Author Archives: David Truss

New Headphones

I finally bit the bullet and got some Airpods. I had to go for the more expensive Pro version because the regular Airpods don’t fit my ears. I’ve been buying cheaper headphones and time and again they have failed me. My most recent pair are just under a year old, and now I routinely need to turn one off in order to get the other to connect. I have another pair of over-ear headphones that I use when I exercise in the morning. They are great for the exercise bike and row machine, with excellent noise reduction, but they ‘click’ when I am running on the treadmill, which is quite annoying.

It seems crazy to me to spend so much on a set of headphones but I have tinnitus in one ear, and I’ve realized that good headphones are better than always complaining. I spend quite a bit of time listening to audio books, and podcasts, and I can definitely pay better attention when I’m not struggling to hear. It’s interesting to me that something like headphones now feel like an essential item. I rarely listen to music, but I do so much listening for learning and for pleasure that I’ve realized I spend hours a week with my headphones on.

Well, that’s me rationalizing a luxury purchase… no buyer’s remorse here, I’ve got snazzy new headphones, and I’m going to enjoy them. 🙂

Backyard bliss

It’s the Saturday of a long weekend. I’m sitting in our gazebo with a coffee, and my family is starting to join me, so this will be brief.

A recent Facebook memory from 6 years ago was a photo of the hot tub pad that I built with a friend, at a time when I was dealing with chronic fatigue and moving cinder blocks was an exhausting ordeal.

That means our wonderful deck has been built for 6 years. This year we added an above ground pool and it is filled and ready for the first dip (for my family, I will wait for it to be warmer after we set up the solar heater). With covid restrictions, I think we will spend a bit more time in our backyard this year, and I have to say that we’ve made it into a place I love spend time in.

And now it’s time to make a latte for my daughter, and put my phone away.

Fast days

Yesterday went by ridiculously fast. I said to my secretaries at 10:20am, “I need a time machine to go back an hour and get all the things done that I thought I’d get done by now.” One of them said, “I think there’s a song about that, 🎵’If I could turn back time’🎶”.

Some days are like that, they zip by and even when you are working diligently, time escape you. After lunch was the same, except more interrupted. The interruptions and the follow up on them are expected in a job like mine. Other people’s priorities can become mine… I’m there to support my staff and students. But some days, like yesterday, happen so quickly that they seem to race by as if someone pressed and held the fast forward button.

I came home and after dinner I did a couple things I had planned to do in the morning. One job was about 5 minutes, the other about 30. Neither were very hard. Neither could get done during the day. The scary thing is that every June gets like this… but it’s not June yet and I’m already feeling the year-end crunch.

I might not be able to turn back time, but I wouldn’t mind if it slowing down just a bit!

The hill

I have my car in the shop so I rode my bike to work yesterday. It’s a really easy ride to work, with about 5% uphill, 15% flat, and 80% down hill. It takes about 10-12 minutes and I couldn’t break a sweat if I tried. Coming home is a different story.

When I leave work to go home, I cross the street corner the school is on and BOOM… there’s the nastiest of hills I have to ride on my whole trip. It starts easy, then turns and gets harder, then a steep bend that stays steep afterwards, then a slight bend and steeper yet. But then you can see a 4-way stop and what looks like the end of the hill, but no. On the other side of the intersection is still an uphill climb. It’s not as bad as before, but having just got on my bike and started to sweat within 3 minutes, it’s still feels tough.

From there, a turn onto a flat, main thoroughfare street for half a block, and a turn at the lights onto my street almost 2 km from home… and with the exception of one small dip and a flat last 100 meters, it’s all a gradual uphill ride.

I remember now why, despite living so close, I have chosen not to ride to work often. That said, none of this ride is that bad. It’s more mental than physical. It’s the issue of starting right on the toughest hill, and that hill progressively getting tougher. And since I’m a lot fitter now than in past years, it didn’t wipe me out. So maybe I’ll ride more often now.

One nice thing that is no longer an issue that used to deter me was having to lug my laptop back and forth, but now with everything I need stored in OneDrive and OneNote, I really don’t need to carry anything home. I have to ride this morning, car is still in the shop. Maybe tomorrow too. After 3 days, I’m pretty sure I’ll decide if this hill keeps me from riding regularly, or if it gets smaller in my mind and riding to/from work becomes a regular thing.

Teaching and Trust

I surveyed our Grad 9’s a couple days ago. Coming from middle school, and getting stuck in a single cohort, they really didn’t get the experience at our school we wanted for them. At Inquiry Hub our students usually connect across grades, and interact as a larger community, which is important in a really small school. But although we were able to give them full days, unlike large schools with a lot more cohorts to manage, the environment our 9’s came into is far more like an extension of a single class in middle school than a high school. That said, they really don’t know what they are missing compared to a regular year here… they’ve never seen it.

I asked them to write on a piece of paper, a positive, a challenge, and/or a suggestion or wish, and I collected them. They could write about any or all of these.

Here are a few of them:

The challenges and suggestions were all related to covid restrictions, with less clubs, and a lack of connection with other cohorts. Beyond that the comments were very positive.

“I like the open and just overall welcoming environment.”

“I like how you can structure your own day…”

“I like how our courses let us set our own goals and learning paths.”

“Even though our community is so small, I like how close we’ve all gotten.”

One comment in particular was quite interesting to me:

“I love how much the teachers trust us here.”

