Author Archives: David Truss

Luxuries Become Essential

What starts out as a luxury often becomes essential… something we struggle to live without. Think of indoor plumbing. Water when you want it, for drinking, cleaning, and flushing waste. At one point these were things you couldn’t do, later they were luxuries reserved for the rich. Now in a ‘developed’ country indoor plumbing is essential.

Phones used to be a luxury item. Then, like running water, they became essential. Our (personal) phones used to be tied to a single location, our homes. At first the chord was 3 feet long, and we were tied to the room it was in. Then the chords got longer and/or the line to the phone was extended, and suddenly my sisters could make private calls from their bedroom or the bathroom. Then came cordless phones and we could even make calls from the back yard or the garage. Then came the cellphone.

The first mobile phone call happened in 1973. The first commercial mobile phone arrived in 1983 and cost close to $4,000. IBM came out with the first smart phone in 1993. In 2005 the first Blackberry came out. In 2007 there were about 295 million people using 3G around the world. And in 2008 the first iPhone came out.

Now, carrying a phone with you is no longer a luxury, it is almost as essential as indoor plumbing. But is it truly a luxury?

I love having Google at my fingertips. I don’t love the access to work email when I’m home with my family. I love being connected to family on a group Snapchat we share. I don’t love telemarketing phone calls interrupting me. I love having an audio book with me at all times. I don’t love talking to people who interrupt our conversation for a phone call, or an alert. I especially don’t love when it’s my phone doing the interrupting… because I can be just as guilty at times.

In the move from a luxury item to an essential item, our phones have changed our behaviour, our communication, and our relationships to one another in significant ways. We are always connected, always available, and always reactive to a device we take everywhere we go. A cellphone is no longer a luxury. It is convenient but can be inconvenient too. It is definitely a distraction.

Here is a parting question: If cellphones were a species, would this be a symbiotic relationship or would we would be the hosts in a parasitic relationship where the phones benefited more from us than we benefit from them?

Sharing the flame

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~ Buddha

There is one more element to this quote that I think is worth reflecting on. Not only does the lighting of other candles not diminish your own candle, but the joy of sharing your light increases the brightness around you!

How and where do you share your flame?

Some kids…

Some kids are easy to like. They make an effort to connect with you. They want to do well. They seek your approval.

Some kids are hard to like. They don’t want to make an effort to connect. They are defiant. They don’t want your approval, or maybe they do, but they sabotage their own efforts because that don’t believe they’ll get your approval even if they try.

Some kids don’t fit either of those categories, and others switch between the two on a given day, or even within an hour. Some kids come to school to learn, some to socialize, some to get out of their house. Some kids don’t want to come to school at all.

Some kids deserve a second chance, while some kids deserve a sixth or ninth chance. Some kids are willing to say sorry, and some of those kids mean it. Some kids make others feel unsafe, some kids do things to make themselves unsafe. Some kids are resilient, while some kids lack the strategies and the confidence to believe that they can be successful.

Some kids make working with them feel like hard work, while some kids help you bring joy to your work day. Some kids are happy, positive, and peaceful and others are sad, negative, and angry.

Some kids deserve more effort, thoughtfulness, patience, love, tough love, and care… more care than you want to or feel that you can give… more forgiveness and acceptance than you want to share.

All kids deserve to be cared for by adults who believes in them; who want them to be better than they are; and, who see the good in them, even when it is hard to see. All kids need to see the goodness in you. They need to know that you believe in them. They need to know you care.

And as for the toughest kids to work with, the ones that drive you crazy, the ones that don’t appreciate what you do for them… they are the ones that can read you the best. They know if you are working from a place of love, or acceptance, or tolerance, or impatience, or anger. They are the kids that most deserve the best you that you can give them. Because only the best, most resilient, and most caring you can get the best out of them. It isn’t easy, but it’s extremely rewarding.

Vaping epidemic

It’s sad to me to know that nicotine use in teens has been going down for years, but with the growth of use of e-cigarettes and vaping, that statistic is now going up. And if it isn’t bad enough that vaping is increasing nicotine use, these little machines are heating up oils and vaporizing them into droplets that are inhaled into the lungs.

