Audio attention

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A few years ago I exclusively switched from reading books to listening to them. I was never a fast reader and always struggled with my attention when reading. I’d get lost in thought and read whole pages without absorbing any of the content. In fact, sometimes while reading I could turn back one page and not remember reading any part of it.

So for me, audio books were a blessing. I could just listen and absorb. However, I’m going through a phase now where I’m losing my attention while listening. My wondering mind becomes a wandering mind and I tune out the sound. When this happens, only one thing seems to get me out of it and that’s a good fiction book. By moving from learning content to enjoying an adventure, I start to tune back in.

So, I’ll put my current read on hold, I’ll skip my next planned read, and I’ll find myself a good fiction book to get lost in. Normally I save fiction for holiday time, but there’s no use listening to something informative now, if every few minutes I’m hitting the rewind button.

I need a good fiction audio book to remind me what it means to listen intently and pay attention.

Small mountains

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We’ve all heard the term, ‘Making mountains out of molehills’, and understand what it means. What we don’t realize is how often we do it. It’s easy to see when someone else does it, but not us. No, our escalated concerns are little mountains. They aren’t mole hills. Other people do that, not us. Our concerns are real… or rather really big.

Except they are not.

~~~

Being a school principal involves a lot of deciding how big to make an issue. Dismissing a problem is only allowing it to get bigger. Overreacting to a small problem can bring too much attention to it and make it bigger.

Being overly supportive of one side of an issue can make the other side escalate the size of the issue. Being neutral can equally exasperate the issue and create a mountain out of a molehill.

An insincere apology can be worse than no apology. Too harsh or illogical of a consequence can be as harmful as being too easy. Because to kids, to young adults learning to navigate the world, their mole hills are little mountains. To them the issues are not small.

But if we’re honest, we think our mole hills are mountains too… and that’s an important point to keep in mind when we get a little frustrated wondering why these little issues seem so big to everyone else.

The difference between a mountain and a mole hill might not be the size of the problem, but simply a matter of perspective. And that’s a perspective worth keeping in mind.

Lost Community

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I loved Twitter so much that I wrote a short ebook on how to get started on it. It started as a blog post and then it took me about a year and a half to slowly make it into an e-book, Twitter EDU. So, it’s an understatement to say that I really loved this social media tool.

But I don’t make money off of the book or Twitter, and I’m not selling anything. So I decided not to pay $8 a month to get a little blue check next to my name. And now that’s all I see when I go to Twitter or rather X now… little blue check marks being pushed my way. Not my community that I built over 17 years, not tweets from people I know. Just threads of popular tweets and tweets from blue check marks with big followings.

Now I mostly just transmit my blog posts there and spend very little time on the site. I used to also go to Twitter for news. I would go to the search page to see popular hashtags and then follow along with some news items. But even that seems to be watered down or rather flooded with highly promoted tweets, rather than being more organic.

I’m not sure I’m going to stick around much longer. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to delete my account. But I question if I need to share my daily posts there? Do I need to try and engage in a tool that just buries my engagement? Do I need to spend time in an app where the engagement I get is spoon fed to me rather than based on an algorithm that caters to my interests?

It was a fun ride. I had a blast on Twitter, I’m just not sure I need to engage in a tool out of nostalgia… a tool that doesn’t seem to care what I’m interested in, when other tools do that so much better.

Not the same mistakes

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Before I share this, no, it’s not a reflection on my parenting. I’m not wallowing in worry about how I’m messing my kids up. This is just one of the most powerful comics I’ve ever seen, and I think about it a lot as a school principal. Also, profanity warning for the comic below.

Now that I’ve got the disclaimer out of the way, let me share that I think this is one of the most challenging times to grow up in the last few decades. More young adults are living longer with their parents, or committing long hours to be able to afford rent. Many have not hit 25 yet and they don’t see themselves ever owning a house, or having a back yard like the one they had as a kid. Many more are disillusioned by what they see in the news and on social media.

Meanwhile, parents are doing their best not to make the mistakes of their parents, and yet struggling to navigate what that looks like. Some parents are doing all they can to help a disengaged kid stay in school. Others are lost trying to figure out inappropriate behavior. Still others are doing everything to protect their child, but preventing them from learning from failure. And still others are doing everything ‘right’, which works for one kid and doesn’t work for another.

And those are the resourceful parents that are trying their absolute best. They aren’t the divorced parents who fight in front of the kids every time the kids are passed off. They aren’t the ones struggling with their own demons of abuse, drugs, or mental illness. Still doing the best they can with the skills they have, but just not skilled in ways that support their kids.

We don’t want to make the same mistakes our parents did. We don’t want to follow the same patterns. That can be, but probably isn’t, a disparaging complaint about our own parents. Rather it’s a recognition that we want to do better, be better.

But try as we might, family dynamics is challenging, the world we live in is challenging, and this comic sums up the parenting challenge perfectly.

A Short Take on Assembly Theory in the Tetraverse Model

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The full title of this video is a mouthful:

A Short Take on Assembly Theory in the Tetraverse Model: A Geometric Representation

Here is the description and related videos:

Joseph Truss and David Truss discuss the geometric model of a tetrahedral universe as it relates to Assembly Theory.
With video clips from Neil deGrasse Tyson & Chuck Nice’s Startalk interview with Sarah Imari Walker.

And clips also from our first Book of Codes video,  ‘We Live in a Tetraverse’.

I recognize this video is for a small audience, and I’m hoping to get some help. Joe and I are viewing the world as geometers, not physicists or mathematicians. If you know of someone smarter than us in these fields, we encourage dialogue and perspectives that challenge our thinking, please share.
Thank you!

Editing time

