Buried in messages

I hate email. It’s a monster, and right now it’s a HUGE monster for me. I’m just surfacing from the longest leave I’ve ever taken from work. I was heavily medicated until late last week and choose to be ‘completely off’ rather than working from home. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always worked while away, and did my best to keep up. But the medication was enough that I lacked judgement and knew better than to try and communicate (or even drive). So, as I look to return to work this week, I see that I have 840 unread emails. That would have been larger if I hadn’t peeked at a few (hundred) along the way, but I never once tried very much Now it’s time.

I know that hundreds will be ones I can just delete. I know that some will be informational and I can read and delete, or file away. I know that some will be ‘ball drops’ where I should have read and followed up with days or even weeks ago, although I did have an auto-response to contact the office. And I know it will take longer than this week to get through them all.

What I hope happens is that most of them are just destined for the delete folder and I can see just how unimportant email is compared to everything else I need to do at work. My direct team that I work with communicate with me on Microsoft TEAMS and they have been very respectful of me being away… so there won’t be a lot there that is overly urgent, especially with a very competent leader assisting while I was away. So, I’ll pick away at it, starting tomorrow. Today I joined my team online for a Pro-D session and then after a short nap I joined my PAC meeting remotely as well. My eyes are blurry and it’s off to bed early tonight. Hopefully the email monster will be tamed by early next week.

In the neighbourhood

Had a buddy drop by today while on a bicycle ride. It was wonderful to get an unexpected visit. An unscheduled visit just isn’t something that happens anymore.

I grew up in a house where the front door was almost never locked. There were days that I would come home from school and a friend would be waiting in the basement for me. They’d open the door and announce that they were there to visit me. My mom wouldn’t even come down the stairs, she’d just tell them I’m not home yet and to go to the basement. A couple of them would even help themselves to milk and cookies before going down the stairs. My mom wouldn’t think twice of feeding them dinner as well. For years we thought my mom’s favourite part of the chicken was the wings, but she just always took them to make sure we had enough food for our unexpected guests. ❤️

I had an older cousin who would drop by unexpectedly and see what’s for dinner. If she didn’t like what she saw, she just left. Other times she’d call and tell my mom, “Don’t cook, I’m making dinner tonight.” That meant that we were having Kentucky Fried Chicken. We loved her visits whether she was bringing food or sitting with us to have what we were having.

I miss the days of unexpected visits, of people dropping by because ‘I was in the neighbourhood’. There was the spontaneity of hanging out and/or breaking bread when it wasn’t at all part of the day’s plan. Even today, my buddy texted before knocking on the door… back in the day there was no opportunity to call if you were in the neighbourhood unless you made an effort to find a payphone. Today, we’d know days in advance before one of our kids brought a friend over just for a visit, much less a meal. And almost nothing is planned on the same day.

Nowadays if there’s an unexpected knock on the door your mind immediately goes to either a package delivery or someone soliciting something. I miss the delight of opening our front door and having a friend there without a plan being made well in advance. Today, I was treated with that again, and it was wonderful.

The luxury of convenience

I had a chuckle today in the grocery store. A woman rushed by me, grabbed an item of of the shelf and keep going almost in a single motion. She was obviously in a hurry. She was also on her cell phone and the part of the conversation I caught was, …”Seriously, I wish our damn phones were still connected to our walls with a wire.” The irony of her saying this on a very portable phone wasn’t lost on me.

I then went to Starbucks and sat for a few minutes having a breakfast sandwich. Our local store is newly renovated and it both looks and feels really nice. They expanded the serving area without taking much seating away, and the order pickup area has a large section with the alphabet in 3 rows to help people find their order by name much faster. However, when I went to dispense my garbage I realized that the only recycling and disposal bins were at the back of the store next to the washrooms. This is not remotely convenient.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when we were doing our main floor renovation last year, we knew we wanted a coffee station on the small counter next to our fridge. It wasn’t part of the original plan, but I requested a sink be added to the counter. I thought about how after the coffee has been pressed on our espresso machine, we would want to rinse out the portafilter, and it would be really inconvenient to walk this over to our kitchen sink about 15 feet away, while it dripped coffee. Between making coffees and rinsing out the wet cat food containers for our cat, there are days I use this sink more than the main kitchen sink.

 On a completely different topic, Zoom calls can be great to bring people together, when geography can be challenging, but it can also be a complete time suck with added opportunities for meetings to happen, when a memo or email would be faster. A memo instead of a Zoom call can free up a lot of time that a meeting can steal from the efficiency of a more productive day.

