Making adjustments

This week I was talking to a grade 9 who wanted to do some research on how students perform on video games depending on the kind of music they listen to. We had students do this in our early years, with a driving simulator done in silence, with classical music and heavy rock. It can be a well done experiment, or it can have way too many variables and not truly measure anything or provide meaningful results. It’s hard to measure only the thing you want to measure.

I recently received my bow back, and today I shot for only the 3rd time in a while. Nothing feels normal and while my scores aren’t awful, they aren’t where they should be. The challenge is that I’m needing to think of too many things and my thoughts get in my way. I need to be patient, make one adjustment, and then shoot several arrows before making another adjustment. I’m splitting my focus. I’m adjusting too many variables and it’s not helping me. And as a result, I’m not feeling like I’m improving.

It will get better, I just need to shoot 1,000 more arrows… that’s been my archery mantra for a while. The challenge is not making too many adjustments at once along the way. If I keep doing that, it’s going to take a lot more arrows to see the improvements I want to see.

Getting technical

While others see me as tech savvy, I know that I’m not. What I am is patient, and willing to experiment. That’s different than savvy. Why do I say this? Because I struggle. I get lost, I make mistakes. I screw up. A lot!

Whenever I’m doing something technical, I have to go painfully slow, or I have to take one step forward and two steps back. This isn’t about me trying to be humble and under-representing my skills, it’s a reality that I’ve come to accept. This is most evident when I try something new. I’m the guy that misses a step, or tries something that I’m too novice to try.

I can remember when I first tried blogging. I’d play with the HTML and quite literally break my blog. Then I’d spend a couple hours on the back end, going way over my head to try to get something besides an error page to show up. But I figured it out. I muddled through.

Sometimes these trail and error escapades left me pulling my hair out, other times laughing at myself, and sometimes feeling like I wanted to cry (especially if my mistakes cost me money unnecessarily). But I try, and I try, and I try. And unlike the song, I find that my attempts create amazing opportunities to learn… and despite the frustration, my attempts at bring more technical than I am are very satisfying.

If at first you don’t succeed

As the saying goes:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again!”

Working with students, what you sometimes see is:

“If at first you don’t succeed… quit before someone sees you fail.” Or, “If at first you don’t succeed… avoid trying altogether.”

What the saying should say:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, something different.” (Try a different approach, don’t just try the same thing over again in the same way.)

When things aren’t working, students seem to have two main gears: keep moving forward, because curiosity points to getting unstuck. Or ‘Park’ because it’s not worth the effort or embarrassment.

Teaching students that effort matters more than results or that a failing result can still be a learning opportunity, is to teach them to be resilient and to persevere. This doesn’t mean everyone gets a participation badge, this isn’t just about another quote, “If you did your best, that’s all that really matters.”

No, this is about creating an environment where students aren’t afraid to bite off more than they can chew… to be so ambitious about their goals that a failure to achieve them still puts students much farther than if they had set the bar too low and succeeded.

This is about creating opportunities for students to do something epic, rather than just something every other kid is doing, with a sample you share of the expected result… a cookie cutter task where students produce the same round cookies, but get to decide where the pretty sprinkles go to make their cookie look a little different than everyone else’s.

If you want students to really succeed, well then they have to start a task with the real potential for failure. They have to struggle with uncertainty of success. They have to learn that not reaching a perfectly successful goal can be an opportunity to learn more and different things. Because without authentic struggle, learning is shallow and fleeting.

“If at first you do succeed… the task probably wasn’t hard enough to truly learn something new.”

Into darkness

The days are getting shorter now. It’s really noticeable when you get up as early as I do. I’m used to starting in darkness, but with a hint of light that continually gets brighter. Now it just stays dark well after my writing and meditation. This doesn’t bug me now, but it starts to get harder when it’s dark heading to work and also dark coming home.

(As a funny side note, how do flat earth’ers explain the seasons and different length of days at different times of the year?)

Growing up in Barbados, much closer to the equator, the sun was up most days between 5:30 and 6am, and set between 6 and 6:30pm. The days were quite consistent in length all year. And so we didn’t have longer summer days the way we have here in Canada… but we also didn’t have short dark (or cold) winter days.

I can’t imagine living much farther North where the sun only shows for a few hours in the winter. I think I’d go a little stir crazy. As it is, I’ve already noticed the darkness creeping in, and I know that it can affect my mood. The cold does the same. It’s something I need to stay aware of. I use a daylight light at work, and as always, load up on my Vitamin D. And I dress warmer than most to keep the cold out. These are ways for me to keep the darkness outside from creeping in.

