Category Archives: Daily-Ink

The infinite classroom

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I recently heard someone describe AI as the infinite classroom… You can get anytime learning, catered just to you. And for a moment I thought, ‘I remember Google being described like that, and YouTube too.’ Now, I know that the ‘catered to you’ part of Artificial Intelligence is a richer experience than Google or YouTube, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t kind of been here before. The guy went on to say that schools today are irrelevant. He was American and his focus wasn’t K-12 education but rather ‘investing’ $200k+ for a college degree that could be irrelevant by the time you get it.

Still, this made me think of all the digital distractions that make school less appealing and engaging compared to out-of-school offerings and opportunities… From AI providing meaningful, just-in-time learning, to social media, to gaming. Be it for learning or entertainment the competition for attention is significant outside of school.

So how do we engage students in schools when an infinite classroom as well as unlimited distractions are happening outside of schools?

What we shouldn’t do is bring back more traditional testing to ensure students don’t cheat using AI. What we also shouldn’t do is try to compete with the outside world and attempt to make schools more entertaining.

What we should do is create rich experiences where students are exposed to concepts and ideas that they would not have found on their own. We should provide social opportunities to learn together. We should provide opportunities for student voice and choice.

It’s not about competing with the infinite. It’s about cultivating learning experiences where students feel invested in the experience. It’s about fostering curiosity and providing shared learning opportunities that challenge students meaningfully.

In a world of infinite distractions, engagement in schools needs to be community and relationship focused. If it’s just about accumulating information and content, then classrooms as we know them will be no match for the infinite classroom (and unlimited distractions) that out of school opportunities will provide.

Count your blessings

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Every day someone gets in an accident that they had no control over. Someone else gets a diagnosis they aren’t expecting. Someone else thinks they have job security, and then suddenly they don’t. This, and worse, happens every day.

Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate what you’ve got when nothing changes. You are just going through days ranging from appreciating, to accepting, to dealing with, to tolerating daily events, completely oblivious to how much harder things could be. Unaware of the challenges others just like you face. Ignorant of how fortunate you are to simply not have faced a more unlucky path.

You don’t need good news to count your blessings, you just need to recognize that the lack of bad news is actually something to be thankful for. And when less positive news does come, when things seem unfair, when hard times surface, there is strength in knowing that you’ve had blessed moments in your life.

The challenge is that it’s hard to appreciate how lucky, how blessed you’ve been, when times are tough… So pause and take a moment to build up your resilience by appreciating everything that’s good right now.

Hold on to the good weather

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I had a summer ritual of sitting for 10 minutes in the morning sun over the summer. Shirt off, eyes closed, listening to a meditation. Today I went in the hot tub after my morning walk and then the sun came out from behind the clouds.

I paused and took full advantage. The sun won’t be up and warm enough in the morning much longer as we head into fall, so I’ve got to take every opportunity I’ve got. I’m going to eke out these sunny morning moments before the fall rains come.

I’m also going to keep finding joy in the little things, like holding on to the good weather while we’ve got it.

No Reason to Wait

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When I was a kid, I used to collect the caps that you fired in a cap gun. They came in a disk with 8 shots each. When we went to the store, I’d ask for another pack of them, and they were cheap so my mom often bought them for me. The thing is, I never shot them. I was saving them just for the right time.

My grandparents lived across the street from us and I kept the caps and my cap gun at their house. They had a room with an ensuite bathroom that belonged to my great grandfather, and after he passed away, I was the only person who went into those rooms. I kept the caps and gun under the ensuite bathroom sink.

The day before we moved from Barbados to Canada I suddenly remembered that the caps were there and I gathered up my gun and my packets and packets of caps. I took them to my dad and asked him to pack them. “David, we shipped our boxes already, and we can’t take all of those on the plane,” my dad told me. So there I was, with hundreds of caps and a couple hour window to use them.

