Goodbye Louis. You’ll be so so missed…always. Don’t worry, we’ll look after G and the kids.

Grateful for:

• hope
• rainbows
• Benji
• changed lives even though we’re not perfect

Curious about:

• Celebrate Recovery
• how to be a friend in the midst of grief

 

It’s that time of the summer when I think I’m supposed to communicate something intelligent and inspirational to staff. After all, there are only three weeks left before schools starts again!

But, it’s summer, and the Olympics are on, and frankly, no one (myself included) wants to read a letter right now.

So, instead, I have decided to continue my visual learning skills plan. Here’s today’s practice, and I think I’ll send it out soon to others. Maybe it can be followed up later with the requisite and predictable text-heavy letter. Or not.

Hmmmm…..

Grateful for:

• Thinking Collaborative and the Cognitive Coaching Foundation course
• freedom to try and sketch
• The Olympics — lots of fun watching all the games

Curious about:

• Will I have enough pluckiness to send out the ‘letter’ above as is? Or will I defer to the traditional formal letter?  Hmm…
• GAFE summit in October at Crescent School.

This past week I was so incredibly pleased to be part of the Technology Enhanced Leading and Learning Institute (#TELL2106). It’s an incredible collaborative event pulled together by Ontario’s three administrator entities, OPC, ADFO, and the Catholic Principals.

Four keynotes (more notes to follow) and several workshops made the two days rich and beautiful with learning.

Anita Simpson gave the closing keynote and at least three of us, Debbie Donsky, Kelly Power, and Beth Woof (that’s me) sketched in live time what we heard and processed. It’s amazing to see how our thinking aligns and also differs. Yes, amazing.

Debbie and Anita do their sketches on paper first, then shift to digital versions. I, on the other hand, start in digital with Paper 53 and then export to other formats including .pdf or printed versions.  All versions are authentic representations of those things that resonated with us as individuals.

 

Grateful for:

• Awesome professional learning and professional colleagues
• Karen and her helpful contributions
• Kelly and Debbie whom I met for the first time this week and feel as if we are already best-co-learner-friends

Curious about:

• How much energy does the current heat spell drain from our electrical grid. Today the big towers in Toronto were asked to go offline and use their generators.
• What must it be like to commute to/from Toronto everyday? Today’s drive, 1 hour on a good day, took 2 1/2 hours!

This week has been such rich learning. Without further adieu, here are some summaries from the presentations by Isabelle Fontaine, Tony Wagner, and Garfield Gini-Newman, all of which were very engaging, stretching, and though-provoking. Thank you!

Grateful for:

• a good meeting yesterday with Shelly and Brian
• a wonderful conference hotel location with everything I need at my fingertips

Curious about:

• power walks in high heat and humidity. Is this healthy?

Today’s visit to my childhood-town-full-of-memories, Williamston, Michigan, reminded me of many tidbits of life I once thought about frequently. My dad’s anecdotal stories added many more dimensions to the memory bank. Here are just a few of things I want to both learn from, and remember always:

Barrett’s store is where my dad worked for many years when he was a student. He had to arrive before 8 a.m., stoke the wood furnace, shovel snow, and then when Mr. Barrett arrived at 8:55 a.m. my dad would leave and run to the nearby K-12 school where he spent 13 years. This store is still going strong and carries several lines of quality clothing and footwear lines.

The Williamston City Hall reminds me that my grandma and I would walk to the park every day and wait until the noon siren pealed out from this location. It was both a scary sound since it was a war-time community practice to be on watch for emergencies. The practice didn’t stop during peace time. It was also a happy sound since it meant we were to walk home and make lunch. I loved those days…very much.

Summit Cemetery is where my grandparents and other relatives are buried under the biggest catalpu tree I’ve ever seen. In this idyllic sand spot with a gentle hill there are countless reminders that many have served in wars across the decades, in particular the Civil War. Flags and monument markers tell the story, so many stories. One family lost eight babies in succession, almost one per year. The late 1800’s were not, it seems, kind to children. In this location there is also a 200+ year old White Oak tree that spans ‘a city block’. Well, maybe not that far, but it’s big. I wondered today about the merit of burial plots — the call back to the land is powerful and the sense of geo-space for memories has impact.

