Tag Archives: Covid-19

Parents Today

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It’s a catchy title, ‘Parents Today’, an invite to go on a rant and share how society has changed and how parents are the problem. And, yes, this is a bit of a rant, but I want to start by saying this is a trend, not an issue with every parent… but it is indeed something I’ve seen more and more of.

That said, I’ve shared before, and I still believe that parents are our partners in education, and I believe it really does take a community to raise a child. And when we work together as educators and parents we can do great things. I’ve seen this in action. We had two sisters thrive at our school. One of them was able to train 20+ hours a week at her sport, still had time in Grade 12 to follow her passions, compose, produce, and sing an entire album of songs, and get high enough grades to get into the university program of her choice.

Her younger sister joined us and was quiet, and I wasn’t sure if she was enjoying herself. Then at the second PAC (Parent Advisory Council) meeting, her mom pulled me aside afterwards to have a private conversation. She got teary-eyed and thanked me and asked me to thank the teachers. She said that this was the first time in her younger daughter’s entire school experience that she wanted to go to school. She said school from preschool to grade 8 was joyless for her daughter, it was a chore to get her to school, and like pulling teeth to get her to say anything nice about her schooling.

She told me what a delight it was to see her daughter waking up and wanting to go to school. What a joy it was to have her come home and share what she was learning. How heartwarming it was to see her smile when she spoke about school. Her mom didn’t realize that this was equally heartwarming for me and my staff to hear.

We can get things right.

But in all honesty, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we can have challenges where a kid struggles and we have to work together to make things better. And again, when we approach challenges as a team, we can often make things better. Not always, but frequently… and this is where the rant sneaks in. I’ve noticed that it could be a lot more frequent if it wasn’t for (some) parents today.

We have parents that overshare information and humiliate their children in front of us. They embarrass their kids with private details that makes the kid feel too ashamed to look to educators for support and assistance.

We have parents that blame educators for a student not learning something. Who expect every possible accommodation for their child, and literally expect us to take the challenge out of learning. They fail to see that learning doesn’t stick when there is no effort associated with the process. They’ll watch their kid spend hours on a video game to perfect a level, then the same kid will put zero effort into an assignment and it’s the educator’s fault because he or she doesn’t understand how their kid learns.

We have parents who see themselves as their child’s friend and advocate, and will not parent them when they need a parent. They will let their child have a device in their room so they can play games or socialize until 3am, then claim it’s too hard to get them to school in the morning. ‘Turn off the wifi? Take their device away? We couldn’t do that.’ Make them go to school tired to understand the consequences of their actions? ‘Oh, no. My kid needs his rest, he’d be too upset if we did that.’

We have parents defend their child, claiming they did the work themselves, even when it’s obvious that they cheated or plagiarized. ‘Just so you know, I was sitting next to her when she wrote that.’ Actually lying to protect them like that is some sort of favour. It doesn’t matter that the child can’t define several of the words used, or that all other writing done in a supervised environment is both structurally different, and reads as if it was written by someone with a weaker vocabulary.

In each of these examples, the parent thinks they are doing their child a favour. They believe they are being advocates. Meanwhile, rather than working with educators to help their child, they are adversarial, confrontational, and/or passively harming their child by not being a parent.

The rise in number of parents I saw doing these kind of things in my last decade of education was concerning. Parents will spend more time getting Chat GPT to argue a case for their child’s ‘defence’ than they will actually parenting their child, or listening to a teacher. They will hear only their child’s perspective and come into the school with metaphorical guns blazing to defend them when the issue was minor and could have been resolved with a simple inquiry. They will send a scathing email to a teacher, realize there was a misunderstanding and then send a meek apology or no apology at all when the small concern is cleared up… Then they wonder why a teacher’s future communication to them doesn’t seem warm and caring… and claim that the teacher doesn’t like their kid.

As a principal, no matter how upset a parent was, I always started a meeting thinking, ‘We are on the same team, we both want what’s best for their child/our student.’ I’ve had hard conversations with teachers, students, and parents as a result of those conversations.

But the hardest conversations where with parents who I had to walk on eggshells around because their child, who was not being a good student, was being ruthlessly defended… And anything I said to suggest their kid had work to do was dealt with as evidence that a collective ‘we’, everyone at school, was at fault… Meanwhile I had a team of exasperated educators doing all they could with a supportive lens.