There’s no doubt that having a mobile phone provides considerable convenience compared to phones with a spiral cord connected to it, in a fixed location. But we can’t deny the distraction that these smart phones have created, taking time away from us. So their convenience comes with a fair bit of inconvenience as well. 

I think people often spend a lot of time thinking about how one thing can be convenient and through a lack of design thinking forget about how other things also need to be convenient. It is true that sometimes one convenience needs to be a sacrificed, and not everything can be equally as convenient. The new Starbucks layout is definitely more convenient for the employees, but they really missed the mark, making it less convenient for customers. That’s a luxury that shouldn’t be missed. 

Something really special

I sometimes forget how lucky I was at the start of my teaching career. I worked with some amazing leaders and educators, and we created very special learning experiences for our students. When I meet former students from those teaching years, they often share a few different comments such as:

  • Middle school was my favourite time in school.
  • You guys made school so much fun.
  • You taught us life skills I still think about.
  • We could tell you all loved teaching and loved working together.
  • It was such a special school!

Today my wife and I (we both taught at the school back then) met up with a former student visiting from Ottawa. She had invited friends and former teachers to meet at a local park. This student is pregnant with her first child and she talked about wanting to find a future school for her newborn that was as special as Como Lake Middle was to her.

She said, ‘For years I thought every middle school was as fantastic as our school’, and that it was comments on our Facebook pages about how special our experience was (from other former students) that made her realize, ‘Wait, that isn’t normal for every middle school?’ She said she thought that’s just what middle school was before talking to her husband and others that didn’t have such an amazing experience.

She brought up a specific lesson I’d shared in a leadership class, and like others she mentioned how much fun the teachers had together. She brought up an experience in PE class where the Vice Principal highlighted her effort in PE, even though she was, as she described it, ‘in the middle of the pack athletically’. And she mentioned a teacher visiting her class on the first day and teasing her teacher in such a fun way that everyone had a good laugh (including her teacher being teased).

I need to spend more time reflecting, fondly reminiscing, and appreciating those years, and the connections to students from those years. They really were something special.

Just a call away

Today I saw a sunset in Greece. It was hours ago, and although the sun hasn’t set here yet, my daughter is on a Greek island and she FaceTime’d me. The photo shared above is from a Snapchat she shared just before calling. She was on a balcony at her hostel, and we chatted for a few minutes while her friends got ready to go to dinner.

When my wife did a similar backpacking trip 30 years ago she spoke to her parents by collect call each time she was heading to or arrived in another country and that would be it for contact for days if not longer than a week. For this trip my wife is in contact with our kid almost daily, even if just by WhatsApp chat. She checks in with her dad a little less frequently, knowing I get the updates from my wife.

Time zones are the only challenge to communication. As I’m writing this at 7:30pm here, and it’s 5:30am in Greece. But beyond that, it’s pretty awesome that we can stay connected… for free with a simple wifi connection. This shouldn’t still amaze me but it does. It would take me 14.5 hours including a layover to get to her, but I can see her ‘live’ on my phone with the only challenge being what time we go to sleep.

Makes me think, who else is just a call away, but I haven’t made the effort?

Getting unstuck

I remember teaching Grade 6/7’s about Nigerian fables. One of them was about a greedy animal during hard times. All the animals had collected food and stored it in a clearing to share, but each night some of the food went missing. To catch the culprit they put tar around the food and the thief got caught in it. The next day after an apology the other animals started trying to pull the animal out. He was extremely stuck and they yanked so hard that they stretched this animal and ripped of its legs.

The fable is about not being greedy, but the title is something like, “How snakes came to be.” I love when the moral is not explicit in the storytelling.

I got thinking about this for a totally different reason, one I’m far more explicit about in my title… the idea of getting unstuck. Sometimes we absolutely have to step out of our current experience in order to see what’s possible beyond where we currently are.

The saying, ‘No matter where you go, there you are,’ has come up a few times recently in conversation. This is only true if you let it happen, if you stay inside of the tiny box you put around yourself. There are people who travel all around the world and they look forward to seeing a Macdonald’s, Burger King, or Starbucks. They look to keep their world the same. But travel can give you so much more than that. There are people who keep friends that aren’t nice to them, who dismiss an entire genre of music, who stick to a plan and never take side adventures. None of these people might see themselves as stuck but they are.

