Dave and I wanted to do something special on the first day of school as new retirees. I suggested hiking the Sea to Sky and taking the gondola down. We took the challenging route up. It was more technical than we expected, but totally doable. It took us a little over 2.5 hours.
What a great way to start the new school year. We might make something like this a new tradition.
It feels a bit weird. Good, but weird. Tomorrow is the first day back to school for teachers and students. Usually this evening is one of feeling the real crunch of ‘back to school’. Normally about now I’d be thinking about my staff meetings, and making sure enough food is ordered. I’d also be thinking of my year goals and feeling the excitement that comes with all the potential for a great school year ahead. But instead of a whirlwind of planning circulating in my brain, I’ve got a few set plans… Starting tomorrow with going on a hike with a buddy who also just retired.
I didn’t expect to feel this mentally free. I thought the new school year pangs would still haunt me. They aren’t. I think one of the things that made this transition so easy is that I got to work closely with my replacement for half a year and I know my schools have been left in excellent, competent hands. There is a catharsis that comes with knowing the schools I loved for 13 and 14 years are going to continue to thrive.
So, no planning to do other than to pack a lunch, drinks, snacks, and an extra layer of clothing. No slideshow presentations, no greeting nervous new students. No big yearly school goals. No staff meetings, no district directives to regurgitate. No obligations to share videos for health and safety or harassment or violence in the workplace… And no onslaught of emails!
I honestly wasn’t sure how ready I was to leave it all behind until now. But I’ve got plans. First, a plan to go for a hike. Then a plan to do the West Coast Trail in a week and a half. And then a plan to spend 3 weeks in Ontario visiting family and friends. And finally a plan to figure out what the rest of retirement looks like… some time in November.
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I wish everyone retuning to the new school year a great year ahead!
You don’t know.
You don’t know that when a kid asked a question, and you went on a personal tangent and told a little side story, that this unplanned moment was what a kid proudly talked about when her parent said, “What did you learn at school today?”
You don’t know that when a kid messed up (again), you were the only adult he knows who didn’t yell at him and actually gave him another chance.
You don’t know that the kid who comes to class early is doing so because you make them feel safe.
You don’t know that 5 years from now a kid will look back at you as their best teacher… ever.
You don’t know that you are the topic of conversation at dinner tables, because you make a student’s day fun.
You don’t know all the ways that you can make a student’s day special when you remember that you teach kids, not subjects, and you treat kids with dignity and respect.
You don’t know just how much power you have to change the lives of the students you serve.
I didn’t read it all word for word, and I ad libbed an ending to coincide with a couple references by student speeches and a video shared before I got up to speak… but here is my last grad speech, titled ‘Pay Attention’ as it was written.
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Yesterday was Father’s Day… and yes, I’m keenly aware that starting my speech with that suggests I wrote this speech as last minute as many of our grads completed their assignments over the last 4 years… but I digress.
Yesterday was Father’s Day and I was out for lunch with my family. Two tables next to us showed me a stark contrast in how families connect or disconnect. Both of these tables had someone my age at them. One of them, a woman, was alone with her elderly father, the other, a man, was with both of his senior parents.
The woman was leaning forward and listening intently to her dad. Juxtaposed to this, the man had his phone in his left hand for the entire meal, and barely ever looked away from it.
He scrolled, and typed, scrolled and typed, and even when his parents spoke to him, he didn’t look up when he responded. His parents had to wait for him to finish his meal to order dessert, but he didn’t speed up his eating, he focussed far more on his phone. Two tables, two totally different dynamics.
We live in an era of distractions. When our attention is elsewhere, it’s not where it should be.
And with that I’ll address our grads directly: Pay attention to what matters.
You’ve had a rich high school experience with teachers who didn’t just teach you the curriculum, they taught you how to think, how to formulate your ideas, and how to come to your own conclusions about the things that matter in this world.