Schools can still work when there is a kid or two with parents like this, but I watched their number rise. I saw the pressure it put on educators… especially after the challenges of Covid. We are at a time when kids need the whole community to support them, and I’m seeing too many parents work against rather than with the school community.

It’s these kinds of parents that are one of the biggest problems in education today.

Approaching 200

We didn’t know on a cold, wet, and dark Friday in January of 2021 that we would make this a usual thing. Two friends, feeling isolated with covid restrictions decided to do the Coquitlam Crunch so that we could meet outdoors when indoor meetings were restricted to your family circle. Now, over 4 and a half years later, we’ve completed our 190th Crunch together, averaging more than 40 a year.

We were about 50 in when we decided that 200 would be a great goal to achieve before we retired, and now that is all but guaranteed. Did we fathom this when we had done just one Crunch? No. We didn’t even know if we’d go again. But sure enough we kept going, with a goal of 40 a year to match the amount of school weeks in the year.

Now, I can’t think of anything I’ve been more dedicated to (besides my wife of course). We do everything we can to not to miss a week. We usually go out on Saturdays, but we’ll squeeze in a Thursday after school if one of us is away on the weekend.

Imagine being just over a year into a routine and deciding on a 5-year goal… then sticking to it. Sounds challenging, but it’s something I look forward to every week. I’d never have spent so much time with my buddy, Dave, if we hadn’t made this a goal, and an expectation. And there are more goals to come… stay tuned.

Taking the shot

I got my second shingles vaccine yesterday. Today my arm is sore, I have a mild headache, and I feel a bit of a chill. But the symptoms are mild and I’ll go about my day just fine. I do marvel at the idea of vaccines and how they can build our immunity to prevent serious sickness. I’m also further excited about how medical scientists are doing research using mRNA vaccines tailored to specific people to fight certain kinds of cancer. This is an incredible breakthrough because normally our immune system does not detect cancerous cells as foreign, and that’s why they are left unharmed by our immune system and spread so easily.

On the flip side, I saw a social media post by a pastor in a small town in Texas bragging that his school was the least vaccinated against measles in the country. There is a measles breakout currently going through Texas and so far one unvaccinated child has died (not from the school mentioned above). In all likelihood, there will be more as a result of not taking the vaccine.

I’m no longer surprised by anti-science, conspiracy minded people.

I can question whether during Covid, if we actually needed to vaccinate small children when only 0.4 percent of the deaths were in those under 20 years old… and still see that the vaccine worked. In fact, the stat above might have been quite a bit higher without the vaccine. I can question the application of the vaccine without needing to question the efficacy.

Imagine our world, with polio and smallpox still being a concern. When is the last time you recall someone getting the mumps? I know that I’m not immune to shingles now, but my likelihood of catching it, and/or having a very bad case is drastically reduced thanks to the vaccine. A friend of my wife got it a week before her scheduled vaccine, and she had to take a lot of time off, and still has nerve damage as a result.

Sometimes you need to trust the science, trust in conventional research, and not social media posts that cherry pick stats and outright lie to convince you otherwise. There are not a cabal of scientists collaborating to dupe you into taking measles or shingles vaccines, to somehow inject you with (insert conspiracy theory here). There are thousands of scientists dedicated to making life better, curing diseases, and increasing both your quality of life and also your time here on earth.

I’m grateful for the advances we’ve seen, and I encourage you, if you’ve missed any of these shots, to go get them.

Family, fun, and fitness

I am in a tiny hotel gym near the Toronto airport, dictating this while on an elliptical. It’s 9:30 PM and we head home to Vancouver tomorrow morning just after 6 AM. It has been a whirlwind week for us. Leaving our home 2:30 in the morning last week Friday to come here for a memorial celebration of the passing of my dad.

We spent a wonderful few days up at BlueMountain, near Collingwood, with my mom, her four kids, and seven of eight grandkids. Unfortunately, the eighth grandkid was hit with Covid and didn’t recover in time to join us. Still, it was so wonderful to have our family together for the first time in over a decade with all 4 kids and that many grandkids m being present. My dad would have loved it.

