Tag Archives: school

Last day

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It’s the last day of school for teachers. Summer break begins for them at 3pm today. I can’t help but feel a bit sentimental at the end of each school year. It really hit me at our grad on Monday, and now again today.

I feel blessed to work at the schools I do. I feel lucky to work with the staff that I do.

It our district we tend to see administrative shuffles around 5 years, and occasionally a principal might stay in a school for 7-8 years. This is my 12th year with Inquiry Hub and 13th with Coquitlam Open Learning. Although most of those years I was actually vice principal, I have been the lead administrator for 11.5 years. That’s rare.

The fact that I’ve been here, at these two unique schools, for this long has been a blessing. In all honesty, had I been moved, I probably would have resigned by now. It’s really, really hard to go back into a traditional box after spending so long out of the box.

But it’s not just the schools themselves that have me feeling sentimental, it’s also the staff. I’m truly lucky to work with the teachers and secretaries that I’ve had the honour to work with. It’s pretty special to walk into a building every day and want to be around the people who you work with.

It is great when I get the opportunity to join the staff in the staff room at lunch. It’s special when the secretaries volunteer their time at evening events because they want to be there to celebrate the students. It’s amazing to watch teachers consistently do what’s great for kids in innovative and creative ways.

On this last day of school I feel blessed. And while I’m certainly looking forward to summer, there is already a little excitement about starting the new year… but that’s getting way ahead of myself. First things first… I’m going to enjoy our last day.

Officially counting down

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Report cards go out tomorrow and Friday is the last day with staff to end the school year… and I’m done! Yes, I’ll be in next week, and there’s a fair bit to clean up before it’s officially summer, but I’m feeling checked out.

Not much left in the gas tank.

It started in June, people asking, “So, are you counting down to summer yet?” I probably heard that question a good 10-12 times in the first three weeks of June, and I always responded with a version of ‘Not yet’. I was being honest, I am not really someone who counts down to big events until they are very, very close.

Well, ask me today and my response is, “Absolutely, I’m counting down!”

I’m ready for summer.

Going to miss them

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We had our grad event last night. Seven performances, mostly from Grade 12’s, and student speeches that left me teary eyed. This one hit me harder than most. These grads feel more like family than students.

I’m realizing that I’ve got some work to do to connect with the other grades next year because it seemed that any time I was out of my office, this was the cohort I gravitated to. Every year seems to offer something a little different. Many students in this group would visit the office almost daily. Grade 12’s need to sign in when they don’t have a first block class, and my secretaries would have full 5 minute conversations with these students. Inevitably I’d get pulled in too.

I get a little nostalgic every year around this time, but I have to say that this grad class was really something special and I’m going to miss them!

Old School Internet

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Our students decided on ‘Old School Internet’ as the theme for this year’s school yearbook. But of course at a maximum age of 18, none of our students actually knew what it was like. So, for my principal’s message, I tried to give them a little taste of what they missed.

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It’s fun for students today to have something like ‘Old School Internet’ as a Yearbook theme, but as someone who ‘lived’ it, let me tell you that you don’t know the pain it caused. Here’s an example: A little-known fact about me is that I designed and patented a bicycle lock. To do this, I had to do a lot of research because a patent can not infringe on other previous patent designs. So back in the old internet days I would have to log onto the internet using my phone (cue the retro sound for this that brings back instant but not gratifying nostalgia)… then I’d go to the slow and clunky US Government Patent Office website and every search would take 15-30 seconds to load. Then I’d see a patent I’d be interested in and that would take 15-plus seconds to load. I’d read about a patent that seemed interesting to look at and I’d try to load the first image to see what it looks like… If I was lucky, it would load in 45 seconds and often it took over a minute. Sometimes the image wouldn’t give me enough information and so I’d have to check the next image… cue the elevator music going through my brain as I impatiently wait and wait and wait for the next image to load… Then I’d realize that I wasn’t interested in that patent and would need to start all over again… And then my wife would need the phone and I’d have to disconnect from the internet so that she could make a call.

So enjoy the nostalgic ‘Old School Internet’ pages in this yearbook, but make no mistake, you are extremely lucky that you don’t have to live in this retro era of internet access… Where you were tethered to a very, very slow phone wire, and every click tested your patience.

(Yearbook cover by Ena S.)

New student day

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Today our Grade 9 students will lead us as we welcome next year’s new students to spend the day with us. Being a school that doesn’t have a catchment, we get only 1-3 students from each middle school, and a few from a neighbouring homeschool program. So come September students don’t really know anyone.

This day relieves the anxiety of the first day of September. It introduces new students to our small community and shows them how welcoming our student body is.

They will learn about us and our routines, and equally as important, they will meet their classmates. I love seeing students excited in September to reconnect with students they met today. Excitement rises, anxiety lowers, and it helps us get the year started right.

It’s a very busy day with a PAC pot luck and meeting to end the day, but it is worth it to help pull our community together.

