Author Archives: David Truss

Decompression time

Leave a reply

First day back from my holiday started great. Woke up, met my buddy and went to the gym for the first time in 12 days. Had a great workout then he treated me to breakfast at his place. Then I had a couple appointments. I met my new doctor for the first time (my previous one is retiring), and I had a physio appointment.

And that made for a full day. Besides that I had a very long nap, and listened to my book. I then watched a bit of tv with my wife. All-in-all a great day. What really made it feel good was just having the time to flake out after a busy morning. No agenda, nothing pressing, no hurry, no worries. Just a good dose of decompression time.

Tomorrow I’ll do the Coquitlam Crunch walk after taking a month off. I hadn’t missed a month since my buddy and I started doing this in January 2021. But my lower back/discs has settled down and I’m not getting any nerve pain down my leg anymore. I’ve done a few completely painless walks, including one that had a bit of a climb during my holiday and so I think I’m ready, and my physio thinks so too.

It wasn’t just today that was about decompression time, it had been almost two weeks of it, and I’m feeling really good. It’s taken me 58 years to figure it out, but a little down time isn’t just good for the mind, it’s good for the body too.

Coming home

Leave a reply

I spent the day travelling today and now I’m home. What a fabulous holiday my wife and I had. It was wonderful to visit with my mom and sister. Unfortunately I spent the entire 10 days with a cough that I still haven’t shaken, but that helped me see the importance of rest.

Normally when a holiday is filled with a lot of down time, I end up feeling guilty, like I wasted the holiday. Not this time. I truly relaxed. I even took time away from my regular routines like meditation and working out… and I did this without the need to beat myself up about it. I just took the time to recover. And as a byproduct, my sciatica has completely gone. I’m not sure if it will return with more activity, but I am thrilled to not feel pain just from standing for a few minutes.

And now I’m home, and the routines return. I’ll be back in the gym early tomorrow. I’ll get back to daily meditation. I’ll start back at work on Monday, ready to enjoy my last 3 months before retirement.

Coming home after a break can often feel like a bit of a slog, but I’m excited to be back, and I’m looking forward to returning to my usual routine… Especially since it’s coming from a desire to get back to my good habits, without beating myself up because I took a bit of time off.

Egoless learning

Leave a reply

I got to participate in a small Jujitsu class today with a buddy who is a black belt. The great thing about going to your first class with an expert is that there is no ego present. I knew before going in that I knew nothing, and that athletic ability and strength were not going to give me the slightest edge against someone who isn’t only a master in his art but also very athletic and stronger than me. So I went it with the mindsets of an apprentice.

With just 4 of us in the class the instructor catered the class to me, and made the lessons very introductory. Then my buddy gave me some one-on-one time. With every escape that either I was practicing on him, or that he was practicing on me, it quickly ended with me in a compromised position. “The last place you want your opponent to be is on your back,” he wisely shared with me. Then we’d be on the floor, him in a headlock, he’d show me an escape, I’d try to counter… and then he was on my back. Every. Time.

It would have been easy to be frustrated, but I expected it. I took it in stride. I would try again, take his advice, and then ultimately lose position a few seconds later. And I’m not being humble, it was always a few seconds later. I marvelled at how easy he made it seem. But that’s what years of practice does. It takes being put into compromising situations hundreds of times to understand how to escape those situations.

If I was a couple decades younger, I’d probably take the sport up, but these days I’d struggle too much with back and neck issues to do more than train for an hour with a black belt, who is fully aware of my challenges, and who is going light on me. I deal with enough injury recovery in my everyday life to add a contact sport to my life routines. Still, I had an absolute blast today. I forgot just how much fun it is to be completely new at something, and to have that ‘beginner mind’ where your ego is parked and real learning happens.

Game night

Leave a reply

When I’m visiting my mom, every night is game night. The game of choice these days is Rummikub. This has been played by our family in the early 1970’s when it first came to North America. It was my Papa Truss who introduced it to us.

