Tag Archives: colleagues

Breaking bread

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I’ve had a few opportunities to have lunch with, to break bread with, colleagues in the past several weeks. Having a meal together, outside of the usual staffroom with its comfortable banter is a treat. It is a good reminder of the fact that we all have lives outside of this thing called work.

I find that my connections to people can become fixed in a place-based kind of experience, and we all play the roles we are supposed to play… to leave that environment and break bread is an opportunity to find new connections, to be ourselves and not just our roles.

Seizing Moments

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to have lunch with my admin team. Now when I say that I’m talking about 3 ‘teammates’ that do not work in the same building as me. So when we can get together and enjoy a meal it’s a special moment. The moment was made that much more special because two of the three people I met are moving on… one to a new position, and the other one retiring. Then, after work, I connected with some other administrators for a wellness gathering. It was wonderful to spend that time connecting with colleagues that I don’t always see during my typical work week. And when I came home, my wife and I had a wonderful evening together. We both seem to have a little more energy than we usually do on a Friday night. It was a fun night of laughter and conversation.

This morning I did the Coquitlam crunch with my buddy, and while it was cold and early, and we were the only ones in the parking lot, it was a ‘seize the moment kind’ of opportunity. This was our 120th Crunch since we started 3 years ago in January 2020. My buddy suggested that the title of this post should be “Just Do It”, and that was the initial plan, but my thoughts go a little beyond that this afternoon.

After our walk and coffee shop social, I went home and said bye to my wife and helped her pack the car to head over to the island to visit her parents. Then my daughter called and asked for a ride because she spent an anniversary night out with her boyfriend and they were heading home from downtown. After dropping her boyfriend at his house, my daughter and I decided to go and enjoy a sushi lunch at a wonderful restaurant. I can’t express how wonderful it is to have grown-up kids who still look forward to a meal with their father (and yes, especially when he’s paying).

Now I am sitting in my hot tub, penning my ideas using voice to text, and even enjoying a little visit for my cat.

Visits with colleagues, chats with my wife, walks with friends, meals with family, and hot tubs on a cold winter day, these are all small little moments individually… But weave them together, and they make for an absolutely wonderful life.

We sometimes go headlong into work, and bury ourselves in busyness, not realizing that we don’t have to put everything on hold until our next vacation, or gathering with family or friends. Tiny moments, planned, and unplanned, are the moments we need to seek and enjoy.

End of the (school) year

Although I’ll be working next week, today is the last day of school with staff. It’s always a day that feels melancholy for me. I’m grateful for the approaching summer, but it’s a final farewell to a year that feels more significant than a December 31st year-end celebration.

It was a challenging year for me on many fronts, but mostly health-wise. I shared this recently in my email newsletter to students and their parents:

After a couple months of working in pain every day, I took most of May off with a herniated disc in my neck, which was pinching a nerve going down my left arm. The good news is that I’m almost completely pain free now and my discomfort level is quite low. The challenging thing is that combined with a few other absences this year, I missed more work this year than I probably have in all the other 24 years that I’ve been an educator. Many of you have heard me speak of how challenging absences are at Inquiry Hub, and how good attendance has a direct correlation to overall success… and unfortunately I got to live the consequences of missing a lot of school first hand. I am so thankful for the team that I work with, and I appreciate how much added work they covered in order to keep the experience so positive for our students.

Add covid which, while not herniated disc painful, left me with a week-long low grade headache in November, and a nasty flu in January that knocked me on my butt worse than covid did, and it seemed to me the year was all about being sick or recovery and catch up. I didn’t mention the loss of my father in the message above, but that also happened while dealing with the physical pain.

I’ll be glad to wrap things up next week. All that said, there is a lot of positives to appreciate. Our grads got into the programs they wanted. Planning for next year has me excited about the year ahead. And while I am having some residual issues with the nerves in my arm from the herniated disc, I’ve been pain free for 3+ weeks.

My left arm is weak, and sometimes uncomfortable, but discomfort is so much better than constant pain. My heart goes out to people with chronic pain. I had just over 3 months of it, and working every day for over 2 months in agony before taking time off was brutal… I can’t imagine what life is like for those that live with daily pain and don’t get to feel the relief I now feel.

This gives me perspective, and makes me feel lucky, despite the challenging year I had. I get to look forward to a summer of recovery and revitalization, not of choosing between being in pain or being so medically intoxicated that I don’t want to do, can’t do, anything productive. I get to look forward and see positive things in my future.

But today is melancholy. Today is about saying goodbye. Goodbye to colleagues, and goodbye to the school year. It’s the final countdown to a year I don’t ever want to repeat. I need to focus on expressing my appreciation to my staff for being more supportive of me than I feel I was to them this year… and I hope to make up for that next year!