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.
Who else just flakes out at the end of the school year?
At least I didn’t get sick. That sometimes happens… I reach Christmas break, March break, or summer, and my body crashes.
After work Friday we hopped on a ferry to visit my in-laws and oldest daughter on Vancouver Island. We were there for a little over 24 hours and then back home last night. Today I started with my Coquitlam Crunch walk, and that was the extent of any physical effort I put into the day. Its also a great opportunity to connect with a friend.
After I came home I had a hot tub, and a nap. I cooked stakes for dinner. I’m on the couch with my wife watching Jury Duty.
It’s 11pm and I’m finally writing my post, and I still need to meditate. I’ll hit my targets… and that’s it. That’s enough… A typical start to a holiday. A good flake out day.
Four years. Not 3 or 6 months, not even 1 year, four. I started my fitness journey with a calendar on January 1, 2019. This was my reflection after a year. The path has been a tiny bit bumpy, but overall extremely consistent and without any significant injury as a result of my fitness regimen.
So often people (including me in the past) go on fitness binges and/or eating diets. It’s a race to see results. And while results can come from these brief attempts to improve, unrealistic fitness plans and unsustainable diets eventually lead to a point where they can’t be sustained.
I’m not trying to run ultra marathons or have a bodybuilder physique. I’m actually going to let myself let loose and eat a bit more gluttonous while on vacation. But I’m also going to find time to exercise, I’m going to return home and be more thoughtful about my diet after my vacation. I’m going to keep playing the long game and not worry about minor fluctuations in my schedule. Because while there will be fluctuations, I’m going to keep a schedule of writing, meditation, and exercise. I’m not looking for quick gains, I’m just working on staying on a healthy path, knowing positive results are still to come… in time. Perseverance and the long game are the path I’m on.
I’ve had some physical challenges this year, and still have a long path of recovery, but on reflection I really haven’t been playing the long game I spoke about in December. This year I decided I didn’t need my tracking calendar any longer.
I tracked 4 goals with this calendar for 4 years, 2019-2022, and saw small improvements every year. This year I stopped. I believed the patterns were built. I thought I would maintain my commitments without needing a tracker.
I was wrong.
So I will start again this weekend. I’ll pick up a calendar and track the last 6 months of the year. My 4 positive habits this year will be 3 oldies:
1. Workouts: 20 min. cardio, stretching, and strength training for at least one muscle group.
2. Meditation: 10 min. minimum, and a second sticker if I exceed 20 minutes.
3. Daily writing here on Daily-Ink.
And I’m going to add something new this year.
4. At least 20 min. of writing that isn’t for my blog.
For this last goal, I’m going to shoot for 26 days, or one day a week for the rest of the year… An admittedly low bar, but still 26 more times that I will have written beyond blogging without this goal! I know that while I watch almost no TV and no sports, I still waste time watching a screen (my phone), and I think like the other goals, tracking will inspire me to build and maintain the habit. I want to write more, I haven’t been writing… let’s see if I can develop the habit.
I realize that in playing the long game, gains are slow. I don’t see quick results and I’m not rewarded explicitly for good behaviour and good habits. I need my calendar to keep me honest. I need it to motivate me when I just don’t feel like working out, and to prevent me from skipping days and building bad habits.
I know the calendar motivates me. I know it shows me when I need to metaphorically ‘pull up my socks’ and avoid ‘no dot’, and ‘one dot days‘. And so starting today my calendar shall be resurrected. It’s time to resume effectively playing the long game.
Although I’ll be working next week, today is the last day of school with staff. It’s always a day that feels melancholy for me. I’m grateful for the approaching summer, but it’s a final farewell to a year that feels more significant than a December 31st year-end celebration.