However, after moving to BC, I forgot about the game. Then a few years back my mom played it with me, my wife, and my girls when we visited her in Toronto. Now we all have our own copies of the game and sometimes my daughters play online.

What’s fun about this game is that the tiles played can be reused to create alternate sets using additional tiles from your hand. So the game evolves and changes with each play. Sometimes you’ll have great plans only to have them completely disrupted by the player before you. Other terms you think you aren’t close to winning and one round later you’re able to get rid of most of your tiles.

But the best part of the game is playing it with family. I’ve had a lot of fun this holiday and a big part of that has been playing Rummikub with my wife, sister, and mom. For now, it’s our game of choice.

Traffic flow

Leave a reply

I’ve had a couple days of long highway drives in Los Angeles and despite significantly more traffic than in Vancouver or Toronto, I have to say that traffic here flows very well. Two things make the flow here unique compared to what I see in Canada. First of all, highway speed limits here are more of a suggestion than a limit. When the traffic opens up the speed goes up. Tonight, at one point I was going in excess of the speed limit and for about 10 minutes and many cars passed me, while I didn’t catch up or pass any. Even when traffic is heavy it seems every lane will travel at speeds seldom seen on highways I’m used to driving on back home.

Another thing that works far better here are lane changes. There seems to be an acceptance of lane changes here that is far more polite and efficient compared to anywhere else I’ve driven. I’ve seen, and in one case actually been, a car needing to cross 2 lanes to get to an exit in heavy traffic, and with indicators on, cars make way for the move.

In Vancouver, that would be responded to in two very different ways. First of all, there would be an angry horn blast and/or the person in the lanes you are trying to get into would speed up to squeeze you out of the lane change. Here, I have seen countless lane changes with neither horn beep nor accelerated blocking.

After hearing about the driving here, and stories of road rage in LA, I’d say, ‘Don’t believe the hype’! The reality is that I’d rather drive here than on any busy highway in Canada. Maybe I’m just in the honeymoon stage and living here would be different, but my sister has been here for 20 years and she’s often told me this is the case. Sounds a bit weird to say, but Vancouver and Toronto drivers could learn a thing or two from spending a little time in LA traffic.

Morning sun

Leave a reply

It is better than coffee, stronger than a multivitamin, and more energizing than sleep or a good workout. It is the warm feeling of the early morning sun.

Bathing in light, not yet too hot, which seeps into my body, much deeper than my skin. While it warms me from the outside, it also invigorates me from the inside. I feel a radiance that is not just an absorption of energy but an emergence of it from within.

This is the power of the early morning sun. Caffeine for the soul.

New achievement unlocked

Leave a reply

In my second year as a teacher, I got to work with Mrs. B, who taught my French class and co-taught PE with me. She was a gymnastics coach and she taught me how to do a muscle-up on the rings. For the next couple years I was the demo guy for this every time the gymnastics unit rolled around. I think the rings muscle-up is easier than doing it on a bar, because on the rings you can keep the rings close to your body, where you have more strength. Think of pulling yourself out of a pool with arms wide on the deck versus just in front of you, close to your body where you have more leverage.

Fast forward almost 25 years and add over 20 pounds to my body and I haven’t tried a muscle up since… and have never in my life tried to do one on a pull up bar.

That changed today.

I unlocked a new achievement. I attempted and successfully achieved a muscle up for the first time ever on a pull up bar. My warm up was some pull-up shrugs, followed by about 5 really high pull-ups. Then I went above the bar and lowered myself down from the top position of a muscle up a couple times. Then I went for it.

I also recorded this first attempt, not because I thought I’d make it, but rather to provide myself feedback to correct any errors. The video is a bit funny to me because I look like I’m in pain even before I started the muscle up. I was visualizing the move, thinking about using my back muscles, and I look anguished rather than focused. 

After my surprise success, I did it a couple more times. The first time I thought I’d try two in a row. I did the first one and didn’t even get close to a full pull-up on the second. Then took a long break and watched the video a few times.

