Tag Archives: learning

That BS kid

I was one of those kids. You know the type, every report card my marks were somewhere between average and good, with comments about me not meeting my potential… The ‘BS’ grade of ‘B’ but only a ‘S’atisfactory for effort, rather than ‘G’ood. With a few exceptions the marks could have been ‘A’s. It got worse in university where my marks became further divergent, with me getting ‘A’s in the courses I liked and ‘C’s in the ones I didn’t.

It took my Teacher Ed degree at 29 years old before my marks started to actually represent my abilities, and even then it was partially because I surrounded myself with people who pushed me. I can still hear Anna-Christana’s voice, “Dave, look at our calendar, we have 3 big things due, one on Thursday, two on Friday next week, so you need to start at least one of them this weekend, ok?”

It took me almost two decades of schooling to figure it out on my own before starting my Masters. And now, despite knowing these kind of students, despite being one of these students, I still don’t know a magic formula to move a ‘BS’ to a ‘BG’ or an ‘AG’. As a side note, it’s not as much about the ‘A’ mark as the ‘G’ for effort, that I’m really interested in seeing… change the effort, grades will eventually follow.

In high school, favourite teachers of mine could get me to put more effort into things, but they didn’t decide to be a favourite teacher, I decided. That speaks a lot to the importance of relationships in teaching, but kids don’t always meet you there. Yes, we can excite these students about a project that are in their areas of interest. Yes, we can give them more choice in assignments and ways to demonstrate learning, but at some point they need to step up too.

I wish there was a secret I could reveal. I wish I could look back in time and say, ‘If only I had done this‘, or i’If only someone had provided me with that‘, well then things would have been different. Maybe there is something, but for me it was my age and my willingness to put the effort in. Until then, learning on someone else’s agenda was pretty much BS to me.

Axe throwing

I went axe throwing for the first time today. It was a lot of fun. It’s the kind of activity where a little coaching and a little practice can go a long way. I really enjoyed throwing one-handed as opposed to with two hands over my head.

https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/img_7624.mov

One of the coaches showed us an underhanded technique as well. I was far less consistent with most shots going too low, and some too high, but I found the bullseyes a few times with that technique too.

This would be a lot harder if the target distance changed, they set you up at a perfect distance for one full rotation of the exe. But even for archery I do the same thing, shooting again and again from the same distances. I imagine that after 1,000 throws, changing distances would be easy to learn.

For anyone that wants to try a fun activity with an easy entry point, this is a great activity to do with your family.

Tech patient rather than savvy

I spent hours today trying to figure out some technology that was new to me. Hours.

Google and YouTube didn’t help. I spent unnecessary money buying an app I didn’t need. I asked for help. I finally got far enough that youtube can help me, but I’m done for the day.

I get stuck trying new things and get single-minded about it. I dig, I try, I fail, I try something different, I fail again. People always ask me for tech help and think I’m tech savvy. I’m not. I’m patient, I’m persistent, I’m stubborn, and I want to know how things work. Sometimes it feels like a gift, today it felt more like a curse.

1,000 more arrows

I’ve been struggling to shoot well with my new compound bow, but yesterday I shot the best round since getting it. I’m still off of my personal best, and I am still a little inconsistent, but I was able to more than double the amount of times I was able to score a full 10 points with a shot. And although I didn’t score as well the second round, I was finding the bullseye more in that round.

Now I’ve started to find a flaw in my execution. I seem to have a lot of movement, beyond the desired movement, just after I trigger the release. This is challenging to figure out, but easier to fix than when you just don’t know what you don’t know. At least I’m at a point where I know it’s my error and not just mysteriously wondering what my bow is doing (because I can’t recognize what it is that I’m doing wrong).

Part of my problem is target panic. That’s when you see that your sight is perfectly lined up with the bullseye and you try to rush the shot. For me, it’s a whole body experience, and I sometimes buckle a bit, with my bow hand not holding strong and my hands come slightly closer together. This is an awful movement in archery, and one I have to work on getting rid of. While it doesn’t happen a lot, I don’t know when it’s coming until I’ve already experienced it.

The cams on a compound bow create a ‘wall’ where you hold the shot where there is a let-off of the weight that’s pulling the string. So my 50lb bow, at full extension, has a 75% let-off and I’m only holding 12.5lbs, while a person with a recurve bow would be holding the full 50lbs. My job is to keep my extension and hold the bow ‘hard’ against the wall, but still be relaxed and not be stiff… Yet, also not be so relaxed that I let myself buckle when I see the bullseye lined up.