It was a challenging year for me on many fronts, but mostly health-wise. I shared this recently in my email newsletter to students and their parents:
After a couple months of working in pain every day, I took most of May off with a herniated disc in my neck, which was pinching a nerve going down my left arm. The good news is that I’m almost completely pain free now and my discomfort level is quite low. The challenging thing is that combined with a few other absences this year, I missed more work this year than I probably have in all the other 24 years that I’ve been an educator. Many of you have heard me speak of how challenging absences are at Inquiry Hub, and how good attendance has a direct correlation to overall success… and unfortunately I got to live the consequences of missing a lot of school first hand. I am so thankful for the team that I work with, and I appreciate how much added work they covered in order to keep the experience so positive for our students.
Add covid which, while not herniated disc painful, left me with a week-long low grade headache in November, and a nasty flu in January that knocked me on my butt worse than covid did, and it seemed to me the year was all about being sick or recovery and catch up. I didn’t mention the loss of my father in the message above, but that also happened while dealing with the physical pain.
I’ll be glad to wrap things up next week. All that said, there is a lot of positives to appreciate. Our grads got into the programs they wanted. Planning for next year has me excited about the year ahead. And while I am having some residual issues with the nerves in my arm from the herniated disc, I’ve been pain free for 3+ weeks.
My left arm is weak, and sometimes uncomfortable, but discomfort is so much better than constant pain. My heart goes out to people with chronic pain. I had just over 3 months of it, and working every day for over 2 months in agony before taking time off was brutal… I can’t imagine what life is like for those that live with daily pain and don’t get to feel the relief I now feel.
This gives me perspective, and makes me feel lucky, despite the challenging year I had. I get to look forward to a summer of recovery and revitalization, not of choosing between being in pain or being so medically intoxicated that I don’t want to do, can’t do, anything productive. I get to look forward and see positive things in my future.
But today is melancholy. Today is about saying goodbye. Goodbye to colleagues, and goodbye to the school year. It’s the final countdown to a year I don’t ever want to repeat. I need to focus on expressing my appreciation to my staff for being more supportive of me than I feel I was to them this year… and I hope to make up for that next year!
I really try to live by the mantra, ‘The meaning of your communication is the response you get’. It puts the burden of my clear communication solely on me. When someone misunderstands or misinterprets my communication, it’s not their fault, it’s mine… I could have been more clear, more concise, more thoughtful.
I had a written conversation with a colleague recently that didn’t go as I had planned. When I saw the misunderstanding, I tried to explain. But I came from a defensive stance about what I really meant. I didn’t think about what their response really meant. I worried too much about clarifying and not enough about understanding.
“This is what I meant to say,” does not repair what was said and interpreted incorrectly. Not usually. In a way it’s doubling down, it’s saying, “You were wrong in your interpretation.” It’s not saying, “I messed up in my communication.”
It’s a minor shift, simple to see after the fact, but delicately difficult to communicate in a response to what was clearly my poor communication. I didn’t get the response I wanted, thus I didn’t communicate well. If that’s my premise, then what I need to do is listen to their response, and communicate about that, not what I meant to say.
It’s a subtle shift. Not an easy one, but an important one.
The end of the year can feel like a constant pace of go-go-go! From wake up to head on pillow that night there is too much to do and too little time. Then things (finally) wind down and you see all that you’d like to do but you’ve been too busy doing what you needed to do. Time suddenly slows, and tasks are more easily accomplishable.
This becomes a time when I need others to collaborate with. Time to have learning conversations and time to co-plan. I notice that working with others motivates me and keeps my productivity pace up.
It’s easy to take a deep sigh of relief as things slow down, and to slow down myself. But the year hasn’t ended and there is still a lot to get done, a lot to accomplish, and an opportunity to better prepare for the new year. Just because the pace has slowed doesn’t mean productivity should too.
Staying motivated as the pace slows isn’t easy. It’s easier to coast through to the ending. My motivation is to do whatever I can to make next year better. Because as crazy as the year-ending June pace can be, the year-starting September pace can be equally frenetic. And so the work I do now will help my productivity in the new school year.
It has been a long ride this year, but I’ve got to stay in the saddle and keep riding at a good pace. I’ve got the whole summer to trot and canter, right now I need too keep the gallop going. Giddy up!
