Author Archives: David Truss

First Day Jitters

Leave a reply

Across Canada there are countless students starting their first day of school today. Some students are excited, some upset to see the summer end, and some thrilled to be seeing their friends again. There will also be many who are nervous, apprehensive, and scared, especially those transitioning to new schools. Moving up a school level is a right of passage every child experiences, and this challenge is met with many different emotions.

Think of how different this experience is for students. Some are leaving friends they’ve gone to school with since they learned to read and write. Some are hoping for a fresh start. There are so many emotions being felt. Nervousness and the jitters are probably felt by most, even for those happily looking forward to the new school year. And all these different students, with there different hopes and expectations, will be met by teachers having similar thoughts and emotions, only tempered with the wisdom of age and experience.

The first day is filled with potential. It is the start of a year more significant than the start of the calendar year. The new school year brings jitters, but it also arrives with hope; with promise; with an opportunity to be great.

Wishing all students, teachers, and school leaders a fabulous year ahead. Make it a great year.

Awful(ly funny) voice-to-text

Leave a reply

I hate the iPhone voice-to-text. I’m never ‘going to’ say ‘gonna’. And I definitely didn’t intend to send the following text to my wife:

“Yes, chat later I’m in the middle of sex right now. No problem for me to come.”

Context: I was at the gym working out, and my wife was going to run an errand later, and was asking me to help. I was in the middle of a SET!

Not 20 minutes later I was trying to tell my wife we could meet a friend at 11 but instead of, “Tell him eleven, maybe?” Voice to text changed it to, “Tell him I love him, maybe?” At least I caught this one before hitting send and corrected it.

Perhaps I need to enunciate my words more clearly. But dang, I’m so grateful that the first mistake was sent to my wife and not a colleague at work. I think my voice to text mantra needs to be, ‘Speak, EDIT, then send’ from now on!

Fun encounters

Leave a reply

Got to see a band of grads from my school perform at an event this evening. A couple weeks back my wife and I took her parents to a coffee shop where we ran into a student we both taught in middle school about 20 years ago.

It’s wonderful seeing former students in our community. In fact, that’s my favourite part of living in the community where I’m an educator.

Seeing students grow up outside of school is a wonderful thing.

OneWord: Pause

4 Replies

In 2020, I appropriately chose a #OneWord of Resilience. For 2021 I chose Thrive. In January of 2023 I chose ‘Many words, not one word’, and these were: Consistency, Efficiency, Positivity, Vocal, and Gracious.

I’m not waiting for January to pick a new word. The school year starts on Tuesday and I’m picking a special #OneWord to focus on for my final year before retiring. This word is Pause.

The inspiration came on my weekly Coquitlam Crunch walk this morning. The past few weeks were prime blackberry season. They have been ripe for the picking, delicious and abundant. But last week it really seemed like the season was at its end. Today on our walk they were very few on the nearby branches and none were the large juicy variety that we could pick to our heart’s content just a week or two before.

Just like that, the season was over… Or so I thought. At the top of the trail we take a small detour loop through a more wooded area and just as we were about to get back on the main path, we passed a section that was filled with ripe berries ready to be picked. I grabbed one and kept walking. Then I stopped. I paused. I told my buddy to hold up. We paused our fitness trackers and spent a few minutes picking and eating blackberries.

A delicious pause in our day.

And there you have it: Inspiration for my last school year. Pause.

Taking the time to sneak in a final moment to enjoy the last of the blackberry season was my literal example of ‘stopping to smell the roses’. And that’s what I plan to do all year. Pause and appreciate, pause and celebrate, pause and experience.

There is a lot I’m going to miss when I leave this job, what I don’t want to do is miss things while I still have time to enjoy them. I’m going to seek out opportunities to take pause in my day and truly experience the things I cherish.

Met in the middle

Leave a reply

My buddy Dave has been on an amazing fitness journey, and has lost a bunch of weight while also building muscle. I’ve been on a journey to add healthy weight, lowering my percent body fat, while gaining muscle. At the start of this year we joked that we were going to meet in the middle, with his weight going down and mine going up.

Before heading to work this morning we went to the gym and worked out together. Then we took turns stepping on the scale. I weighed over a pound more than him! We did it, we met in the middle. Well, almost in the middle… Dave covered a bit more of the gap. Still, this wasn’t a real goal, just lofty target we put out into the universe. Now we are there. Next steps are for both of us to make gains together.

Finding time

Leave a reply

A buddy of mine from Ontario is in town for a couple days. He texted me saying he had Thursday morning available. The bad news, I have a 9:30am appointment. The good news, I get up at 5am to start my morning routine and he is on Ontario time so he’ll be up early too, here on the west coast.

So I’m meeting him downtown at a restaurant that opens at 7am. We’ll have almost an hour and a half together, then I’ll drive back uptown to go to my meeting. Easy. Sure, I’ll miss a workout, but I haven’t missed one this week and so I’m due anyway.

The most important thing is that I get to spend precious time with a friend that I rarely get to see. That doesn’t happen often and so the fact that I’ll spend about the same amount of time driving as I will with him doesn’t matter. Too often we bend over backwards to make work commitments and don’t think twice about cancelling or postponing opportunities for personal commitments.

Not me. Not today. Today I get to make the visit happen. Is it a bit rushed. Yes, but it’s short notice and that happens. The point is that it’s important to make time for good friends… especially those that we don’t get to see all that often.