My third attempt was the cleanest, then I stayed on the bar and followed up with 10 pull-ups as high as I could go, which was very high for the first few, degenerating to a struggle to get my chin barely over the bar on the last one.

Still, I couldn’t be happier with the results. I was expecting this to take me a month to six weeks to achieve and I hit it on day one! My new goals will be to be able to do more than one in a row and eventually to be able to do one without swinging my body. But for now I’m going to celebrate the win. My workouts have definitely been building my strength, and I think it’s pretty awesome that this 58 year old body was able to pull this off on my very first attempt.

Who will get us there?

2 Replies

Stephen Downes shared the following on LinkedIn:

“I was asked, “Please provide a brief abstract that summarises your views on the impact of AI on higher education.”

As far more than the language models that have captured the attention of the world over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) represents a significant increase in human capability, augmenting and sometimes exceeding our natural capacities to perceive, reason, create and remember. Ubiquitous access to these capabilities changes the definition of what it means to learn and to be educated. Skills once reserved to the domain of experts are now in the hands of everyday people, while most every discipline is devising new models, methods and pragmatics of work alongside, or teaming with, these new tools. This challenges educators along a number of fronts, impacting how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach. Today’s educator in a world of AI is responsible for far more than passing along knowledge (indeed, the machine can do most of that). We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care.

Thoughts?” ~ Stephen Downes

—

Although my thoughts align with K-12 education as well as higher education, these thoughts come to me in the form of a question:

Who is going to get us there?

Who is the ‘We’ that Stephen is talking about when he says, “We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care”?

Because I love this vision of what teaching can become, I just don’t see a clear path to take us there.

‘We’ won’t get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business, products, and tools… their locked-in subscriptions will tout measures of success that don’t align with this vision, even when they say that they will.

‘We’ won’t get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge.

‘We’ won’t get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum, or even new guidelines that somehow redefine for teachers, “how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach”.

I hope I’m not coming off as a pessimist. I’m excited about what’s possible. I just fear that ‘we’ aren’t going to get ‘there’ any time soon unless ‘We’ align philosophy, policy, and economic support for the transformation of schools into something different.

Short of that, I fear that ‘We’ will be having the same ‘20th century schools in a 21st century world’ conversation in another 10 years… which I’ve heard since getting into education in the late 1900’s.

It takes time to unwind

Leave a reply

It might have been slowed down a bit due to having a cold, but it has taken me a while to unwind this holiday. I always take a short while to get used to holiday mode, and not feel guilty for having a quiet day where I don’t do much.

Today I didn’t do much of anything. I spent a bit of the morning feeling guilty about not getting a workout in, and then late this afternoon I finally felt it… I felt unwound enough to just relax and enjoy doing a little bit of nothing.

The big plans for tomorrow are to head to a beach and rent some bikes to ride on the boardwalk. A busy day compared to today, but also, how chill is that for a day plan?

Now the holiday really begins. Now it becomes guilt free listening to a an audiobook for over an hour. I can just chill, and not feel like I should be doing something else. I can sip my morning coffee in the sunshine and feel like no matter what the day brings, it will be a good day.

I don’t have to fill time, I can just appreciate what I’m doing, while I do it… even if the thing I’m doing is nothing.

Lemon love

Leave a reply

My sister has a lemon tree in her back yard. The lemons on this tree are not normal. First of all, they grow quite large. The phot below show lemons from her tree. The two in my hand are what I’d consider large sized at my local grocery store, the rest are more typical of what comes off of her tree. Secondly, these lemons are sweet. I make a lemonade with them and there is no need for sugar.

The juice of two lemons fills half of a tall glass. Add water, (or if I’m feeling fancy, soda water), a little Angostura aromatic bitters, and some ice and I’ve got the most delicious lemonade I’ve ever tasted.

The lemons in the photo produced a litre of juice. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some lemonade to make.