I remember seeing a video clip where Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the possibility of alien life. He said that when you consider the intelligence difference between humans and chimpanzee DNA is just 1% (actually closer to 3%, but the point is still valid)… how much smarter could aliens be if they had an even bigger DNA difference to us? It could be possible that alien life forms could be so intelligent that we seem like chimpanzees or even chickens in comparison. ‘Oh look, those human teens are learning simple algebra, how adorable.‘
So aliens might see us as quite simple life forms in comparison to themselves. This could also happen with Artificial Intelligence here on earth. Maybe one day we create an intelligent identity that thinks of us as simple-minded. I shared this idea before that man will never invent artificial intelligence that is ‘as smart as’ humans. The moment an AI is as smart as us, it will instantaneously be smarter than us. When we get to that threshold, the AI will instantly be a lot smarter. It will be as smart as us but also faster at mathematical calculations, faster at solving puzzles, and could also be stronger than us, see better than us, and would definitely have a better vocabulary than us.
We are amazing creatures. We are at the pinnacle of intelligence on planet earth. We are also still quite barbaric. We fight over land, we don’t feed everyone despite having enough food. We take unnecessary risks with our lives, and we even kill one another. We live tribal lives, and while we use tools and technology in ways that far exceeds what any other living thing can do on this planet, our achievements could be minor on a cosmic scale.
We have no way of visiting a distant planet in a single lifespan. We act like parasites on earth, spreading wildly, and killing the planet as we overpopulate large parts of both hospitable and even inhospitable land… meanwhile displacing key animals on the food chain. We are slightly intelligent life forms, with monkey brains.
If we ever come across aliens, they will probably be a lot smarter than us. If we ever create as-smart-as-human intelligent life it will instantaneously be smarter-than-human. In both cases we will move from being the smartest of animals to being less intelligent, and maybe less significant, than another intelligent form.
Still, so far we are the smartest monkeys. It’s just too bad that we do so many dumb things.
Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.The image is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken. Captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image was revealed to the public by NASA on 11 July 2022. (Wikipedia)
It’s too hard to fathom just how big the universe is. The image below only shows a few stars, they are the bright spots with 6 flares coming off of them… a by-product of the James Webb telescope’s design. The rest of the bright spots are galaxies. Galaxies that each hold billions or trillions of stars.
And if you held your pinky up to the night sky you would completely cover the area of the sky that this photo covers with a sliver of a finger nail.
We are so insignificantly tiny, and our Milky Way galaxy is so insignificantly placed in the universe. We just can’t conceive of just how inconceivably vast our universe is, and how insignificantly tiny our solar system is.
It’s too much to comprehend. And yet, here we are. So significant to each other, so connected to our planet. We get to live lives rich in mystery and wonder.
What other life is out there, or was out there, some time in the 13 billion years of our universe’s existence? Could alien life comprehend our existence? We’ll probably never know.
If there was life in one of these distant galaxies right now, we wouldn’t it know for millions or billions of years. The light we see in that photo above are from the past. To put it into perspective, if they were looking at light from our planet, they would be seeing light emitted from before dinosaurs roamed the earth… in other words they would be looking at prehistoric life on a planet with single cell organisms or perhaps no life at all… yet.
It’s a price I pay as an educator. It doesn’t matter how many positive things happen in a school year, I always feel a little regret at the end of the year. I wanted the year to be more. I wanted it to be better. I wanted to make a greater contribution. I wanted to have more impact.
Twenty five years into my career, and I’ve felt this every year. This year it stings a bit more because my health issues made me miss a lot of school. But I also know this is just me being hard on myself. I know that if things were 100 percent better and I hit every goal I had, I would still feel subtle regret that I didn’t set my targets high enough.
Yesterday a grad came by with flowers, and a card, and a card from their parent. Both cards shared thanks for four amazing years in a school that gave them an opportunity that they felt they couldn’t get anywhere else. That’s heartwarming. And yet this morning I’m lamenting about what else could have been done.