I shot every one of them off. Eight quick shots in succession, reload, repeat. I can still remember the smell of the fired caps as I recall this years later. I also remember being a bit sad that I had not spread out the use of the caps, that I lost out on many enjoyable opportunities because I was saving them up for the ‘right’ occasion. There was always going to be a better time to use them, until there was almost no time at all.

How often do we do something similar? We are waiting for the right moment. We are metaphorically hoarding an idea, or waiting to find out more before we act, or wanting the conditions to be perfect before we move forward?

James Clear said, “Use the best idea you have right now. Claiming you need to ‘learn more’ or ‘get your ducks in a row’ is just a crutch that prevents you from starting. Education is a lifelong pursuit. You will always need to learn more. It’s not a reason to wait.”

Shoot off a few caps, don’t wait.

Uncivility

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The statements that I wholeheartedly disagreed with almost everything Charlie Kirk stood for, AND that I am deeply saddened and appalled that he was gunned down, murdered, are not contradictory. In fact, put together, these two statements make another statement: They say that violence is not an answer to disagreement in a civil society.

Violence is uncivil.

When societies accept violence as a natural consequence to disagreements, they lose site of what it means to be a free society. They permit further violence as a solution to disagreement. They invite and incite tyranny, control, and loss of freedoms. They go down a path to being less civil, and more dangerous. And they lead to a society more greatly restricted in both rights and freedoms as citizens.

I’ve said before, “We need a society that allows disagreement. We need to be civil about how we protest. Because there is no civil society where violence and damaging property works one-way… only the way upset people think it should. Societies that tolerate inappropriate protest are inviting responses that are less and less civil. And nobody wins.”

Nobody wins, civility is lost, and rationalizations or justifications of any kind promote the worst kind of tolerance… tolerance to violence.

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Related:

• Appropriate Protest

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Embracing the cycle

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There have been many years where during the summer my fitness has been on cruise control. I do just enough so that I do not fall too far behind in gains. This summer was different. I pushed hard, stayed very healthy, and even moved in the right direction.

Now I’m back at work, and I’m just going through the motions, doing the bare minimum to check the box that I did a workout. That’s just where I am right now. Normally this would bug the crap out of me, but I’m actually accepting this as part of the cycle. It’s really hard to be pushing for improvements all the time. It’s hard to stay motivated.

Sometimes just showing up is a win. Putting the time in, without giving 100% is still putting the time in. Some days that’s all I’ve got. And the reality is, that’s a lot more than not showing up at all. That’s a lot more than many people do.

It might be a few more days, it might be a week or two, but I’ll get back into a cycle where I push myself. Until then I’ll still get on the treadmill, I’ll still stretch, I’ll still move weights around… and more importantly, I won’t beat myself up for not doing enough.

Constant interruptions

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I was reminded yesterday of the never ending flow of interruptions that a school principal can be faced with. My day went well enough, nothing major happened, and I had some positive interactions with both students and staff. But I was a yo-yo bouncing in and out of my office, feeling like I was always working on a task other than what I wanted to, or planned to, be working on.

At one point I washed my coffee cup to fill it and then ran two errands with an empty cup in my hand, because I was distracted before filling it. At another point I was holding an HDMI cable that I was taking to a teacher and was interrupted a couple times, and even went back to my office holding the cable, before finally taking it to its intended place.

And this is often the norm. Being pulled one way when trying to go another. Starting a task and finding it undone an hour later. Creating a quick ‘To Do’ list, only to make it a ‘To Do Tomorrow’ list.

At one point I was asked a policy question regarding funding for an online course. I was pretty sure our system was trying to charge a student for a course I thought they should get for free. I went to the OneNote where I keep my links to the BC government policies. I got several 404 errors on the website. This even happened to my 2025-26 policy link I added in April. It seems the Ministry has made updates again and changed the main links.

I searched the website for the specific reference. Couldn’t find it. I asked Copilot to look for me. Copilot agreed with me, but didn’t provide links to the actual policy for this specific situation. I asked my online principal’s group chat, and this usually very responsive chat stayed silent for an hour and 40 minutes. Then I got an answer agreeing with me with a comment that this principal also couldn’t find the answer when she asked previously, and had to get a response from the Ministry via email.

