Author Archives: David Truss

Fuelling my disillusionment

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A few months ago I wrote the following in response to a LinkedIn post, and then saved it in my drafts. The problem is, I didn’t copy the link to the original post properly. Furthermore, if I recall, it didn’t really answer the question that was posed. It was tangentially connected but not completely on topic.

I’ve edited my comment slightly, and I want to share it since I’m wonder if ‘it’s just me’ feeling this way?

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It’s the doing more with less that fuels my disillusionment.

  • Greater and often unrealistic expectations of parents and universities.
  • Greater student social-emotional as well as educational needs.
  • Greater demands to prevent litigation (more documentation, more protection of data, more health & safety requirements… all ‘necessary’, but time consuming.)
  • Greater demands and expectations from the Ministry of Education, and Worksafe BC.
  • Greater costs – pay hikes, heating costs, perishable supplies. Even with no cuts to education, less money gets to the classroom.
    I could go on. I’ve watched my role shift from educational leader to middle manager of an educational machine. I feel like a shield trying to redirect and manage the above impacts away from teachers so that they, rather than we, can do great things with kids.

Still an important role but a lot less personally rewarding.

Am I the only principal feeling this?

Follow our journey

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Dave Sands and I are finally sharing our goal scheduled for next August. We are going to ‘Everest the Crunch’. What does that mean? Mount Everest is 8,849 meters high. The path we take when we walk up the Coquitlam Crunch, a local walk that traverses a power line up the Westwood Plateau area of Coquitlam, is 243 meters. To ‘Everest the Crunch’ we will go up the Coquitlam Crunch 37 times in 48 hours.

I’ve written a number of times about doing the Coquitlam Crunch with Dave… and there is going to be more shared as we get closer to our Everesting day. Dave will be starting this trek on his 60th birthday, I’ll be close to my 59th birthday. We have both been on health kicks which have put us in fantastic shape, and we’ve started training.

Today we did 3 trips up the crunch and 2 trips down, which took us 2 hours and 12 minutes. The training sessions will get longer in the coming months. When we Everest the Crunch, we’ll only be going up. We will be seeking support from family and friends to help drive us down so we don’t have to jockey our 2 cars up and down the hill between our upward climbs. We will also invite people to join us a lap or two.

All that and more details to come. For now it would be great to have people follow us on Instagram as we document our journeys, both from now until next August, and especially during our 2-day challenge. Please follow EverestTheCrunch on Instagram.

And the adventures begin…

The struggle is real

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Today I wanted to quit. I’ve procrastinated for over an hour and a half, and my morning routine will be incomplete. Doubt kept circulating in my head. I feel like I have absolutely nothing to say. It’s been six plus years of writing every day… maybe today it ends. Done.

Well, the fact that these words are written here says that I beat today’s demons. That said, it feels painfully cliche to write about how hard it is sometimes to write. Trite.

It’s a day to remember that if every day was easy it wouldn’t be worth doing. A day to remember that it’s not every day that we can do our best work, and in fact 50% of those days will be our worst 50%. You can’t do better than that on average, the math doesn’t math.

My fingers are moving, words are appearing before me, constructed from thoughts in my head, and another Daily-Ink will be published. I didn’t quit. I also didn’t add any real qualitative value, but I didn’t quit.

Tomorrow will be easier. I say that rather unconvincingly, but with honest hope. Sometimes the blank screen is daunting, and painful to look at. It’s a prison wall more than a screen. Today was one of those days. I’ve scaled the wall, not step by step but word by word, flowing better now because the page is no longer blank. The prison break was successful.

But am I really free? Is my choice to write daily an opportunity for artistic expression, or is it a life sentence? Today it feels like the latter. When that feeling comes more than 50% of the time, I will need to consider freeing myself, but for now I’ll keep writing.

Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.

Emotionally invested

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“When students are emotionally invested in the learning process, commitment and performance will typically go up. Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist who studies learning and creativity, said, “If we want to see what young people are capable of achieving intellectually and creatively, we have to engage them in activities that matter to them.” By linking students to their personal interests and their own creativity, they can explore questions like: What do I love? What am I good at? What problems can we solve? What do we want to create? Why is this important? How will we figure this out? What might we contribute to the world? It’s within this productive struggle and its inherent ambiguity that students can build a self-inventory of creative and adaptive capabilities. These life-building skills will transfer beyond the project and the classroom. Students can discover what’s possible for themselves and what they’re capable of.”

