Tag Archives: stories

Working weekend

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I’m at school putting the final touches on a presentation I have to give tomorrow. The presentation is to the Ministry as part of a quality assurance process for provincial online schools. I find that working at my workstation with multiple displays makes this kind of work much easier than trying to do it at home.

The hard work is done, all I’m really doing to the presentation now is redacting personal identifiers of any students for privacy, and checking my math on the stats I’m sharing.

If you were to give me a grade on the prettiness of this presentation, I’d probably get a failing grade. A lot of the slides are dense with words and information. However, I’ve been assured by the ministry that it’s the story I’m telling that matters, not what the slides look like, and I think our team is telling a pretty compelling story about how we support a few of our most vulnerable kids, as examples of the supports we have in place.

That said, when telling a story, it’s easy to miss key elements or not recognize how they connect to more universal supports we offer. So, we will tell the stories, the slides will make the connections to evidence requested… and that means we’ve got some dense slides to share.

As an online vice principal and principal for the last 15+ years I’ve seen how online schools can be a great choice to get extra credits for a multitude of good reasons, and I’ve seen students come to us as a last resort when nothing else is working. For the students who come to us by choice, we do an amazing job getting them what they want. For those that come to us out of necessity as a last choice, we might be less successful statistically, but each of those statistics is a student, with their own stories and challenges, and we don’t forget that. These students take much more of our time, and resources, and we do everything we can to help them. It is these efforts I hope to share with the ministry tomorrow. And so the stories are what matter most… but the slides will (dense-as-they-are-with-information) demonstrate the evidence and details we are asked to provide.

Archiving memories

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There is a quote I often hear about the fact that nobody will know your name in 3 generations. This makes me think of my grandparents, and the stories they used to tell. I was fortunate enough to get some video recordings of both of my grandmothers (Granny T & Granny B), but not of my grandfathers. Today I dug up the 10 pages story that my grandfather, Motel Truss, had recorded a few months before he died. I don’t have the recording itself, but I have the document that my mom transcribed from the recording for him. He wrote it as a request from the Barbados Jewish Community. Later, a book was written, ‘Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados‘ and my grandparents were all mentioned in it as well.

I think towards the end of the year I am going to try to document images and stories of each of my grandparents. Nothing extravagant, but something that my kids, and maybe their grandkids could look at to learn a bit about their distant ancestors. It was a very different time, with completely different hardships and challenges, and I think their stories are worth documenting and sharing.

Telephone game

We’ve all played it at some point. I whisper a complex message to you, you pass it on as best as you can. It goes through a group of people and the end result is nothing like the original message.

I have a recipe for Spanish Rice given to me by my mom over the phone. It’s a list of ingredients to put in a frying pan, with almost no measurements. “A big squeeze” of a bottle, “just a little bit” of another item. The only definitive instructions are to bake in a dish at 350° for about 30 minutes, with the water ‘just above the rice’.

I just made it for the first time this year and didn’t put enough water. I salvaged it by adding water in a much bigger dish, but it’s definitely not the best version I’ve made. I’ll make it better next time, because I’ll remember this experience. But both my daughters love this recipe and I’ll need to do a better job of sharing it with them rather than this vague set of instructions that I’ve used for over two decades now.

This makes me marvel at the way knowledge was shared through oral traditions, for thousands of years before written history. It makes sense that stories and metaphors were used to help make the information easier to transfer.

A great example is the three sisters:

“The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous people of Central and North America: squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.” ~ Wikipedia

How many generations did it take to learn of this symbiotic relationship between the 3 plants? And then, how clever to call them ‘sisters’ to help solidify their relationship and easily pass on the information to the next generation.

But I also wonder what knowledge was lost, or passed on inaccurately? What stories live on, like those of a great flood shared by cultures and peoples all over the world; yet have been given different meanings and interpretations that are based on the metaphors and stories of them being transferred poorly, like the telephone game, over centuries and centuries, over an unknown number of generations. For most of human history the telephone game was the main way to transfer knowledge. What was lost along the way?

Who I used to be

One of the funniest ‘athletes getting older’ stories I know is one of a former national water polo player who was somewhere around 60 years old and playing in a game against an enthusiastic teenager. The old guy swam into the hole (centre position) and the you scrappy kid was all over him. The ball came into the hole and the overactive kid fouls the old guy… a normal thing in the game of water polo, but the kid was a bit aggressive. After the foul the old guy looks back at the kid and says, “Hey, don’t you know who I used to be?”

It’s fair to say that I used to be an athlete. I played water polo at a high enough level, and trained hard enough to say so. And while I’m pretty fit now, and probably in better shape than 70-80% of people my age, I am not an athlete. I don’t say that disparagingly, but I don’t play any sports, and I’m very much past my prime. Where this comes into play is in my inability to really push myself.