I know progress will be slow from here, but at least I’m in a good headspace where I can see a path forward. I’m going to make many more bad shots, but the good shots will be more frequent. I’m finally not just floundering and feeling like I’m not improving. Now I just need to keep shooting. 1,000 more arrows, then 1,000 more after that…

Post-it notes everywhere

My sister recently reminded me of how I used to write essays in school. While doing research, I’d write all my ideas down on Post-it notes. Then I’d take these notes and group them into big ideas. Then I’d take the big ideas and put them together into paragraphs.

I never wrote my introductory paragraph until I’d stitched all my Post-its into a cohesive essay body, then I’d decide what my thesis was and write my introduction. Then I’d go back and tweak the essay to fit.

The process looked chaotic, with these sticky paper squares completely surrounding me, sitting on my bedroom floor. Some of them stuck together in groups, others orphaned until I could figure out if I needed them. My dad would laugh at the sight, and make comments about my brain being filled with sticky notes.

Today, when I write on my office whiteboard, I see this come out in a different way. I don’t have Post-its stuck everywhere, but I see ideas stitched together and orphaned thoughts that I want to fit, but don’t. I have neat and tidy final drawings and ideas, and messily scratched words and thoughts that will be erased once I figure out how to expand on them and connect these ideas to the ones I’ve already decided to keep.

In a way, I’ve kept the same system, I just don’t use the post-its. I enjoy big thinking and stitching ideas together. I like making connections between unrelated things. I might have given up the process of writing with Post-it notes, but I haven’t given up on thinking the same way as when I used them. Over the next week, I’m going to pull out my post-its and see if they can’t help me advance my whiteboard thinking that has been stagnating recently.

Let’s see if this helps me… I’ll keep you posted. 😃

Don’t know what you don’t know

I broke my bow a couple weeks ago, and bought a used but better bow than the one I had. This new-to-me bow was used by a top Canadian archer at the World Championships a few years ago… it’s a better bow than I’ll ever need. But I’m having such a hard time with it.

To be clear, it’s not the bow, it’s me. I’m a go cart driver trying to drive a Ferrari. With my old bow, I could tell when I was shooting well and when I struggled. With this bow, I’m shooting and it feels good, but with inconsistent results. Good shots and bad shots feel the same. Worse shots feel like the bow has a mind of its own, torquing in my hand after my shot, the string hitting my arm. I never had this issue with my old bow.

Here’s the challenge, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong? I don’t know what I don’t know. I’ve made all kinds of adjustments and still get inconsistent results. Yesterday while practicing, my buddy who is helping coach me heard me complain (again) that the bow feels too narrow on my hand, and I don’t know why.

He said, ‘Well, you can keep complaining and do the same thing, and get the same results. Or you can stop and try to fix it.’ And he sent me to get cardboard and tape, and try to make the grip wider to see if that helped. Covid makes these conversations a bit tougher, because he’s making suggestions from a distance, where we would normally be shoulder-to-shoulder working this out. So, he shot a couple more rounds while I hacked away at cardboard and wrapped my handle in tape.

It seemed to work, a lot of inconsistencies went away. I started shooting better, and the string stopped hitting my arm after my shot. I came home and wrapped a new handle with better material than cardboard, surrounded by some tennis racket over grip.

I’ll give this a try for a while. It might help considerably. It might be one of many adjustments I make. It might be something that promotes bad habits and I might need to undo it and start all over again. I need to remember that I’ve only had this bow for two weeks, and I’m still a rookie on a huge learning curve. Right now I’m in an experimental phase and need to shoot my next 1,000 arrows before I can consider my feedback valid enough to ‘know’ more. It’s hard to fix things when you don’t know what you don’t know…

Cruise ships and education

It’s going to be a long time before cruise ships are going to reintegrated into people’s holiday schedules. Covid-19 has probably hit their market as hard as any other market. I actually had my first cruise planned through the Mediterranean last summer, but with that cancelled and refunded, I have no plans to ‘do’ a cruse any time soon.

The pandemic has also massively disrupted schools… but I fear that things will be business as usual soon, and kids will be ‘doing’ school just like they used to.

What was learned from remote learning and altered schedules?

What skills became more important?

What skills and competencies should we focus on?

What can students do at school besides going to block after block of classes?

I hope that we don’t just jump back into the way things used to be. Just as many will be cautious about getting on a cruise ship any time soon, we should also be cautious about heading back to school like it was in 2019.

Face-to-face Conferences

While I’m looking forward to our Professional Development Day this coming Friday, I wouldn’t be being honest if I said that I wasn’t missing conferences. I’ll be attending from my laptop, alone in my office. I won’t be going to a large auditorium for a keynote, sitting next to friends, making lunch plans, geeking out in conversations with people I don’t usually get to see, making podcasts between sessions… there is a lot of appeal to engaging with connections beyond the sessions you go to at a conference.

