Author Archives: David Truss

The pain of inaction

“Most failures are one-time costs. Most regrets are recurring costs.

The pain of inaction stings longer than the pain of incorrect action.
~ James Clear

When I look back on my life, I have very few regrets. I do not look back longingly, I look back fondly. I look at my mistakes as lessons, and my repeated mistakes as necessary because I wasn’t yet ready to learn the lesson. But when I do think of regrets, it is almost never for the things that I did, but rather the things that I did not do.

I regret not appreciating the outdoors enough on a beautiful day, not taking a photo, not spending more quality time with a lost friend or family member. I do not regret trying something challenging or new. Indecision or lack of action are far more likely to haunt me than a bad decision.

I remember reading once that this Shakespeare quote was wrong,

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.”

In reality the hero confronts the same thousand deaths the coward does, except the hero actually faces them. Heroes are not ignorant of the same fears and worries of the coward, they just don’t cower at them.

“The pain of inaction stings longer than the pain of incorrect action.”

—–

Image by MDARIFLIMAT

My review of ‘Educated’ by Tara Westover

I just finished listening to this book, ‘Educated’ on Audible. It was thoroughly enjoyable and yet hauntingly disturbing. I left a review:

5 out of 5 stars
By David Truss on 2019-11-07
Two stories in one.
This wonderful book is at once the story of a woman escaping the clutches of a broken home, steeped in zealot faith, violence, and mental illness, while also being the story of a young girl yearning for acceptance and love from her dysfunctional family.

I can’t help but feel blessed to have had the upbringing that I had after reading this memoir. What struck me most, besides the horrible way Tara was victimized by her family, was how she kept returning, allowing herself to fall back into such an unhealthy environment.

I struggled to understand the draw, the appeal, to seek out her family’s love and approval when each time she tried she was pressured into conforming into a life that made her feel justifiably tortured. How could she possibly want to try again? And yet she did, and did again…

Tara’s story has helped me understand why an abused wife would go back to her husband, or why an abused child would remain silent. It defies logic. But logic is not the metric at work. In a way it is love, or at least the desire to be loved. In a way it is dependency, or at least the illusion of need, though I don’t have the experience to understand such a need.

Like I said in my review, this is a story of someone victimized by ‘zealot faith, violence, and mental illness’. This triangle of despair left Tara feeling trapped. It should have been easy to leave but it took courage to escape the bonds of family and the desire for acceptance. While Tara was able to escape, I believe that many do not. I believe that any one or two of these traps that victimize children are enough to take hold and imprison that child in a cycle of pain and suffering… to compel them to remain in an unhealthy environment, while someone from the outside ponders why the child would choose to remain in such a circumstance?

From the outside, it is easy to judge, to question, and perhaps even to blame someone for not escaping such a past. But that judgement or blame is undeserving. I am reminded of Plato’s Cave. But I realize that even when someone is able to see that life is more than just shadows on a wall, they might still accept the shadows as what really matters. We cannot easily break the bonds of our childhood and enter another realm. Tara struggled but she escaped the cave. Many do not.

Act your age

It was 21 years ago when I was on my practicum to become a teacher that a student taught me a valuable lesson. The kid was a bit of a handful and he often acted out in class. He was quite manageable for my teacher advisor, and for me when my advisor was in the room, but he’d act out in an exaggerated way when I was teaching this grade 6 & 7 class on my own.

I don’t remember what the issue was, but one day he did something and I held him back after class. I waited for students to leave then I went over to his desk and sat down next to him. I only remember one thing about the conversation, during my little monologue I said to him, “You’re acting like a little 9 year old!”

He spoke up in response, “I’m 10.”

I froze. Staring at him blankly, I thought to myself, I told him to act his age… and he is… he’s being a little kid in a class of little kids.

After that he was still a challenge at times, but I gave him more responsibility to help me out and he responded well. When he acted out a bit, I remembered his age and that he needed help and guidance. He didn’t need a teacher that was expecting him to act like a mature 15 year old when he was just a 10 year old kid with a lot of energy, being asked to sit at a desk for long periods of time.

I don’t think I’ve ever told a kid to act their age again. In fact, the only times I’ve ever thought that since this incident has been when adults act and respond like kids. I must admit I find that disappointing. But when kids make immature choices, that’s often when they are acting their age.

Teacher as compass

I love the metaphor of ‘Teacher as compass’; helping students navigate their own learning journey.