I see it specifically in training certain muscles. I struggle to go past 80% effort. That’s the challenge point for me. If I really like an exercise, I remember how to push hard, but if I don’t like it, I struggle. I’ve lost that ‘athlete’s edge’ where I can push through the discomfort and really give my maximum effort at will.

That’s why I say I used to be an athlete. It’s not about the fitness, it’s not about feeling positive about how well I take care of myself (I do). It’s about the lack of ability to really push myself to a point past the threshold of discomfort that athletes can do every workout.

Maybe I’m just out of practice, and I need to have a sport as a reason to train? Maybe it’s that I’m more externally motivated and I need a team relying on me? Perhaps if I joined a gym and was surrounded by people I’d push myself more than I can training at home alone.

In any case, I know who I am now and who I used to be, and I’m good with that. I might have been an athlete, but now I’m a guy who wants to still be fit and healthy in 25 years. I don’t want to run a marathon, and I’m too crappy a swimmer and not willing to do the work to get back in the pool and play water polo again… but I am going to push where I can, be smart about how much weight I move around so I don’t hurt myself… and every now and then push to my max and remember who I used to be.

The stories we tell

I was taking my weekly walk with a buddy last weekend and I told him a story about the first time I watched a show we both enjoyed in our youth. He then told me that this was the third time I’ve told him that story, but he knew I enjoyed sharing it so he liked hearing it.

I’m visiting my parents and I’ve heard a few old stories from them and my sisters, and I’m sure they’ve heard a few repeats from me. It’s interesting the way our old stories define us.

Do we remember fond moments or frustrations? Do we reminisce about family gatherings or family disagreements? Is it acts of kindness or malice that we weave our stories around? Are these stories of joy, laughter, sadness, or scorn?

What do we hold on to? What shapes the memories that matter, and ultimately shapes us? If these memories don’t serve us well, can we change them? Can we redefine these memories? Can we give them less or more power over us?

I believe we can. And if we happen to hear our family or friends share happy stories more than once, hopefully we can have the same grace my buddy had to listen and enjoy (again).

Childhood memories

As I get older I find that childhood memories become one-dimensional. I remember a specific memory for a specific reason, and no other memories around that moment. In the retelling of these memories, I further solidify what the memory means to me and build a specific narrative around it.

One such memory is of telling my parents there was no way that I’d live in Toronto the rest of my life. I had walked home from Junior High, 14 years old, and it was late January or early February. The weather was bitter cold and I couldn’t feel my fingers, ears, or toes. I called out to my parents, “Family Meeting”. This was not a typical thing in our household.

A little background, we moved from Barbados to Toronto when I was 9, and this was my 4th winter. I sat my parents down at the kitchen table and told them I wasn’t going to live in this ice-cold country the rest of my life. I promised them I’d get my university degree, but then I was out! I remember saying, “When I leave, don’t ask ‘where did this come from?’ It came from right now!”

I’ve shared that story many times since, including recently. It’s part of a narrative that ended with me moving to Vancouver, the warmest part of Canada that I could find. I still say my parents ‘moved me’ to Toronto as part of that narrative, and although I stayed one extra year after graduating, I knew I was not going to live in Toronto from that day I held our first and only family meeting.

What’s interesting about this is I really have no other significant memories from that year. I have vague memories of Junior High but none closely associated with that day. None.

Most my childhood memories are like that now. Specific events, with a purpose for remembering them, and not much more. I wonder if that’s just me or do other people feel the same way? Do you have specific memories with a narrative attached that keeps the memory relevant, or do you recollect more than those snippets of time from your childhood?

The stories we believe

We don’t perceive reality. We quite literally make it up. Our beliefs are fiction. It’s not an easy thing to accept. But this, unlike our beliefs, is true.

Religion, politics, relationships, even theories are all based on the knowledge that we’ve either had passed down to us or that we consumed. Relying on other people’s beliefs.

Then we make judgements and then we stand by them. Some are good, some are bad, all are judgements… not reality.

Think of the stories that have been passed down to us. From origin stories to cavemen to great floods. How many people believe that early humans lived at the same time as Jurassic dinosaurs? That’s just one story many people have wrong.

There are so many more. We should be more humble, and less susceptible to stories that don’t move us towards being more loving, caring, and kind people. We should worry less about tribal stories that keep us apart.

Why can’t the stories we choose to believe help us make the world we live in a better place to live? But then again, that’s the reason for religious wars… the strongly held belief in a better world. It’s an endless loop.

We need better, more believable stories, the current ones aren’t working.