but my daughters are. So, off to the restaurant I want with my youngest daughter, and we devoured a meal for two that could easily have fed 3 people… but we were both hungry and devoured everything. Simply delicious!
We have a Professional Development Day today and so we held our Remembrance Day Assembly yesterday. It was completely organized by our student leadership club. My only contribution was a suggested theme, and it was shared because I was asked. Beyond that the agenda, setup, sound, performances, and every word spoken was done by students.
The main organizer, in Grade 12, is an exceptional writer, and I could hear his voice, his excellent vocabulary, weaved through the presentations. But he didn’t speak, he sat with the team working on the sound system.
I didn’t get to hear the rehearsal like I’d hoped, but one of our Grade 10’s assured me that it went really well. This was obvious in the assembly, because everything went smoothly. The performers were mostly from Grade 10’s, all future leaders capable of taking on running the event next year.
There’s a difference between student leaders who help a teacher run an event, and student leaders who take full responsibility for an event. There is an authenticity that comes with full control. Of course the students need to be ready for this. Putting them fully in charge but unprepared is not a recipe for success, but there is another side to this.
What if things go wrong? Well, there are different kinds of going wrong. If a student is playing an instrument and misses a note, that’s not a big deal. If a student says something inappropriate in a formal assembly, or obviously doesn’t take the event seriously, that’s different. If someone forgets a line, that’s different than if the event feels ad hoc and unplanned.
When students are ready, they need to be provided with authentic opportunities to lead. And when they step and truly lead, it’s impressive to see what they can do. One of the highlights for me, a thing that really made me feel impressed, was that the main organizer did the same thing we did. He stepped back, work done before the event even started, and he let the younger students MC, he let his team run the show. He distributed the leadership the same way it was distributed to him.
I’ve been on a really positive tear recently in the gym. Both my cardio and weight training has seen positive gains.
And today I rest.
This has been an amazing year for consistency of workouts. Most weeks have been 6 or 7 days of working out at some level… 20-30 minutes of cardio, 5 minutes stretching, and then working a single muscle to fatigue. Or the 50+ minute Coquitlam Crunch walk, or a workout with my buddy at his gym.
Sometimes this year I’ve had weeks where I really didn’t take a break. That’s not hard to do when I’m only working one muscle strenuously besides doing my cardio. I can give my muscles a full rest before pushing them again, without having to take a day off. But my cardio always involves legs and when they get tight, my back gets tight.
This morning my body is telling me to take a break. I’m about to meditate and do a longer than usual stretch, and that’s it. It’s weird, I know how important rest is, but I usually plan my rest days before I get up in the morning and I can’t help but feel a little guilty skipping my workout today.
It’s a mental game I play with myself. It’s a fear of developing a bad pattern, of breaking the habit. So rather than just feeling good about my rest day, I sit with slightly guilty pangs. This is silly, of course, since what I’m doing is listening to my body. But part of me fears that an unplanned rest day like this is an excuse to have another one soon.
I should see my rest metaphorically as the space between musical notes, as the gaps that make the music. But instead I see my rest as a sign that I’m slipping, that my age is showing, that I’m getting soft. I’m not sure why I do this to myself? It’s a head game of rationalizations, rather than just letting go and enjoying the break. But maybe it’s also that I truly enjoy the way working out makes me feel, the sense of accomplishment before I even leave the house.
Still, I need to listen to my body, take the rest day… and feel good about it!
I’ve restarted writing this three times now. I’m not going to try again. I’ll let the ideas flow and just see where I end up.
I wish that I was surprised. I’m not. I’m disappointed. I’m saddened. But I’m really not surprised.
There are some amazing countries where freedom and equality are almost synonymous. There are countries where political differences do not polarize people into opposing factions. The United States of America is not one of them.
Why does it matter to me, a Canadian? Because ideas are memes that travel beyond borders. Because our biggest and only neighbour seems to be on the precipice of four years of strife, unease, and constant political banter. Because representation matters and I’m not a fan of what’s being represented.
We are entering an era of division. A polarized world where I have more questions than answers. Questions about global battles in Europe, the Middle East, and potentially Asia. About the battle for rights based on gender. A constant battle of words between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’.