For me personally, I’ve been stuck in pain and/or drowsiness for a couple months and while I’m slowly recovering, I am also stuck in the way my days go. I’m not following any healthy routines to consistently workout or meditate. I can still ride a stationary bicycle without causing any harm to the bulged disc in my neck. Meditation would actually be great right now and I’ve let my daily habit slip.

I’m going through slow (admittedly often dizzy) motions of the day waiting for moments of clarity, but when they come I don’t necessarily take advantage of them. I need to see beyond my current condition. I need to see what I what to accomplish in the future and I need to do things now to support that. I need first to have goals that I want to achieve beyond where I am now, then I need to move towards those goals.

Sometimes it only takes baby steps, sometimes it takes a massive leap. But you don’t get unstuck thinking ‘No matter where you go, there you are’. The issue with this is not about geography, it’s about moving who you are to who you want to be.

Own your own domain

Background: In March of 2008 I purchased DavidTruss.com, DavidTruss.org, and DavidTruss.net. I didn’t start my blog on Google’s Blogger, or on Edublogs, or one of the ‘user-friendly’ blogging websites, I used Elgg, which I was invited onto by a friend, and it was clunky. To make changes to the look of my blog I had to play with the HTML. I often tried and failed, and I learned a lot that I would not have learned on an easier site. However, they sold out to Eduspaces, which in the transition killed a lot of my backlinks. Then it looked like Eduspaces was going to change again after I had spent hours cleaning things up, and I got fed up and decided to own my own domain name. I reserved the .com, .org, and .net as the most popular addresses, and I keep all 3 with the .org and .net being pointed to the .com site, (so if you go to DavidTruss.org it auto re-directs to DavidTruss.com).

I keep the .org and .net domains only for vain reasons… Search for David Truss online and you’ll probably find me for most of the links, and I like it that way. Maybe one day I’ll stop paying for the other domains, but for now, I will keep all 3 addresses. For a fun explanation of why my first blog was called ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ you can find the story here, under Why ‘Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts’? For this Daily-Ink you can learn more by reading Why Blog Daily or The act of writing, where I coined my byline: “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.” 

The current backdrop: That’s a lot of reminiscing, so what value am I going to add here? The reality is that it is getting more and more difficult to parse truth from lies, and deep fakes from actual audio and video clips. Things go viral without fact-checking, and it would be easy for someone malicious to spread misinformation about you, me, or anyone else. We know that lies spread faster than the truth in social media and this is only getting worse. Soon, you won’t be able to trust anything that comes to you on social media and what will matter most is where you get your information from. The sources you trust will matter, although even these you may have to evaluate. For those sources you don’t already know and trust will be handled with caution and doubt… even when the message is something you want to believe.

Why own your own domain? While you might think that deep fakes are things only celebrities and politicians need to worry about, the reality is that ‘regular’ people are already getting scammed with technology that used to cost thousands of dollars but can now be done free with AI tools. While your own domain won’t help with an impersonation scam like the one I just linked to, your digital identity will be much easier to misappropriate. My voice and image are on the internet. There are quite a few photos and videos of me online, and so there is enough data for someone to create an AI enhanced video of me saying whatever the culprits decide will be funny, insulting, mean, our downright disgusting. A funny version of this was a prank a former student pulled where he and other students uwuify’d some images of me while I was on a social media sabbatical. This was harmless fun, and never intended to impersonate me, but the technology is now there for anyone to do this.

Your domain means you control the narrative. Your own domain means that if something is being shared that you didn’t create, you can point to reliable information. If you have your own website, that’s where you can share your perspective on things, and it isn’t controlled by anyone else. Someone can create a Facebook profile that looks just like mine, and use my images on it. Someone can create a @davidatruss or @datruss1 account on Twitter and make it look like I’m the one saying what they want me to say. A Youtube channel would be just as easy to set up as well. Whereas DavidTruss.com is my domain. I own it. I control the narrative. And… I have a big enough digital footprint that people can see it’s not some site that was just put up a week ago. Does this make me bulletproof to a scam? Absolutely not! But it gives me some leverage to share my own voice if I do get impersonated.

Your domain, your words, your narrative.

Scam prevention: As a final thought, to prevent scams where family members are impersonated, have a ‘safe word’ that you share in times of distress. Not your pet’s name or anything like that. Choose a word that even people you might know wouldn’t guess, like ‘apricot’ or ‘gazebo’ or a phrase like ‘This is extra sauce important’!