~ Robert Attwell, Student-Powered Inquiry-Based Learning

Robert visited our school last year and wrote this article, published last month in Canadian Teacher Magazine. (See a PDF of the article here.)

A couple days ago 5 pre-service teachers from Simon Fraser University visited our school for the day and I had them end the day learning about some of the inquiries that on of our Grade 12 students, Jacob, did while he was with us since Grade 9. Afterwards, I asked Jacob, what’s something that he really liked about coming to Inquiry Hub, and what’s something he thinks he might have missed coming to such a small school?

Jacob chose only to speak about one thing. He said, ‘If I didn’t come here I’d never have had the opportunity to do all these projects, or I would have had to do them on my own time… except I probably wouldn’t have had the time to do them.’ Essentially, he has had school time to work on projects and inquiries that have mattered to him.

I think that should be something all schools spend a bit more time doing.

Technical difficulties

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I’m surprised that the Jetpack app that I use to publish about 95% of my Daily-Ink posts is so buggy. I often hit ‘Publish’ then get an error. When that happens the post usually publishes anyway, but on the app my post stays in drafts. This can get very confusing.

Sometimes I update the draft and it moves to the Published tab, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all very confusing. I would not be surprised if I have published the same post twice, thinking that an older post was just a draft I hadn’t completed. The whole process is very messy.

In fact, I was just trying to clean up some of the mess and ended up deleting two posts from a few days ago. I had to go into the Trash and restore them, then date them correctly to have them displayed in the right order on my blog.

I’m always intrigued how advanced our technology is and yet how often we have to put up with bugs and technical difficulties. Our TV doesn’t always work nicely with our cable box. We occasionally have to delete and reinstall streaming apps just so we can log into them. I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I don’t watch a lot of TV and often give the remote to my wife to navigate… But when it’s time to reinstall the app, she hands it to me to assist. Shouldn’t all this be intuitive? Shouldn’t it all just work?

I wonder if this is going to get better or worse? As all our devices get more technical are we just going to have to face more technical difficulties? I’m guessing this will be the case. We are going to see more and more not-really-smart ‘smart devices’. The limitations of their smartness are going to create a lot more glitches, bugs, and technical issues. In the coming years we are going to see more rather than less technical difficulties.

An AI advertisement

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I scrolled past this add a few times before paying any attention to it. But then it gave off an uncanny valley feeling that made me look a little closer. I think it was the very staged first question that bothered me most, and yesterday I finally took the time to watch it through a critical lens. It’s an ad for a Tai Chi app, but I cropped the video to hide the brand because I don’t want to amplify it, I want to critique it.

Here is the ad:

And here are a list of telltale things that suggest it is AI.

1. Look at the opening image. The woman is talking at a 90° angle to the stage, and there is no one at the podium below her.

2. The ‘expert’ is a perfectly chiseled man who is never named. No recognition of him as an expert in the field… because he’s fictitious.

3. Obviously fake audience members. The first image shows a blurred bearded man who doesn’t seem real to me. The second image has a man wearing a partial microphone like the expert.

4. The painfully fake script.

“Isn’t a gym better?”

“Gym doesn’t work after 40.”

This isn’t necessarily evidence of AI, it could just be bad writing, but it comes off feeling very wrong and unnatural. It’s like there was an intent in the text to make the expert sound like English is his second language but his voice doesn’t carry that same suggestion.

5. Comments are turned off. There is no benefit in having viewers outing the ad as fake. It’s better to allow the ad to fool more people without being called out.

The reality is that I could pick this ad out as fake, but that’s only because it was done poorly. We are going to see a lot more ads done this way and they are going to be good enough to fool us completely. It’s just a matter of time, and that time is approaching very quickly.

Rent free

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There are a couple people who I don’t really like, who also happen to live rent free in my brain. It really bugs me that these two people can surface in my mind like an itchy scab. I want to forget them but they scratch at my brain and I think about them.

My last dream this morning was about one of them. I haven’t worked with him in over 15 years. I have no reason to think about him, but there he was in my dream, where he bumped onto me and asked for my phone number. I said ‘No’, but then instead of feeling like it was over I felt guilty. Then the rest of the dream was about him trying to contact me and me trying to avoid his contact. It was stupid and unrealistic, as dreams often are, and it ended up waking me up.

