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.
This time of year can feel like a grind. So much to do, so little time. So when we get a little reminder of why we do what we do, it’s special, and uplifting. Tonight is our senior spring formal and the evening will be one of those reminders. Seeing our now grown up students all dressed up, and remembering their younger selves when they first arrived at the school, will be a reminder of the growth and development we’ve supported in these young adults.
Yesterday we had another little reminder. A card and gifts for the staff from the parents of a grade 12 student. What makes this card extra special is that it comes from a prof in teacher education. Here is the letter, a wonderful battery charge as we head into the final few weeks of school.
Dear IHub Faculty and Staff,
Thank you for an amazing four years! We could not have asked for a better or more supportive learning environment for [student name]. We are so grateful for all you do to provide engaging apportunities for students that connects them with their passions and gifts.
Thank you for supporting [student name] unconditionally and for all your patience and flexibility. You are the gold standard of what education should be. We raise a glass to you all and honour all of your contributions to the lives of the students in the graduating class of 2025!
It’s only 8 seconds long, but this clip of and old sailor could easily be mistaken for real:
And beyond looking real, here is what Google’s new Flow video production platform can do:
Body movement, lip movement, objects moving naturally in gravity, we have the technology to create some truly incredible videos. On the one hand, we have amazing opportunities to be creative and expand the capabilities of our own imaginations. On the other hand we are entering into a world of deep fakes and misinformation.
Such is the case with most technologies. They can be used well and can be used poorly. Those using it well will amaze us with imagery and ideas long stuck in people’s heads without a way previously to express them. Those using it poorly will anger and enrage us. They will confuse us and make it difficult to discern fake news from real.
I am both excited and horrified by the possibilities.
I recently wrote, ‘The school experience’ where I stated, “I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence?” In that post I was focused on removing the kind of things we traditionally do with opportunities to experience learning in the classroom (with and without AI).
What’s interesting about this is that the change will indeed come, but not for the right reasons. The reason we’ll see a transformation of schools happen faster than expected is because with AI being constantly used to do homework, take notes, and do textbook assignments, grades are going to be inflated and it will be hard to discern who gets into universities.
This will encourage two kinds of changes in schools. On the one hand we will see a movement backwards to more traditional testing and reduced innovation. This is the group that wants to promote integrity, but blindly produces students who are good memorizers and are good at wrote learning. However, not producing students ready to live in our innovative and ever-changing world.
The second kind of school will promote competencies around thinking, knowing, and doing things collaboratively and creatively. These are the real schools of the future.
But I wonder which of these schools will universities be more interested in? Which practices will universities use? It’s easier to invigilate an exam that is based on wrote learning than it is to mark group projects in a lecture hall of 200+ students. So what kind of students are universities going to be looking for?
I fear that this might be a case of the tail wagging the dog and that we could see a movement towards ‘traditional learning’ as a pathway to a ‘good’ university… The race to the best marks in a school that tests in traditional ways and has ‘academic rigour’ could be the path that universities push.
This is a mistake.
The worst part of schooling is marks chasing. It undermines meaningful feedback and it misses the point that this is a learning environment with learning opportunities. Instead it’s about the mark. The score that gets averaged into GPA’s and meets minimum requirements to get into programs or schools of choice after high school.
The question I ponder is if universities will continue to focus on that metric and continue to wag the dog in this way, or will they start looking more meaningfully at other metrics like portfolios and presentations? Will they take the time to do the work necessary to really assess the student as a learner, or will they just continue to collect marks chasers and focus on accepting kids who come from schools that are good at differentiating those marks in traditional ways?
This could be an exciting time for universities to lead the way towards truly innovative practices rather than being the last bastion of old ways of teaching and learning… Old ways being perpetuated by a system that values marks over thinking, traditions over progress, and old practices over institutions of truly higher learning.
University entry is the tail wagging the dog, and so the way that universities respond to AI doing work that students have had to do will determine how quickly schools innovate and progress.
When you call a sibling, text a friend, video chat with a kid or a parent…
When you go to a birthday, an anniversary, a reunion…
Will a memory from today come up in conversation?
What separates today from the many days before, now long forgotten?
Of course if every day were truly memorable, it would be unlikely that we could recall them all, and peak experiences do not feel like they are special if they occur every day… but the question still holds, “Will you remember this day?”
If not, what can you do to make it more than just another forgotten day?
It has been 6 years in the making, but I’ve seen some pretty amazing gains in my fitness and strength, especially in the past 2 years. The 4 years before that included gains too, but they were very small. Well, initially I did see a good drop in unnecessary weight, but after the first year my gains were small and hard to recognize. Now I’m seeing the results of my hard work.
