Category Archives: Daily-Ink

By the numbers

Documented worldwide cases of Covid-19 have surpassed 3 million people. The US will surpass 1 million of those later today. Canada will surpass 50,000 this week. And sadly, over 200,000 people have died as a result of contracting this virus.

Canada and California are similar in population size, both are doing a good job keeping the number of people infected down, and both are still dealing with 1,000 to 1,500+ new cases a day.

The good news, hospitals here on the North American west coast are not inundated like they have been in Italy, Spain, and New York. The challenging news, we are not out of the woods yet and diligence must be maintained… especially as we move to reopen parts of the economy.

I’m no longer making predictions about what things will look like in the coming weeks and months… the virus isn’t a weather system coming in from the west and bringing rainfall. It has a life of its own. While we have considerable influence as a community, and as citizens who want to keep the spread of the virus down, we also have to respond to new outbreaks and change our habits as suggested by health authorities.

It will be a dance… Opening things up, tightening things up, closing things down, permitting small gatherings, and then recommendations against them. The numbers will dictate what makes sense. And while that’s easy to say, as we do the dance, it will feel like the songs aren’t staying on long enough for us to get used to the rhythm.

It won’t feel like things are normal for quite some time. And that’s not the new normal, that’s a level of stress and uncertainty that will loom for a while. I was trying to avoid paying attention to the numbers, but I realize now that they are something tangible that I can pay attention to. I can see patterns, and try to understand why we are getting the provincial and federal health and social distancing advice that we are getting.

The numbers aren’t complete, they don’t tell the whole story, but they tell us when things are headed in the right versus the wrong direction. Whether they grow incrementally or exponentially, they tell us a story, and we should be aware of when that story changes… and be prepared for new changes to our rules of social and work engagement when they do.

Finding my sea legs

I remember a trip to the Cayman Islands with my dad. We were on the small island of Cayman Brac and we hired a boat to take us to see a shoreline that my dad wanted to explore. The boat wasn’t very big, under 25 feet long, and not designed for anything more than a day trip. The captain was a short, old man with a weathered, leathery face that made him look over 100 years old. He was letting me troll for marlin while we travelled. The waves were choppy, the boat bounced and swayed, and I had to keep my eyes on the horizon to keep from getting sea sick.

At one point I caught a barracuda and after I reeled it up to the boat, I couldn’t get it over the edge of the boat without standing up from my chair. The movement of the boat set me on my ass before I could take two steps towards the stern. The old sea captain put my dad’s hand on the steering wheel and pointed forward. He then walked to me, as sure-footed as if he were a young athlete on a flat track, picked me off the deck and helped me back into the seat. He then took my rod, walked back to the stern and got the fish into the boat. All the while, the boat bounced in the rough seas and this captain casually made tiny little shuffle-step movements with his feet, keeping himself perfectly balanced. This ancient-looking man had sea legs, he was as comfortable with the motion of the sea under his feet as we are on land.

This is my twenty second year as an educator and for the first time in years I feel like I’ve lost my ‘sea legs’. I’m struggling to find my balance. I’ve struggled with work load, and time management, and work-life balance before – I think all committed educators do – but this is different.

I recently discussed with Dave Sands that, “All screen time is not created equal,” but this is where I’m losing my balance. Beyond a daily walk, I’m spending every moment of my time in my school office or at home. During this time, I’m spending a fair bit more time online. When I’m at work, there is a constant flow of video conferences that interrupt any sense of work flow for my other tasks, and so days are very busy, but don’t always feel productive.

My online time at home flows from distraction, to entertainment, to work, to creating and writing, to news, back to work, and then back to news or distraction, with a daily workout thrown in. Recently, I’ve missed workouts, I’ve missed my daily meditation (3 times this month), I’ve spent more time writing (without writing much more than I usually do), and my focus seems scattered.