Altered states

I’ve spent most of the last few weeks in an altered state. My herniated disc is almost always on my mind. The meds have numbed most of the pain, but I’m often feeling like my head is not screwed on tight enough. The description I use is ‘loopy’ which I describe as somewhere between mildly drunk and mildly high. The challenge is that I don’t really enjoy this state, and I find it hard to concentrate. It’s not a feeling I enjoy.

Even writing my Daily Ink has been challenging with me often putting these short posts away for a while and coming back to them. I end up doing a lot of edits… like making this new thought into a new paragraph and breaking a stream of consciousness run-on sentence up in the previous paragraph. I also used a wrong word (probably a typo) and I’m struggling to make sense of what I actually wanted to say… the sentence no longer having any meaning for me.

At least I’m no longer adding to the altered state with (legal in BC, Canada) marijuana gummies , which I was supplementing my pain meds with to manage my pain between pills. As much as I don’t enjoy the loopy feeling now, I enjoyed it less when I had to numb myself to doldrums of constant pain.

New meds that I started Friday night are leaving me with windows of clarity I haven’t had for a while, but also reintroduce new levels of ache and discomfort (verging on pain) that I thought I was free of on the more loopy medication.

Overall… I think I’m on the mend, but I am not there yet. I’m now dealing with feelings I know I should let go of, but struggle with. Feeling that I should start catching up on work, feelings that I will be in recovery for a very long time. Feelings that I’m wasting away life in a loopy altered state. I’m on the mend, I’m in the mend, I’m on the mend… that is what I need to focus on, loopy altered state or not.

Use it or fall behind

Check out what Khan Academy has done so far, since getting early access to Chat GPT4 last August.

And here’s what’s coming soon:

The gut reaction to using new technology in education is to ban, block, and/or punish students for ‘cheating’. While I’m not going to link to the many times I’ve already said this, I’ll say it again… the technology is not going away!

So how do we use it effectively, creatively, and for learning? 

That is the question question to ask… and Chat GPT4 and tools like it probably have better answers than you can come up with.

14 years ago

I shared this on my Pair-a-Dimes blog, May 13th, 2009:

— — — —

Sometimes you can’t just take baby steps, and you’ve got to commit fully to experience something…

I’m leaving my job, my home, and my country.

I have just accepted a Principal’s position in Dalian China for September. My wife will be teaching at the school and my daughters will be attending it. We weren’t actually looking for different jobs, they found us several years after my wife and I had applied to a number of International Schools for teaching positions. A path opened up before us… it wasn’t the planned path, but it was certainly worth investigating.

I can’t describe the turmoil my wife and I went through deciding whether or not we should uproot our family, and leave great jobs, friends and colleagues that we care about. Then finally we asked ourselves a simple question, “If we don’t do this, will we regret it later?” The answer was ‘Yes’.

And now that the decision is made, I am so excited about the new adventure!

— — — —

My close friends, my principal, and my assistant superintendent were told about my plan before publishing this, but I know it was an unusual way to share such information back then. Nowadays people expect to hear about things like this on Facebook or on other social media platforms, but that was far from the norm in 2009.

I remember an acquaintance saying to me at a meeting a week later, “So I had to read your blog to know you were taking off on us.” This perturbed me a bit because first of all we didn’t have the relationship where I’d be ‘informing’ him of this news in the first place, and secondly, I was sure he never read my blog and it was either shared with him or he just heard about it.

That was a different time. Looking back, and reading the comments I realize that I had amazing connections from my district, the province, and the rest of Canada, the US, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and China commenting. But I had many people in my district that thought it was completely weird that I’d share something like this on my blog. Meanwhile outside of a small but amazing group of local friends, it was my blogging and tweeting community that was genuinely excited for me.

They also stuck with me, reading and commenting on my blog and sharing in my China adventures.

I often say that I live my life without regrets, but if I had just one it would be that I wish I had travelled more when I was younger. This China trip opened up a world of experiences and holidays that I never would have had if my wife and I hadn’t realized how much we would regret not taking this trip.

My oldest daughter just finished an 8-month assistant teaching job in France and is currently holidaying in Greece, having just left Croatia, and is having exactly the kind of experience I wish I had at her age.

There’s a saying, that says, “No matter where you go there you are.” And I totally understand this sentiment… you can’t run away from yourself. But international travel creates contexts, experiences, and exposure to cultural differences that opens up your eyes and expose you to opportunities to grow in a way that’s hard to do ‘at home’.

We couldn’t have had the opportunities we did as a family had we not taken the plunge and moved to China… I would do it all over again if I had a chance!