Experience is something you get right after you need it.

Leave a reply

Ever notice how many jobs say, “Experience required”? Who are all these experienced workers looking for new jobs?

How many jobs want you to have a degree first? I understand a doctor, nurse, lawyer, architect, or engineer needing a degree, but how many corporate jobs really need a prospective employee to have a degree?

I love the quote, “Experience is something you get right after you need it.”

At some point in your life you are going to learn something on the job. You are going to figure it out either just when you need to… or just after you’ve messed up the first attempt.

Hiring is going to change. You aren’t going to see companies focusing on degrees and academic accolades. Instead, you’ll see people with micro credentials or niche skills being hired because they have learned skills that directly relate to the job expectations. Or you’ll see jobs being offered on a trial basis and companies willing to hire based on characteristics like flexibility, ingenuity, and creativity. ‘Come try this out for a 3 month contract, and we’ll see if you’ve a) Got a good head on your shoulders, and b) Fit with our community and values.’

Don’t worry about experience, you’ll get on the job. Just come with the right attitude and an affinity for the job. The first time you try something, that’s when you’ll get the experience. Before that, it’s not schooling or past experience, it’s evidence that you are a learner and you are willing to put in an honest effort. That’s what will get you hired.

We don’t know

Leave a reply

Is light a particle or a wave? According to the double split experiment, it depends on how you choose to measure and observe it?

How many species are still unknown to us in tropical forests and deep in our oceans?

What is consciousness? We know so much about the functioning of the brain and yet we still really don’t understand consciousness.

What if anything exists beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There is currently a theory that we might be trapped in a black hole. This would help to explain why most galaxies spin in the same direction. If this is the case, is our entire universe just one black hole in another universe with many more?

Even if that is a disproven theory, there is still so much more we don’t know about our universe, and new discoveries from modern space telescopes are often showing us things that make us question what we thought we knew.

We don’t know so much about the universe or even where our thoughts come from. And yet we are constantly trying to find meaning in everything around us. We seek to know the unknown, to know more than we now know.

There are still so many more mysteries to be solved, so many unanswered questions. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know… and so we wonder, we question, we delve into the mysteries with wonder and amazement. We don’t know, but we seek to know.

Odd Duck

Leave a reply

I have the unusual honour to run two schools, both of them quite unique. I’ve had that privilege for a dozen years now. While my title has changed, I’m the only principal in the district that has stayed in one location for this long. Partly because I haven’t wanted to move, partly because there aren’t many other principals raising their hands to say they want to run two schools, one of which has a program in every high school.

I’ve been an executive member of the BC online principal’s association since 2014, and in that community we recognize that we have far more in common with each other than we have with principals in our own districts. We literally do things completely different than our regular ‘brick and mortar’ (as opposed to online) colleagues. We have different rules and compliance, and we accept students to start new courses throughout the year, with every student on their own timelines.

My other school, Inquiry Hub, is a ‘regular school’ but it is tiny. We still have people in our district, 12 years in, that think we are an alternate school. We are not. And then we run the school like a speciality program, but we are a school, not a program. It’s a unique and odd duck of a school that works with self-directed students, with all the interesting passions and quirks they bring.

Now as I look ahead to retirement, I have the unusual task of thinking about succession. I only know one principal who would be interested in my position and she’s probably going to retire within a year of me, so she’s not a great candidate, (although she’d do an amazing job). Since I don’t know anyone else who would actively be shopping for a move into my position, and even if I did, I couldn’t guarantee that district leadership would agree with me, I’ve got to make sure that whoever comes in can easily get all their ducks in a row.

Part of this will be done for me because I’ve got two great teams of educators, and awesome secretaries, who care about the direction and success of the schools. However, this year I really need to do my part in ensuring the unique aspects of the two jobs have a scope and sequence that is tracked, and all the nuances of running these two schools are shared with the new principal.

It’s not easy to replace an odd duck… the new odd duck might be completely different. But hopefully I can make the transition as smooth as possible so that the incoming principal can enter the role quickly. I’d like to give them the tools and resources to take over with minimal disruption, and also with opportunities to put their leadership skills to work, rather than just managing things while on a massive learning curve.

I hope this new principal will fall in love with the role as much as I did. The challenging thing is that I also hope it’s their last career move, because I think it’s really hard to move back to the ‘regular’ system after being an odd duck.

Short gains, long views

Leave a reply

It’s hard to stick to healthy routines over the summer. It takes a lot more effort than when you have everything dialled in and a schedule to keep. That said, I’m thrilled about how I’ve taken care of myself over the summer. I haven’t just been in maintenance mode. I’ve actually stayed right on top of things and continued with my goals, albeit in tiny increments.

But tiny increments in the right direction still means I’m going in the right direction. The thing to remember is that while the gains are small and hard to see, they are only hard to see when looking short term. I’ve gained muscle this year, and I’ve simultaneously reduced my body fat percentage.

Sure when I compare myself to the start of summer, or even a couple months before that, the gains are small. But when I compare myself to 2 years ago, or better yet when I started my fitness goals 5-and-a-half years ago, the gains are significant!

It’s easy to get frustrated with how small gains can be in the short term, but fitness and wellbeing are lifelong goals and as such gains should be looked at through a longer lens… and I have to say that things are going, looking, and feeling great!