“Federal authorities consider the ingredients safe to consume as food. But our lungs are only equipped to inhale clean air.” Vaping heats up oils but “Our lungs are never meant to have fat in it.” This is “a chemical insult to the lungs,” according to What are vaping-associated illnesses and why are doctors concerned? – CBC News

Here is some interesting information, in infographic form, from The National Institute on Drug Abuse: Teens and E-cigarettes

The last time I went to the movie theatre there were two ads for vaping, one for a vaping product, the other to promote vaping marijuana. The legalization of marijuana has probably created a spike in teen use here as well. A few days ago, I read an interesting article on the teenage brain, and this was the section on smoking and pot smoking:

“Other studies have linked smoking in teens to alcohol abuse, which itself has a devastating effect on both memory and intelligence. And it turns out smoking pot may be far worse for the teen brain than previously thought. Recent studies have linked regular marijuana use in adolescence to smaller brain volume and more damage to white matter. Smoking daily before the age of 17 has been shown to reduce verbal IQ and increase the risk of depression.“

I think that things will get worse before they get better. More than ever, advertising deploys strategies of influence that we didn’t even understand a decade ago. And while advertising for cigarettes is banned, that’s not the case for vapes and now marijuana. Vaping flavours like cotton candy and cherry entice young kids to get used to vaping. Peer pressure doesn’t help. Add to that the fact that vapes are designed to be easily concealed, made to look more like USB drives rather than cigarettes, and you have the makings of a major problem.

Teen vaping is on the rise… so are the negative effects of inhaling oil droplets, nicotine, and marijuana into the young, developing lungs, brains, and bodies of our youth.

Vitamin D

About 3 years ago I dealt with 6 months of chronic fatigue. It was awful. It was caused by an extreme deficiency in Vitamin D. But in Canada, only a specialist can ask for a Vitamin D test as part of a blood test without it costing the patient money, and so it took 6 months before a specialist tested me.

Vitamin D is known as the sunshine pill. Sunlight provides your body with Vitamin D. But we don’t expose ourselves to enough sunlight in the northern hemisphere, and winter is approaching with shorter, darker days ahead. I take 5,000IU (International Units) of vitamin D3 daily. I call it my ‘sunshine in a pill’. That’s a higher dose than most people take, but it works for me.

40-50% of North Americans have a deficiency in Vitamin D. There are possible links to this deficiency and MS – (Multiple Sclerosis). Chronic fatigue does not actually have a significant correlation. My deficiency was at less than 5% of what it should have been and the specialist said that another person at that level might show it in completely different ways than me.

But here is my public service announcement: Winter is coming, you will be exposed to less sunlight. Get a little sunshine in pill form and start taking Vitamin D.

Work and Flow

Today was busy, but I never got into a good workflow. It’s the nature of being a principal. I had several meetings, and they all went well: an admin meeting, a parent meeting, a teacher meeting, and several meetings with students… some planned, some not. I had to organize a lunch, and I had to problem solve an issue with secretaries. I had a phone call with a vice principal about a student, and had another student visited to share work his class had done.

Another unplanned meeting with a student and parent after school went really well, but also took away some key time I had scheduled to create a form that I need to share with some online teachers in all our high schools. That form will be completed tonight or tomorrow morning before this is posted. It was the main thing on my ‘to do’ list today. That ‘to do’ list of 7 items was only down to 6 items when I left for the day. I had more unread email at the end of the day than the start of the day. Tomorrow morning the list will only be down to 5 items after I get that form done, the email will be a bit lower.

Some days you can get into a flow and check off things that need to get done, one after the next. Other days can be consumed productively yet productivity is low. The biggest challenge for me is to not let too many days like this pile up.

Buyer Beware!

Do you shop online? If you do, you probably rely on customer reviews to help you vet the quality and reliability of a product, and the company selling the product. However, those reviews are being gamed in a number of ways!

I’ve always known that some reviews are fake. Click on a profile of a reviewer and you see that they have recommended 15 products. Check those reviews out and it turns out that most of them are for the same product under different listings. Does that person really need 12-15 of the same product when you need only one? Are they buying, for example, 14 Bluetooth headphones and rotating through them daily for 2 weeks, then reviewing each one, but only bothering to do that for this one product? Unlikely.

