Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Publish button pangs

It’s hard to believe that I started blogging 13 years ago! I’ve gone through many different web addresses, and I’ve published things on other platforms like wikis and discussion forums, (and even in a book), but blogs are my favourite way to share.

The challenge with blogs, and even this daily one, is that all these years later I still get pangs before hitting the publish button. I still want to read over my post one more time before I commit to publishing. Is my message clear? Did I miss something? Is my grammar good? Is there a better word I could use to describe… ?

And then I still make mistakes! My last post was written on election night, and scheduled for the next morning. I woke up, meditated, re-read the post, made a few small changes, and hit the update button. All nice and easy. I dropped my kid to school and my post got published while I was seeing a teacher and some students off on a field trip. My post auto Tweets, posts to Facebook, and to LinkedIn.

I walk back to my office and I check Twitter, someone ‘Liked’ my post and on a whim, I click on it and re-read my post again, this time as a published, ‘final’ copy…

I find two typo’s. Two careless mistakes! How could I have missed these, they are so blatant! So I go to my WordPress App, click the edit button and make the changes. It’s 8:15am, the post was live for 1/2 an hour, maybe 3 people have read it, but I’m embarrassed. Ashamed. Upset with myself for being so careless.

It’s stupid. I know it is. But any work I’ve done until now to reduce the publish button pangs is gone. They are back in full force.

The weird thing though is that I like it! I like the pressure I put on myself. I believe I write better because of it. I believe I care more because of both a real, and an imagined audience. I get to be a writer! I also get to be my own editor, and I want to be excellent at both of theses things.

Let the pangs come. I want to be hesitant before hitting publish. I want to feel the pressure to do well, to not make careless mistakes, and to look things over one more time. These pangs are a badge of honour that I wear as a blogger.

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P.S. I’ll still make mistakes, so feel free to point them out to me. You will be doing me a favour.

P.P.S. I’ve seen students care far more about their writing because they were sharing their work publicly. They too can benefit from the publish button pangs!

The great divide

I make a commitment as an educator to promote people doing their civic duty and voting, and so I choose not to publicly share who I vote for. I want people to exercise their right, and participate in the democracy that they live in, and I’d rather promote that than promote any one party.

That said, I must say that I’m saddened by the story told by voters in yesterday’s election:

  1. The news leading up to the election focused on dirty tactics and the ‘ugliness’ of the attacks by parties on other parties.
  2. The Bloc Québécois had a resurgence, suggesting the return of separatist attitudes in Quebec.
  3.  While the Liberals won, the Conservatives had the popular vote.
  4. #Wexit was trending during the election, with Albertans wanting to start their own separatist movement for Western Canada.

The story being told is one of a divided nation. Head south of the border and the story, while quite different, also speaks of divisiveness in their upcoming election as well. Head ‘across the pond’ and Brexit tells yet another story of a country divided.

How does our media promote this? News headlines need to be catchy to gain clicks and advertising, or to keep people glued to their television. Social media sites are slow to respond to hateful comments and trolling. Hate and divisiveness spreads quickly. False information is easily shared. Memes that attack and ridicule get more likes and shares compared to newsworthy items on issues that really matter.

Why are democracies becoming so polarized, separatist, and adversarial? Why do we identify on the extremes rather than recognize that our ideas and opinions sit on a spectrum? Why do these extremes define our politics?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I have concerns about how great a divide we are seeing, and I wonder what can be done to promote a democracy that can be defined by unity rather than polarization?

Vote. It matters!

Today is Election Day in Canada. 🇨🇦

I’ve already written that ‘Voting is a civic duty‘.

Now it is up to you! Every vote matters. It matters not because your one single vote is likely to make a difference. It matters because living in a democracy matters. Freedom matters. The opportunity to vote matters.

…And if it matters, then do your part.

Vote!

Tool agnostic

One of the most influential posts I’ve written on my educational blog was Transformative or just flashy educational tools (written 9 years ago). It led to multiple presentations, including this one: Transforming Our Classrooms – Ignite

In the original post I said,

A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.

The tools we use and what we use them for matter. But more than ever we should be agnostic about the tools being used… as long as they are being used well! For example: We are a Microsoft school district and so we use Teams, OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, and MS Forms among other tools in the suite. This is an excellent set of tools that allow us to know that if a student wants to collaborate on a document or create a presentation, then they have what they need to do the job well, with a great tool intended for that purpose. That said, we are also a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) district and students come with other tools, or like to use other tools that they prefer.

Should we make a group of student collaborate on OneNote or Teams, if they all want to use Google Docs?

Should we make a student present in a PowerPoint if they want to use Apple Keynote?

Should we tell students Microsoft Forms are the only forms they can use?

