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  • Playing With Clay

    “Let it Be” plays in the background. 

    My kids are at the table molding things out of clay while I write. I just finished a 5km run in 25 minutes. My wife is knitting a sweater.

    The bills are paid, my investments are growing and we’ll soon be meal planning for the week.

    While this sounds like a stream of ‘flexing’ (as the kids say today), it should be known:

    • an elementary teacher I had said there was no point in challenging our class because we wouldn’t amount to anything more than construction workers or housewives
    • I destroyed my knees at sixteen and could never run on them without injury
    • a high school teacher I respected told me to stick to computers because writing wasn’t my forte
    • a specialist told me that when it came to having kids, I was a hopeless cause

    but

    • the reason I wanted to write is my grade six teacher, who said he loved reading my stories and hoped I would keep writing them
    • one of my high school teachers told me I should teach because I was a natural at it
    • my circle of friends have been incredible cheerleaders in my pursuits
    • my family has always been in my corner

    I’ve ignored one of these groups and listened to the other, however, some days I wish both groups could see me now…

    writing away while my kids play with clay.

  • The Time to Stress Out

    There’s a time to stress out and there’s a time when all the stress in the world won’t change the outcome.

    As long as we stay focused on what we can do, and we give it everything we have, then there’s nothing left to worry about afterwards. 

    Life hits you with so many bombs and you either defuse them, or don’t allow them to be your problem anymore. The real trick is not being around other people when their bombs go off.

  • There Was A Hope

    In the 90s that the Internet would be the great democratized landscape, evening the playing field for all who have access.

    It would exist without gatekeepers and its ubiquity and scope would be too much for any one company to own. It would be an escape from the limited media as our source of information, which we knew had a bias to it, but accepted as there were no alternatives. 

    It could give you the world and suddenly, it didn’t matter where you lived because you could connect with anyone. 

    Best of all, the content was free. 

    How naive we were. 

    Yet, what I find most baffling, are those who saw what we did, saw what happened and are now giving the same hope to AI. 

    And they say religious adherents were ignorant of their misguided hope.

  • Hanging Out With Jesus

    Setting aside the rhetoric of having a “personal relationship with Jesus,” which is nothing more than an inner spiritual meditation framed around a particular idea, I would like to know what it would really be like to hang out with him. 

    What conversations would happen as we walked endlessly?

    How would he react to my nonsensical ramblings around the dinner table?

    Could he cure me of my endless gas that is apparently powerful enough to fumigate a household (according to my kids)?

    It’s easy to get lost in nonsensical religious battles over benign details that were enough to split societies, forgetting that he was also a thirty-something year old man who grew up in this world. If he were around today, I’m certain we’d be speaking about him with the same candour and heartfelt awe as Keanu Reeves. 

    Yes, I made the comparison and should some ecclesial authority wish to excommunicate me on the matter, also note I once asked an exam question to explain their similarities. 

    I guess the real consideration is what expectations I would have of him. Aside from his miracles and acts of healing, he didn’t smite the Roman Empire and bring peace to the world. He was executed. 

    The onus was on his followers to continue his work. Not in some cataclysmic event, but in the every day interactions with the people they came across. Which leads me back to wonder what it would have been like to hang out with him. 

    I’m not sure, but I’ve taken my best guess, attempted to act the same towards others and hoped it would be enough to plant a seed of peace and joy in their lives. No megaphones on street corners necessary. 

  • That’s So High School

    I hear this expression pop up in conversation people have about their workplace or social groups. It points to this 70s-early 2000s motif that people have these super cliques and cast out or ignore those they don’t want a part of them. 

    However, my observations in a high school over the past fifteen years show something different. 

    High school, and the adolescent mind, has shifted a lot. Yes, some things will never change (and I don’t think we’d want them to), but the high school clique experience peaked around the time Mean Girls was released in theatres. 

    Yes, students still have their groups and there’s still bullying, but the number of students who feel close to their parents, or consider them a role model, would make the 70s adage of not trusting anyone over 30 a laughable ideal. Then there’s the athletes who show up to Math club, the packed classrooms of Dungeons & Dragons games and the group chats for all graduates to participate in. 

    On that note, the biggest drama that consistently happens revolve around prom dresses. Well, that and relationships. 

    High school is a much different experience and if we’re still feeling our current situations reminds us of our own experience, it’s probably pointing to the stunted maturity of the people involved.

    If you really want to be insulting, you might want to tell those people to grow up and act like kids today. Either that or wear the same outfit as one of them. 

  • The Post Apocalyptic World

    A high school friend of mine once told me about a survival week he completed with air cadets. Equipped with nothing but a pocket knife and two matches, he had to survive in the wilderness for a week with the understanding he could give up at any time. 

    Although impressive in its own right, what struck me was his reflection on what made the ordeal difficult:

    “It wasn’t that you were hungry, or thirsty, or tired. It was boredom.”

    He then went on to describe his ordeals, including giving names to sticks and having full fledged conversations with them. It should be noted that “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks hadn’t been released yet, so that movie made perfect sense to me when it came out. 

    I find this to be a pertinent point often missed in survival groups or post-apocalyptic motifs. Sure, you can engineer a shelter, equipment and find sustenance, but so few people are mentally equipped to deal with isolation for extended periods of time. 

    This presents a few options:

    Learn to be bored, without the aid of any communication, mediums of entertainment or movement through populated areas

    or

    Strive to build solid communities with an interdependence on each other, recognizing survival isn’t possible without them. 