Don’t pay attention to people who talk about their own truths. Don’t pay attention to AI slop designed to steal your time and attention. Don’t pay attention to extreme political views that are more interested in exciting anger than encouraging understanding. And don’t pay attention to those who profit from division, outrage, or fear.
Instead, pay attention to evidence. Pay attention to people who ask good questions. Pay attention to those who listen before they speak. Pay attention to the people in your life who challenge you to become wiser, kinder, and more courageous.
You’ve had a head start. You’ve been going to school in a community that fosters your individuality; a community that is accepting of different opinions, different perspectives, and let’s face it, different levels of quirkiness. All the while, allowing you to express your true self within a kind and accepting community. Take this with you wherever you go. Be the one who others appreciate, who others admire, and who understands when to speak up and to speak out.
The reality is that no other school makes you present and voice your views and opinions with authentic discourse more than iHub. And so, you are uniquely skilled to filter the BS that comes your way, to see through insincerity, and to be the one who speaks up and speaks out when no one else will.
However, it all starts with your attention.
A few of our former grads came back to talk to you a couple months ago. One of them who is on a sports team training for 20 hours a week and working part time on top of a full-time university course load said that Inquiry Hub prepared her to use her time well, and she’s shocked at how students feel overwhelmed with just their course loads. Another student said her professor complimented her on how good her essay was and she replied, “Really, I think my high school Humanities teacher would have given this a high ‘B’.”
I bring this up because you are headed into new learning opportunities where you can choose to be like other students, or you can design your learning journey like you did here at iHub. And the experience you have can be one driven by your attention, or by distractions.
Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess. Where you choose to invest it will, in many ways, determine the person you become when you get to my or your parent’s age… You’ve already gotten off to a good start.
Now I’d like to address the family and friends of our graduates. The Inquiry Hub staff: our teachers, secretaries, and custodians, have watched these young folks blossom over the past four years. They came to us with unique talents and gifts, and while some of them needed a lot of help to figure out how to thrive at school, some needed no help at all. But no matter their starting point, they have all grown tremendously in ways that are hard to measure.
You have a lot to be proud of in this group. They have not only thrived at school, they have also thrived in their activities in the community and thrived at work. They have made us so proud of them, and you should be proud too. Think back to what they were like four years ago.
Pay attention to the things they value and share with you. Watch the way they interact and engage with the world around them. They are wonderful human beings, and while parents can take pride and pat themselves on the back, remember that these young grads are also young adults who deserve to be appreciated for the fine people that they have become.
Stop and pay attention, and we can see what a community can build when people choose to invest their time, their energy, and their care in one another.
Graduates, in a world where everyone and every deviceis competing for your attention, remember that your attention is your life. Every hour you give away is an hour you never get back. Spend it on people. Spend it on ideas worth wrestling with. Spend it building things that matter.
And to your families: Thank you for giving these graduates your attention long before they ever earned a diploma. They are sitting here today because of countless rides, conversations, encouragements, reminders, sacrifices, and moments that probably seemed ordinary at the time. They weren’t ordinary. They mattered.
So today, celebrate this milestone. Put the phones away and look around this room. Pay attention to these graduates, to your families, and to this moment.
Because years from now, you won’t remember what was on your screen. You’ll remember who was sitting with you, who leant you an ear when you needed someone to listen to you, and who disagreed with you in class, but did so in a way that was respectful. And even if you never do another fishbowl discussion, you’ll remember that Inquiry Hub was the school you chose, you attended, and you gave your full attention to.
Congratulations, Class of 2026.
One of my favourite running jokes is that the biggest part of a Principal’s job is ‘Other duties as assigned’. The funniest part is that none of them are actually assigned. They are the jobs that spring up unexpectedly, and don’t really belong to anyone, and so they are either something a principal does themselves or something the principal has to delegate, which in itself is a task to do.