Grateful for:

• memories
• 175 years of sustained community presence for 1st Baptist Church in Williamston.
• parents and grandparents who model curiosity, exploration, and discovery.

Curious about:

• why are there so many wind turbines in southwestern Ontario, and why are they on the south side of the 401?

Two and half weeks! Rich learning on every level.

I’m tired….and encouraged. Exhilarated.

Takeaways include:

Talk a lot and use real words, even big multi-syllabic words. Little kids get them, use them, understand them, and remember them. And if not, they are good guessers and predictors, true 21st century learners.

 

Walk a lot while you’re talking. Stuff happens and you never know what the next serendipitous learning moment will be. The Curriculum of Life will happen in the mini-steps.

Ask a lot of questions that prompt thinking and limit telling.

For example,”It looks like you built three LEGO towers. What is the same about each one?”

Rather than,“good girl, you are so smart for building three LEGO towers with three blocks each.”

Play a lot (get on the ground or the floor, smash your clock or at least hide it 6′ underground, and don’t look at the dust on the floor while you’re down there. Lose the broom while you’re at it, too).

Grateful for:

• H, R, L, and R, L and K, J and S, W and Benji
• West Jet and the wonderful direct flight from Vancouver to Hamilton
• time standing still

Curious about:

• What happens when it’s time to say good-bye to your best four-legged friend ever?
• how to determine if a dog is in pain?

 

So, I finally succumbed and downloaded the Pokemom Go app.

Why?

An example of what I saw at the park from The Ottawa Sun

Well, I was at the park with two little ones, and doing my very best non-helicopter-concerned-adult imitation, I was at quite a distance and just purposed to ‘let them be’.  Indeed!  It was glorious, and might have included a scraped knee or two, but also untold amounts of independence, curiosity, and exploration. Kid stuff. Good stuff.

So, from my carefully perched position, I was able to see another phenomena. The park was full of people….lots of them…and not a single one looking at each other, no eye-t0-eye contact, no non-verbal facial expressions noticed, no gleam of interest in the other.

But curiously, they were together in small groups of friends, families, and even new acquaintances. Many of them engaged in head-down conversations with others, many of whom had evidently never met before. They were walking, albeit slowly and with circuitous paths. They sometimes huddled together or sat side by side on park benches. Two wheeled by on bicycles with iPhones in hand and eyes gazed downward,  and I wondered how they didn’t crash.

Each person, even the youngest toddlers and the almost-grey-haired adults, held a device, and on that device was Pokemon Go. It felt surreal with so many people almost floating in slow motion.

So…with all my adult-care-for-youngsters-attentiveness, I confess that I did take one fraction of an eye off the little ones and simultaneously downloaded the app. I had to! Right?

Within seconds I was online and could see the cause for the impromptu gathering (and more people kept coming). Nearby were three Pokemon entities. I stood up, one eye still on the little ones, and began to attempt my first Pokemon catch. Silly things….they kept wiggling away, but finally I got the turtle in sight, within a circle thingy that kept radiating in and out.  Nothing happened even though I kept pressing my iPhone button.

Later, in an act of Pokemon community, I asked a nearby-head-down-safe-looking-adult how I could get the turtle. What’s the aim of the game I wondered. “You have to toss the ball over the head of the pokemon…get it beyond him”, I was told.

A few attempts later, my head now down for more than seconds, and I realized that my little ones were off on their own, climbing monkey bars to less-than-safe heights. And I had become distracted.

Ouch!

Something is not right about this situation. I have decided that the question “To Pokemon or not” is important for me to answer.

I deleted the app.

This reminds me of a most important book illustrated by one of my favourite children’s adult authors, Chris Van Allsburg. I urge everyone to read, The Wretched Stone.

Pokemon looks stoney to me.

