Tag Archives: reflection

What could have been

I feel it every year.

It’s the last official day of school, an administrative day. Students picked up report cards yesterday and teachers wrap things up today. This is the day that I look back and think of what could have been. I think of the lost opportunities, the missed potential, the goals unmet.

I know I’ll look back and see the accomplishments as summer begins, but for some reason this day has always been melancholy, and sadly nostalgic (if that makes sense). It’s weird. I don’t tend to be the kind of person that holds regrets and wallows on missed opportunities, but this day always harbours feelings that the year could have been better. Specifically, on this day I look back and feel that I could have, and should have, been better and given more of myself to the school year.

It’s a feeling that’s hard to shake, through the goodbyes and the well wishes for a wonderful summer. It will go away, but today it sits with me, now and throughout the day ahead. Oh, what could have been! It sounds sad, but in a way, it holds me accountable and makes me want next year to be better. There are “promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

While the past holds many successes, and the future holds much potential, today I sit with what could have been.

Final week of school

This time of year is always challenging. The days are filled with loose odds and ends being tied up, and I’m usually both nostalgic about the wonderful year it has been, while also disappointed that we didn’t do more. How did our little Grade 9’s of four years ago graduate so quickly?

I’m going to miss our graduating class next year, but in all honesty, I’ve been missing them since the March break, when remote learning began. This has been a whirlwind few months and while I usually try to hold on to these final days and cherish them, I find myself thinking, ‘Let’s just get this year over and done with!’

This isn’t a typical year-end feeling for me. I want to see yearbooks passed around. I want to see students hugging each other goodbye. I want to hear the exciting summer plans of students and teachers.

I want to feel like there is some normalcy to the end of the school year. Instead, I find myself being underwhelmed, tired, and wanting to reach Friday as soon as possible. Just admitting that makes me feel disappointed. I think part of this feeling is that so much effort was put into making last week special, that it already feels like the year has ended. The grad – celebrations, the final presentations, even a virtual brunch organized by one of our teachers.

It isn’t that this year wasn’t special, it’s just that it already feels over. And so admittedly, I’m ready for a break, and while I still have a couple weeks of finishing the year off, a part of me feels I’m already done.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way.

No more Daily Ink posts on my personal FB page

If you read my Daily Ink post via my Facebook Story, or on my wall, please follow my Pairadimes Facebook page. If you read my blog post somewhere else, just skip to the last paragraph.

As I approach a year of Daily-Ink blog posts, after leaving this blog dormant for a while, I’m reflecting on the process. One thing that I like about when I hit “Publish” on my blog is that it gets auto-posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my Pairadimes Facebook page. Then I manually go to the FB post on my page and add it to my FB story and my FB wall. I’m no longer going to do this. The challenge is that I often write my post either the night before it gets posted or I write it in the morning over an hour before I post it, (I like to have it done before my morning meditation and workout).

So, daily I have this task that I need to remember to do… and it becomes a chore rather than something I want to do. It also makes me feel like I’m ‘plugging my blog’, saying “Look at me!” And while I love comments and engagement on my blog, I do find I write better when I focus on the writing itself and not an audience of readers. Having my Daily-Ink blog automatically go to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my FB page is enough. Please follow my posts at one of these sites if you normally read my blog on my Facebook wall. Today is the last day I regularly share my posts on my FB wall or on my story.

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And as a special request to all readers, I do love your comments! Comments make the blogging experience better. However when I get a comment on Facebook or LinkedIn, or in a a tweet, they are fleeting. They end up on my timelines, never to be seen again. However, I go back to my blog posts often, and a comment there becomes part of a historical conversation that becomes part of the blog. So as a special request, please comment on my blog posts rather than in social spaces. ~ Thank you!

More than academics

Last night we did a livestream of iHub Annual, a yearly celebration that includes presentations, awards, and our Grad. It was one hour long, but it took a couple hundred hours of work to put together, including running the social distancing grad celebration a couple nights before. It didn’t go perfectly, there were a few kinks, but overall it went very well! Our awards at our school are minimal: Leadership & Community service, inquiries, and the Grade 12 ‘Spirit of Inquiry’ Award, for the grad or grads who exemplify what it means to combine leadership/community and also produce amazing inquiry projects.

Highlighting the service to our community (the school or greater community) is something that makes me appreciate what schools do beyond academics.

It’s interesting to think of how remote learning has interrupted the feeling of community, but we still try to bring kids together. One of our teachers started a watch party of the livestream on Teams, and going to check out the chat conversation afterwards was heartwarming. The students watching were complimenting the student performances, congratulating the award winners, and sharing in the celebration of the night. It really was powerful.