I need to rework my daily routine during this pandemic. It feels difficult because there is a constant flow of information that keeps shifting what things look like at work. There is also ever-changing news about how our social distancing expectations will change going forward. Metaphorically, the waves keep churning, and I’m struggling to keep my balance on the boat. I don’t have my sea legs. I’m going to rethink and reintroduce some of my routines that have worked for me before, and see if I can steady myself a bit.

Truth is stranger than fiction

Setting the stage for Part 1: April 24th, 2015

It was 5 years ago yesterday. I remember the exact day because it’s not every day that a DeLorean  appears out of nowhere, flying down your street. There was a thunderous ‘crack’ that echoed through the neighbourhood, and I opened the front door in time to hear the soft rumble of the flying car hovering above our street. It landed and turned into my driveway. The x-wing shaped door on the driver side opened up and I was shocked when none other than Emmett Lathrop “Doc” Brown, Ph.D, came springing out of the car, heading directly for me.

Doc: Are you Dave Truss?

Me: Ummm, yeah.

Doc: I’ve got a USB zip drive, can I use your computer.

Not waiting for a response, he rushed through the door, passing me and headed into my living room. He stood there dishevelled, holding a key chain with a zip drive dangling along with a couple keys next to it.

Me: OK, um, this way.

I lead him to my dining room table, placed my computer between us, logged in and pointed the keyboard closer to him. He shoved the zip drive into the USB slot on my computer. He seemed rushed.

Doc: I’m going to show you something. It’s from the future. Five years from now there is going to be a pandemic as bad the 1918 Spanish Flu and President Donald Trump is…

Me: Wait, what? Donald Trump is President… of what?

Doc: The USA! I tell you there’s going to be a global pandemic in 5 years and that’s what you ask me?

Me: Sorry, I thought you were being serious.

Doc: I am! Shut up and let me finish. President Donald Trump, he makes things a lot worse, I mean A LOT WORSE. But you can stop it.

Me: Umm, you’re nuts.

Doc: Look, here is a video of President Trump 5 years from now.

We watch the video together.

Me: Ok, where are the cameras?

Doc: What?

Me: You are pranking me. I’m on Candid Camera, right? Who put you up to this? Where are the cameras? Those aren’t real goggles are they? You’re hiding a camera in them, aren’t you?

I reach for the goggles on his head and he pulls away.

Doc: Listen, the fate of the world is in your hands, did you not see the video I just showed you, it’s from 5 years into the future, your future, and…

Me: …and it’s a skit from Saturday Night Live!

Doc: What?

Me: Or a sitcom? Or from Late Night with Seth Meyers… it’s a comedy skit. It’s funny, made me laugh. Good one.

Doc: No! No-no-no, this is the future. This is going to happen in 5 years. This is your future, and you can change it.

Me: You’re funny.

Doc: …Your’s an idiot, do you not understand the seriousness of what I’m telling you.

Me: Are you really trying to tell me that ridiculous video is from the future? …And you want me to take you seriously?

Doc: YES!

Me: Hey Doc, if that’s “The Future”, come back and find me then, and I’ll give you a million bucks.

Doc: I don’t want your money, I need your help!

Me: Well I don’t think you are getting either. I think it’s time for you to reveal the Candid Camera cameras, and let’s both have a laugh, or it’s time for you to leave.

Doc: Unbelievable.

Me: Exactly.

Setting the stage for Part 2: April 24th, 2020

Yesterday: I arrived home from work, parked my car and started walking up my front steps… Then it happened. It had been 5 years, but the sound was unmistakable. There was a thunderous ‘crack’ that echoed through the neighbourhood, followed by the rumble of the flying DeLorean, hovering above our street. The car lands and turns up my driveway. The driver side x-wing door opens and a not-too-impressed Doc greets me.

Doc: Hello David…

End.

____

“There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.” ― Neil Gaiman

Comedic responses to the video above.

Strange days indeed

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — strange days indeed

Everybody’s runnin’ and no one makes a move.

