Monthly Archives: May 2025

The pump

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I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to work out with my buddy at his gym, at least once a week for the past few months. My home routine is usually just cardio, stretching, then working one muscle group to fatigue… sometimes with just 3 sets of one exercise, and sometimes 3 each of two exercises, but again using the same muscle group.

With my buddy, at his gym, we do a bit more than that. The last couple workouts have focused on shoulders with some biceps and triceps thrown in. Both of these last two workouts I’ve pushed hard enough that my shoulder muscles were jacked up. I could feel the pump long after the workout was done.

While I’m not used to this feeling, and it’s a bit uncomfortable, I have to say that I really enjoy it! It’s a feeling that says, ‘I’ve pushed myself’, and while it isn’t necessarily a pleasant feeling, it comes with a good sense of accomplishment. The pump is not something you feel unless you’ve really made your muscles work.

Now I need to figure out how to add more to my home program so that I get this feeling a bit more often. It’s hard when I’m on a time crunch, but I know I can do this more often, and I want to get to that ‘pumped up’ feeling on a regular basis.

As an aside, I’m blown away by how much creatine helps with reducing soreness. A workout like today’s would normally lead me to total soreness in a couple days that would make lifting my arms above my head feel like work. But since adding creatine to my daily health regimen, I’ve hardly ever had that level of soreness, even after hitting personal bests or working to a pump like I did today. And that makes the pump so much more enjoyable when I’m not going to feel like I’m physically paying for it two days from now.

Passion Projects

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For the second day in a row I got to watch student IDS – Independent Directed Study – final presentations. The last couple were from a Grade 11 on ‘Coding a Cookbook’ and a grade 12 on ‘Creating a Music Album’.

I’m so glad we recorded these. Both the depth of learning and the appreciation of the learning process were on full display. Presentations were exceptional both in design and also in delivery. This isn’t a surprise because these are skills intentionally taught at Inquiry Hub. And students do so many presentations at our school that they comfortably get in front of an audience to speak.

Still, I watch and I’m so impressed with the ability of these teenagers to be captivating presenters. And there is no better presentation to watch than an IDS, where the entire curriculum is designed by the students. Let students work on and learn about topics they are truly passionate and interested in, and they’ll very often go above and beyond expectations.

Celebrating challenges

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I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

Morning light

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I love waking up to my room getting lighter. My body just tells me it’s time to get up. As each day has slowly gotten longer we are now at the point where light creeps through the edges of our darkened curtains and signals me that it is time to rise. With a 5am wake up time, it takes until this time of year for that to actually happen.

My perfect routine would be in bed by 11pm, wake up at 5 to 5:30am, then a nice siesta in the afternoon. But I can’t siesta at work, so I force myself to bed before 10pm. Still, a night like last night had me up until almost 11 anyway. Even a couple sleep meditations couldn’t get me to sleep.

Yet it was easy to wake up before my alarm this morning. With daylight sneaking into the room my body told me it was time to get up. And so for the next few months my mornings will be a lot easier, and I’ll awaken ready for the day… all thanks to the morning light.

Self-interests in AI

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Yesterday I read the following in the ‘Superhuman Newsletter (5/26/25)’:

Bad Robot: A new study from Palisade Research claims that “OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off”, even when it was explicitly instructed to shut down. The study raises serious safety concerns.

It amazes me how we’ve gotten here. Ten, or even five years ago there were all kinds of discussions about of AI safety. There was a belief that future AI would be built in isolation with an ‘air-gap’, used as a security measure to ensure AI systems remained contained and separate from other networks or systems. We would grow this intelligence in a metaphorical petri dish and build safety guards around it before we let it out into the wild

Instead, these systems have been built fully in the wild. They have been give unlimited data and information, and we’ve built them in a way that we aren’t sure we understand their ‘thinking’. They surprise us with choices like choosing not to turn off when explicitly asked to. Meanwhile we are simultaneously training them to use ‘agents’ that interact with the real world.

What we are essentially doing is building a super intelligence that can act autonomously, while simultaneously building robots that are faster, stronger, more agile, and fully programmable by us… or by an AI. Let’s just pause for a moment and think about these two technologies working together. It’s hard not to construct a dystopian vision of the future when we watch these technologies collide.

And the reality is that we have not built an air-gap. We don’t have a kill switch. We are essentially heading down a path to having super-intelligent AI ignoring our commands while operating robots and machines that will make us feeble in comparison (in intelligence, strength, and mobility).

When our intelligence compared to AI is equivalent to a chimpanzee’s intelligence compared to ours, how will this super-intelligence treat us? This is not a hyperbole, it’s a real question we should be thinking about. If today’s rather simplistic LLM AI models are already choosing to ignore our commands what makes us think a super-intelligent AI will listen to or reason with us?

All is well and good when our interests align, but I don’t see any evidence that self-interested AI will necessarily have aligned interests with the intelligent monkeys that we are. And the fact that we’re building this super-intelligence out in the wild gives reason to pause and wonder what will become of humanity in an age of super-intelligent AI?