This morning a video, Numb – a short film by Liv McNeil, was shared with me:

While remote learning works for some, for others it just isn’t school. I think about how much of what we highlight in our year-end celebration has to do with community, compared to a focus on academics… and it really makes me think about how much more of school is about belonging, and well-being, and community. That isn’t to say academics isn’t important, it’s just that school does so much more than give students final marks on a transcript.

Community and Belonging

Yesterday 18 Inquiry Hub grads crossed the stage and received their high school diplomas. They then went to a room and stood behind a camera for a quick 3-5 minute interview. I watched them all, hearing what they had to say about their experience at our school. Time and again I heard them speak of enjoying the community and relationships they built with each other.

I know we have challenges at the school and things can always be better, and I know that in a small school, things can get cliquey, but we have been able to foster a lot of cooperation and acceptance of very different groups.

One of our students who has thrived at our school was actually out of school, taking online courses having been completely dissatisfied with her previous school experience. She was coming to our building to do testing, (I’m principal of the online school too, and Inquiry Hub shares a room with the online school to offer testing twice a week). She said that when she came in for testing she could feel the positive atmosphere from the school and knew that it would be a good place for her.

We’ve had educators come through to visit the school and they have said the same thing. This has been a constant. It even happened 4 years ago when we were struggling to build community with two student groups that felt more like factions than cliques. It was weird, here we were struggling to build community and even bringing in an elder to do a circle, and a couple days later four educators from Alberta spend a morning with us, and when I meet them at lunch they told us what a great vibe they had, and what a positive learning environment it was.

As I said, we are far from perfect, but we strive to help everyone feel like they belong. Our school special events and celebrations are run with a lot of student input and organization. But this has been much harder to do with students mostly learning remotely. The iHub Annual tomorrow night is usually 90% student run. This year its being run by me and two former students hired to assist. Their expertise will go a long way in making the event special, and since they are brothers they can work closely together while we still respect social distancing expectations. It will go well, it won’t be the same as a team of students both running the event and training the younger students, which normally happens this time of year for us.

With the likelihood of school starting up in a limited capacity in September, I wonder what we will need to do differently to foster that sense of community and belonging? It’s harder to build community than it is to sustain it, and so we will need to intentionally think about what we do to keep our positive sense of community going next year.

A simple question

I’m always intrigued by the questions we ask ourselves. We worry, and fret about things that could, but don’t happen. We ask stupid questions like, ‘Why me?’ So that our brains fill the void with reasons that make us feel like victims of our own circumstances. We ask for advice, but then we don’t listen to the advice given to us.

Here is a good questions to ask:

What can I say or do to make today better for another person in my life?

It’s a simple question that can bring as much joy to yourself as it does to someone else.

Twitter has changed, but so have I

Back in November, I celebrated 12 years on Twitter and I reflected,

“I still love Twitter, and it is still my go-to place to connect and learn from others when I’m online. But, 12 years in, I miss the power of this network to engage me in deep learning filled with rich conversation. However I also recognize that my focus has changed too. I transmit more than I converse, I dabble more than I engage. If I’m honest, I probably could not have maintained the engagement I gave Twitter at that time for 12 years.“

Recently, I responded to a tweet that asked: “has anyone ever found a friend through twitter and actually met up with them?”

https://twitter.com/hashplanted/status/1260988566676668422?s=21

And I responded, “Again and again and again…”, then shared a few examples:

I genuinely miss the days when I would get onto Twitter at about 4:30, after a day of teaching, and I’d scroll my timeline all the way back to the last tweet that I read in order to ‘catch up’ on what I missed during the day. I miss conversations that would last 15+ tweets, with others joining in to the ‘conversation’, and I miss the sense of connectedness and intimacy I had with genuine friends that I had never met face to face. I miss how Twitter was connected to blogging, and conversations went from sharing a link to conversations in the blog’s comments. It was a different time, and it comes with some nostalgia.

But as much as Twitter has changed, so have I. I lurk a lot more. I move conversations to Direct Messages, or other communication tools. I transmit – meaning, when I write this Daily-Ink, or a post on Pair-a-Dimes, or on my Podcast, or YouTube, then I share a link on Twitter… sometimes my last 3 or 4 Tweets might be me sharing something I’ve done. This can seem like I’m marketing or doing self-promotion, and some people don’t like that… I look at it 2 ways: 1. I produced some content to share, and I’d actually like some attention on it for the effort. And, 2. Is it really self-promotion when I’m not selling anything?