It can be as gross as clearing dog poop off of a field between custodial shifts. As industrious as assembling shelving that you thought would come pre-assembled. As mundane as scheduling staff at a special event to ensure appropriate supervision. Or as glorious as getting duck taped to a wall or getting a face full of whipping cream. It’s 1001 other duties ‘as assigned’… or it can be the many wonderful things I shared in my post called ‘Role of the Principal’ back when I was in China in 2010.
It’s really all the ‘other’ duties that makes a principal a principal.
“Here’s a great tool to help you…”
What inevitably comes next is a description of an activity devoid of pedagogy and purpose. As technology has crept into education, time and again I’ve seen the focus be on activity and ‘engagement’ but the so-called engagement is more about keeping a student’s attention rather than focusing on the learning intention; on the intended learning outcomes.
When achievement sneaks in, it’s not about student comprehension, but rather on improving test scores, a proxy for measuring success that is far from perfect. Again, this does not help with the practice of good teaching,
17 years ago I wrote that ‘Best Practice is still Practice’, and said, “What we don’t need is a bunch of processes labeled as ‘best practice’ to limit us from seeking something that is yet more effective. Best practice is still just practice.” We also don’t need a lot of flashy new tools that pretend to be about our practice when really they are just activities that keep student engaged and occupied. Activities that don’t really focus on meaningfully engaging students as learners on a learning journey.
What’s the pedagogy behind the activity?
A few months back I saw a video from a very articulate young girl who goes by Gluten Free Runner on TikTok. I liked the video but didn’t follow her. She just came back on my feed again and her recent video definitely earned her a follow.
She asks, “What if the way we measure intelligence is completely missing the point?” And then she reads a journal entry she wrote about school. I don’t want to say much about it other than please listen to it.
The description shared on the video says this:
“There’s a concept recently learned about called Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
We’ve optimized what can be measured: grades, test scores, credentials, things like that.
Maybe part of the issue is that we started treating those measurements as the thing itself, instead of just rough indicators of something much more complex.
Maybe the goal of education shouldn’t be to decide who is “smartest,” per se, but to help people understand how they can best contribute.”
Here is her video: https://www.tiktok.com/@gluten.free.runne/video/7649444429090000142
My favourite part is her questioning if we are being educated or schooled? “Education is a process. Schooling is an institution.”
No notes… just go watch her video.
I want to say that I’m not going to miss the June rush, but I will. I always chuckle a little when people who are not in education say things like, “You must be winding down to summer now.” It’s much more like ‘ramping up’ than ‘winding down’. There is so much going on in a school in June, and adding retirement events to this just makes it feel a little overwhelming.
Today is a crazy day for me. We have next year’s incoming students visiting for the day, followed by our final PAC meeting, followed by a district retirement dinner. From the moment I hit the gym at 6am until 8pm tonight I don’t have a moment to spare. That said, it should be a really fun day too.
That’s the thing about the June rush, it is simultaneously great and exhausting. It’s a month of dichotomies. It’s I time of event-after-event, but each one of those events is a bit of a celebration. There is excitement about graduation, and ending the year, and there is the sense that the pace is all too much. There is the excitement of changes to come, and the sense of sadness of things ending.
Here’s the thing about the June rush, it’s easy to get stuck in the busyness, in the rush and the planning of event after event, in the checking off the last time you have to do something, and in the melancholy of knowing things are coming to an end. Meanwhile, each event is a gift. Each event is an opportunity to spend time with students and colleagues, and to celebrate the year that was. Yes, June is really busy, but within that busyness is hidden many moments to appreciate.
I’ve repeatedly said what a privilege it was to start my teaching career where I did. I was surrounded by new and truly great teachers whom I got to grow up with. Some of them are still my closest friends today, and many of them are principals. Even the ones who didn’t go the route of administration, are still great teacher leaders today.
One benefit of entering the profession in this incredible environment is that we had a culture of sharing and cooperation, and it was common to see another teacher or the principal or vice principal visit classrooms. If the VP walked into your room, you didn’t stop teaching, you kept going until a good stopping point. In fact, the VP might even contribute to the lesson.