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I spent most of the day editing a video conversation I created with my uncle. We spent a good 3+ hours today chatting and recording a couple videos, then I started editing one of them. Despite using Descript, a great tool for generating captions and editing out common filler words, I still found myself spending a considerable amount of time doing fine edits.

That’s the nature of my personality. I’ll be a bit too much of a perfectionist, and spend too much time paying attention to small details… and time just slips by. I was recently recorded for a podcast and the host used the same tool. But I could tell that he edited the video much faster than me. That said, there was nothing wrong with the editing.

There were a couple edits that I would have done more carefully, but in all honesty it was good enough… and with the interview running almost an hour it would have taken him way too long to edit to the level that I’m trying to do right now.

The lesson from this should be for me to recognize that I don’t need to spend so long editing. I should shoot for ‘good enough’ and just get this thing done. But I won’t. I’ll slog away, paying attention to too many details. Then I’ll cringe at all the parts I should have done better.

~~

Bed time. The rest of the edits will have to wait. I’m glad tomorrow is a holiday, I want this done before I head back to work!

Korean BBQ

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It’s such a fun concept to sit at a table with a barbecue grill in the center, and be served a plate of raw meat. Hotpot is similar. Food served uncooked, and finished at the table to your liking.

My wife isn’t a fan of meat platters for dinner, but my daughters are. So, off to the restaurant I want with my youngest daughter, and we devoured a meal for two that could easily have fed 3 people… but we were both hungry and devoured everything. Simply delicious!

When students lead

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We have a Professional Development Day today and so we held our Remembrance Day Assembly yesterday. It was completely organized by our student leadership club. My only contribution was a suggested theme, and it was shared because I was asked. Beyond that the agenda, setup, sound, performances, and every word spoken was done by students.

The main organizer, in Grade 12, is an exceptional writer, and I could hear his voice, his excellent vocabulary, weaved through the presentations. But he didn’t speak, he sat with the team working on the sound system.

I didn’t get to hear the rehearsal like I’d hoped, but one of our Grade 10’s assured me that it went really well. This was obvious in the assembly, because everything went smoothly. The performers were mostly from Grade 10’s, all future leaders capable of taking on running the event next year.

There’s a difference between student leaders who help a teacher run an event, and student leaders who take full responsibility for an event. There is an authenticity that comes with full control. Of course the students need to be ready for this. Putting them fully in charge but unprepared is not a recipe for success, but there is another side to this.

What if things go wrong? Well, there are different kinds of going wrong. If a student is playing an instrument and misses a note, that’s not a big deal. If a student says something inappropriate in a formal assembly, or obviously doesn’t take the event seriously, that’s different. If someone forgets a line, that’s different than if the event feels ad hoc and unplanned.

When students are ready, they need to be provided with authentic opportunities to lead. And when they step and truly lead, it’s impressive to see what they can do. One of the highlights for me, a thing that really made me feel impressed, was that the main organizer did the same thing we did. He stepped back, work done before the event even started, and he let the younger students MC, he let his team run the show. He distributed the leadership the same way it was distributed to him.

Rest Day

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I’ve been on a really positive tear recently in the gym. Both my cardio and weight training has seen positive gains.

And today I rest.

This has been an amazing year for consistency of workouts. Most weeks have been 6 or 7 days of working out at some level… 20-30 minutes of cardio, 5 minutes stretching, and then working a single muscle to fatigue. Or the 50+ minute Coquitlam Crunch walk, or a workout with my buddy at his gym.

Sometimes this year I’ve had weeks where I really didn’t take a break. That’s not hard to do when I’m only working one muscle strenuously besides doing my cardio. I can give my muscles a full rest before pushing them again, without having to take a day off. But my cardio always involves legs and when they get tight, my back gets tight.

This morning my body is telling me to take a break. I’m about to meditate and do a longer than usual stretch, and that’s it. It’s weird, I know how important rest is, but I usually plan my rest days before I get up in the morning and I can’t help but feel a little guilty skipping my workout today.

It’s a mental game I play with myself. It’s a fear of developing a bad pattern, of breaking the habit. So rather than just feeling good about my rest day, I sit with slightly guilty pangs. This is silly, of course, since what I’m doing is listening to my body. But part of me fears that an unplanned rest day like this is an excuse to have another one soon.

I should see my rest metaphorically as the space between musical notes, as the gaps that make the music. But instead I see my rest as a sign that I’m slipping, that my age is showing, that I’m getting soft. I’m not sure why I do this to myself? It’s a head game of rationalizations, rather than just letting go and enjoying the break. But maybe it’s also that I truly enjoy the way working out makes me feel, the sense of accomplishment before I even leave the house.

Still, I need to listen to my body, take the rest day… and feel good about it!

Divided we fall

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I’ve restarted writing this three times now. I’m not going to try again. I’ll let the ideas flow and just see where I end up.

I wish that I was surprised. I’m not. I’m disappointed. I’m saddened. But I’m really not surprised.

There are some amazing countries where freedom and equality are almost synonymous. There are countries where political differences do not polarize people into opposing factions. The United States of America is not one of them.

Why does it matter to me, a Canadian? Because ideas are memes that travel beyond borders. Because our biggest and only neighbour seems to be on the precipice of four years of strife, unease, and constant political banter. Because representation matters and I’m not a fan of what’s being represented.

We are entering an era of division. A polarized world where I have more questions than answers. Questions about global battles in Europe, the Middle East, and potentially Asia. About the battle for rights based on gender. A constant battle of words between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’.

I don’t foresee unity, I see a great divide. I foresee a constant and painful to watch news cycle that is filled with vitriol and malice. I hope not to see a loss of freedom, a ‘loss of Inalienable Rights’, which should be an oxymoron, but might not be. I hope for the best… I’m just not expecting it.