I agree that our teachers give students a lot of freedom, and choice. And students at iHub get a fair bit of unstructured time to work on what the want/need to work on. But I never thought of this through the lens of trust, like this student.

When students feel trusted, they feel empowered, they feel they have a responsibility to keep that trust. It’s an interesting lens to see the dynamic of the classroom through. How does the relationship between the students and the teachers change when trust is given and valued? Where does the responsibility for learning fall in a trusting relationship? What else is fostered in a trusting environment?

Kudos to our teachers for creating such a wonderful learning environment in these challenging times.

Cat alarm clock

It’s not fun having your cat wake you up at 3am with an angry high pitched scream. What could possibly be wrong? And then I find him at the back glass French doors, hair raised on his back, looking at a cute, fluffy, grey and white cat just outside the doors. The other cat is sitting calmly watching him, taunting him with complete lack of concern. The only recourse is to lock our cat in the bedroom, or try to chase a cat away, that will surely return as soon as I fall back asleep.

Our cat isn’t usually like this. Our neighbour has a male cat too, and our two ‘boys’ are best friends. They hang out together all the time. They roam the neighbourhood together. They visit each other to start their days. They have quite the ‘bromance’ and don’t even put up a fight if the other cat is eating their food.

But this grey cat is not a friend. He or she is one of the only reasons our cat will wail like a heavy weight just landed in his tail. And last night we got the 3am wake up call.

I don’t mind when our cat, Oliver, walks on me at 5am, even though he won’t settle on me. Instead he wakes me up to pet him 2-3 times, then goes to my wife. He literally comes to tell me, ‘I’m going to cuddle with your wife’. But this is ok. I’m usually getting up about then and so this wake up call is fine.

On the other hand, Oliver screaming bloody murder at 3am is really not an ok way to be woken up. Hopefully the cute, fluffy, grey and white cat is regularly kept inside, and we don’t have too many unplanned cat alarms in the coming days and weeks ahead.

People are Blackberries

This is a silly metaphor, but it works for me.

Blackberries are a unique fruit. I can eat a handful of raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries, and it doesn’t matter how many I put in my mouth, I enjoy them all the same. That’s not the case for blackberries. Blackberries taste better when you have one at a time. Two blackberries in your mouth are not as enjoyable as just one.

I think this is the case because individual blackberries have distinct taste profiles and these unique qualities get cancelled out when you taste too many of them at once. The collection of taste profiles isn’t as good as tasting them individually.

I like people the same way. One at a time. I enjoy conversations with a single person far more than with a group. I want to hear their profile, I want to focus on the individual. At parties I seldom seek out a group of people. I’d rather have a one-on-one chat.

To me, people are blackberries, not any other berry… and I enjoy them most, one at a time.

Yard work

I’ve probably written about this several times before, but I’m really not a fan of yard work. I don’t understand growing grass and making it nice and healthy, just so that it needs to be cut more often. I think weeds are prettier than a blanket of green grass. I understand watering a vegetable or herb garden, but flowers are made to be outside… if they don’t grow with the weather you have in your environment, then they are the wrong flowers to grow.

I love being outside, and I enjoy my back yard immensely. I want to spend time out in the sunshine. In fact, I’m about to assemble our above ground pool and I’m looking forward to putting a couple hours into this. So, it’s not that I don’t like doing chores outside, I just don’t like gardening, and cutting the grass, and weeding. Maybe one day, 30 years from now, if my knees and back are capable, I might fall in love with nurturing a garden. But right now, I’d rather sit in my back yard and enjoy the dandelions… if only my wife (and neighbours) agreed with me. 🙂

All the extras

We’ve been looking to replace my old minivan, and shopping for a hybrid SUV. Today I decided that I’ll just stick with my van for a couple more years, and probably go all electric when I do upgrade.

Nowadays shopping for a vehicle is all about the extras you get lumped together. It’s not about personalization, it’s about packaging. My wife wants a sunroof, ‘Oh well then you have to go two models up and you get the video rear view mirror’ (makes me dizzy), ‘the built in GPS’ (my phone and CarPlay is fine), ‘and the trunk opens by waving your foot under it’ (wow, I couldn’t live without it, I think to myself sarcastically).

I can’t see myself buying another gas-only car ever again, but while we still want a larger SUV, the choices seem to be overpriced features in hybrids, and I think I’d rather wait for a larger full electric, that I’m not spending thousands more on features I don’t want.

My commute is 6.6 kilometres (4.1 miles) round trip, to and from work. For now, I’ll keep my minivan and shop again in a couple years… maybe then I’ll be a little less fussy about paying for features I don’t want.

New conspiracy theory

I wish I saved the video clip where I heard this… it’s brilliant and I don’t know who to give credit to.

Here’s how you out conspire a conspiracy theorist anti-vaxer who talks about how the government is using vaccines to control you… you tell them this:

“You are right! And their plan is very clever. Vaccinate all the sheep who listen and comply. Then spread a deadly variant of the virus, and kill off all the unvaccinated who don’t listen. And further get the sheep to follow them by saying, ‘See, we told you the vaccine would save your life.’ Thus wiping out anyone that doesn’t obey and reinforcing the importance of complying.”

🤣🤣🤣

Now there is a ridiculous conspiracy theory that I’d like to see spread widely in the conspiracy theory circles.