For me, it usually includes meeting ‘digital friends’, people that I know from online/Twitter, whom I’ve never met before face-to-face or whom I have met, but less times than I can count on one hand. These connections invariably make the conference great for me. And not only do I get to meet these wonderful people, they tend to be people that like geeking out with me about what we’ve learned. If I go to a mediocre session, no problem, I can chat with someone who went to a better one. Go to a great session, and now I’ve got someone to share it with out loud, to help me solidify what I’ve learned.

But beyond the learning, there is the human connection. There is the opportunity to be with people I don’t get to see often but I enjoy their company. It’s about being with my tribe. I’ll enjoy the sessions on Friday, but I really look forward to a time in the future when I can once again go to a conference, pick up my swag, and connect with people that make the whole conference experience great!

Documenting progress through journaling

When I restarted archery last December, I was told by my coach that I should be journaling after each practice. I don’t know why, but I decided that I’d do this using pen and paper. So when I come home from practice, I open my paper notebook and I reflect and journal. Then I take a photo of this and add it to an archery album on my phone, where I also add photos of my score cards.

At Inquiry Hub we are always telling students to document their journey. For some this is a natural thing that they do, for others it’s a challenge. I remember doing a presentation at a local conference, and I took along a few soon-to-be grads from our first year with iHub grads. An educator asked one of the grads, ‘What would you tell your younger self if you were to start back at Inquiry Hub all over again. (A great question.) One of my grads said, without missing a beat. “Oh that’s easy, I’d say, ‘document, document, document’.”

This student and his twin brother had done some amazing inquiries, however they didn’t journal along the way nearly as much as they should have. For example they assembled a very finicky 3D printer, and watched many amateur user videos to trouble shoot, but they didn’t make their own videos when they came up with clever fixes and hacks. Graduating and looking back, they could see what they missed out on.

Students can learn so much from regularly reflecting on both successes and failures. So too can adults. My journal today didn’t look at the frustration I had tuning my new bow. Instead I capitalized on the idea that, while my site and rest are still off, and I’m adjusting as I go, I can still focus on my shot process and do that well.

I know that keeping a learning journal has helped me with my progress as an archer. For some reason, I also feel that literally putting ‘pen to paper’ has helped me anchor in the lessons that a digital journal wouldn’t. And yet, I tend to look at the journal more because it is also available digitally on my phone. All this to say, that as part of a learning process, reflection and journaling are very effective.

Remember that along your learning journey, it’s a good idea to journal, reflect, and document, document, document.

Blockchain and education

Blockchain defined: Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network… ~ IBM

One place that I see blockchain technology being used in education is credentialing. Right now a general arts degree at a good university is a credential that says, ‘I know how to study, write essays, and express my ideas’. Unlike professional programs like engineering or law or med school, a general arts degree is about building more general skills. More and more jobs are not requiring a professional focused degree, but also demand more specific skills than a general degree.

Can a potential job candidate manipulate pivot tables in Excel? Or understand the basics of coding in python? Or use a design thinking process? These questions aren’t always answered by a degree, and might be answered by a certificate. What if Microsoft or other large companies delivered skill-based credentials through online courses? What if when you received certification of completion of the course, you didn’t just get an easily copied and doctored paper certificate, you also got digital certification that could not be doctored by you, but could be verified by anyone?

Imagine having a digital portfolio that linked to all your credentials in immutable ledgers. Your skills could be verified and job descriptions could include expectations of specific skills and credentials. What do you know? What can you do?

So, maybe in the future a college degree will be less impressive than a series of verifiable skills. Maybe high school students will start getting these credentials before they graduate. To me this had a few implications to think about:

1. If we move to a more skill-based economy, how will this affect our school curriculum?

2. If credentials and credentialing become a major driver to workforce hiring, will this force more specialization in high schools?

3. Where does that leave the soft skills like communication, critical thinking, and creativity?

Some people think that credentialing like this can replace teachers, I don’t. I think teachers become more valuable. Let credential testing and digital training measure the skills that are easily measured, and let teachers loose on helping students be more creative, more entrepreneurial, and better problem solvers. Let teachers focus on helping students trying things that are epic, things that are so big they are likely to fail, and help students understand perseverance. Have teachers focus on developing communication and cooperation skills, and helping students understand the importance of learning and process.

Credentialing won’t diminish the role of the teacher, it will magnify their importance in creating leaders and problem solvers. And to me, that’s the more exciting part of being a teacher.