~ John Lennon

If you go back to the end of 2019 and made predictions of the future, there’s no way you would imagine the situation we are in. Imagine going back in time 5 years and taking a newspaper with you. Let’s make that 50 years, and describe something as ‘simple’ as a cell phone.

I remember seeing this commercial and marvelling at what people would have thought to hear such a prediction.

I’ve been humbled by world events recently. I tend to be someone who is confident about my opinion but I don’t feel like I can talk with any sort of authority about what the world will look like in six months. I have no idea where we will be in the fight to contain Covid-19? I don’t know what school will look like on a day-to-day basis? I couldn’t intelligently guess who will win the US federal election?

I read news articles and they are filled with bias. I often fact check things before I share them. I actually spend time calling out friends when they share misinformation. I see clever, comedic articles like this:

And I wonder just how many people will share them, thinking they are real?

There are days when news seems more fiction than reality. I foolishly thought that in the Information Age, the information available would be accurate. I think it’s funny that people used to worry about Wikipedia being inaccurate, and now it’s the first place I go to confirm facts. I didn’t think I’d regularly use Snopes to fact check articles before sharing them. I didn’t think people of authority would call news they didn’t like fake, and that I’d consider major news agencies propaganda pushers. I didn’t think science would take a back seat to bizarre, unfounded theories. If you went back in time a decade and played a clip like this one, nobody would believe this is anything more than comedy… Pure satire.

These are very strange days indeed… and I don’t see them getting less strange any time soon.

In the shadows

I had a conversation yesterday with someone who carries very strong negative memories with them from something that happened many years ago. It wasn’t violent, and didn’t cause any trauma to their body, but it did to their mind. It was essentially an emotional bullying issue, one that especially hurt because it came from someone believed to be a friend. It hurt more because it wasn’t just a one-time thing, it was repeated.

As I listened, I was taken back by the hurt that was still carried. They say ‘time heals all wounds’, but I think sometimes ‘time wounds all heals’. Sometimes the passage of time does not separate us from emotional pain, rather time bathes us in it.

I think that’s why people end up self medicating. It’s easier to numb the pain than it is to face the pain that lurks in our memories, haunting us. The memory, the upset, the anger, or the pain, can seem as present and as relevant as things happening to us daily.

I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t play one on tv or the internet, but I asked this person a question.

I asked, when recalling the incidents, if they saw the experience through their own eyes or if they saw themselves in the memory as if they were watching a movie? The answer was ‘it’s like a movie’.

Aren’t our minds amazing things, that we can recall a memory and see ourselves in that memory! How does that work? We aren’t really reliving it if we can see it happening to us. It’s more like we are watching our own history. This gives us more power than we might think we have:

  • We don’t have to review our memories up close.
  • We don’t have to recall our memories in full colour or at full speed.
  • We can create new endings. Rewind and replay it.
  • We can literally put the memory into a television screen.
  • We can recall memories as still, black & white, blurry photos in old frames.

We can move memories into the shadows of our minds rather than have them fill our brains in full technicolor and splendour. We don’t have to get rid of them, (I’m not sure we can), but we can reduce their power over us. We can relegate the memories to less significance.

It’s similar to controlling anger. When something upsets us and makes us mad, how long do we hold on to that anger?

Let’s say you are driving to work one morning and someone cuts you off. I mean really cuts you off, you have to break hard and swerve into the curb lane to stop from hitting them and getting in an accident. You slam on the breaks and your horn simultaneously, but the other car drives off, seemingly oblivious to what they just put you through. How long do you hold on to that anger?

Is 5 minutes appropriate?

What about for the rest of your commute?

What about until everyone at work has heard your story?

How about until you’ve told your spouse when you got home.

How about the following week?

How about you recall the incident every time you pass that spot on the road on the way to work?

How long is it acceptable to hold on to that anger, to build up that moment in your mind? How long do you let that that angry moment in the past control your emotions in the present?

We have many memories that belong in the shadows of our mind, rather than in full colour and right in front of us.