Meditation plateau

I’ve hit a flat spot in my meditation. I’m letting my mind slip for long periods, and even nodding off. I can’t seem to stay focussed, and no matter how much I tell myself that refocusing on my breath after distraction is a part of meditation, I find myself frustrated at my lack of ability to focus… although this frustration does come after I’m done, rather than in the moment.

I think I need to find time in my week to extend my meditation past 10 minutes. I think that I’ve created a pattern of 10 minutes of relaxation, not meditation. I need to get past this plateau rather than just get comfortable on it.

I thought after 2 years of consistency I’d feel more accomplished at getting into a meditative state… but this monkey brain seems a bit slow to learn, or rather, a bit too busy to be quieted. Whatever I decide do, it needs to be different than what I’m doing now, if I want to see and feel an improvement.

Dropped calls

I live in an old house, and rather than traditional drywall, we have plaster with wire mesh in it. This makes our house a bit like a Faraday cage. Some days when reception is bad, I have to find a spot that works and stay still to keep the call from fading in and out, and sometimes I even have to go outside.

But I notice it’s not just at home. I have bad zones in my school too, and will even tell someone I’m talking to on the phone, ‘You might lose me for a couple seconds as I walk through this hallway.’

My running joke is: iPhones are amazing, they can do so much, it’s too bad they don’t make good phones.

I do find it odd that I’m better off on a Zoom call or WhatsApp, streaming a video call on wifi, than I am making a simple phone call. As the world slowly moves towards global wifi, I think we might see an end to traditional phone calls. We’ll still carry phones with us (one way or another), we just won’t be tied to a phone network and locked into phone company contracts. And we won’t be dropping as many calls.

Time keeps ticking

It’s wonderful when you get to spend a weekend with family. I enjoy my work, but I have to say that I’d love a 4-day week with 3-day weekends. Time seems to be going by so quickly.

As I get older, I seem to be more and more fascinated by time… and the time we have with our family of different generations.

Here is a video to help you really think about this.

Being a good listener

A quick post to help me reflect out loud.

Recently I think I’ve been a poor listener. It’s not that I don’t listen, it’s that my listening has been filled with my own interjections and relevant stories. I realized this a few days ago when a colleague was sharing an experience they had on the weekend. I immediately shared a similar experience, then asked more about their’s.

That sounds polite but it isn’t. I didn’t just relate, I stole their thunder. I took away from a moment of someone sharing their experience, so that I could share mine… the story became mine, with theirs being a footnote.

I’ve reflected and realized that I’ve engaged with others like this too often in the past few weeks. I need to listen more in order to listen, not to ‘add to’, not to ‘fix’, not to ‘steal’. Just to listen, ask, encourage, celebrate others, and be present.

Here comes the rain

It’s dumping outside this morning. That will happen when you live on the edge of a rain forest. It will happen a lot more as we creep into November, which is probably the wettest month in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, or maybe that’s February? The point is, we are heading into a whole lot of wet in the next while.

But today I have a walk up the Coquitlam Crunch trail planned with a friend, and we have a goal to do this trail once a week, at least 34 times, this school year. Today will be #3.

That will mean a lot of hikes in the rain. While it’s less than 30 minutes to the top, it’s almost an hour long. That’s long enough that if you aren’t dressed appropriately you are going to get soggy and cold. And I hate being cold!

So, I’ll bundle up, get sweaty in too many layers, and be happy to be outside with my buddy. Because when you live where we live, you either go outside and get wet, or you coop yourself up inside for several months of the year. It’s time to get wet…

Leading or in a leadership role?

As the September crunch hits, this is something I think about. Am I leading my team or am I just in a leadership role? When I have days like yesterday, when I’m consumed with stuff that needs to get done and the tasks that keep coming at me have me pinned to my desk… I feel more like a manager than any kind of leader. I know it’s a balance, I know this work needs to get done, but it seems to me that the required management tasks have a way of increasing and multiplying over time.

So, the role of both leader and manager starts to feel less like something you can do simultaneously, and more like an inverse relationship. Spend more time on leadership, the management aspect suffers, spend more time on management and you’ve got less time to lead.

Knowing this and feeling like the management role has grown over the years is tough. Distributing the leadership helps a lot, but that is a delicate balance as well. There is a difference between authentically sharing leadership and delegating work and tasks. Sometimes the difference is simply in interpretation, sometimes the intent seems to have motive. I guess that too is a challenge of leadership. How do you share the leadership such that you can get more of everything done?

Do this well, get more done. Do this poorly, your team suffers, and so do you. I’m not going to bother with trying to draw another image, but essentially the goal is to move the entire line to the right… you are getting more done with both aspects, but the relationship is still inverted.

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All this said, it has been a smoother startup than last year. It feels like it’s going to be a great year ahead. Metaphorically, I feel like a juggler and I’ve got all the balls in the air… and I’m making it work, but hoping no one throws another ball my way.