I don’t foresee unity, I see a great divide. I foresee a constant and painful to watch news cycle that is filled with vitriol and malice. I hope not to see a loss of freedom, a ‘loss of Inalienable Rights’, which should be an oxymoron, but might not be. I hope for the best… I’m just not expecting it.
Sometimes I get sucked right into the death scroll. I am pulled into the vortex of swiping to the next video and being fully engaged entertained by what’s on my phone screen. I laugh out loud, I share with friends and family, I am amazed, I am enlightened. But mostly I’m entertained and distracted.
There is a love/hate relationship to this scrolling. I find it a healthy escape, better than watching a half hour TV show that has less than 22 minutes of actual show, and an often painful laugh track. Why watch something produced for the masses instead of a stream of vignettes that an algorithm caters to me? I also despise the time suck sometimes, wishing I got my butt off the couch because the 30 minutes I thought I was going to spend ends up being longer. Or worse yet, a quick check of the phone leads me into a direction I wasn’t planning on going.
I think my use is mostly healthy, but if I’m honest there are times when it’s really not. My week days are pretty manageable, with my scrolling primarily happening after dinner, but weekends tend to be a different story. Sometimes I can spend way too long staring at my phone. The algorithm figures me out and feeds me a continuous flow of entertaining distraction.
I don’t need to go on a social media diet, it’s not a problem, but it is something I need to pay attention to. Am I using the algorithm to provide a bit of entertainment, or is it merely a time-sucking distraction? Am I in control or am I letting the algorithm control me?
Some days in the gym can feel really strong. My buddy and I were both having one of those workouts yesterday. We both lifted a little heavier than we usually do, and felt strong throughout our sets.
We were discussing how working out with someone is a real motivator compared to working out on our own. It was at this point that I realized we had something in common, and that’s playing competitive team sports.
For both of us, working out with someone and doing more than we would on our own is not about showing off, it has much more to do with giving our best for the team. He’s relying on me to perform well, and I’m wanting to do the same for him.
When you’ve played team sports, you understand that the team relies on you and there is a kind of pressure to be better than if you were just doing the practice, workout, or even game for yourself. There is a mutual understanding that ‘we rely on each other’, and that not giving full effort is letting down everyone, not just yourself.
I wonder if this is something felt greater in people who have been on a competitive team compared to someone else? I wonder if people who choose solo sports rather than team sports get that same boost from some else? Or if they just innately feel that extra push and don’t need an outside influence?
I for one thrive on it. Most of my workouts happen alone, at home, in my basement. There are days I push, and days I kind of just go through the motions. But when I’ve got a workout buddy, that’s the motivation I need to thrive and have a really good workout every time!
There is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to influence the way we do school in the very near future. I have been pondering what that influence will look like. What are the implications now and what will they be in just a few short years.
Now: AI is going to get messy. Unlike when Google and Wikipedia came out and we were dealing with plagiarism issues, AI writing is not Google-able, and there are two key issues with this: First, you can create assignments that are not Google-able, but you are much more limited in what you can create that is un-AI-able. That is to say, you can ask a question that isn’t easily answerable by Google search, but AI is quite imaginative and creative and can postulate things that a Google search can’t answer, and then share a coherent response. The second issue is that AI detectors are not evidence of cheating. If I find the exact source that was plagiarized, it’s easy to say that a student copied it, but if a detector says that something is 90% likely to be written by AI that doesn’t mean that it’s only 10% likely to be written by a person. For example, I could write that last sentence in 3 different ways and an AI detector would come up with 3 different percentages of likeliness that it is AI. Same sentence, different percentage of likelihood to be AI written, and all written by me.
So we are entering a messy stage of students choosing to use AI to do the work for them, or to help them do the work, or even to discuss that topic and argue with them so that they can come up with their own, better responses. We can all agree that the three uses I shared above are progressively ‘better’ use of AI, but again, all are using AI in some way. The question is, are we going to try to police this, or try to teach appropriate use at the appropriate time? And even when we do this, what do we do when we suspect misuse, but can’t prove it? Do we give full marks and move on? Do we challenge the student? What’s the best approach?
So we are in an era where it is more and more challenging to figure out when a student is misusing AI and we are further challenged with the burden of proof. Do we now start only marking things we see students do in supervised environments? That seems less than ideal. The obvious choice is to be explicit about expectations and to teach good use of AI, and not pretend like we can continue on and expect students not to use it.
