Tag Archives: relationships

Parenting adults

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As an educator, I’ve seen the struggle some parents have with creating boundaries. For example, there are parents who don’t parent because they don’t want to undermine their friendship with their kid. They don’t parent their kid, they raise a buddy. From my experience, this is not good parenting of a school-aged kid. Kids need parental guidance, not just a supportive friend.

As a parent of two young adults, things change.

My wife and I took our youngest out for a birthday dinner last night. It’s hard to believe that my baby girl is 24! During the dinner she made a simple statement, “I’m so glad you two aren’t just my parents but friends I want to be around too.”

That hit a chord with me. My kids aren’t just my kids anymore. They are adults who I enjoy being around, who I want to spend time with, who I miss when I don’t see them. It’s not just that they are my kids, it’s not just that I’m their parent, they are amazing people I want in my life.

That simple statement said so much. It made me feel lucky, blessed. My wife and I raised two awesome kids, and they in turn have given us the ultimate gift in return… they enjoy our company as much as we enjoy theirs. ❤️

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Ps. All that said, I’m still Dad, they are still my kids, as my youngest reminded my by sending me a TikTok about all the things she’ll never learn to do… because that’s a dad’s job! 😆

A quick road trip

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Later today I head to Kamloops for an all-day meeting tomorrow. The principals of Provincial Online Schools are meeting. We connect with the Ministry of Education in the morning, and spend the rest of the day addressing concerns and supporting each other. While there is an option to connect online, it can’t be understated how valuable it is to meet face to face occasionally.

I’ve shared this before, but it’s an important point: I have more in common with these principals than I do with all my colleagues in my school district. Online learning has different funding rules than regular schools; Different approaches to learning and support of students; Different demands at different times of the year. We also have very different needs for support, and a lot of times we look to each other for that support.

Sure, we are a group that are comfortable connecting online, and we do that often. We even have a WhatsApp group where we ask questions and support each other. But there is something really special about getting together face-to-face a few times a year. And while that meeting usually happens a bit more locally for me, it’s my turn to put some travel time in.

It will be a short, overnight trip, but it will be worth it to connect with my long distance colleagues.

A little escape

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My wife and I got away for a couple nights to Whistler. We had an event Saturday night in Pemberton, but stayed Friday night as well. Besides having the smoothest, fastest drive there and back, we also had a fabulous weekend getaway.

We checked in at 6pm and ordered room service. Then didn’t leave the hotel until we left for the party at 5:30pm Saturday night. We didn’t go into the village, we didn’t do anything other than go to breakfast at the hotel restaurant, and I had a short workout and hot tub before my wife got up Saturday morning. Lunch was junk food and protein shakes that we brought with us.

In other words, other than meals made for us, we didn’t do anything we couldn’t have done at home. In fact, my gym and hot tub are nicer than the ones at the hotel. Yet it was a fabulous little escape.

Isn’t it wonderful to step outside of the usual routine and go somewhere other than home? We enjoyed the party Saturday night, but even more so we enjoyed the getaway. Sometime a little change of scenery is all you need, no big plans, no schedules, just time away doing nothing special other than being together. We don’t need big plans all the time. Sometimes small, almost ‘nothing’ plans away from home are more than enough.

Little shifts for little things

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She never puts the cap back on the toothpaste.

He never puts the toilet seat down.

The kids never put their shoes in the front hall closet.

I could go on, there are so many little things that family members do that can irk us. None of them are a really big deal, but they rub us the wrong way and perhaps even anger us. We might think them as thoughtless acts. We might even think they are doing it just to bother us… the thing is, they aren’t.

My wife, Ann, has a problem shutting cupboard doors. We joke that it’s genetic, her sister does it, and one of my daughters does it too. I’ll walk into the kitchen and one or two cupboard doors will be left open. It’s not an occasional thing, it’s a very regular thing. And when I see this, do you know what I think?

Ann was here.

That’s it. Nothing else. There’s no anger, no need to correct the behaviour. No lecture.

Sometimes it gets a smile out of me. Sometimes I try to guess what she went into the cupboards for?

What it’s not is an anger point, or a reason to lecture or correct the behaviour. This might seem like a little thing, but like I mentioned, this happens all the time. Just imagine what my life would be like if I let it bother me?

So what are some little things that others do, that you let bother you? How much better would your life be if you just let it go? That little behaviour isn’t being done to bother you, so if it does bother you, who is the one that has the problem?

Small mountains

We’ve all heard the term, ‘Making mountains out of molehills’, and understand what it means. What we don’t realize is how often we do it. It’s easy to see when someone else does it, but not us. No, our escalated concerns are little mountains. They aren’t mole hills. Other people do that, not us. Our concerns are real… or rather really big.

