Finding time

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A buddy of mine from Ontario is in town for a couple days. He texted me saying he had Thursday morning available. The bad news, I have a 9:30am appointment. The good news, I get up at 5am to start my morning routine and he is on Ontario time so he’ll be up early too, here on the west coast.

So I’m meeting him downtown at a restaurant that opens at 7am. We’ll have almost an hour and a half together, then I’ll drive back uptown to go to my meeting. Easy. Sure, I’ll miss a workout, but I haven’t missed one this week and so I’m due anyway.

The most important thing is that I get to spend precious time with a friend that I rarely get to see. That doesn’t happen often and so the fact that I’ll spend about the same amount of time driving as I will with him doesn’t matter. Too often we bend over backwards to make work commitments and don’t think twice about cancelling or postponing opportunities for personal commitments.

Not me. Not today. Today I get to make the visit happen. Is it a bit rushed. Yes, but it’s short notice and that happens. The point is that it’s important to make time for good friends… especially those that we don’t get to see all that often.

Experience is something you get right after you need it.

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Ever notice how many jobs say, “Experience required”? Who are all these experienced workers looking for new jobs?

How many jobs want you to have a degree first? I understand a doctor, nurse, lawyer, architect, or engineer needing a degree, but how many corporate jobs really need a prospective employee to have a degree?

I love the quote, “Experience is something you get right after you need it.”

At some point in your life you are going to learn something on the job. You are going to figure it out either just when you need to… or just after you’ve messed up the first attempt.

Hiring is going to change. You aren’t going to see companies focusing on degrees and academic accolades. Instead, you’ll see people with micro credentials or niche skills being hired because they have learned skills that directly relate to the job expectations. Or you’ll see jobs being offered on a trial basis and companies willing to hire based on characteristics like flexibility, ingenuity, and creativity. ‘Come try this out for a 3 month contract, and we’ll see if you’ve a) Got a good head on your shoulders, and b) Fit with our community and values.’

Don’t worry about experience, you’ll get on the job. Just come with the right attitude and an affinity for the job. The first time you try something, that’s when you’ll get the experience. Before that, it’s not schooling or past experience, it’s evidence that you are a learner and you are willing to put in an honest effort. That’s what will get you hired.

We don’t know

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Is light a particle or a wave? According to the double split experiment, it depends on how you choose to measure and observe it?

How many species are still unknown to us in tropical forests and deep in our oceans?

What is consciousness? We know so much about the functioning of the brain and yet we still really don’t understand consciousness.

What if anything exists beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There is currently a theory that we might be trapped in a black hole. This would help to explain why most galaxies spin in the same direction. If this is the case, is our entire universe just one black hole in another universe with many more?

Even if that is a disproven theory, there is still so much more we don’t know about our universe, and new discoveries from modern space telescopes are often showing us things that make us question what we thought we knew.

We don’t know so much about the universe or even where our thoughts come from. And yet we are constantly trying to find meaning in everything around us. We seek to know the unknown, to know more than we now know.

There are still so many more mysteries to be solved, so many unanswered questions. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know… and so we wonder, we question, we delve into the mysteries with wonder and amazement. We don’t know, but we seek to know.

Odd Duck

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I have the unusual honour to run two schools, both of them quite unique. I’ve had that privilege for a dozen years now. While my title has changed, I’m the only principal in the district that has stayed in one location for this long. Partly because I haven’t wanted to move, partly because there aren’t many other principals raising their hands to say they want to run two schools, one of which has a program in every high school.

I’ve been an executive member of the BC online principal’s association since 2014, and in that community we recognize that we have far more in common with each other than we have with principals in our own districts. We literally do things completely different than our regular ‘brick and mortar’ (as opposed to online) colleagues. We have different rules and compliance, and we accept students to start new courses throughout the year, with every student on their own timelines.

