Tag Archives: documentation

Working weekend

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I’m at school putting the final touches on a presentation I have to give tomorrow. The presentation is to the Ministry as part of a quality assurance process for provincial online schools. I find that working at my workstation with multiple displays makes this kind of work much easier than trying to do it at home.

The hard work is done, all I’m really doing to the presentation now is redacting personal identifiers of any students for privacy, and checking my math on the stats I’m sharing.

If you were to give me a grade on the prettiness of this presentation, I’d probably get a failing grade. A lot of the slides are dense with words and information. However, I’ve been assured by the ministry that it’s the story I’m telling that matters, not what the slides look like, and I think our team is telling a pretty compelling story about how we support a few of our most vulnerable kids, as examples of the supports we have in place.

That said, when telling a story, it’s easy to miss key elements or not recognize how they connect to more universal supports we offer. So, we will tell the stories, the slides will make the connections to evidence requested… and that means we’ve got some dense slides to share.

As an online vice principal and principal for the last 15+ years I’ve seen how online schools can be a great choice to get extra credits for a multitude of good reasons, and I’ve seen students come to us as a last resort when nothing else is working. For the students who come to us by choice, we do an amazing job getting them what they want. For those that come to us out of necessity as a last choice, we might be less successful statistically, but each of those statistics is a student, with their own stories and challenges, and we don’t forget that. These students take much more of our time, and resources, and we do everything we can to help them. It is these efforts I hope to share with the ministry tomorrow. And so the stories are what matter most… but the slides will (dense-as-they-are-with-information) demonstrate the evidence and details we are asked to provide.

Archiving memories

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There is a quote I often hear about the fact that nobody will know your name in 3 generations. This makes me think of my grandparents, and the stories they used to tell. I was fortunate enough to get some video recordings of both of my grandmothers (Granny T & Granny B), but not of my grandfathers. Today I dug up the 10 pages story that my grandfather, Motel Truss, had recorded a few months before he died. I don’t have the recording itself, but I have the document that my mom transcribed from the recording for him. He wrote it as a request from the Barbados Jewish Community. Later, a book was written, ‘Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados‘ and my grandparents were all mentioned in it as well.

I think towards the end of the year I am going to try to document images and stories of each of my grandparents. Nothing extravagant, but something that my kids, and maybe their grandkids could look at to learn a bit about their distant ancestors. It was a very different time, with completely different hardships and challenges, and I think their stories are worth documenting and sharing.

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.

The cost of a photograph

Back in July, 2019, when I started writing daily, I wrote ‘Photographs in my mind’. In it I spoke nostalgically about the era of print film and the unknown of if I got the shot I thought I did, until after photos were developed. I also wrote about the photos I ended up not taking, and how some of those are more memorable than the ones I did take. Here is the end of the post with one particular shot that came to mind today.

There was the shot I lined up at Pike Place in Seattle, of an older man sitting on the hood of a parked car enthralled in a book, while cops on the street behind him tended to a fender-bender. I can still see the image that I did not take, feeling like I was invading his privacy.

We seem so much more free to take photos now, always having a camera in our pocket, and not a concern of the cost of taking one more shot.

But of all the shots I didn’t take, the photographs that still linger in my memory. These come to me from an era when film was the only option and the cost of the next shot lingered in my mind.

Today I thought of a different kind of cost, not financial, but maybe social, cultural, or personal. I thought of the potential photo I didn’t take above, and how I felt that I would have been invading this man’s privacy, stealing a moment from him. This made me think of children having photographs and videos shared on social media by parents. Precious moments, but also embarrassing ones. I then thought of photos shared without permission, voyeuristic images shared in confidence then reshared in anger, more often than not by a vindictive, jilted, or just plain mean ex-boyfriend.

I thought of photographs that perpetuate stereotypes, or promote cultural exploitation. I thought of videos that show people at their worst going viral and how they typecast a person on the bases of a single act, one transgression, an embarrassing moment memorialized as the defining of a one-dimensional character.

We don’t live in the film era anymore. We live in an era that is not just witnessed, but fully documented. And I wonder, what is the price? What costs are we paying for the free availability of endless videos and photographs?

Documenting your life

It occurred to me last night that a daily blog is an interesting way to document your life. It’s not a true journal, like a diary, because there are things I won’t share because it’s public… However it is a document of my thoughts and it opens a door into the things I think about.

I’m basically at a point now where I look back at old posts and some I remember writing and some I don’t. The blog is documenting thoughts I don’t even remember having. Have you ever looked back at a piece of writing and not remembered writing it? It’s kind of a weird feeling.

Kids today are doing this in different ways. They are sharing videos on TikTok, photos on Instagram, and even memories on Snapchat. Yes, even on Snapchat, the app where everything disappears, there is an option to save your video and Snapchat will share your ‘memories’ with you each year, like us old folk see on Facebook.

We are documenting our lives in digital, social spaces. Some of these spaces will disappear over time, and we will lose a piece of our histories. I no longer have my Ning and my Wikispaces memories archived, I can’t even remember some of the names of the apps that I stored memories on, that no longer exist.

But some will survive, some will get archived. While a paper journal can disappear, digital footprints might stick around for a very long time.