Guiding students forward

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Watch this leadership lesson I just found on Instagram:

I can’t help but think about how important this is not just in business/leadership roles, but also in teaching. The best teachers guide students. Teachers are the compass: “A compass doesn’t point the way, it points north and guides the student on their own journey.”

We lose sight of learning when we focus on teaching courses and not students. We lose our bearings when the curriculum is more important than the learner. We are completely lost when we teach to the test.

Watch the video again, and think of the times you led a challenging student rather than faced off with them. Like the time you put the ‘trouble-maker’ in charge because you had to leave the room for a couple minutes… knowing he would keep things in line for you but would cause problems if a peer was left in charge of him. Or the time you metaphorically threw a lesson out the window because students felt lost and you were not getting the learning across. Or when you sat with a kid to do 5 homework questions, letting them know that if they did that with you, they wouldn’t have to do any of the remaining homework.

Are you the guiding compass or the bossy captain? Are you facilitating learning or trying to push learning down their throats? Are you building resistance and conflict or resilience and trust?

If you could turn back time…

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If you could turn back time, what would you do differently? I try to live life without regrets. I do my best to think of ways to feel blessed with the choices I’ve made and the life I have lived.

Occasionally, I’ll wish that I travelled more, or that I chose to be a bit more adventurous… but then I wonder if that would have taken me down paths where I didn’t meet my wife, or my best friend, or if I wouldn’t have had my kids.

I don’t know how the road not taken would have diverted me from the life I have? And so I don’t want to turn back time, but instead I want to appreciate the time I have. And that’s why I think I’m going to retire at the end of the next school year.

More on this later, but I wanted to put that out in the universe. I’m not turning back time, but I’m looking to make the time I have left a little more special.

We don’t need more inputs

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I heard a quote on a podcast today and I really felt it: The podcast is Jimmy Carr on Chris Willamson’s Modern Wisdom:

“The answers you’re looking for is in the silence you’re avoiding. You need fewer inputs, not more.”

How often do we seek answers externally when what we should be doing is looking inward?

Very long day

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My flight was at 7am Toronto time. I got up at 4:15, which is 1:15am Vancouver time. It’s now 8:30pm and I’m back home watching a movie. Then my alarm just went off to remind me that I haven’t blogged today. Other than two fifteen minute naps, I’ve been up 19 hours today and I’m staying up until my wife gets home in about an hour.

Because a 5 hour flight wasn’t enough to fill my day, I also did the Coquitlam Crunch with my buddy after he got off work, and I came home from that and did a small workout. So I must admit that right now I feel the effects of being up for this long. The hot tub and shower definitely didn’t help to wake me up at all.

So, I’ll finish writing and turn my movie back on that I started much earlier today. I won’t be surprised if my wife finds me asleep with the tv on. Yes, the day has been, and still is, long… but it has also been good. My suitcase is unpacked, the pool and hot tub chemicals have been topped up, and the garden has been watered. It’s amazing what you can do in a 19+ hour day!

Bad weather, good day

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I dropped my car off at the designated location and my buddy picked me up, boat-in-tow. There was a light drizzle as we headed to Long Point on Lake Erie. When we arrived at the lake it was pouring rain. Fortunately the hard downpour didn’t last too long and settled back to a drizzle.

We fished along the outside of the retaining wall which served to protect the boat launch, not wanting to be too far away with a possible thunderstorm in the forecast. My buddy caught 3 small bass and I came up empty handed before we headed in for lunch.

We planned an early lunch to coincide with when the worst rain was scheduled according to our weather radar we had looked up on my phone. Sure enough the rain really picked up just as we were heading to the covered picnic area.

Then we ate delicious deli sandwiches as rain poured down. Like clockwork, the rain started to subside minutes after the radar map said the worst had passed, but it was possible it would continue to rain the rest of the day.

Still, we got back in the boat and headed out. We crossed the bay, knowing the worst of the rain was over and wanting to hit the shallow reeds we fished a couple years ago. Sure enough the fish started biting, and my friend was relieved that his guest was also able to catch some fish. And the rain stopped.

It would have been easy to let the rain discourage us. To cancel the trip, or to call it a day at lunchtime. But instead we decided to make the most of a very wet day. The reality is that we would have had a great day even if we didn’t catch fish… but I’d be lying if I said that catching 20+ fish between us didn’t make the day that much more special.

Time and space for learning

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In the past few weeks I’ve seen a few videos about schools in the US where students doing 2-3 hours of AI guided learning are outperforming most other schools.

This report really excited me to see:

Going forward Teachers (or Guides) are going to have such important roles to play as AI ‘covers’ the required curriculum with student focused just-in-time learning. Then the teachers will work on life skills and competencies, and enriching student-focused passions.

Two questions to focus on:

  1. What is the core curriculum?
  2. What competencies do we want to foster in all students?

Beyond that, it’s really about creating the time and space for students to be guided while they pursue their interests and passions.