If it really bothers someone, it’s really easy to hit the unfollow button. I also don’t read and comment on as many blogs as I used to, and so I’m not engaging the way I wishes others do. That said, I still find it funny when someone retweets a link I share (be it to my content or someone else’s) faster than it would take to read the content that was shared! I make it a rule not to share anything I haven’t taken the time to read or watch myself.

So, as much as I miss the old days of Twitter, I’m using Twitter differently and can’t expect the same experience I had before smartphones, hashtags, and less than 500 people on my timeline. Things have changed. But I still love Twitter, and 95+% of the time I see good things and ‘Angry Twitter’ doesn’t show up in my network. That’s a far better ratio than Facebook, and my community on Twitter that I engage with is still pretty awesome. It’s not what it used to be, but neither am I.

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PS. Twitter EDU is a free eBook I wrote to help people find greater value in the tool when they get started. Share it, if you know someone that can use it.

2nd place

It’s the proudest I’ve ever been as a coach. But we didn’t win the game. I was coaching the York Maverick Juvenile (17 and under) Girls Water Polo Team, in the gold medal game, at the Provincial Championships in Guelph, Ontario. It was a round-robin tournament and we came in first in the preliminaries, and then won against the 4th place team to get to the finals.

The other team, that got second in the prelims, and was competing against us for gold was Ottawa. The Ottawa team was significantly more experienced than us and we were the underdogs when we beat them in the preliminaries. We had never beat them in the regular season, and my girls played amazing, shocking everyone by winning that game. It was the early 90’s so this next point might be off by a little bit, but I recall that with a dozen 17-and-under year old players on each team, Ottawa had about 27 more years playing experience than us. They were expected to easily sweep the tournament after a perfect season. That didn’t happen. My girls played the game of their lives to that point and we went into the gold medal game having beat them once the day before.

A couple hours before the gold medal game I held a team meeting in one of the hotel rooms. We were packed in, and actually had to go into the hallway to demonstrate a defensive move we needed to work on. One of the Ottawa plays they were doing was this pick or screen that I thought was illegal. One of their players would swim away from the play and do this screen, with the sole intention of impeding one of my players covering another player. I thought it was illegal, the referees wouldn’t call it. So we went to the hotel hallway so that we could see and feel what needed to be done to prevent this from working as well as it did in the previous game. We also had an impromptu violin performance from one of the girl’s boyfriends, and the girls were pumped to go play, and hopefully beat, this previously intimidating Ottawa team again.

The gold medal game was intense, it was exciting, and it was nerve-wracking! My girls were once again playing the game of their lives. We were even up by a couple goals at the half. But the Ottawa team was well coached, very good, and they didn’t panic. They played their own experienced, confident game and half-way through the final period they took a one goal lead.

I called a time-out, and gave my starters a bit of a rest. I can’t say that I gave them any kind of special pep talk, simply telling them to rest and keep playing the strong game that they played all along, and to muscle through that illegal pick that was still causing us grief. Good defense means less goals for them and more time on offence for us. Our team tied the game pretty quickly and every play going into the final minutes of the period were anxiety-filled and intense. The period ended on a tie.

The overtime rules for the medal round was two 3-minute periods, then if still tied, the game went into 5-minute sudden death periods. In the first overtime period Ottawa scored and we couldn’t answer. In the second overtime, Christine drew a kick-out (penalty) from the hole (the centre offence) and she scored on the power play. The two timed overtime periods ended in a draw, now came the sudden death rounds.

So many years later, I don’t remember how long they played in this final period. I only remember the final sequence that ended the game. We were on offence and our shot clock was running out. Arianna caught a pass from about 7 meters out and we were all yelling, “Shoot!” Arianna took the shot, the ball hit the crossbar and floated on the goal line. I remember seeing the goal judge, on the same side of the pool deck as us, stand up out of his chair, flag in hand ready to wave it if the ball fully crossed the goal line. It didn’t. The goalie reached back and plucked the ball from its precarious spot, half-way into the net. We were literally centimetres away from winning the goal medal game… millimetres if you consider the location of the ball as it hit the crossbar.

The goalie then passed the ball down the right wing, it was passed further down to one of Ottawa’s strongest players. She had a slight lead on my player, but my player was swimming hard and taking good position to prevent a breakaway to the net. The Ottawa player picked up the ball and took a hard shot across the net. My goalie, Titia, made a great save. She had the angle covered and had to reach across the net to block the shot. She did, but the rebound landed right on the hand of an Ottawa player, who did a quick wrist-shot before the defence could react. With such a quick rebound shot, Titia was still out of position from the previous shot and the wrist shot went easily into the unprotected side of our net.

