Author Archives: David Truss

No more Daily Ink posts on my personal FB page

If you read my Daily Ink post via my Facebook Story, or on my wall, please follow my Pairadimes Facebook page. If you read my blog post somewhere else, just skip to the last paragraph.

As I approach a year of Daily-Ink blog posts, after leaving this blog dormant for a while, I’m reflecting on the process. One thing that I like about when I hit “Publish” on my blog is that it gets auto-posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my Pairadimes Facebook page. Then I manually go to the FB post on my page and add it to my FB story and my FB wall. I’m no longer going to do this. The challenge is that I often write my post either the night before it gets posted or I write it in the morning over an hour before I post it, (I like to have it done before my morning meditation and workout).

So, daily I have this task that I need to remember to do… and it becomes a chore rather than something I want to do. It also makes me feel like I’m ‘plugging my blog’, saying “Look at me!” And while I love comments and engagement on my blog, I do find I write better when I focus on the writing itself and not an audience of readers. Having my Daily-Ink blog automatically go to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my FB page is enough. Please follow my posts at one of these sites if you normally read my blog on my Facebook wall. Today is the last day I regularly share my posts on my FB wall or on my story.

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And as a special request to all readers, I do love your comments! Comments make the blogging experience better. However when I get a comment on Facebook or LinkedIn, or in a a tweet, they are fleeting. They end up on my timelines, never to be seen again. However, I go back to my blog posts often, and a comment there becomes part of a historical conversation that becomes part of the blog. So as a special request, please comment on my blog posts rather than in social spaces. ~ Thank you!

Setting up for summer

I hope that all the dads enjoyed Father’s Day today. I spent most of it putting together a 12′ by 22′ above ground pool. With our big summer trip to Spain and Portugal cancelled, we’ll be spending a lot more time in our back yard this summer. So although it wasn’t a typical Father’s day, I spent it setting the foundation for a good summer ahead.

That isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the day. I got a couple nice gifts and I enjoyed BLT bagels with a couple eggs cooked in bacon grease (a favourite meal for me), and my wife made delicious fish tacos for dinner too.

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I usually spend more of Father’s Day with my girls, but my youngest had to work today, and the pool needed to be put together. Today was about setting things up for summer, and it was a good day.

Words on the wall

My wife bought these 3 themed pictures for my daughter for her grad. I like the poetic feel to them. It seems like we get stuck in tweet sized captions,


… And Meme sized laughs,

… And forget that prose beyond a line or two can capture our thoughts and imagination.

Sometimes it’s inspiring to read platitudes and carefully scripted ideas.

“…life is simple, it’s just not easy.”

“…we may not have it all together but together we have it all.”

“The secret of having it all is knowing you already do.”

More than academics

Last night we did a livestream of iHub Annual, a yearly celebration that includes presentations, awards, and our Grad. It was one hour long, but it took a couple hundred hours of work to put together, including running the social distancing grad celebration a couple nights before. It didn’t go perfectly, there were a few kinks, but overall it went very well! Our awards at our school are minimal: Leadership & Community service, inquiries, and the Grade 12 ‘Spirit of Inquiry’ Award, for the grad or grads who exemplify what it means to combine leadership/community and also produce amazing inquiry projects.

Highlighting the service to our community (the school or greater community) is something that makes me appreciate what schools do beyond academics.

It’s interesting to think of how remote learning has interrupted the feeling of community, but we still try to bring kids together. One of our teachers started a watch party of the livestream on Teams, and going to check out the chat conversation afterwards was heartwarming. The students watching were complimenting the student performances, congratulating the award winners, and sharing in the celebration of the night. It really was powerful.

This morning a video, Numb – a short film by Liv McNeil, was shared with me:

While remote learning works for some, for others it just isn’t school. I think about how much of what we highlight in our year-end celebration has to do with community, compared to a focus on academics… and it really makes me think about how much more of school is about belonging, and well-being, and community. That isn’t to say academics isn’t important, it’s just that school does so much more than give students final marks on a transcript.

We go live tonight

Students crossed the stage on Tuesday, but tonight we celebrate with our first ever YouTube Livestream.

Two former students, brothers, are our tech team and the show has been a dedicated effort of staff and these two boys since last week.

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I won’t lie, the idea of a live show, on a platform we haven’t used before, is nerve-wracking, but we will be as ready as we can be.

iHub Annual — Going live tonight, Thursday June 18th, 2020 at 7pm.

InquiryHub.org/annual2020

Community and Belonging

Yesterday 18 Inquiry Hub grads crossed the stage and received their high school diplomas. They then went to a room and stood behind a camera for a quick 3-5 minute interview. I watched them all, hearing what they had to say about their experience at our school. Time and again I heard them speak of enjoying the community and relationships they built with each other.

I know we have challenges at the school and things can always be better, and I know that in a small school, things can get cliquey, but we have been able to foster a lot of cooperation and acceptance of very different groups.

One of our students who has thrived at our school was actually out of school, taking online courses having been completely dissatisfied with her previous school experience. She was coming to our building to do testing, (I’m principal of the online school too, and Inquiry Hub shares a room with the online school to offer testing twice a week). She said that when she came in for testing she could feel the positive atmosphere from the school and knew that it would be a good place for her.