If we can learn to not let the anger of a jerk that cut us off minutes, hours, days, or weeks ago control our present state or well being, couldn’t we do the same for something years in the past.

Maybe we can let time heal our wounds .

It may take practice, but if we’ve already changed the memory into a movie, seeing it from a perspective that we didn’t experience, then haven’t we already made changes that have removed us from the original experience? And if our minds can do that on their own, maybe we can choose to ‘see’ those memories in more distant and less angry ways. Maybe we can alter our past so that it interferes less with our present.

Missing the target

Today was to be the day. The last day of my 30 Day challenge to do a 30 second unsupported handstand. But I’m not there yet. I’ve already written about the challenge of making Incremental Improvements:

“We are often enamoured by the quick fix, the easy answer, fast and obvious results. But these quick rewards are not always available. Sometimes it’s the slow incremental changes that make us better, stronger, and more resilient. Sometimes we need to work through things slowly and properly in order to see the results we really want.”

The fact is that I’m getting stronger and closer to my goal. However I also have to be honest and say that I haven’t given it 100% of my effort. If I’m even more honest, this is something I tried and failed to do a year ago. A few days ago my Facebook memory from last year was a video of me doing a handstand against the wall and sharing that I wanted to do a one-minute handstand by the end of June ’19. I obviously failed or I wouldn’t have been doing a similar challenge again.

I’m on a good path and I’ll get there. I’ll set another goal. I’ll – share – my – progress, and I’ve got my buddy, Kelly, working – alongside me. I’ve missed my target, but my goal is within sight, and I’ll get there. I will continue to work on my strength, but I haven’t focussed enough on my balance. Working on strength has more tangible and rewarding results, so I’m not surprised that I put my focus there. Now it’s time to focus on the less glamorous aspects, where falling again and again are part of the learning.

The next time I share my road to a handstand here, it will be to show that I’ve achieved my goal… and I’m putting a note on my calendar that I want to reach that goal 30 days from today.

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1252973978118844427?s=21

A world of meetings

Today is the first day in a while that I don’t have an 8:30am neeting, but I have one at 9, a long one at 10, then 12, 12:30. And 1pm. For almost four and a half hours I’ll be sitting at my desk staring at my computer screen in meetings. That’s less than what I had yesterday. And yesterday, I ended up on 3 one-on-one conversations with teachers, and a phone call with a student as well. I barely got out of my chair.

I know things will settle down. I value much of the work being done in many of these meetings, but right now I feel like these meetings are equally a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I still get to connect with colleagues and video helps me feel far more connected than voice alone. Cursed because many meetings could just be informational meetings take 1/10th of the time.

Spending 4-6 hours a day in meetings is not efficient or effective, and some days even small ‘to do’ lists are taken home, or added to tomorrow’s list.

What’s really making this tough is that when I normally have days like this, I can take a break by walking down the hall and checking in on kids. I can peek in on teachers teaching a class. I can sit in a busy staff room and join a conversation. My daily 12:30 meeting is a staff check-in organized by the teachers and still feels like this, but for the most part I miss the opportunities to connect with students and teachers in a busy school… and I’m getting a bit tired of non-stop meetings.

The tightrope balance of parenting

Yesterday I recorded a podcast with Dave Sands and we discussed 7 PARENTING TIPS to help navigate the challenges of students LEARNING AT HOME during the Covid-19 pandemic. This got me thinking about how different kids are, and how hard it is to be the perfect parent for a kid.

Parents hold an imbalance of power over kids, who are in a constant state of growth. With growing up comes both more responsibility and more expectation of freedom. These things do not develop at the same speed, and our expectations will often be mismatched with our kids expectations. When it comes to how much choice and freedom kids are given versus how much of that choice and freedom they feel they deserve, parents will often think of the child they were dealing with a few months ago, while kids feel like they’ve grown up since then.