The near future: I find the possible direction of use of AI in schools quite exciting to consider. Watch this short video of Sal Hahn and his son, Imran, working with an Open AI tool to solve a Math question without the AI giving away the answer.
When I see something like this video, made almost 6 month ago, I wonder, what’s going to be possible in another couple years? How much will an AI ‘know’ about a student’s approach to learning, about their challenges? About how best to entice learning specifically for each student? And then what is the teacher’s role?
I’m not worried about teachers being redundant, on the contrary, I’m excited about what’s possible in this now era. When 80% of the class is getting exactly the instruction they need to progress to a grade standard in a class on the required content, how much time does a teacher having during class time to meet with and support the other 20% of students who struggle? When a large part part of the curriculum is covered by AI, meeting and challenging students at their ideal points of challenge, and not a whole class moving at the class targeted needs, how much ‘extra’ time is available to do some really interesting experiments or projects? What can be done to take ideas from a course across multiple disciplines and to teach students how to make real-world connections with the work they are studying?
Students generally spend between 5 and 6 hours a day in class at school. If we are ‘covering’ what we need to with AI assistance in less than 3 hours, what does the rest of the time at school look like? Student directed inquiries based on their passions and interests? Real world community connections? Authentic leadership opportunities? Challenges and competitions that force them to be imaginative and creative? The options seem both exciting and endless.
The path from ‘now’ to ‘the near future’ is going to be messy. That said, I’m quite excited about seeing how the journey unfolds. While it won’t be a smooth ride, it will definitely be one that is both a great adventure and one that is headed to a pretty fantastic destination.
_____
Update: Inspired by my podcast conversation with Dean Shareski, here.
We’ve all played it at some point. I whisper a complex message to you, you pass it on as best as you can. It goes through a group of people and the end result is nothing like the original message.
I have a recipe for Spanish Rice given to me by my mom over the phone. It’s a list of ingredients to put in a frying pan, with almost no measurements. “A big squeeze” of a bottle, “just a little bit” of another item. The only definitive instructions are to bake in a dish at 350° for about 30 minutes, with the water ‘just above the rice’.
I just made it for the first time this year and didn’t put enough water. I salvaged it by adding water in a much bigger dish, but it’s definitely not the best version I’ve made. I’ll make it better next time, because I’ll remember this experience. But both my daughters love this recipe and I’ll need to do a better job of sharing it with them rather than this vague set of instructions that I’ve used for over two decades now.
This makes me marvel at the way knowledge was shared through oral traditions, for thousands of years before written history. It makes sense that stories and metaphors were used to help make the information easier to transfer.
A great example is the three sisters:
“The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous people of Central and North America: squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.” ~ Wikipedia
How many generations did it take to learn of this symbiotic relationship between the 3 plants? And then, how clever to call them ‘sisters’ to help solidify their relationship and easily pass on the information to the next generation.
But I also wonder what knowledge was lost, or passed on inaccurately? What stories live on, like those of a great flood shared by cultures and peoples all over the world; yet have been given different meanings and interpretations that are based on the metaphors and stories of them being transferred poorly, like the telephone game, over centuries and centuries, over an unknown number of generations. For most of human history the telephone game was the main way to transfer knowledge. What was lost along the way?
The next time you buy yogurt, take a look at how much sugar it has in it. Do the same when you are buying ‘healthy’ cereals like the ones high in fibre. If you don’t normally pay attention to labels, you will be shocked.
It takes a tremendous amount of effort to eat healthy these days. Almost every packaged item has more sugar than you’d expect. I remember being at a roadside grocery while on holidays a few summers ago. I was thirsty and ended up choosing a lemonade rather than a can of pop. I thought I’d avoid a sugary soda. I got back to my car and that’s when I looked at the label. My lemonade had over 30 grams of sugar, (about 10 times more than a can of Coca Cola).
I don’t mind indulging in a sugary, tasty treat every now and then, but I make a concerted effort not to eat a lot of sugar as part of my regular diet… and it’s hard. It shouldn’t be, but so much food in our grocery stores have high doses of sugar.
I try to get most of my sugars in fruit. I will occasionally order a sugar free Diet Coke when I’m having fast food. And I read labels and make smart choices at the grocery store. But it’s not easy, it seems like there is sugar and more sugar everywhere I look.