Grateful for:

• a reminder that technology isn’t everything
• a reminder from Dean Shareski, @shareski, that people are not responding to each other as much on Twitter. I think it’s a version of the Pokemon phenomena and we need to be careful
• the park, the play structures, the sunshine, the slips and falls, the breeze in our hair

Curious about:

• Trump. How, oh how can this trumpiness be happening?
• What will pervasive ubiquitous technology do to our brains?

 

 

I’m learning….learning…learning…

It’s OK (if not wonderful) to let time stand still. There is no clock in this picture. Amen!

Grateful for:

• children and grandchildren
• raspberry patches at my home
• red ‘happy’ boots
• techno-free zones
• freedom from the tyranny of plogging — I know that I’m ‘supposed’ to be on top of this and faithfully post, but it really just doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things

Curious about:

• what will happen during the current Democrat Convention? Will will be any more or less crazy than last week’s Republican event?
• what will happen in Rio? Will the Olympics actually happen?

 

My reading list and ‘bookshelf’

A techno detox is just what the doctor ordered and Massassauga Provincial Park for a five day canoe trip was the prescription. While there, we found a most amazing dead pine stump, full of knots and gnarls, with lots of evidence that it had found the cracks in solid rock sufficient enough to sustain life for untold years. Amazing.

We dragged it back to our favourite site and it became a display for the reading materials I had stuffed into my sac and subsequently portaged more than once. Their benefit far exceeded their weight and I don’t for a second begrudge the strain in my backpack. Learning through books, and in this case mostly magazines, is worthy work. Indeed!

Further, the gift of the June 24 edition of The Economist, pre-Brexit, was a gift from some unknown paddler before us. S/he had left it under a burnable log (another gift) as if to say, “I know you’ll now find time to read from cover to cover — enjoy this exquisite moment.”  Or perhaps s/he said, “Oh my…this magazine is far too heavy to portage all the way home, so I’ll leave it for the next unsuspecting but morally upright camper to do the deed for me.”

Either way, it was a gift.

Later…we burned the stump (not Discover, or Scientific American, or National Geographic, or The Economist, or Anne Fadiman’s book about re-reading — No indeed!) and watched it in fascination as it blazed under a waxing moon. Beautiful! In every way possible.

Grateful for:

• #604, #34, #16, some of my favourite numbers
• Wes, the best life-long paddler and camper ever!
• wild blueberries (not enough to eat yet, but plenty enough to remind me that last year we saw bears eating in ‘our’ patch)
• Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn who continue to dance through the night sky
• Binoculars for star-gazing and bird-watching, particularly Ospreys who never cease to bring beauty to my lens
• 

  A dead stump burns

  Fire (in fire pits)

Curious about:

• Why can there be such peace out in the wilderness and simultaneously such chaos, pain, suffering, and violence? Awful news from Bastille Day in Nice met us as we left our paddle-powered-canoe and headed home in a motor vehicle with a radio and other technologies powered up.
• Why did the water levels go so high this year and kill thousands of young white pine trees?
• Is there someone who manages water in the Great Lakes?  Or do the levels just go up and down at the whim of Mother Nature?

A second question from Wes goes like this:

Q2: “If you had to advise a young person about whether or not to get married, what would you say?”

A2: Another L—O—N—G pause. It’s complicated, partly because relationships are under such pressure (it seems) these days, and since so many people are jaded and jilted by what they thought life might bring and what it ended up not bringing.

A2a: YES….get married if….

A2b: …if you are fully OK and prepared to be single.  There’s no sense merging into another’s life when you yourself are not fully present and aware, and willing to be interdependent. Independence will be a thing of the past, and it will be expanded by something bigger and better. However, it’s not a 50/50 proposition. Only 100/100 will do.

A2c: ….NO…don’t get married if you think another person will satisfy, or fill the cracks, or be for you all the time, or will fulfill a contract. It doesn’t happen that way. But covenant relationships can work and are worth it.

Grateful for:

• 35 years
• Life partner

Curious about:

• what will relationships look like as society and more and more people (it seems) progressively become increasingly  disenchanted with togetherness?