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.
Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Making a to-do list for the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Telling people you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Writing a banger tweet about how you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on other people who have done the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Fantasizing about all of the adoration you’ll receive once you do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading this essay isn’t doing the thing.
The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.” ~ Strangest Loop
It doesn’t matter if it’s a workout, a phone call, a challenging conversation, or even a blog post. The task won’t get done unless you actually do it. That said, if you want it done, it’s good to schedule it, it’s good to add it to your tasks, and it’s good to tell people and make the thing public. The quote above doesn’t dismiss doing these preparatory things, it just identifies that these aren’t enough.
We had our Thanksgiving dinner last night. 15 of us enjoyed a wonderful sushi feast.
When my family lived in Dalian, China we didn’t have an oven. Both Christmas days that we were there we had Pizza Hut for our Christmas dinner.
Most families have traditional meals like turkey, roasted ham, or other holiday foods that they want year after year. Our family went out for Harvey’s hamburgers today for our American family that miss this fast food burger joint, living south of the border.
Earlier this week my sister made a Caribbean peas and rice dish, a family favourite, for us. Also, I made an Asian stir fry rice dish, and we also went for Beaver Tails, because my mom was craving them.
Our family are not big on traditional foods, but we really enjoy large meals with more food than we need. I think that’s why I love leftovers so much. We don’t need turkey, and we don’t need fine dining. Just give us sushi and pizza, and a holiday or family event as an excuse to get together.
I remember driving from Toronto Ontario to Phoenix Arizona over 3 days with only paper maps. That’s over 3,500 kilometres of travel before the era of ‘Sat Nav’ and GPS. A wrong turn wasn’t met by auditory instructions to turn around, or automatic rerouting. No, it was followed by being oblivious until you saw a highway sign that told you that you are on the wrong road, or looking for the name of an exit you saw, only to realize it’s on a different highway.
You’d drive into a city at night and then start looking for a hotel. No google searches or cell phones to call anywhere in advance. No instructions to get back on the highway unless you asked at the front desk.
But it was usually the last 5-10 kilometres that were the toughest. Highways are well labeled on maps, but side streets are a whole other story. You could spend 4 hours traveling at the maximum speed limit and make great time, only to flounder in the last few minutes and spend 20 minutes lost and frustrated.
I remember being lost in a suburban community with my wife once and we gave up, just deciding to follow another car out of the maze of houses we were in… only to be disappointed when he turned into his driveway. We were quite embarrassed after circling the cul-de-sac and the person we followed was standing outside his car wondering who we were and why we followed him?
It was a different time, and one I’m not yearning to repeat. I’m happy to have Waze or Google Maps take all the mystery out of driving somewhere I’ve never been before. I am glad my daughters don’t have to navigate with a paper map, although they will never know the joy of driving over the paper crease where you folded the map, leaving a section that you spent hours driving through. Unfortunately phones can be as big or bigger a distraction than a paper map, but make no mistake, when it came to trying to read a paper map, your attention was definitely not on the road.
We are over the fold now, never to return to the era of paper maps. There are no creases on a digital map, no more folding, unfolding, and refolding. No more getting totally lost with no clue what to do next. We can always have a little voice telling us that we are rerouting, and always have a digital line we can follow.
Today there was more strife in the Middle East. Innocent lives lost in the Gaza Strip. Two warring sides with no foreseeable compromise. No peace to be found. More bloodshed to come.
I’ll never understand man’s inhumanity to man, and can’t get over the fact that for Gaza, and many other zones of conflict, both sides think they are fighting in service of God. Really? A benevolent god or a tyrant? How many must die to appease this ‘heavenly’ being? What’s the finally tally going to be?
We are at an impasse. We need to decide if it matters whether we are religious beings or spiritual beings. We have to decide if being a good person means following a faith blindly or believing we are all one species that needs to coexist? We need to choose between being spiritual and ‘humanly’ connected or being segregated by angry Gods who demand selfish obedience. Because these selfish gods are inhumane… and I for one want to see us coexist as a species that is more concerned with being peaceful and loving than a colonies of ants fighting over territory.
Are we really just animals fighting for dominance and territory or are we self aware beings that are seeking rich and fulfilling lives? It’s our actions and not our words that reveal the answer to this question… and right now, I don’t think our actions reveal the answer I’d hope for.
“I talk to educational leaders every day and for the most part, they are willing and in many cases excited to embrace the potential of Generative AI. When you consider its role in education, what are the specific elements that excite you and what are the aspects that give you pause?”