My other school, Inquiry Hub, is a ‘regular school’ but it is tiny. We still have people in our district, 12 years in, that think we are an alternate school. We are not. And then we run the school like a speciality program, but we are a school, not a program. It’s a unique and odd duck of a school that works with self-directed students, with all the interesting passions and quirks they bring.

Now as I look ahead to retirement, I have the unusual task of thinking about succession. I only know one principal who would be interested in my position and she’s probably going to retire within a year of me, so she’s not a great candidate, (although she’d do an amazing job). Since I don’t know anyone else who would actively be shopping for a move into my position, and even if I did, I couldn’t guarantee that district leadership would agree with me, I’ve got to make sure that whoever comes in can easily get all their ducks in a row.

Part of this will be done for me because I’ve got two great teams of educators, and awesome secretaries, who care about the direction and success of the schools. However, this year I really need to do my part in ensuring the unique aspects of the two jobs have a scope and sequence that is tracked, and all the nuances of running these two schools are shared with the new principal.

It’s not easy to replace an odd duck… the new odd duck might be completely different. But hopefully I can make the transition as smooth as possible so that the incoming principal can enter the role quickly. I’d like to give them the tools and resources to take over with minimal disruption, and also with opportunities to put their leadership skills to work, rather than just managing things while on a massive learning curve.

I hope this new principal will fall in love with the role as much as I did. The challenging thing is that I also hope it’s their last career move, because I think it’s really hard to move back to the ‘regular’ system after being an odd duck.

Short gains, long views

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It’s hard to stick to healthy routines over the summer. It takes a lot more effort than when you have everything dialled in and a schedule to keep. That said, I’m thrilled about how I’ve taken care of myself over the summer. I haven’t just been in maintenance mode. I’ve actually stayed right on top of things and continued with my goals, albeit in tiny increments.

But tiny increments in the right direction still means I’m going in the right direction. The thing to remember is that while the gains are small and hard to see, they are only hard to see when looking short term. I’ve gained muscle this year, and I’ve simultaneously reduced my body fat percentage.

Sure when I compare myself to the start of summer, or even a couple months before that, the gains are small. But when I compare myself to 2 years ago, or better yet when I started my fitness goals 5-and-a-half years ago, the gains are significant!

It’s easy to get frustrated with how small gains can be in the short term, but fitness and wellbeing are lifelong goals and as such gains should be looked at through a longer lens… and I have to say that things are going, looking, and feeling great!

Remembered and forgotten

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I went to a friend’s father’s funeral today. It was a Catholic service. The music was pleasant, the tribute was lovely. You can tell he was loved by family and friends. It was really nice.

This made me think a bit about what kind of service I’d want? If I had a terminal diagnosis and knew the date was looming, I’d probably want a celebration of life before I died. To me that is the time to actually get together and celebrate.

That said, I’d prefer to live a long healthy life and slip away in my sleep at a ripe, but cognitively sound, old age. Without knowing the date was coming, what kind of celebration would I want?

Two things come to mind. First, I’d want a long interval between my death and my celebration of life. Don’t hold it when the pain of loss is close, don’t make my death date a date to remember. That’s not a date I want defining memories of me. Second, it’s not very important what I want, after all, I’m gone. Let the people who I matter to pick a distant date, maybe my birthday for example, to gather in any way they wish, and to do with my ashes whatever they wish.

Forget the actual death, remember the life the way you want. The celebration isn’t for me, it’s for those left behind.

27 years

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Today is my 27th Wedding Anniversary. Including the time we’ve dated, I’ve now spent more than half of my life living with my wife. What a wonderful adventure it has been! I feel blessed to have found such a wonderful person to spend my life with. And together we’ve raised two amazing daughters that I couldn’t be more proud of. Tonight we celebrate as a family, breaking bread together at one of our favourite restaurants. Tomorrow we head off early to go to a funeral of a friend’s parent. The contrast in celebration is stark, and an important reminder to appreciate all that we have, while we still have it.