What should have been a simple question took me almost 2 hours to answer. And I can’t even count the amount of other things I did in that time, including a 45+ minute meeting and a 10 minute phone call to a parent that I played text tag with trying to find a good time that we could both chat.

Yesterday was a good reminder of the constant interruptions, redirections, and multitasking expectations of a principal. Sure there are those moments that are efficient and effective, but for large parts of any given day, with countless ‘other duties as assigned’ tossed unexpectedly onto my ‘To Do’ list, or rather the ‘Gotta do this first’ list… most of the time the interruptions are the job.

Somewhere in between

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There is somewhere in between hard science and woo-woo science where consciousness sits. There is a space between evidence we can see and unknown connections that are not yet explainable, but will be one day.

We talk about coincidences, synchronicity, and even dumb luck to try to understand relationships between unlikely events. We’ve all heard stories of people ‘just knowing’ things they shouldn’t know, or being aware when something happens to a loved one far away. It happens. It’s unexplainable.

Some people will profess that it’s divine intervention, others will talk about energy fields, still others will proclaim psychic powers. There are as many theories as there are experiences that promote them.

I think that consciousness is inherently connected. I think that we don’t yet understand how? We can’t understand how to either harness or observe the connections, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Without a radio, I can’t prove to you that there is music being transmitted on multiple frequencies around you right now. Without sensors, I can’t prove to you that the sun hits you with ultraviolet light.

We don’t have consciousness sensors yet. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t being bombarded by waves of consciousness all the time. Maybe the holy men of the past were just tuned into a frequency that we aren’t able to see or hear. Maybe intuition is a kind of a weak consciousness radio receiver?

Somewhere between current science and wacky woo-woo wanna-be science there sits a currently unknown and undiscovered understanding of consciousness. We see glimpses of of it, but don’t have the knowledge to explain it.

Rich conversations

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It’s amazing how good conversations with people you love and care about can help you through a day. It reinforces that we are social beings and that we require connections to sustain us.

I am someone who appreciates my alone time. I like solitude, and I’m much more of an introvert than people might think I am. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I value and appreciate time with family and friends. Liking solitude isn’t contradictory to enjoying rich conversations. Being an introvert doesn’t mean that I don’t want to build strong connections to others, I’d just rather not do so in larger social situations. 

I have a friend who can go into any social situation, make connections with people he just met, and have a rich conversation that go well beyond discussing the weather, occupations, and general family updates. He can find common ground and start to instantly develop rapport and develop a relationship with people he barely knows in minutes. That’s not me. In a large setting, I’d rather find one person I’m comfortable with, maybe two people, and have a more intimate conversation rather than sharing things in a group. Both approaches are valid, they are just different. Both are about the same thing, which is making and maintaining connections to others.

At one point I used to have these kind of rich conversations on Twitter. I found like-minded people who I’d connect with and then we’d slide into direct messages and get to know each other. I’d go to conferences and connect to people I had never met face-to-face, and I’d feel like I already knew them. I no longer do that with social media. Now I use social media to connect to people in my life already, as a means to add one more layer of connection. My daughters get sent different things than my wife, which is different from what I share with my best friend, which is different from what I share with my uncle, and again different from things I share with my mom and sisters. In each case adding another avenue to build connections I already have. 

Then there are text messages, phone calls, FaceTime, and even Zoom. In each case I’m building up a connection to keep the conversation going with people I care about. I’m looking to develop richer connections, richer conversations… essential to maintaining my wellbeing and my bonds that sustain me when I can’t always see people in person.  

 

 

Goodish

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I was texting to a friend and asked how things were going. His response, ‘Goodish’. This word hit a chord with me. I get it. It’s a sentiment more than descriptor. It’s less than ‘but’, as in ‘I’m good but…’, and yet more than saying satisfactory.

Health is good, a few aches, yet doing well. Family is well too. Work is just fine. Me? Oh, I’m ‘Goodish’.