However, I just came across an entire product line search on Amazon where the vast majority of products, iPhone headphone jacks, didn’t only have fake reviews, the items being sold had reviews for completely different products!

What made this worse was that some of these were ‘sponsored’ and one of them was marked ‘Amazon’s Choice’.

Looking at the first 8 reviews on display for this product, 7 of them are high ratings for a computer hard drive, and the one actual review for the product was a 1-star review saying the product stopped working after a couple weeks.

I don’t always go to the reviews when I see high star ratings by many reviewers, but the price seemed way too low to be good. This is definitely a case of buyer beware! The scammers are gaming Amazon, and I’m sure they are gaming other sites as well… don’t get ‘star struck’ and be sure to read a few of the reviews.

Stretching and flexibility

Right now, I’m sitting in an upright position on the floor, with my legs at about a 60° angle, my knees straight, and I’m trying to lean my body forward as I speak into my phone and doing voice to text for this post. I’m not very flexible and to do this I actually have to arch my back to keep me from falling backwards. For me flexibility in my hips and hamstrings has always been a major issue resulting in at the very least daily discomfort, and often pain in my lower back. And even though I know that stretching is extremely important, in my mind the discomfort of stretching sits on the pain continuum rather than on the discomfort continuum. I hate it. But at my age it’s a choice of doing it or losing even more flexibility and suffering more pain in my later years. So here I am, stretching the very muscles I hate to stretch, after warming up with some cardio on the treadmill for 20 minutes.

I was thinking about my distaste for physical stretching and flexibility and it made me wonder, where else in my life am I inflexible? Where else do I need to stretch? I can think of a few patterns in my communication that are ineffective. But I also think I’m blind to the areas I probably need to stretch more. Unlike my back pain that tells me I must physically stretch, the pain points in other areas of my life aren’t big enough to make me see them.

I think human nature makes us more likely to get defensive about our more inflexible areas of our personality, rather than openly seeing them as areas to stretch and grow. It hurts to admit our non-physical flaws, flaws we can’t see. But these flaws that we hide from ourselves, and get defensive about, are the flaws where we probably need to stretch ourselves the most.

What are the pain points that you experience? Are you stretching yourself in those areas?

Flawed message

I’ve seen this post a few times now and while it has a message that will get a lot of ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ on social media, it completely misses the points it should want to make.

Here are my 2 biggest issues with the post:

1. It pits the school against parents, saying ‘these are the things you are responsible for’ rather than, we need to work together to instil these things in our children’. The approach is an attack rather than saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. No, instead of that it says, “you do your part, let us do ours”… “You teach manners and etiquette, we will do that teaching thing.”

2. Here is the teaching thing shared in the poster,

“Here at school, on the other hand, we teach language, math, history, geography, physics, sciences, and physical education. We only reinforce the education that children receive at home from their parents.”

This is extremely problematic thinking about what a school does or should do. It says, ‘we are about teaching subjects, not students’. It says content and subjects are the purpose of school, rather than helping to create critical thinkers, and problem solvers, and compassionate, educated citizens.

Signs like this water down what a good school should be doing, while taking a jab at parents… Parents who we should see as partners, rather than blaming them for not making perfectly polite and compliant little learners, so teachers can focus on ‘subject matter’.

Waving a disapproving finger at parents accomplishes nothing. Sharing a poster like this also accomplishes nothing, because the ideas it supports are flawed.

The Vampire Rule for Email

I apply a key vampire rule to give my staff a break from work emails.

After 6 PM staff only get emails from me if the email is invited in. In other words, if they have asked me a question and want an answer, then a response has been invited. But if that invitation for a response isn’t there, I delay email delivery until the next morning.

So like a vampire at the front door, I can’t enter (with email) if I have something to share that is not initiated (and therefore invited in) by my staff. New topics are set to be delivered early the next morning.

From dinner time on, and on weekends, the vampire invitation rule applies for my outgoing emails to staff.