Last night I read this tweet from Will Richardson:

I quoted his tweet and responded:

This made me think about the first time I used this metaphor? I went looking on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and it turned out to be 13 years ago: David Warlick’s K12 Online Conference Keynote 2006. David used a metaphor about trains and ‘riding the rails’, and I decided to create a different metaphor:

“A great metaphor here, on the theme of learners navigating on their own, is the teacher as the compass. We point in a direction, (not necessarily the direction that the student is going), and we are a reference point or guide to the learning. As students sail (rather than ride the rails) they must choose their destination, (what they want to learn), and tack and adjust their path as they go… using the teacher as a compass that keeps them on their ‘learning’ course.

Challenges

  • Students and teachers need to know how to sail- they need to be literate in these new ways of learning and communicating. They must be adaptable, willing to course-correct as they go.
  • Students and teachers need to seek out other sailors- communities of learners, online this too could be considered a literacy issue .
  • Students must bring their own sails- and not all sails are created equally, the metaphor can work with sails being competency (skills), motivation, handicaps (the ability to function physically, emotionally, intellectually (not everyone has the same sized sail), and technically (the ‘new’ literacy issue again)).
  • Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.
  • Teachers need to be ‘useful’ compasses- “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the Moon” comes to mind here… also think of using technology for learning rather than using technology to teach. If students steer themselves, they will take us into uncharted water, and we need to be able to point the way even when we may not know the best course of action. (It isn’t about ‘right’ answers, it is about the journey- this goes back to Warlick’s [or rather Toffler’s] idea that learners (students and teachers) need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time.”

—

If teachers are focussed on providing content, they don’t need this metaphor because they are essentially taking all their students on the same journey. The teachers are captains with their students on the same boat. However, ‘Teacher as compass’ works very well with inquiry-based learning. Students will do projects where they become more knowledgeable than the teacher in a specific area of content. If teachers are trying to be the content providers for students who are all on different learning voyages, the teachers will fail. However, if teachers are guiding their students, helping them seek out information, and expertise, and supporting them in creating a learning plan… if they are the compass… then they can support students on their individual learning journeys.

Teacher as compass: Teachers provide the true north, and help students find a worthy course… one that will challenge their skills on the open learning seas.

__________

Also posted on Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts 
Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Asking your kids the right questions

Here is a long, but interesting article in the Atlantic, “Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids“.

In it the authors, Adam Grant & Allison Sweet Grant, say:

To demonstrate that caring is a core value, we realized that we needed to give it comparable attention. We started by changing our questions. At our family dinners, we now ask our children what they did to help others. At first, “I forget” was the default reply. But after a while, they started giving more thoughtful answers. “I shared my snack with a friend who didn’t have one,” for example, or “I helped a classmate understand a question she got wrong on a quiz.” They had begun actively looking for opportunities to be helpful, and acting upon them.

This reminds me of a post I wrote 11 and a half years ago when my kids were 6 and 8, “Who have you help today?”

I used to ask my kids, “what was your favourite part of the day”, then I added “Who did you help today?” And as I mentioned in the post reflection:

It was only a matter of weeks before my oldest daughter’s ‘favorite part of the day’ was also the answer to ‘who did you help today’.

A question like this is so much more powerful than, ‘What did you do at school today?’, or ‘What did you get on your test?’, or ‘Did you have fun?’ Simply asking the question, “Who did you help today?” tells a kid what you value.

small changes can have a big impact

A friend of mine, Keith, was visiting this weekend and I went downtown to connect with him. We walked by the Starbucks I used to manage, a couple blocks from where he used to work, and he asked someone to take our photo in front of it. It brought back fond memories of us connecting at lunch breaks.

Taking this photo and looking inside reminded me of something I did while I was there. This narrow Starbucks on Hornby Street is near the law courts, the art gallery, and many office buildings. In the mornings the rush was crazy for about an hour and a half, then the store would quite down with smaller rushes at lunch and at the end of the day. One of the challenges this rush created in the mornings was that people would look in, see the lineup, then leave… hopefully to come back later, but likely we were losing customers.