Tasks in my calendar

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I’ve got a full day today, but when I look at my calendar I don’t see meetings, I see tasks. For example, a phone call to make, an order to buy, a form submission deadline. I used to just flag tasks but I’ve found that adding them to my calendar is far more effective.

Looking at my calendar on a Monday can sometimes be daunting. So many small tasks that got carried over from the previous week. Yet this is far more effective than having a separate tasks list. Sure I still keep a small paper ‘To Do’ list with some big items that can’t just be checked off in a 15 or 30 minute calendar appointment time, but most of my tasks get calendared.

And sometimes those tasks get moved to the next day. So many times a calendar item gets swallowed up by the daily goings on of a school building. My intention to get 3 tasks done between 9:30-10:30 suddenly becomes 1 task done in the afternoon and the 2 others being pushed to later in the week. But I am definitely more efficient and effective when these tasks are in my calendar.

If I need more information before I can send an email? Slide the email right into my calendar. I need to prep (or read something) for an upcoming meeting? Slide an appointment into my calendar before the meeting.

I look at my calendar all the time. It’s available on all my devices. And consistently adding tasks to my calendar has helped me stay on top of things that can easily be missed when juggling a busy day of distractions. The key is to look back at my calendar at the end of the day and make sure anything missed gets moved forward.

Just keep blogging…

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I came across this post, via a Facebook memory, which was posted 5 years ago today. ‘Journaling Out Loud’, in which I stated, “I’m sure there are some people that wonder, ‘why would anyone want to do this anyway?’ That’s actually not a bad question. For me, I love to write and I wasn’t doing enough of it. The self-created obligation to do so inspires me to make the commitment.”

And I also shared this quote,

“For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.“ ~Seth Godin

I think my total readership has gone down in the past few year. Social media shares used to get a lot of clicks but I don’t pay and I’ve noticed that organic visits to my posts have dropped dramatically… while I’m simultaneously seeing my feeds full of items from people who pay subscription fees. Membership has its privileges.

But I’m not worried about readership nearly as much as I am about the act of writing… as well as clarifying and developing my ideas. I take pride not in accolades but rather in commitment. I write Every. Single. Day. Some days are really hard. Many days I’m just going through the motions. But I hit that publish button every day.

I get to share my artistic expression, my imagination, my thoughts on interesting topics. I also keep my commitment to healthy living by frequently referencing my routines and challenges on my blog.

And sometimes the words just flow. They dance from my brain, to my keyboard, to the screen and say exactly what I want to say with just the right word choice. On those days I hit the publish button with delight. It doesn’t matter if this flow state comes to me once a week or once a month, that’s enough to remind me of why I journal out loud every day.

And so I’ll be back tomorrow. For now I’ll just end with my blog byline, shared in a post many years ago:

“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.”

Truth and bias

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I was listening to Chris Williamson on a podcast and he said this quote.

“People think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

~ First attributed to William Fitzjames Oldham

This reminds me of another often quoted phrase, regarding there being three sides to every argument, the one side, the other side, and somewhere in the middle is the Truth.

I had a phone discussion with a friend recently and we were discussing politics. We saw the topic from two totally different perspectives. I then had face-to-face discussion with another friend about a global issues and again we came from completely different perspectives. In both cases neither of us changed each other’s minds.

In one case I want to be wrong, in the other case I wish that I was wrong, and that my bias, ultimately my prejudice, could be changed. In both cases I recognize that getting new information really didn’t change my view… even though I might be happier and see things more positively if the other person was right.

Am I just a symptom of the times? Am I a victim of misinformation, who is choosing to believe perspectives that are intentionally biased? Am I not able to see the truth somewhere in the middle because I lack perspective, or am I blind to my own prejudice?

It’s getting harder and harder to find narratives that are clearly true. Arguments tend not to be about seeking truth but rather earning airtime, and garnering clicks & shares. The math is such that a false accusation will get millions of social media likes and reshares, but the correction barely gets seen. A fake video gets major attention. A blatant exaggeration or even a lie is simply accepted as close enough to true and accepted.

It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t lead us to the Truth, ‘somewhere in the middle’. No, instead we are left rearranging our prejudices and biases, and sticking to our points of view without ever really thinking.

Spring formal

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Last night was our senior spring formal. Our school is small enough that we actually hold it for grades 11 & 12 combined because it would be too small for just one grade. This is only our second year running the event, and I’m convinced that we’ll do this every year. Watching our students enjoy the evening together reminded me what a wonderful community we have. Having not just every teacher but also our secretaries join us was also special.

Our students were appreciative, and enjoyed the whole evening, with many making the effort to thank us all for the event. I spent the entire evening taking photos and I am pretty sure I’ve got at least one of every kid that if they don’t love it, at least their parents will. I was reminded of my days taking wedding photos, except that I did that back in the film era and it used to take over a week to know if the pictures I took were good or not. Having instant results is so much better.

It’s wonderful to have a year-end event like this. We will still have our grad night, but for many kids getting decked out for the dinner dance will be as memorable or more memorable than walking across the stage and receiving their diploma. And so I’m glad we are able to provide this experience for our students… despite them not being in a big, more traditional high school.

A good reminder

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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!