The easiest place to notice this is my calves and arms. And why do I notice these two areas more than anywhere else? Because of the way my clothes fit. I have pants that used to fit loosely that now ride up my legs every time I sit down because my calves don’t allow my pants to drop back down. And my favourite T-shirts that used to fit loosely are now tight and make me look like I’m trying to show off.
What changed in the last couple years? Why have I seen these gains, when I hadn’t before despite working out as hard?
I’ve been taking creatine for a few years now and the required recovery time of my muscles after a workout has decreased. (So has the 2-day later soreness that I barely get anymore other than leg days, which have always been hard for me.)
I’ve increased my protein. I’m probably still not at the recommended 1gram of protein per pound that I weigh, but I’m now over 3/4 there rather than averaging less than half of that daily.
Really pushing to max (hypertrophy). I push myself more working out with a friend, or at school. Not only can I lift heavier when I’m using machines I don’t have in my home gym, I can also lift heavier when I have a spotter (and motivator).
Consistency. I’ve said it over and over again… the most important day in the gym is the day you don’t feel like going and you go anyway. These days my workouts are such a big part of my day (even though most are for less than an hour), that I struggle to convince myself to take a day off. Volume matters when looking to increase muscle mass.
I think I’m at my ideal weight now, but I have a goal to gain 5-7 pounds more by the end of this year. The way I see it, I won’t be at this ideal weight 15 years from now if I just try to maintain this current weight. But if I’m 7 pounds more now, I could again be at this ideal weight in 15 years, despite muscle loss that can come with aging.
So, I’ve got more gains to make, and I think I’m on the right path to gain the weight I want. The only challenge is that I might need to buy some better fitting clothing.
Real change only happens when the pain of doing something new is less than the pain of avoiding the new thing. I was talking to my buddy, Dave, after our 178th Coquitlam Crunch today and we spoke about the discipline and work that we’ve put into fitness, good eating habits, and our social-emotional wellbeing. It comes down to the fact that habits are easier to maintain than motivation, and showing up matters more than any other factor.
It sounds so cliche, but the most important workout is the one you don’t want to do… but still do. It’s a scheduled workout day and you have zero motivation… do a workout anyway. Your gas tank is empty and you can’t imagine doing your workout routine… go to the gym anyway and do a 20 minute walk in the treadmill.
Probably more than 50% of the times that you drag your ass to the gym, not wanting to go, you’ll end up doing more than you expected you would do. But guess what? The other times when you don’t do more, when you just barely do the minimum… these are the workouts that really matter. You showed up! You kept the habit going. You made the next attempt to go to the gym easier. “If I can get to the gym feeling the way I did yesterday, I can definitely get to the gym today!”
“My advice,” Dave said, “would be just show up for the first 100 days. Don’t expect to see changes, don’t even look in the mirror. The first 100 days are about making workouts something you never miss, or monitoring calories and developing good eating habits.”
Essentially, the first 100 days are really hard, and they matter the most. I said that, ‘Real change only happens when the pain of doing something new is less than the pain of avoiding the new thing.’ Whatever your new habit is, reduce the pain of doing it by making the desired goal mandatory.
You want to go to the gym 5 days a week? For the first 100 days there are no excuses, nothing is allowed to make you miss. You went away for the weekend and didn’t work out? You go to the gym every day from Monday to Friday. Exhausted and don’t want to go to the gym on Thursday? Too bad, you already missed the weekend, and attendance is non-negotiable.
Will that Thursday workout be a good one? Probably not. But it will likely be more than you thought you had in you, and it was the most important workout of the week. You got there. You kept the streak going. You aren’t someone who skips out, you don’t make excuses, you maintain your habits. You are a regular who would rather feel the pain of a workout than the pain of letting yourself down.
Just show up for the first 100 days. After the habit is established, then you can look at losses and gains. Then you can reduce fat, add muscle, increase flexibility or endurance… or just feel good about yourself because you have developed a great habit that you find easier and easier to maintain.
Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. We’ve all heard the term, “Your eyes deceive you,” and the reality is that there’s a lot more to this saying than we think… because our eyes are always deceiving us.
We don’t see the same range of colours as other species of animals. We don’t see bands of light such as infra red. We have a blind spot that our minds fill in. We see a version of the world around us, and while it’s a fairly accurate perception of the world, it’s still only a rendering of what’s there.
So there are many things that we are unaware of. Things that happen too fast for us to fully see. Even our frame rate for seeing things affects what we see as and interpret. We don’t see a hummingbird’s wings in flight. Do hummingbirds?
We can’t see as far as a hawk. Nor are we as aware of movement in our peripheral vision as hawks. Birds wouldn’t be very good flying hunters if they only had the eyes of a human.