Some parents navigate this well, but many struggle. Some hold on to power over their kids to keep them safe. In doing so, they can create resentment because they are being too strict. Some parents give too much power to kids too soon, and kids tend to take advantage of that power and make poor decisions. Some parents get it right with respect to some expectations, and totally wrong with others. This can relate to chores, use of money, curfews and bedtimes, use of technology, eating habits, manners, homework, and all sorts of household rules and expectations.

The thing is, that some kids need more structure and more guidelines, and some kids need more freedom and choice, an it’s a tightrope balancing act not just to figure this out for a kid, but also to recognize that what works for one kid might not work for another… even in the same household with the same parents! To give a concrete example, one kid might need parameters around getting homework done, because without that support they won’t get it done, while an older or younger sibling might be able to do homework completely independently, without any parent supervision or support. Having different rules for these kids can create tension and so can having the same rules and not providing the freedom and responsibility that the more responsible kid deserves (especially if the one that deserves more freedom is the younger of the two).

So parenting tips are something that will always be tricky to give. What works for some, doesn’t work for all. That said, I really think Dave Sands and go over some ideas that are not prescriptive, but rather they are things to think about when trying to deal with kids learning at home… no matter how you currently parent or how good or challenging your kids might be. Here are the tips:

1. Manage Expectations
2. Make a Schedule
3. Minimize Distractions
4. Learning occurs everywhere
5. Set daily and weekly goals
6. All screen time is not created equal
7. Model learning.

I think there is something of value here for every parent. Please check the podcast out, and let me know what you think.

What will it look like?

A few days ago I wrote a post This is not the ‘new normal’, and I said,

“This is not the ‘New Normal’, this is a pandemic that will come to an end. This is temporary.”

This morning I ‘met’ Dave Sands on Zoom and we recorded a podcast. We spent about an hour online together and it was great to ‘see’ him. The fact that this was not face-to-face didn’t matter that much. In fact, I’ve ‘seen’ Dave much more in the last few weeks than I have in months. The reason for this is that we’ve connected almost daily on Microsoft Teams for work, since the March break ended 3 weeks ago. But I would have loved to have Dave over to do the recording. To sit and have coffee and enjoy his company along with the conversation.

This afternoon my wife and I joined another couple in their back yard. We sat apart, respecting ‘social distancing’ norms. We brought our own cups and drinks, and left after only touching the chairs we sat on. No handshakes, no hugs, no communal snacks or drinks. This was our first social gathering like this in about 2 months. It was wonderful to connect.

This is not the new normal, but I wonder what the new normal will look like? Will we be less likely to greet people with hugs and handshakes? Yesterday I saw a girl and her dad at a crosswalk. The young girl looked like she was about 4 years old. She got off her bike and ran to press the crosswalk button… with her elbow. Will we ever look at things like elevator buttons, public handrails, and door handles the same way?

Part of me thinks that things will eventually return to a normal that resembled what it looked like in 2019, but part of me wonders about social norms and practices, and how these will change? Will we bow to greet someone rather than shake their hands, hug, or fist bump? Will restaurant workers preparing our food all wear masks? Will we carry hand sanitizer everywhere we go and use it constantly?

We are months and months away from any kind of normal, but when that normal arrives, how many norms and social practices will have changed as a result of Covid-19 pandemic.

4 Tips for Microsoft Teams Video Meetings

Here is a quick video that I created with 4 tips for running video meetings in Microsoft Teams.

Here is a shortened slide show:

 

And here is a PDF Version: PDF-4-Quick-Tips-for-Microsoft-Teams-Video-Meetings-by-David-Truss. This includes a link to my post: Having Back Channel Support in an Online Video Class.

The first 3 tips are very basic, but I think thoughtful implementation of a good ‘backchanneller’ is something even seasoned presenters can benefit from.

I enjoy creating and sharing videos. My last one, though instructional, was a bit more creative. This one was focused on getting the information out while being both fast and informative. As always, feedback appreciated.