When AI covers the curriculum the role of educators for the rest of the school day really gets innovative and exciting.

Our inability to rationalize the irrational

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I found a letter to the editor that my dad wrote on September 13th, 2001,

In the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack a few days ago, there seems to be a perception that the U.S. intelligence community had been completely unprepared for the magnitude of its ferocity and destruction.

The incomprehensible fanaticism motivating a large number of individuals prepared to commit their lives to such a suicidal and barbaric undertaking. presumably may have been considered an inconceivable scenario by intelligence strategists.

Nonetheless, the unthinkable has happened – which demonstrates clearly our inability to rationalize the irrational.

Abraham Truss, Scarborough (Ontario, Canada)

It was published on September 16th in The Toronto Star, page A12 in the Editorials and Letters section, changing only the opening sentence to clarify, “In the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack in New York City last Tuesday…

The last sentence is chilling to me: “Nonetheless, the unthinkable had happened – which demonstrates clearly our inability to rationalize the irrational.”

As we approach 24 years after 9/11, it seems as though we are still committing irrational acts, and we are still incapable of rationalizing them. The news is filled with contrived rationalizations, profiles of killers, talking head debates, and biased perspectives inventing rhyme and reason for irrational acts. Reasons we search for, but are clearly unable to meaningfully comprehend. And still the irrational behaviours continue…

Going home

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It doesn’t matter that I’m 57 years old and have lived in a different province for 32 years… visiting mom is ‘coming home’. For the week leading up to my visit I had to keep correcting myself. I’d say, “I’m going home to my parents.” It has been over two years since dad died, but ‘home to parents’ is still my default.

I’m not in the house I grew up in. I’ve only ever slept on a couch here. But I still call visiting mom, ‘home’.

I don’t think that will ever change.

Brilliance lost

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I’m visiting my mom with a huge task at hand. She will be moving soon and needs to downsize drastically. When my dad passed away a couple years ago I had to go through boxes and boxes of files. I reduced hundreds of boxes down to 8 that I kept. What did I think was worth keeping?

My dad was a brilliant man, genius level, with all the quirks that come along with Asperger’s level exceptionalism. He was a kind of mad scientist who came up with brilliant ideas that actually worked… he just never had the business acumen or any luck in getting these ideas to market.

I’m trying to document what I can (scanning his notes) to record two key concepts:

  1. A patent to extract platinum from catalytic converters and electronic waste. This was proven to work effectively with a grant from The Ontario Research Foundation or ORTEC.
  2. A diesel additive that mixed water and diesel to a perfect solution, and ran more efficiently than diesel alone. Dad experimented on old trucks and 2-stroke engines with his additive adding 10-25% efficiency, with higher efficiencies in older motors.

Both of these involve science well beyond my understanding and I’m struggling to decide what’s worth copying.

Then I come up to other ideas like a nuclear powered plane that he shared with the military. I have no idea what to do with this? I took a picture of a few pages, then I realized I just can’t keep this all. It would take me days and days to copy it all and nothing will ever come of it.

He had so many brilliant ideas and it’s just sad to see them disappear. But I don’t have 15 days to copy everything and sort it all in a meaningful way. I’ll be hard pressed even to copy everything for the two inventions above.

So back I go to try to archive this stuff as best as I can… hoping that some day someone can actually use his ideas rather than for his brilliance simply to disappear forever.

Old jokes, new format

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Build it and they will Like, Follow, and Share… the newest craze to hit the internet is nothing more than a rehashing of old ideas in a new format. By now everyone has seen the Bigfoot videos where an AI Bigfoot is doing a selfie vlog and telling jokes as well as doing ridiculous antics. If you haven’t seen them, Google ‘Bigfoot Vlog’ and they will show up in droves. I’ve notice a few things. While a few of them are refreshingly funny, most of them rehash really old jokes, many of which are based on racism, sexism, or tropes that have all been done before. It’s literally just old jokes in a new format.

But they work. They get the click, likes, and shares. They are going viral. And they are creating copycats that are now doing the same thing, using AI, but with people rather than Bigfoot. Videos that are mostly 100% realistic and yet still sit somewhere in the uncanny valley of almost right, yet not fully. And again, just rehashing old content in a new format.

Expect a lot more of this. Also expect world crisis to be leveraged for the same attention. You’ll see bombing in the middle east that’s actually just AI video. You’ll hear government leaders and celebrities saying outlandish things, except it won’t really be them. You’ll see alien landings, meteor landings, and even plane crashes that didn’t happen but were rather prompted into video reality.

When we get tired of the jokes, we’ll just start to get fooled more and more by AI drama that is invented to draw our attention. But for now, the jokes will come. They will get more inappropriate and cross lines a person wouldn’t with a video of themselves. And as attention wanes they will get more extreme, more tasteless, and so abundant that we’ll just be tired of them… as I am already tiring of them.