We lost.

I remember tears welling up in my eyes. Yes, it hurt to lose. Yes, it was gut-wrenching to think how close we came to winning less than 20 seconds earlier. But as much as that hurt filled me, I also felt joy. I felt proud of what my girls had done. They played their hearts out. They put everything they had into they game. I remember Christine holding on to the edge of the pool, my fittest athlete, asking for help to get out. After helping her, she lay on the pool deck exhausted, defeated, having put everything into the game. I remember seeing the tears in everyone’s eyes and just being overwhelmed, not in disappointment as much as in pride. These girls did everything they could to win. They played for the second game in a row against a much more experienced team, and showed that they were worthy opponents. They were silver medalists with hearts of gold.

I’ve coached gold medal winners. I’ve played in gold medal games, and worn the gold medal around my neck as a player and as a coach. I’ve never had a moment in sports that I’ve been more proud of a team than I was in that tournament, and that second place finish.

The tech won’t always work… and that’s ok.

I’ve been ‘playing’ with digital learning and technology for a while now. My first blog post was in 2006 and my first podcast was in 2012. It’s Sunday night and I published a podcast over an hour ago. It usually takes a while to get onto iTunes, because first it has to go to a podcast hosting site called Blubrry. I did this a week and a half ago, and it went to Blubrry and then to iTunes pretty quickly. But tonight the new podcast won’t move to that first step, and I have no idea why? Even after I ‘ping‘ the website, (even though that should happen automatically), my post won’t go to Blubrry. That’s the frustrating thing, I don’t think I did anything different but somehow it won’t work. It might need time, and everything will be fine in the morning by the time this is published. It might not and I’ll have a whole lot of troubleshooting to do.

I do podcasts for fun. I do podcasts to learn. I’ll learn from this, but right now it doesn’t feel like fun.

Educators, as you head into the new world of ‘remote learning’, while we cope with social distancing, empty schools, and COVID-19 continuing to keep us physically separate, please realize that the technology doesn’t always work as planned. It doesn’t always work for the neophytes, and it doesn’t always work for the people like me that think they know what they are doing. When you get frustrated, and you will, remember this: Remember a time when you were really excited to teach a lesson. You stayed up late figuring things out and setting up the handouts for kids. Then you got to school and the photocopier jams horribly. You have no time to get your printing done. Dang! Your whole plan is done and needs reworking. At that point, you didn’t say to yourself, “That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again!” That would be silly.

You’ll try using some technology for the first time and it won’t go as planned. You’ll try doing a video conferencing lesson and it will flop. You’ll have students doing things you didn’t expect them to do. And you’ll work it out. You’ll connect with your students. You’ll laugh at yourself and they’ll laugh too. You’ll get a lesson or two from a student that knows more than you. And soon, you’ll feel much better about the technology and the strategies you are using.

Oh, and even then, there will be times when the technology doesn’t work… and that’s ok.

The quick answer isn’t always the best answer

Tomorrow marks the first day back from March break in our school district. Teachers will not be returning Monday/Tuesday, and can schedule a time to come in to collect resources etc. after that. The continuation of learning plan will evolve over the week in response to schools being closed to students due to COVID-19.

I know that students and families want to know what things will look like after that, but no one is rushing to give answers, and for good reason… This is all very new to us and our approach moving forward deserves thoughtful planning.

We need to consider:

  • Ministry expectations and requirements
  • District plans and protocols
  • Capabilities of staff & technology
  • Capabilities and needs of students and families
  • Fairness with respect to expectations across the district and province.

This last point is interesting. At one my schools, Inquiry Hub, we could almost run everything the same. Every class already has shared digital spaces. We could have students meet on Microsoft Teams during class time and students are only in class 40-60% of their day, so they could still have large parts of the day to do school work, and inquiry projects, and have free time. But how fair is it for us to expect this of them at home, when no other school is expecting this? How fair is it when we don’t know how equitable home situations and supports are?

We need to go slowly. We need to ask a lot of questions. We need to think about expectations at the provincial, district, school, and home levels.

A quick response will not be as good as a slow, thoughtful response. The pandemic has everyone thinking in ’emergency response mode’. What we need now is long term thinking and planning. We can’t treat a continuation of schooling like we are in a constant crisis with immediate response time required. We have to remember that the school year ends at the end of June, and quick responses now, without thinking and processing time, will not help us get to the end of June in a thoughtful and supportive way. We need to slow things down, think things through, and put the long term well-being of our students first.