Except they are not.

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Being a school principal involves a lot of deciding how big to make an issue. Dismissing a problem is only allowing it to get bigger. Overreacting to a small problem can bring too much attention to it and make it bigger.

Being overly supportive of one side of an issue can make the other side escalate the size of the issue. Being neutral can equally exasperate the issue and create a mountain out of a molehill.

An insincere apology can be worse than no apology. Too harsh or illogical of a consequence can be as harmful as being too easy. Because to kids, to young adults learning to navigate the world, their mole hills are little mountains. To them the issues are not small.

But if we’re honest, we think our mole hills are mountains too… and that’s an important point to keep in mind when we get a little frustrated wondering why these little issues seem so big to everyone else.

The difference between a mountain and a mole hill might not be the size of the problem, but simply a matter of perspective. And that’s a perspective worth keeping in mind.

Breaking bread

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.

Information abundance requires pattern recognition

What a fantastic quote by Adam Grant,

“The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It’s how well you synthesize.

Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.

It’s not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.”

Pattern recognition and synthesis are the path to innovation, ingenuity, and invention. The collection of knowledge is not enough. Wisdom comes from recognizing how to make connections across different fields, how to make meaning out of relationships that not everyone sees.

Artificial Intelligence can give us the knowledge we seek. It can dumb down the ideas to our level of understanding, and even teach us with relevant examples when we are stuck. More information won’t be what we seek. Instead we will seek new connections, patterns, and relationships.

The desired experts of tomorrow are probably not the siloed experts we once sought. Instead they will be information generalists who understand how to take information from different fields, identify relationships others don’t see, and synthesize information such that they can tell a story others won’t know to tell.

How are we preparing the next generation of learners for this new future? How will schools need to change to help students prepare for the future in a world of abundant and easily accessible information? It certainly won’t be by feeding them content. Instead, the future of education lies in creating challenges where students need to synthesize information and recognize connections and patterns across different fields of study.

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Related: My ‘Transforming Our Learning Metaphors’ Ignite Presentation from almost a decade ago.

The blame game

It’s easier to point a finger outward than it is to point it inward.

It’s more comfortable to see the faults in others than to accept the faults of our own.

It’s less work to hold others accountable than to accept responsibility.

Accusations are not as scary as being vulnerable.

It’s simpler to rationalize than it is to be critically introspective.

Accepting responsibility rather than blaming is hard work. Owning your own shit is hard work. Making things right when things have gone wrong is hard work… especially since sometimes right just means better, and no matter what you do, you can’t get back to the way things used to be.

But when you play the blame game nothing gets better. In fact, things usually get worse. Most punishment and discipline is about blame. Being restorative means sharing the responsibility to make things better.

Accepting ownership of your own actions and consequences, that’s when personal growth happens. That’s when we get unstuck. That’s when we begin to create an empowered reality rather than a sense of victimization.

How do we make things better? That’s not always an easy question to ask, and it’s usually very hard to answer. But the answer is never blame.

Closing the gap

There are people, both friends and family, for whom time between connections always seems small. You don’t see a friend for months, even years, and when you finally reconnect the distance that has passed disappears.

More lines on our faces, more grey in our hair or less hair, but the same person, the same relationship, the same bond remains. Time moves more slowly when the bond between friends is strong. It is as if the time between meeting is somehow time-shifted. Just as Einstein’s theory of relativity explains how traveling faster slows time down, it seems that gaps of time between friends meeting has a relativity to it.

The time gap travels closer to the speed of light. All other experiences between visits race by in the blink of an eye, and the time between visits disappears. Friendships have a relative time that closes the gap between visits. And when friends meet again it is as if the gap between visits was nothing but a passing moment.

There is a general relativity of friendship, and rooted within it friendship is timeless.

Evening walk

When I arrived home yesterday I felt pretty wiped out. I could tell that I was not going to do much for the evening. A long day followed by dinner and just about nothing else. Then my wife suggested a walk.

We had a great walk. We bumped into people we knew and had a wonderful conversation, and we came back home feeling refreshed.

I take a lot of walks with my wife and also with a good friend. And yet I am still in awe of how much they can change my disposition; how they can alter my mood.

There is something special about walking with someone you care about. Last week I walked with my daughter and it was the most we talked in months. That’s mostly because I was on holidays away from her the entire summer, but it was still a great conversation we had, and would not have had if she didn’t suggest the walk.

Need some time to connect or reconnect with someone? Skip the coffee shop or pub and go for a walk.