My wife, kids, and mom spent the last couple nights in downtown Toronto, went shoe shopping for my mom, visited the Aquarium, and saw a musical, ‘In Dreams’. The play features Roy Orbison music and my mom loved it. We all did. I was worried when it started with a side story of a woman losing her husband, but that wasn’t the focus of the show and didn’t ruin the mood despite the recency of my fathers passing.

Today we went back to my mom’s place, hung out and ordered Caribbean style Doubles from a roti shop. I really wish I could find some good West Indian takeout in Coquitlam, and since I can’t, I always make sure I get some when in Toronto.

I probably should be getting to bed right now with a 3:30 AM wake up call, but I hadn’t had any exercise other than walking at my moms pace for three days now, and I’m not sure what I’ll feel like doing tomorrow after a long day of travel. So, I am using speech to text and panting slightly, unsure of how much editing I will need to do when I get off this machine.

I remember hearing that by the time you’re 18 you have spent roughly 95% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. Losing my dad has really made me put this statistic into perspective. I think about my daughters at 21 and 23, and I’m actually grateful that one still lives with us, and I already see how hard it is to plan to get together with the older one who lives an hours drive and an hour and a half ferry ride away from us.

I’m actually thankful for covid in that it was the reason my siblings and mom started a group chat and that has increased my communication with my mom and sisters. Seeing my sisters’ now grown up kids has been wonderful too, and I really question where the time has gone. It occurred to me that my oldest nephew is older than I was when I had my first kid. That seems so hard to grasp. I am now the generation that I think my parents should be. Looking at old photographs, I find pictures of my parents as adults when they were younger than I am now, and yet in my mind I’m still just a kid… Their kid.

Cardio is done, I’ve edited my voice-to-text writing above and it’s time to put on Enya and do my stretches. I’ll keep thinking and reflecting on my time with family, and then I’ll crank the music and get a little bit of strength exercise in. I like doing a variety of exercises at hotels, using machines I don’t get to use in my simple home gym.

Tomorrow, I travel home then start to worry about catching up at work. It’s going to be a bit painful, but I’m glad to have had this time, and it know how much it meant to my mom… and to me!

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!

Grade 9 for a day

Today a group of Grade 8 students who will be joining our school next year are spending the day with us at our school. Our Grade 9’s have planned the day for them. Our school only takes a few students from each of our middle schools so students arrive at our school in September knowing very few other students.

While students will be nervous today, this event really breaks the ice for students when they join us in September. It allows them to arrive at their new school already knowing a bit more of their community, both students in their grade, and older students who have already welcomed they to our community.

It’s a long day for me because we also run an after school barbecue for parents followed by our Parent Advisory Committee meeting in the evening. But I love days like this. I enjoy seeing our students welcome other students to our school. It’s fun to see the nervousness of the new students fade away throughout the day. And it’s great to feed our community.

Last year we only ran this event for an afternoon, and we didn’t run it at all during the two covid years before that. So it’s nice to bring back the full tradition, and to provide this community event again. It adds to the welcoming feeling to our school, gives our Grade 9’s an authentic leadership experience, and gives our future students a great sense of our school community.

4th poke

When I look around at the people I know in my community, very few other than my wife and I have not had covid-19 yet. I don’t attribute it to anything more than luck. I know people that have been equally as cautious and more cautious than us that have had it. We both work in schools and have greater exposure than an office worker who spent most of the last couple years working from home. We’ve been lucky.

Yesterday I got the Moderna Omicron-Containing Bivalent Booster shot. It was an easy decision for me. The variant most prevalent right now is Omicron, and I’m happy to increase the odds that I don’t catch this virus. A number of people I know have felt the lingering effects of covid for several months, and having been someone who has previously dealt with 6+ months of chronic fatigue (a vitamin D deficiency about 4-5 years ago) I’d rather not deal with something like that again if it can be avoided.

This is why I decided to to get a 4th shot:

I work in a school and if I can avoid getting and/or spreading a virus, then that’s good for my whole community. I take the flu shot each year for the same reason. Does that stop me from getting the occasional flu? No. But it probably stops me from getting sick more often than I do. Viruses are tricky things and flu shots are not a perfect science. The purpose of a flu shot is to prevent some of the more likely flus that are going around, not all flus. I see this Omicron-Containing Bivalent Booster in the same way I do a flu shot… it’s a vaccine focusing on preventing contraction of the more likely variants. I’m not 100% preventing covid, I’m reducing the likelihood of contracting common variants that are currently circulating.