    Unless we do more of the latter now, we will be forced to do more of the former. 

  • Plenty of Time

    There’s this adage that when you’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you and there’s no need to worry about rushing into anything. Here’s the problem:

    Tomorrow is not guaranteed to anyone.

    I think it’s more fair to say that more opportunities will come your way when you’re young and uninhibited, but to meander aimlessly?

    Unless there’s lessons to be learned in that meandering, all we’re really doing is delaying the maturation into adulthood. 

    There’s always plenty of time, until there isn’t.

  • The Home to Maintain

    Consider the home you live in. 

    It requires constant care just to maintain a level of comfort to keep being there. It’s also done in the anticipation of guests (maybe) and understanding this is the place you want to relax in. 

    While prevention is always the better route, any repairs need to be attended to immediately. Otherwise, the problem exacerbates to the point of a costly overhaul. Of course, this doesn’t even account for those random events such as fire or floods that would require a complete rebuilding of whatever was lost. 

    But we consider it worth it because it’s still our home and we need to live in it. We go to great lengths to take care of it and make it a place we want to be, even though it’s still just made of fragile building materials that are ephemeral. 

    Yet, the home we should really be taking care of is the body we inhabit.

    This is the home we live in for our entire life and while advances in medicine are allowing us to change out some of the parts, it can’t be replaced. Repairing it is tough, especially as we age, and ignoring the maintenance always comes back to hurt us. 

    Yet, just like the dwellings we live in, we must strive to make our home a comfortable place to be. We should want to sit with it, enjoy it and every so often, put it to the test to see what it’s capable of.

    And just like your dwelling, your body is going to function differently over time and what you need from it will change as circumstances change. However, maintenance is still needed. 

    Don’t ignore the one home you can’t replace. 

  • How Far Can You Push Education?

    My initial foray into education had an idealistic streak to it in thinking that I could do something to change the monstrous machine that is the education system. While my focus was purely dedicated to teaching Religion, I spent quite a bit of time dipping my toes into various methods that have been beneficial across disciplines.

    Even a slight nudge to a large ship can still change its course, right?

    Unfortunately, this dedication to honing my craft and aspiring to be at the top of my game at all times led me to some sobering conclusions:

    • education is a big machine that has existed long before I got there and will continue long after I’m gone
    • it’s highly political
    • nobody really cares what I’m doing
    • I wasn’t a fraction as good as I thought I was

    Now, those conclusions haven’t stopped me from doing my best and striving to push my craft as far as I can take it, but it’s also put a damper on my motivation for doing so. 

    In my observations and careful studies of what ultimately works, well… we already know, but refuse to consider it in lieu of more flash in the pan ideas, progressive ideas for the sake of looking innovative, or downright stubbornness of not wanting to change. 

    While there’s no one size fits all solution, there is a reason why the Michaela school in England (the “strictest school in the country”), which pulls from the poorest areas, has consistently outperformed every other school in the country for years. Or why Nancie Atwell’s school in the US has grade eights reading classic literature meant for seniors, while also writing at that level. Coincidentally, Atwell was the first teacher to win the Global Educator’s Prize, which is literally the award for best teacher in the world.

    Or the reason direct instruction has consistently been the most effective method of teaching. 

    In a microcosm of culture where academics are valued and students are nurtured to hold a high standard for themselves, while also taking responsibility for that standard, you see great success. Unfortunately, when you try to implement ideas that work in a larger culture that clashes with it, it often fails. 

    My personal stance is we replaced values with tools, or methods, confusing the purpose of what those were meant to achieve. We don’t need another app to help students learn; we need to give them a reason to want to learn in the first place. Then it’s simply a matter of picking the best tool, or method, for the job.  

    The values should lead the methods, not the other way around. 

    Unfortunately, you can only push so far before you hit the boundary where you’re no longer supported. On top of which, culture is always changing and the narrative needs to change with it. Students today no longer buy the idea that studying hard and getting a great education will lead to a great job. While I share their frustration with that sentiment, I’d much rather have an educated population than an uneducated one because if we don’t teach them how to think, someone else will teach them what to think. 

    I don’t think I need to explain the end result of a society that learns from social media and non-stop news cycles posing as reliable journalism. We’re living it. 

    But to fight against that, I have to fight against a much larger culture that repeatedly hammers home the idea that education is a scam, alongside a system that constantly has to justify itself to that culture, and a world that is changing faster than we can have time to adjust to each iteration. 

    So, how far can we really push education?

    As far as we can in hopes it can impact culture enough to push it further.

  • The Forward Thinking Butterfly Effect

    A paradox of time travel, more like an issue, is this concept of the butterfly effect. Even the most minuscule of actions could seriously alter the future in some way and we could never be sure of the effect. 

    Movies, shows, books, comics… this hypothetical situation plays out everywhere.  While it makes for fun musings, I want to consider another adjacent idea. 

    Suppose this is true and any alterations to the past, no matter how minor, have serious consequences. Well, then what do our current actions do for the future?

    Eventually we will get to a future that extends from our actions at some point, so what actions are you committing today? If even the smallest gesture or act can alter the world of tomorrow in a big way, wouldn’t it be wise to do as many good actions as possible?

    Or maybe you don’t have to concern yourself with the grand displays and focus on what’s in front of you, knowing it does have a big impact in the grand scheme of things. To be honest, it’s probably the only thing we can handle right now anyway.