Another aspect of this is that we barely ever sent anyone to the office. In 9 years at a middle school I can only remember sending 2 students to the office, there might have been more, but like I mentioned in my post, “The 4 ‘D’s leading to office discipline”, I could count my office referrals on one hand. But the point I want to make here was also mentioned in that post but not explicitly discussed.
When you get into administration of a school, one of the most shocking things you’ll encounter is that some teachers use the administration as part of their classroom management strategy. Coming from the environment I did, teachers managed their classroom and something ‘really serious’ had to happen before a student was sent to the office. Other than that, we figured things out.
My first assignment as VP was filled with office referrals that shocked me. I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself, ‘That’s it? That’s all this kid did? And that’s why he’s in my office?’ This was my biggest adjustment, a huge realization of how amazing my first 9 years were at Como Lake Middle School. We had a culture of learning and caring that was significantly above the norm, and so ‘normal’ felt insufficient.
I currently work at schools where I find that not only are office referrals appropriate, but I’ll often get a ‘heads-up’ of a potential issue, and then that issue could still get handled without me. But my first VP job was a shocker. The adjustment I had to make was to not make unhealthy comparisons to my previous experience. Yes, this issue would have been handled differently at Como Lake, but things are different here.
It was a hard transition, to be supportive and not judgmental. Like I said before, “In my eyes, sending a kid to the office was essentially telling the kid, “I cant manage you,” which takes away any leverage I may have the next time this student has any challenging behaviour.”
Now, the complaints I deal with for my online school are often ones where parents are already involved, making the situation a bit more complicated before they get to me. Or at Inquiry Hub, kids are sent to me to solve good problems… they want to do a project that needs special permission or considerations. I love solving problems where my biggest challenge is, how do I get to ‘Yes’? How do I solve this problem so that our students can benefit? These are by far my favourite office referrals… rather than doling out consequences for inappropriate behaviour.
Facebook reshared a ‘Blast from the past’ post with me, it was a Daily-Ink post titled, ‘I teach leadership not followship’. This title is a quote from friend, and first teaching mentor, Dave Sands. What I enjoyed most about seeing this post again was the Facebook comments on it. Here are 2 from colleagues and one from myself:
Dave MacLean:
l’ve drawn from so many experiences from our days as Lakers. Truly the environment that pushed all of us in such a healthy way. So many strong leaders with such mutual respect for each other. I would be lying if I said there weren’t days where I pang for those days of pedagogical debate and learning. Tha for the trip down memory lane. I was recently at Como for an articulation meeting and our legacies are still present in the culture 15 years later.
David Truss:
Dave MacLean I can’t think of a richer learning environment than what we had. I believe that more than 1/3 of the teachers we worked with in the first 5 years at Como Lake became administrators… yet it was always about collaboration not competition, and servant leadership, by staff as well as students.
Elaan Bauder Gudlaugson:
Dave MacLean, David Truss
Como Lake was my first experience in education that taught me about how I wanted “school” to be. The staff made all the difference.
I’m fortunate to have reunited with Elaan, and we have worked together again at Inquiry Hub for the last 5 years. And she’s right… the staff really does make the difference!
It’s hard not to get a bit nostalgic as I head into retirement. And this is a good thing. To this day my closest friends are still people I connected with in those early years of teaching. We knew we had something special going on. We still see former students in the community who tell us things like, “We could tell you liked each other and that you liked us.” And, “Those were the best years of school for me.”
I entered education with an inspiring group of people who were also amazing educators and leaders. We grew up together as educators and we watched our families and children grow up too. I wish every educator could find a community like this in their early years, because I know I had something special.
There is nothing wrong with being nostalgic when I can frame it as being lucky and blessed to have had the opportunities to learn and grow within the community that I got to. It paved the way to a career I can look back on with love, warmth and fondness.
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Update: Two more posts where I share this perspective.