No.

We should ensure every student has a good tool available to them, and we should ensure we use these tools when it benefits to have the whole class on the same tool. However we should also give students choice when we can, and be tool agnostic… as long as the tool they use does not hinder their ability to accomplish the tasks they want or need to do.

 It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.

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* Related to this, at Inquiry Hub we’ve had a couple students at the school create their own presentation software, which has been used at school functions like our Open House presentations!

Confidence and Competence

Yes, you can be overly confident, and cocky. We see plenty of that with #fail tagged on social media these days.

Yes, you can be highly competent and lack confidence. We often see this on tv shows like America/Britain’s Got Talent, etc.

But at breakfast with Dave Sands & Brian Kuhn, Brian was talking about doing some extreme mountain biking with a group, and how he noticed that confidence and competence created a positive loop with each one increasing the other.

I noticed the same while downhill riding with my nephew. We did a couple runs of the same trail and I hadn’t ridden like that in over 15 years. The first run, I followed him and avoided some of the tracks he chose, keeping myself ‘safe’ but also feeling scared anyway. I kept seeing myself make a bad choice and going over the handlebars or into a tree. I tried a couple things out of my comfort zone, was cautious and mostly unsuccessful. But by the end of that run, I could feel my confidence build, having not had any worse case scenarios materialize.

Round two was a different story. I attacked the hill trying everything my nephew did, and while I couldn’t keep the same line as him, I could feel my confidence and my competence rise. My speed was better, keeping closer to him, and I rode far better than the first run.

Confidence feeds competence, which feeds confidence…

Teaching and Learning Beyond Google

When students get time in their day to solve interesting problems, they need to learn to ask questions that go beyond Google. The problem isn’t interesting enough and worth solving if the answer is easy to find, if the data has already been collected, if the information is readily available.

If students are asking interesting questions, the teacher can’t be the content expert, they can’t know the answers that every student is seeking to discover. So, the teacher becomes the compass. The guide that points students in the right direction. Teachers steer students away from questions that are too general and easy to solve. They help refine questions that are too vague or too hard to accomplish. Teachers in the era of Google must still provide content knowledge, but they know that this knowledge is the foundation for discovery, not just the information to be learned. Learning is a process, not a product.

When learning goes beyond Google, students need to be supported in learning to communicate and collaborate with others. They need to seek experts outside the classroom. They need to solve authentic problems in the community or in students’ lives. Sometimes the teacher needs to create or help create the questions; They need to provide the scaffolding, direction, or support to ensure students are becoming competent learners. Sometimes teachers need to step back, get out of the way, and let students lead, teach, thrive, and even fail… on the path to learning through discovery, trail and error, and reflection.

The journey is seldom a straight line. The path is seldom easy, and well defined. It is not the teacher’s job to remove obstacles on the path to to solving interesting problems. On the contrary, they must ensure that there are enough obstacles in the way, and that students are challenged while not being overcome by obstacles too big to navigate. The compass does not know the final destination, or even the best route, but gives direction by pointing to north. This is the art of teaching in an era of learning beyond Google.

False alarms

If you hear a car alarm, you don’t immediately think, ‘Oh no, a car is being stolen!’ You likely believe the car was bumped accidentally in some way.

If you hear a fire alarm, you don’t immediately think, ‘Fire!’ You might smell for smoke, but your instinct will be that it is a false alarm.

If you hear a security alarm in a shopping mall, you don’t immediately think ‘Thief!’ You likely think that someone didn’t get the security tag removed from their purchase.

Police and ambulance sirens tell us to move out of the way, but they are going ‘somewhere else’. They are noisy inconveniences that slow us down or wake us up. We live in a world of beeping and wailing alarms. They lull and numb us to actual emergencies. An annoying tone at a doorway, that’s not a thief, it’s someone using the wrong door by accident, or someone holding the elevator door open for longer that it is meant to stay open. A security or fire panel droning on and on is an error, not a genuine concern.

If you were ‘alarmed’ for some reason 100 years ago, or for millennia before that, then that alarm was genuine! Dropping bombs, enemy attack, a fire, dangerous animals, threatening foe, dangerous terrain, unforgiving weather. An alarm sounded to indicate a threat or a real concern.

Now we trigger alarms all the time and our nervous systems have grown accustomed to responding without triggering genuine concern… but our senses are still triggered. Ever notice how much more annoying false alarms are when you are on vacation? We want to escape false alarms as much as we do any other parts of our regular lives.

I think we should seek ways to reduce the amount of false alarms we hear. I think that they are repeatedly adding to people’s anxiety and stress. We shouldn’t have to live in a world of constant false alarms.