We might be in endemic rather than pandemic times, but there are still people catching covid variants in our community… and unless I had a non-symptomatic case, I’m still one of those people with no natural immunity. I like the idea of decreasing my odds of catching covid. Just like I decrease the odds of getting a flu with my yearly flu vaccine.

The real numbers

In the last week and a half I’m aware of 18 people whom I personally know have caught covid-19, likely the Omicron variant. But of these 18, (half of which are 2 families), I think only one of them is reported. Others sat on 811 for more than 2 hours before giving up on the call. Others have mild symptoms, and here in BC they are asking people with mild symptoms not to get tested, because testing locations are being overwhelmed.

Extrapolating on these numbers, even if I overestimated the amount of cases in BC to be 1/3 reported (that would be 6/18 rather than 1/18), then the real number of new covid cases is a massive number.

This is surprisingly a good thing. First of all, our hospitals are not overwhelmed with serious cases. Secondly, at this rate of infection, we are moving quickly to heard immunity.

Well, that’s my hope anyway. I am only working with my own anecdotal evidence, and coronavirus has kicked my predictions in the butt more than once. Still, it’s good to look forward and see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe by spring everything will be open and masks will be optional. Maybe. Still, it feels good to have a little optimism right now. Even if we really don’t know the real numbers, I think they are looking good… Time will tell.

Change of plans

Before covid hit, I was scheduled for a Mediterranean cruise, with stays in Spain and Portugal. One of my daughters had a semester abroad cancelled. And we are not the only ones that have seen all kinds of changes in plans occur.

Today I took a discretionary day off to assist with a family member having surgery, only to learn this morning that the surgery was cancelled. That’s the nature of what the last couple years have been like… The best laid plans of mice and men…

After build-up and expectations, cancelled plans are tough. I think they are taking a toll on people. It’s not a big deal when one thing doesn’t go as planned, but when plans are cancelled again and again, when rules and expectations change again and again, it gets to be mentally exhausting.

We need to give ourselves the permission to be upset and disappointed, we need to allow ourselves the opportunity to be pissed off. And then we need to take a deep breath and move on. It’s not healthy to stay in a state of disappointment. The reality is that remaining in a state of disappointment accomplishes nothing, except maybe to make us feel crappy.

Living through a pandemic is stressful, but the alternative is worse. We’ll get through this. There will be more cancellations. There will be more rule changes. There will be more upset people acting irrationally. But in the end, we’ll persevere, and as long as we are willing to adapt, and be as thoughtful and safe as we can, we will be stronger from the adversity we’ve faced.

The boost

I finally got my notification and am booked for my 3rd, booster, Covid-19 shot. I still have to wait a couple weeks to get it, but at least I have a date on the calendar.

Our bodies are amazing things, and the idea that we can train our blood cells to fight off a virus before it can affect us adversely is incredible. That we now have the science to do so without even giving us a less harmful version of the virus is even more astonishing.

I’ve been big on pushing Vitamin D as a great way to boost our immune systems. It’s a cheap, easy to access, almost impossible to overdose, vitamin that is also a hormone which helps our immune system. It can’t and won’t prevent covid, but it can drastically reduce how covid and other ailments affect you, if you get sick. And, about 70-85% of people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in Vitamin D, due to a lack of sunlight, (especially in the winter).

I’m also a huge advocate for the vaccine. I had measles, mumps, and chicken pox in the same school year as a kid. I missed 40+ days of school that year. My kids didn’t have to go through that. My mother-in-law had polio, my wife and I didn’t have to go through that.

MNRA vaccines, and the science behind them, could potentially prevent a far worse (more fatal) virus in the future from ravaging the human race. And how could it do this? By giving our immune system a timely and needed boost.

Politics aside, profits to big pharma aside, possible covid treatments, after getting sick, aside. What we have here is a chance to reduce the likelihood of having a bad covid experience. Go to any social media site you like and search the hashtag #longcovid, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… regular people of all ages and many in good health pre-covid.

Will a booster guarantee anything? No. But I am happy to give my immune system a boost, and hopefully you will too.