On top of our eyes naturally deceiving us, our mood and disposition further skews what we see. We see half of a glass of water and some consider it half empty while others see it as half full. Different observers can see two people conversing and can feel curiosity, jealousy, or even no interest in the conversation. Each of these perspectives alters the meaning behind what we’ve observed, and ultimately colours the experience for us… changes what we think we see.
I find it an interesting thing to think about. Our visual impression of the world is just that, an impression. It’s a form of deception. We have a specific lens of the world that is not true as much as it is interpreted. And, it is interpreted based on a reasonable facsimile of the world, not a true view of reality.
We are observers with imperfect observation tools, which while deceiving us also gives us a good enough grasp of reality that we can share our experiences… and others find what we experience to be congruent enough with us that we walk around believing we see the world as it is. But really we don’t. We are constantly being deceived by the limitations of our eyes. And for the most part we believe that the world we see is the world that actually exists, not just our limited but effective interpretation.
We have a small ravine behind our school. There is a well kept trail through this tiny piece of nature surrounded by a school, industrial buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday after work I went for a walk around the very short trail. After 12+ years in this building I’m realizing how rarely I visit this space. I have a little piece of nature nestled right against my school and I almost never take advantage of it.
There is power in nature bathing, in surrounding yourself in trees and getting away from the noise of the city. Getting away from the digital calendar, and email, meetings, and all those ‘other duties as assigned’.
Don’t believe me? Just turn up the volume and listen to this recording for 20 seconds.
Did you hear the birds or just the water? Listen again. Think about what 5 minutes of this could do for your day.
I’m going to find myself on this trail a little more frequently in the last few weeks of school.
I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence? There are some key elements of school that are completely undermined by tools that do the work faster and more effectively than students. Here are three examples:
Homework. If you are sending homework such as an essay home, it’s not a question of whether or not a student uses AI, it’s a question of how much AI is being used. Math homework? That’s just practice for AI, not the student.
Note taking. From recording and dictating words to photographing slides and having them automatically transcribed, if a traditional lecture is the format, AI is going to outperform any physical note taking.
Textbook work? Or questions about what happened in a novel? This hunt-and-peck style assignment used to check to see if a student did the reading, but unless it’s a supervised test situation, a kid can get a perfect score without reading a single page.
So what do we want students to do at school? Ultimately it’s about creating experiences. Give them a task that doesn’t involve taking the project home. Give them a task where they need to problem solve in teams. Engage in content with them then have them debate perspectives… even provide them with opportunities to deepen their perspectives with AI before the debate.
Class time is about engaging in and with the content, with each other, and with tools that help students understand and make meaning.. Class isn’t consumption of content, it’s engaging with content, it’s engaging in collaborative challenges, it’s time to be creative problem-solvers.
Don’t mistake the classroom experience with entertaining students, it’s not about replacing the content or the learning with Bill Nye the Science Guy sound bites of content… it’s about creating experiences where students are challenged, while in the class, to solve problems that engage them. And this doesn’t mean avoiding AI, it does mean that it is used or not used with intentionality and purpose.
We need to examine what the school experience looks like in an era when technology makes traditional schooling obsolete. We didn’t keep scribing books after the printing press. Blacksmiths didn’t keep making hand-forged nails after we could mass produce them. Yet AI can efficiently and effectively produce the traditional work we ask for in schools and somehow we want students to mass produce the work the old way?
How do we transform the school experience so that it is meaningful and engaging for students… not AI?
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*I used AI (Copilot) to suggest the production of nails as being a redundant item no longer created by blacksmiths. I also use AI to create most of the images on my blog, including the one with this post, with a prompt that took a couple attempts until Copilot offered, “Here comes a fresh take! A Rube Goldberg-style school, where the entire structure itself is a fantastical machine, churning out students like a whimsical knowledge factory.”
My youngest is off on an adventure for the next 3 and a half months, and so my wife and I will be on our own in our big house from now until the day I return to work after the summer. I have to say that it feels a bit weird after 25+ years. The longest we’ve gone before this with both kids out of the house has been about 5 weeks.
My daughter will return from the trip and be back with us. Our oldest might be coming back as well depending on the school she selects for her next degree. So, we aren’t really empty nesters yet, and may not be for a while yet… but this is a wonderful first test of what’s to come.
Frankly, I’m perfectly ok with this being for just a few months and I’m happy to have our adult daughters who don’t mind being under our roof. In this era of soaring rent and house prices I imagine we aren’t the only ones who will see our kids staying with, and returning to, their parents for a large part of their 20’s. And although it will be nice to see what empty nest life will be like, there is no rush to get there on a full time basis.