This isn’t me feeling depressed. This isn’t me fishing for compliments. It’s me wondering who else feels this at the end of the school year?
In reality, I don’t want this ‘subtle’ feeling to go away, (that said I also don’t want it to be more pronounced). I actually want this small feeling at this time of year. It doesn’t sadden me as much as it drives me. It makes me think a bit about the potential of next year. It fuels me and inspires me to think bigger, to be excited about what’s possible. It’s kind of like the feeling of coming in second in a competition, you aren’t thrilled, but you had a god season, and now you are excited about next season.
Maybe it’s possible to garner that excitement without the subtle regret? Maybe it could happen where you feel like you won the season and you want to create back-to-back winning seasons? Perhaps that’s possible. But unlike a sports season, a school year doesn’t have a trophy, and there are always things about the year that could have been better.
So, I’ll take the subtle regret. It won’t make me sad, but it will make me want to make next year better… and I really believe it will be.
Yesterday’s grad went well. There were a few bumps along the way, including our livestream going down, which is not anything you would want to happen. Even after a reboot, it never worked as planned. So, to remote grandparents and others waiting to watch from home, it was a disappointment.
At the event there were a few other bumps. One funny one was that our awards have nominees, and then a winner is announced. But the teacher who had the announcing envelopes tucked them inside a shelf in the lectern then forgot where he put them… and another teacher doing the first award presentation didn’t know who the winner was? That caused a bit of a scramble. But it also caused some laughs. It wasn’t a big deal, and got sorted out quickly.
Big bumps like the livestream going down are regrettable. We don’t know what caused the issue, and if we could have foreseen the issue in any way, it would be upsetting to know that we could have prevented it. But this wasn’t the first livestream we’ve done, and we didn’t do anything differently. The technology failed us, and we still don’t know the cause.
Little bumps like the lost winner envelopes are more preventable than our big bump was, but less important. No one missed out on anything, and the delay was minor… even entertaining.
Planning a big event is challenging to do without a few bumps. Stress levels can be high, and there are a lot of moving parts. Seldom does everything go perfectly. The trick is to not sweat over the little bumps, and to do everything in your power to avoid the big bumps.
Small bumps don’t ruin the event, big bumps can. I feel sorry for those that were trying to watch our event from home. We learned a lesson to always ensure we are saving a local recording and not just recording to the cloud. That way if a livestream connection ever goes down again, we will still have a local copy of the event to share later. That is to say, if our livestream ever dies again, the at home audience can watch it later… and the big bump becomes a small bump.
I remember running an assembly as the leadership teacher back when I was in middle school. It was for a Terry Fox run, and we had a former teacher and coach of Terry as a guest speaker. I’d heard him before, he’s both articulate and engaging, and I knew it would be a good presentation. But what I remember most about that assembly was that our guest speaker was the only adult who spoke.
My grade 8 leadership kids completely ran the show. They helped classes get seated. They greeted him. They quieted the audience. They introduced him. They thanked him. They gave out the instructions for the run. These aren’t huge tasks, but they take planning and rehearsing to do well. And to me it looks so much better when students run the show.
Tonight we have our grad and I have an amazing teacher who is behind the scenes helping make sure everything goes smoothly. But it’s a student who set up the YouTube live stream, it’s students performing musical acts, it’s students doing most of the work. And it’s student MC’s that will host the show.
It wouldn’t happen all that smoothly without this teacher behind the curtain, but no one in the audience is going to know what he did, how hard he worked, and how other teachers also helped from behind the curtain. What everyone will see is a student run show.
Our school prides itself in being student driven and led… and it really is. But it isn’t like this just because of the students, it’s because of teachers providing the opportunity. Teachers making sure students have the skills, and have put in the practice. It doesn’t just take student leaders, it takes teachers that make room for students to lead and to shine.
My teacher won’t take a bow today. He won’t get any of the limelight. He’ll stay behind the curtain and he’ll get satisfaction from the students doing a great job. That’s what great teachers do.