If you know me, I’m not someone that dislikes a lot of people. I can only my think of these two right now, beyond them I really don’t expend a lot of thought and energy into people I’m not a fan of. But for some reason these two people creep into my brain and bother me.

They both hold an inflated sense of self-importance. They both lack awareness of what others think. The one above has a habit of bringing things up that people don’t want to hear. He’ll often start a sentence with, “I hate to say it but…” then say something almost with delight. The other person is a true narcissist. I thought I knew what narcissism was, thought I understood it, then met this person and realized that everyone I ever thought was a narcissist previously were simply people with narcissistic tendencies. Neither of these people are people I consider nice, people that I’d want to be friends with.

Yet early this morning, there is this guy intruding in my dreams… living in my brain rent free.

Despite the fact that I owe them nothing, and in fact they have done harm to me and my state of mind, I end up thinking about them. It’s like a PTSD response in some way. Occasionally, (fortunately not too frequently), I’ll be thinking of something totally unrelated to them, and yet they pop into my brain.

I don’t wish them harm, I don’t want to think about them at all. There are so many wonderful people in my life that deserve far more of my attention. So it makes me wonder, why do these two deserve any of my thinking time? They don’t. They aren’t in my life now and they don’t ever need to be again.

And that’s where I end this thought… unresolved. No answers, no deep understanding. Just two people I’m not a fan of, who pop into my head and occasionally live there rent free.

Ripple in time

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I was at a dinner with some online school principals from other districts last night and one of them mentioned the influence that I had back in the early days of Twitter. It was interesting to hear his thoughts, and to recall what those days were like. The sharing and learning had a depth to it that I haven’t felt since. It was a time when educators were trying new things, playing with new technologies, and experimenting with their own practice on an almost daily basis. And then openly sharing their successes and failures, asking questions, and seeking solutions to new and thoughtful problems.

I’ve thought fondly of those times, but I never really took the perspective that I had influence, or that what I was doing was having a ripple effect on others. I felt more like I was riding the ripples of others than I felt like I was making the ripples myself.

It was quite an honour to hear him speak of the influence I had, and to look back at that time a little differently.

A quick road trip

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Later today I head to Kamloops for an all-day meeting tomorrow. The principals of Provincial Online Schools are meeting. We connect with the Ministry of Education in the morning, and spend the rest of the day addressing concerns and supporting each other. While there is an option to connect online, it can’t be understated how valuable it is to meet face to face occasionally.

I’ve shared this before, but it’s an important point: I have more in common with these principals than I do with all my colleagues in my school district. Online learning has different funding rules than regular schools; Different approaches to learning and support of students; Different demands at different times of the year. We also have very different needs for support, and a lot of times we look to each other for that support.

Sure, we are a group that are comfortable connecting online, and we do that often. We even have a WhatsApp group where we ask questions and support each other. But there is something really special about getting together face-to-face a few times a year. And while that meeting usually happens a bit more locally for me, it’s my turn to put some travel time in.

It will be a short, overnight trip, but it will be worth it to connect with my long distance colleagues.

Margins over manpower

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Amazon just laid off over 14,000 people. According to Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, who wrote that they are ‘Staying nimble and continuing to strengthen our organizations’, “The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

What are the ‘biggest bets’ they they are investing in? Chips. AI chips. Profits before people. Margins over manpower. The human equation in a company no longer matters. People are as expendable as office supplies. Need cost savings? Fired employees save a lot more money than reducing the cost of paper and staples.

The shareholder model of capitalism is slowly collapsing. It’s the middle and upper middle class that is getting laid off. Meanwhile, large companies like Nvidia invest billions of dollars in Open AI, and Open AI takes that money and buys Nvidia chips. Simultaneously, all these companies lay off staff to amplify margins, buy more chips and grow even larger.

Top executives who are already making millions hit their shareholder targets and get bonuses. Meanwhile regular employees face layoffs and have no job security. You think your $200,000 job is safe? Only until the next quarter’s earnings are going public, or until the merger is completed after your small company is swallowed up by one of the big guys.

If it was just Amazon, that would be one thing, but similar reports of layoffs have recently been announced at IBM (9,000 jobs in the US alone), UPS (34,000 jobs), Nestle (16,000 jobs), Intel (24,500 jobs)… the list goes on. What happens to the global economy when hundreds of thousands of people become jobless while large companies recycle their money, reinvesting in each other in circular deals where funding is promised back to the investors in product purchases?

What happens in a world where profits and margins matter more than people?