I commented:
“What excites me is how we can collaborate with AI to generate and iterate ‘with’ AI in ways that would never have been possible before. What gives me pause are when tools are used to make work easier, and the level of challenge becomes low. Different, challenging work is where we need to head, not just easier work, or work avoidance by using AI… so the work itself needs to be rethought, rather than just replaced with AI.”
Tomorrow I leave for Toronto for my dad’s memorial. It will be the first time in over 10 years that my parent’s grandchildren will all be together. All 8 cousins under the same roof. Growing up I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins, but my kids have not had that opportunity. Now they are all young adults, the last time they were together as a full group they were kids. It’s amazing how time flies.
It’s hard to say goodbye to a parent, but getting together as a family makes it a bit easier. In the end our children are our greatest legacy, and so are their kids. My grandfather used to call us, his grandkids, his ‘second crop’. He’d frequently say about his second crop, “If I knew they were going to be this much fun, I would have had them first.” 😂
In the coming days my parent’s first and second crops will all be together. I’m really looking forward to this celebration of life, and legacy.
I was at a dinner meeting and one of the group rode up in an electric unicycle, ‘a self-balancing personal transporter with a single wheel’. It looks like a lot of fun. A younger me would have loved to hop on it and give it a try… but that’s not me anymore.
I love adventure, I love trying new things, but I also like going to bed without being in agony. I enjoy when my back feels the same age as me and not like it’s 20 years older. And I know that one minor fall from an electric unicycle can launch me into a world of pain.
It’s not about lack of wanting to try, it’s self-preservation. I’ve learned (usually the hard way) that some activities have an expiry date on them. It’s not based on how old the activity is, it’s based on how old I am… And an electric unicycle’s expiry date went off about a decade ago. That’s a nope for me.
Living in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, I miss the rainy season in Barbados. When the rainy season hits on this tropical island, it meant a morning rainstorm with water droplets the size of coins soaking you in seconds, followed by the cloud cover passing you and the rain stopping almost instantly. After that there was 20-30 minutes of uncomfortable humidity as the hot sun evaporated the rainwater. Maybe this would happen again later, but often it wasn’t until the next day.
Occasionally you’d get a cloudy, cool day that lasted the whole day with intermittent rainfall, but there might only be 5-10 days like that the whole season. Maybe I’m underplaying it, after all I was 9 when I left, but I remember a rainy season I could easily handle.
Today was a reminder that BC rain is nothing like that. I spent over an hour outside in misty rain, putting our above ground pool away. It was damp, and there was a constant drizzle or mist. It was gloomy. There was hardly a time during the day that I could tell you where the sun was due to the heavy cloud cover… And the season is just starting.
The worst two months of weather here are usually November and February. But the gloominess starts now. I’ll make the most of the grey days to come, even heading to and from work in the dark. I’ll continue to take my Vitamin D, and I’ll use my sunlight desk lamp at school. But I have to admit that I’d take the rainy season in Barbados any time over the rainy season in Vancouver.
I find it interesting how the voice in our heads can be so loud. Sometimes it’s like we live two different lives, one in the 3-dimensional world and one in the ethereal space between our ears. Both lives playing out simultaneously and each distracting ourselves from the other.
Sometimes they sync and we become a singularly focused person… both lives becoming one in moments of joy, love, anger, or gratitude, as examples. But often those are high and low moments that draw our mutually focused attentions. Most of our lives they seem to be in minor conflict with each other, fighting for our full attention.
I like the moments when my internal dialogue is quiet, and more focused on being present in the physical world, but there are times when this seems impossible. There are times when the internal dialogue is a complete distraction from reality, in a full on battle for attention. When I’m in this space, the internal dialogue usually wins. These are times that I’m more comfortable being alone than in the presence of anyone. Yet, I don’t feel alone… I’ve got an internal voice keeping me company.
This is neither good nor bad, this is determined by context. If I’m thinking of something dark or gloomy, it can be a bad headspace to be in. But if I’m deep in thought and excited about some new learning or ideas, or if I’m creating or writing, then I could be in a fantastic headspace.
My internal dialogue is like a second world, a second life that lives inside my head, and can be on a continuum from fully engaged in the physical world to almost fully ignorant of my surroundings. Both extreme cases can be wonderful, but it seems I live most of my life balancing the two worlds as best as I can.
I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?
Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.
If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.
There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.
So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.
These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.
I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.
Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.
All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.
The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.