Teaching wisdom

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We all know that one person who didn’t do well in school and isn’t ‘book smart’ but if there is a problem to solve he or she will figure it out. Or someone who’s a tinkerer, who dabbles in fixing anything from a small electric toy to a car engine… maybe they were good at school, maybe not, but they solve problems we would struggle with. This isn’t traditionally the kind of wisdom taught in schools. It’s born out of curiosity and ingenuity.

How can we make learning at school more like this? More like the problem solvers we are going to need. We aren’t going to out book smart AI. We aren’t going to write reports as well as a smartly prompted AI. But even a good AI isn’t going to figure out why a sink suddenly has low pressure any time soon.

Maybe that will come, but for now we are going to be able to out problem solve AI or at least be the ones that figure out what to ask AI to help us out.

So how do we maximize the learning at school to provide students with the kind of wisdom they need to be resourceful in an AI filled world? It won’t be with wrote memorization. It won’t be the review tests. It won’t be the book reports or the 15 math questions going home for homework.

What kind of learning experiences are we creating at school? Do they foster wisdom, systems thinking, and/or problem solving? Are we getting students excited about being learners and problem solvers? Are we creating environments for creators or compliant workers? Because the path of AI and robotics is quickly making compliant workers redundant.

I don’t know if we can explicitly teach wisdom, but we can create experiences where wisdom is valued and the right answer isn’t predetermined. We can design problems that require collaboration, creativity, and insight. And we can teach students to harness AI so that it serves us and we add value to what it can do with us.

Creating unique and challenging learning experiences, with students helping us design these experiences or even designing them themselves…. This is the path forward for schools. If a student spends the day only doing things AI can do better than them, what’s school really teaching?

Honouring Ceremony

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Last night I went to our district’s Indigenous Education Grad Honouring Ceremony. It’s a celebration of heritage and culture. It reminds me that we need to make sure that we provide spaces for people of all backgrounds to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be honoured.

This seems particularly prescient with what is happening south of our border. Using book-banning in Texas as an example, individual communities can decide what books are acceptable and not acceptable to be in schools. Books about different cultures or life choices can be banned simply because the majority are not in favour of them. I am dumbfounded that this is something happening in 2025. But it is.

Inclusion, acceptance, tolerance, and ultimately kindness and love are all being threatened. I grew up in a very multicultural family. We celebrated our differences through food, and at meal time everyone was always welcome. That was our way of honouring. We welcomed you even if your potato salad had raisins in it. But jokes aside, I see what’s happening in the States right now and it scares me.

Our work is not done yet. Inequities still fall along heritage lines, and injustices of the past are far from reconciled. And in this polarized environment, we need events like our Indigenous Education Grad Honouring Ceremony to remind us to celebrate our differences, respect and value heritage, and provide an avenue where the cultures and heritage of our youth are not only respected, but revered and truly honoured.

Celebrating challenges

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I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

Tasks in my calendar

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I’ve got a full day today, but when I look at my calendar I don’t see meetings, I see tasks. For example, a phone call to make, an order to buy, a form submission deadline. I used to just flag tasks but I’ve found that adding them to my calendar is far more effective.

Looking at my calendar on a Monday can sometimes be daunting. So many small tasks that got carried over from the previous week. Yet this is far more effective than having a separate tasks list. Sure I still keep a small paper ‘To Do’ list with some big items that can’t just be checked off in a 15 or 30 minute calendar appointment time, but most of my tasks get calendared.

And sometimes those tasks get moved to the next day. So many times a calendar item gets swallowed up by the daily goings on of a school building. My intention to get 3 tasks done between 9:30-10:30 suddenly becomes 1 task done in the afternoon and the 2 others being pushed to later in the week. But I am definitely more efficient and effective when these tasks are in my calendar.

If I need more information before I can send an email? Slide the email right into my calendar. I need to prep (or read something) for an upcoming meeting? Slide an appointment into my calendar before the meeting.

I look at my calendar all the time. It’s available on all my devices. And consistently adding tasks to my calendar has helped me stay on top of things that can easily be missed when juggling a busy day of distractions. The key is to look back at my calendar at the end of the day and make sure anything missed gets moved forward.

Spring formal

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Last night was our senior spring formal. Our school is small enough that we actually hold it for grades 11 & 12 combined because it would be too small for just one grade. This is only our second year running the event, and I’m convinced that we’ll do this every year. Watching our students enjoy the evening together reminded me what a wonderful community we have. Having not just every teacher but also our secretaries join us was also special.

Our students were appreciative, and enjoyed the whole evening, with many making the effort to thank us all for the event. I spent the entire evening taking photos and I am pretty sure I’ve got at least one of every kid that if they don’t love it, at least their parents will. I was reminded of my days taking wedding photos, except that I did that back in the film era and it used to take over a week to know if the pictures I took were good or not. Having instant results is so much better.

It’s wonderful to have a year-end event like this. We will still have our grad night, but for many kids getting decked out for the dinner dance will be as memorable or more memorable than walking across the stage and receiving their diploma. And so I’m glad we are able to provide this experience for our students… despite them not being in a big, more traditional high school.