Inside the store, we had our main cash register, then the pastry case, followed by a counter then the 2nd till for selling coffee beans. Back then the beans were not pre-packaged, we had scales and empty bags, and cupboards with different flavoured coffee beans in them. Generally we would run just one till, unless someone wanted coffee beans, but every morning rush we would have both tills open to maximize how many people could come through. However this created a huge problem for us because the line up would be 10-15 long for over an hour and a half, and navigating to the two tills slowed things down and created opportunities for people to butt in, although I’d say this was mostly done unintentionally. No matter how we managed it, at some point during the rush we’d be apologizing as we helped navigate who should be next, with the lineup going to two very different places, but the store being too narrow to really create two separate lines.

I spoke to my District Manager and told her I wanted to move the second cash register. This also meant moving the pastry case too, to make room for the two tills to be close, but also have a space in between them to serve two different customers. She understood the challenge and had it done to my requested specifications. In the following weeks the results were pretty impressive. During our 1.5 hour rush, we averaged between 45 and 60 more customers (15-20 more per half hour). We had many regular customers thanking us for the change. We also had less people walking by because we were busy, since they knew that the line up would go quickly.

The renovation was probably paid off in a few months, we dealt with less issues around managing the line, customers were happier, and all we did was move a cash register about 9 feet (2.75 metres). We can’t always make big sweeping changes but sometimes small changes can have a big impact.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place (and…)

The origin of the idiom ‘between a rock and a hard place’ can be found in ancient Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must pass between Charybdis, a treacherous whirlpool, and Scylla, a horrid man-eating, cliff-dwelling monster. Ever since, saying one is stuck between a rock (the cliff) and a hard place (the whirlpool) has been a way to succinctly describe being in a dilemma. (source)

There is a simple strategy that I often use, both for myself and when working with students, that seems to help when I/they are stuck ‘between a rock and a hard place’. The strategy is to find a 3rd choice. The interesting thing is that the 3rd choice doesn’t have to be great, it can be worse than the other two, but it does something tricky to your brain. When you have to choose between two tough choices, you can think of it as a scale, and you weigh things on either side. The problem is that you think of one side and add weight, then you think of the other side and you add weight there too. Your brian does this indecision dance between the two tough choices, never really allowing you to pick one over the other.

Sometimes, by seeking out a 3rd option, you can discover something you would not have thought of when putting yourself in a dichotomy. However, if you are truly stuck between a rock and a hard place, you probably don’t have a good 3rd option and so the 3rd option is often even worse.

When you add a 3rd (undesired) choice, you can no longer look at the problem as if it is on a scale. The extra option becomes a comparison point for the other two choices. So what your brain does is that it weighs your original two options against the new option, instead of against each other. When this happens, one of those options will often seem better than the other, in a way that comparing just the two on their own didn’t.

When dealing with students, this also helps give them an ‘out’. Often a student is choosing between doing the right thing which is uncomfortable, or accepting a consequence. In this situation, it might seem logical for a kid to make the ‘good’ choice. However, an oppositional student, or a student that is embarrassed, might actually choose the more painful choice. It’s not like they are actually choosing it, they are choosing not to do the thing you want them to do as an act of defiance. A third choice takes away the oppositional response. Now they have to weigh three things, and the better choice looks significantly better than the other two.

So the next time you are stuck between a rock and a hard place, you can torture yourself with a tough and unclear decision, you can avoid the problem altogether (knowing full well that it won’t go away), or you can come up with a 3rd choice to help you decide… it’s up to you!

Staying ‘on brand’ while being digitally present

A few months ago, I shared a link on Twitter to an article about James Fridman’s Twitter Account. People send James photos to Photoshop and he changes the photos in entertaining ways. Like this:

And like this:

But the ‘Featured Image’ on the post I shared was of a girl in a bathing suit who James had done one of these photoshop requests for. I shared it and then I got a Direct Message from someone in my community that I respect, who said she was surprised that I would share something like this. In all honesty, I didn’t think much of it, so I looked at the tweet again and thought two things. First, that it wasn’t a big deal that I shared a photo of someone in a bathing suit because this was about photoshop humour. Then I thought, ‘Would I share this photo on its own if it wasn’t for the article going with it?’… and I realized I wouldn’t. So, I deleted the tweet and shared one specific tweet that highlighted James’ humour, like the two tweets above.

Yesterday, I got a phone call from my sister about one of my Daily Ink blog posts. She said to me that while she understood the point I was trying to make, I came off as a bit full of myself in an unflattering way. She was right. That wasn’t my intent, but I could totally see how it could be interpreted that way. I went back to the post and made some minor changes, which I think changed the tone of the post to one that was more about my intention as opposed to mistaken interpretation.