I’m also days away from my 27th anniversary of being an educator. And here too is a similar contrast, as I plan for this to be my last year before I retire. I don’t leave counting the days, I leave feeling like there is still more work to be done. I leave with a reminder that I’m going to miss this as much as I’m looking forward to the freedom of not working daily.

How did I get to two milestones of 27 years and still feel like things have only just begun? How does time go so quickly? How am I the parent of two adults in their 20’s? My oldest daughter is a quarter of a century old. My young wife and I are both in our late 50’s. She has been an amazing educator for over 30 years. Those just don’t feel like our statistics, those are the stats of older people. I saw a T-shirt on an older man, who rode past me a few days ago, and the message on his shirt said: “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” I haven’t connected so quickly to a T-shirt slogan in a long time.

All that said, today is a day of celebration. The past 27 years have not necessarily been easy, but they certainly have been rewarding and memorable… and I look forward to the next 27 years of finding joy, showing appreciation for what I have, and feeling younger than I am.

Instant feedback

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Yesterday, at our welcome back session for principals, one of the assistant superintendents asks us a couple questions to get feedback on what we thought was important for our district visioning. This is a typical kind of exercise to start the year. Usually this data is collected then in a later session we look at the data and trends.

But instead, he had us do the activity individually, then connect as a table group to prioritize our results. Then one person per table put the top 5 answers into a Microsoft form.

The assistant superintendent then used Copilot, Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence LLM, to not only collate the data, but also to look for trends. He did this during a break so that we were not waiting on him. Then we came back and discussed not only the results but also his line of questioning.

Probably my favourite part of this is when he told Copilot, ‘here is the data’, but forgot to paste it in. Why? Because it’s important to model that you can make mistakes when trying something new.

I was discussing with a colleague before the meeting that I was hoping to see this happen. I’m tired of people collecting large amounts of data that will then take hours to assess, when we have new technology that can find trends invisible to us in mere seconds.

In the meeting we still did a lot of activities to connect us to our peers, we still had great table talks and meaningful conversations, but when it came time to collect and assess data we didn’t go old school, instead we took advantage of the technology available to us in a meaningful way. And yes, more analysis of the data may come later, and not all of it using AI, but to have this powerful tool use available and to not both use it and model it, would be a real shame.

It was really great to see this happen in yesterday’s first meeting of the year.

What happens in between

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Well, today is my first day going back to work after the summer break. While the first day of school isn’t here yet, I will restart my regular morning routines and get myself ready for the craziness of September. This time of year always comes with excitement and a touch of nervousness. What will the new year bring? What’s in store for the next year?

Preparation starts in the mind, it begins as a seed of promise waiting to blossom. It will be a great year.

Then the actual planning begins. But the reality is that preparation only takes you so far, then it’s up to you and your team to execute; to hit the ground running; to make the students feel welcome… and to help your students see the potential for the great year ahead that you see.

And it all starts today.

It’s also time for something else. Tonight my youngest daughter returns from a 100 day trip to Europe. This is the longest she has been away from home, and after a fabulous adventure she is on her first of two flights back to us. It has been amazing to follow along on her Instagram travel account, and also get occasional early morning video calls of her sharing her location and what she’s doing. Seeing tiny snippets of her day.

As my new school year begins, my daughter’s European adventure comes to an end. It’s a reminder of the cycles we go through, the starts and finishes. We often focus on the beginnings and endings, the big calendar events….

What’s important to remember is that the adventure is what happens in between.

A 2 beach day

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It’s the day before I head back to work and at 7am I hopped on a ferry to Victoria to visit my eldest daughter. We wanted to go on a hike to a waterfall and headed out to Sombrio Beach. We went to a the stunning falls but the hike itself was extremely short.

So, we hopped back into the car and headed to Mystic Beach. This was a bit longer hike to another beautiful beach. It too had a small, spitting waterfall right near the ocean.

Then back to Victoria for delicious prawn tacos at one of our favourite restaurants, Cafe Mexico.

12 hours later and I’m back on a ferry heading home. Such a wonderful day with my kid to end the summer!