We’ve had educators come through to visit the school and they have said the same thing. This has been a constant. It even happened 4 years ago when we were struggling to build community with two student groups that felt more like factions than cliques. It was weird, here we were struggling to build community and even bringing in an elder to do a circle, and a couple days later four educators from Alberta spend a morning with us, and when I meet them at lunch they told us what a great vibe they had, and what a positive learning environment it was.

As I said, we are far from perfect, but we strive to help everyone feel like they belong. Our school special events and celebrations are run with a lot of student input and organization. But this has been much harder to do with students mostly learning remotely. The iHub Annual tomorrow night is usually 90% student run. This year its being run by me and two former students hired to assist. Their expertise will go a long way in making the event special, and since they are brothers they can work closely together while we still respect social distancing expectations. It will go well, it won’t be the same as a team of students both running the event and training the younger students, which normally happens this time of year for us.

With the likelihood of school starting up in a limited capacity in September, I wonder what we will need to do differently to foster that sense of community and belonging? It’s harder to build community than it is to sustain it, and so we will need to intentionally think about what we do to keep our positive sense of community going next year.

Grad day part 1

Today the Inquiry Hub grads cross the stage, but that’s not the end of grad. They will be coming in 15 minutes apart, and they won’t see each other receive their degrees. On Thursday night we will share their moments up on the stage with the rest of our community, and any family members that want to watch online.

It isn’t what they were expecting grad to look like, but we’ll do our best to make it a great experience for them.

Grad 2020 hasn’t been anything we expected to experience, I know this not only as a principal, but as a parent too. Nothing about this grad is normal, but everyone is doing their best to make it special.

Crossing the stage

I lived in Ontario and had to do Grade 13 to finish high school, as was required if you wanted to go to university back in 1986. Recently I was thinking back to my grad convocation and while I remember the grad dance, I have no memory of crossing the stage to get my degree. I remember that at the end of the school year I needed to have a nose operation (it was broken playing water polo and needed to be re-broken to fix), and so I must have missed the stage crossing, or I’m sure I would remember part of it. But what I do recall missing is not my grad ceremony, but a huge year-end party at my friend’s cottage. I was so disappointed at missing that!

I don’t remember putting on a cap and gown, I have no recollection of a valedictorian, no photos with family and friends. Oddly enough, I remember the valedictorian for the school year before, reading his speech at an assembly.

Fast forward to university, and I didn’t go to my grad again. I went to my girlfriend’s grad the year before I was supposed to graduate. I know because the guest speaker was Benoit Mandelbrot, famous for his work with fractals. That was a memorable speech.

But as for me, I took an extra semester, and followed that with a semester off. Then the following year got special permission to take my final courses at a different university so that I could play varsity water polo. Then after I got my final course required I thought I would get my degree, but the convocation date came and went with no notice sent to me. I inquired to learn that I must actually apply for graduation, it isn’t just granted to me.

After my application was accepted, I was told I could cross the stage in the spring of the next calendar year, 3 years after I was supposed to graduate. At that point I didn’t have any friends still attending the university and didn’t bother going back to cross the stage with strangers.

I didn’t cross the stage until I was 30 and graduating from teacher’s college. I crossed the stage again for my Masters, eight years later. In both cases, my wife came to celebrate the event with me. So, I’ve had the experience, I’ve tasted the sense of accomplishment of crossing the stage in a cap and gown and receiving my degree… I just had to wait a lot longer than most.

Showcasing their passion in school

I have a friend that is a master craftsmen. He routinely helps me with work, like installing my deck, and French doors to replace a bay window to the deck… And in fairness I should say that I help him rather than ‘he helps me’. I become the inept assistant and he puts up with my help. 🤣

He reminded me today that he got a ‘P’ (Pass) in woodworking in school. The pass was a ‘gift’ that the teacher gave him after he helped clean up the shop at the end of the year. He had the skills to do well in the course, but he didn’t jump through the hoops, making all the simple projects required by the teacher.

This makes me think of the kid who runs her own business but is too busy to do a good job in her Entrepreneurship course. Or the musician that is creating his own music, or artist selling their own art online, but getting a ‘B’ in their respective Music and Art classes because they are just doing what needs to be done in class.

Each of these examples make me wonder:

What more we can do in our schools to showcase the out-of-school passions and interests of students, while they are at school?

With the knowledge that we may be moving to some level of blended learning to start the year in September, this might be an ideal time to ask this question!

Angry Twitter, angry news

From news articles, to Facebook posts, to Twitter, to Imgur & Tik Tok, I cant seem to go anywhere online without finding anger and hate magnified on my screen.

It’s bitter, undermines my mood, and makes the world seem cold and uncaring. For every uplifting and inspiring post that’s shared, there are five to a dozen angry ones.

I’m sure this is having an impact on people in ways that are unhealthy, not just to ourselves, but to our society in general.

Are there reasons to be upset? Yes!

• Yesterday was the single worst day of ‘Daily New Cases’ for Covid-19

• Civil unrest to fight injustices has lead to unjust confrontations between police forces and peaceful protesters.

• Videos of looters and blatant prejudice are meme-ified and virally spread.

That’s the backdrop to what we watch and read about online. It’s impossible not to see this without tuning out completely… and so other than my Daily Ink tomorrow, you won’t see me online this weekend.

I need a break from all this. My guess is, you probably do too!