I share a lot online. If you were to look at 100 of my blog posts, here on Daily Ink, or on my Pair-a-Dimes educational blog, or if your chose to read 100 of my tweets, I think you could learn a lot about me. I think you could get a good sense for my character, what I stand for, and what kind of a person I am. However, if you chose to judge me on my worst blog post or my worst Tweet, well then I’m sure I wouldn’t look so good. I recognize that, and I’m happy to take a look at my worst blog posts and tweets, and change or delete them. That said, I know more will come later. If I’m going to share as much as I do, I’m going to occasionally share something ‘off brand’, something that doesn’t generally fit with my identity or at least my digital identity.

I touched on this a bit in my post, Ideas on a Spectrum, where I noted that there seems to be a culture of attacking a person based on not liking their opinion or a statement they share online. I on the other hand am fortunate to have people around me that are respectful and thoughtful. The person who sent me a Direct Message about my tweet could have said something in a reply, in a public setting, to me but instead chose to send me a private message. My sister could have thought, ‘Well, that’s not like Dave’ and then let it pass by, but she gave me a call and said, “I know this isn’t what you intended, but you should know that this is how I read it.”

Public comments can help too. I really appreciated Stephen Downes helping me identify the context of a meme that I shared as my photo to go with a post. See Once upon a meme where I discussed this. Stephen said in a comment that he wouldn’t be comfortable using the meme and named the meme so that it would be easy for me to find information about it. He gave me what I needed to be informed in a pubic, but very respectable way.

These are people I want in my lives. People who know me, or I guess you could also say, ‘know my brand’, and who help me stay on course. I’ll make mistakes, and because I share a lot digitally, I’ll be making those mistakes in public. I appreciate having a community that recognize that mistakes are mistakes, and who are willing to help me.

Playing it up for Halloween

I live in a house with three people that are passionate about musical theatre. They can all sing, and they are all natural on the stage. They can watch and re-watch live plays over and over again. As for me? I’ll talk in front of school with over 1,000 students, and I’ve presented to hundreds of educators, but give me 3 lines to memorize and act out, and I’m a mess. I’m robotic, monotone, and completely unnatural… and I hate it! I’ll happily go to see a performance, and I truly enjoy watching talented people perform, I just don’t want to perform myself.

Then comes Halloween. Once a year I put on makeup, and I go ‘full on’. I make the most of a fun day, I share my costume online, I take photos with my secretaries, my staff, and my students. I have fun, not because I’m in my element, but because I get to revel in the enjoyment of others, and be part of something I would usually avoid for most of the rest of the year.

It always turns out to be a wonderful day. Then I wash off the makeup, I put my costume away, and I happily wait another year before I do it again.

Happy Halloween!

In orbit around the sun

Yesterday was my sister’s anniversary, and that made me think about how many rituals and celebrations are based on one rotation of the earth around the sun: Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, school years, mating seasons, and harvests… All these are based on our orbital geography around our galaxy’s star.

Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 149.60 million km (92.96 million mi),[1] and one complete orbit takes 365.256 days (1 sidereal year), during which time Earth has traveled 940 million km (584 million mi). ~ Wikipedia

We celebrate events based on yearly journeys of 940 million kilometres. That works out to over 2.5 million kilometres a day! Would this yearly trip have been as significant if the earth’s axis was not tilted, giving rise to the changing seasons?

Perhaps one of the most apparent factors contributing to Earth climate change is the angle at which the earth is tilted. This is the angle at which Earth’s axis of rotation is from the vertical, also known as Earth’s obliquity. Earth’s current tilt angle is approximately 23.5 degrees. The axial tilt angle affects climate largely by determining which parts of the earth get more sunlight during different stages of the year. This is the primary cause for the different seasons Earth experiences throughout the year, as well as the intensity of the seasons for higher latitudes. For example, in the Northern Hemisphere, if there were no axial tilt, i.e. Earth’s obliquity would be zero degrees, then there would be no change in the seasons from year to year. This would be because there would be no difference in the amount of solar irradiation received, year-round, anywhere on Earth. ~ Wikipedia

What would life be like if temperatures stayed relatively constant depending on your latitude? How important would birthdays be? Would our calendars be based on the moon? How important would the passing of a year be?

Enjoy your next orbit!