Empowering students

Inquiry Hub is a small school. We don’t have a lot of grads, but we have grown enough that we need to switch venues for our Annual/Graduation. We run this event together, for our entire school community, so that our grads have a full auditorium at their ceremony.

For this special event, the presentations and entertainment are organized by our students and teachers together. At the event, our students run the show, with teachers handing out awards, and students providing the entertainment. Last year we packed the small auditorium, and with 8 more grads this year, the search for a new location began.

Two of my grads did the research and presented me with a couple options. We started inquiring about dates and costs, and by ‘we’, I mean my students did, presenting the final suggestion to me. My job, pay the deposit and set up the first technical visit.

That visit was today. We looked at the stage set-up, I shared my thoughts and ideas, and while a few were taken, a few weren’t. When the meeting with the booking coordinator was over, we thanked her and she said, “It’s funny, this whole time, until you came in today, I thought I was corresponding with teachers.” She had no idea that all the setup and communication (other than me joining in to sign the papers and pay) was done by students.

I thanked her and told her that these students, Jazmine & Antoni, would continue to be her main contacts for the event, other than final payment. The first 5 minutes of the drive home, the car ride was silent, while these two students made notes on their phones.

The one big realization that I needed to remind them of was that unlike last year, they would be in grad gowns in the front seats, and other students would have to work back stage. They assured me that the 2 students that were being groomed last year were ready to take on the challenge, and they were not available today or they would have joined us. I guess I should have known that already, but if I didn’t trust them then I wouldn’t really be empowering them.

I’m not pretending that there won’t be a lot for myself, my teachers, and my PAC (Parent Advisory Council) to do, to ensure that the event goes smoothly. But, I also know that what will make this celebration extra special is that it will look and feel like it was student run, with a level of quality that surpasses what you’d expect from a student run event. Why? Because when students feel truly empowered, they shine.

500 Billion Dollars

Imagine if the richest 100 people in the world each put aside 1 billion dollars to change the world. Think that’s too much? I just looked up the top 20 billionaires and they could each give away 15+ billion. Realistically, there could be 500 billion or 1/2 of a trillion dollars given away from the top 100 billionaires without changing their lives significantly.

What could that money be spent on?

Clean water, clean(er) energy, and food for the poorest 1/4 of the world. This would be a good start. Health & family planning would also be essential.

How different could our world be?

When I read articles like this: ‘Eye-Popping’: Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion

I wonder how these billionaires can imagine that their continued gains can benefit anyone, including themselves? At what point do gains like this have diminishing returns? At what point does compassion replace greed? At what point does social conscience take precedence over financial profit?

I don’t pretend to have the answers as to how to do this in a way that is equitable and helps people thrive, but with that much money, people smarter than me could be hired. There needs to be a redistribution or redirection of wealth to make our world more equitable, and more livable for those that need it most.

11 years ago, George W. Bush bailed out banks for 700 billion dollars. Since then, those banks have made the rich richer. What if the richest people in the world were to bail out the poorest? How many lives would be meaningfully changed for the better? What impact would that have on the overall well-being of humanity? The world needs another bailout. The richest people in the world have the means to provide it.

Image the possibilities!

A different kind of thanks

It’s Thanksgiving holiday Monday in Canada. From Wikipedia:

Thanksgiving Day… began as a day of giving thanks and sacrifice for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year… Although Thanksgiving has historical roots in religious and cultural traditions, it has long been celebrated as a secular holiday as well.

For many, it is a time to pause and be grateful, and to give thanks for the things you truly value and appreciate. And for many it is a time for glutinous eating, stuffing bountiful amounts of food into belt-widening bellies. And most importantly, for many it is a long weekend when people make the effort to congregate with family and friends for a meal and get-together.

For me this morning, I will first give obligatory thanks to my wonderful family and friends, and for the blessings I have to live in a democratic and free country. And thanks for good health, and wellbeing for myself and those I love. These are people and circumstances that I’m truly thankful for.

And now for something completely different:

I give thanks for living in an era of indoor plumbing.

I give thanks for thermal underwear, that keeps my skinny legs warm in the winter.

I give thanks for audiobooks that let me ‘read’ on the treadmill, while walking, and driving.

I give thanks for the invention of chocolate covered almonds.

I give thanks for my coffee maker.

I give thanks for spill-cheek, I mean spell check, without which I would look much dumber.

I give thanks for our hot tub, and for our electric salt and pepper grinders, that are absolute luxuries that no one ‘needs’ but make me happy.

I give thanks for toothbrushes, deodorant, soap, and shampoo. And I’m equally thankful for other people using them!

And finally I give thanks to the readers of my daily journal. Whether you comment, or share, or lurk, knowing that you are there helps me with my creativity and helps me to write better.

Thank you.