Turning 50

Wow.  Its finally happened.  I have turned 50.  I know that many of you may be surprised as, sadly, I look a lot more aged and withered than 50 already.  While the battering of my youth, and perhaps career on occasions, have left me a little greyer and fatter than I had hoped for at this time of life, I am only 50.

I remember my dad’s 50^th.  I was 25 at the time, just married, 10 feet high and bulletproof.  It feels like yesterday, yet here we are a quarter of a century down the track, I’m hitting the big one and my dad is turning 75.  What a special year it is for our family.

I remember as a young teacher around the same time, my then principal turning 50.  All of us on staff brought in funny gifts to tease him about his age and his wisdom, or folly, or both really.  He was a great leader and a good guy, but my overriding thought at the time was, wow, 50.  Man that is old.  He is so old and wise.

And now it’s me.  I feel neither old or particularly wise really.  And I wonder if there are young bucks on our team looking at me thinking what I thought back then, what feels like just a moment or two ago.

One of my mum’s favourite sayings is, ‘Time waits for no man, and very few women.’  She’s a fun lady and it is usually accompanied by one of her trademarks laughs.  But it’s true.  Time rolls on.  We are all victims of the inexorable reality of the chronograph. 

In one of his elvish poems Tolkien wrote, 

véni avánier ve lintë yuldar, si man i yulma nin enquantuva.

which translates to ‘The years like swift draughts pass away, now who will refill my cup?’  Aging is an eternal theme throughout the ages, it appears in literature and on film, in the oral traditions of most cultures.  And those themes raise their head in each of us as we hit another birthday with a zero in it.

Arrayed before this 50-year-old are the young and fabulous.  The student in our care and the families that we serve.  My generation, Gen X, are slowly leaving the education scene.  In the next 7 to 10 years our children will have moved through schools, our workforce will increasingly be less and less Gen X-ers and more and more Gen Y and Gen Z.  It’s a fact. 

What am I doing to prepare the students in my care for their tomorrow not my past?  What am I doing to prepare my college for relationships with Gen Y and Gen Z mums and dads, not the increasingly disappearing people of my generation?

We have to be in this space, we have to understand and implement best practice, we have to work differently as the world changes and the rate of that change increases.  We dare not rest on ‘we’ve always done that’ or else we risk becoming irrelevant very quickly.

Consider the fidget spinner.  By the time schools got around to working out if they were good or bad or if they should have a policy about them or not, they were gone.  We need to be agile, creative, flexible, adapatable and we need to create citizens who are the same.

Ah, so it goes.  The young and beautiful will inherit what’s next.  My 50 will become 60 and so forth etcetera until finally the curtain closes.  But I’m a child of the King, I’m a citizen of forever, so let the years come I say.

Buen Camino

Commonwealth Games Reflection

The Games

I am a sceptic.  Last year my wife was very keen to enter the lottery to go in the draw to get tickets to the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.  I relented.  I remember being sceptical enough not to get tickets to the Sydney 2000 Olympics and then regretting it once the games began and the hype increased.

Anyway, we got tickets to the Netball, the Athletics and the Rugby 7’s.  Watched the opening ceremony on TV, watched a bit of beach volleyball on TV, a bit of swimming and started to get hyped.

Then we went to the netball.  It was awesome.  The movement of people to and from venues, the volunteers and the positivity, the venues, the hype, the actual competition and sporting excellence, the vibe, the whole shebangabang completely overwhelmed my scepticism and we loved it.  I grabbed an extra ticket to go the hockey as well with a hockey tragic mate and loved that too.  Every occasion we had to be there we had the same experience, a truly world class competition and an internationally envious organization of the whole games.

And then came the closing ceremony.  Wasn’t that something.  We stayed up all night and watched that on telly.  Like many Australians we wondered about some of the song choices and the artists, we certainly wondered where the athletes were and suspected that the broadcasters were holding them until last to keep us glued to out telly as long as possible.  But they never came.  Sadly.

And then they cut to Johanna Griggs and Basil Sempilas.  That was a moon landing moment I reckon.  Those who saw it live will remember it for the rest of their lives.  It was quite shocking and unexpected and certainly added to the hype about the whole show.  I think it made the gap between the real and the ideal seem larger than it actually was.

I feel a bit sad about all of that negativity though.  I think one of the really good decisions that was made by the organisers was to include school kids and volunteers in both the opening and closing ceremonies.  Our College had a number of students participating in both, and ex-students as well.  They trained so hard, spent so many long nights for months in preparation, contributed selflessly to the event in service of something greater than themselves, and they shone.  The images we saw on TV of the life guards, the dancers, the kids with the glowing cubes, choirs, all of them were terrific.  Their enthusiasm and dedication was so obvious to see and should be applauded and praised.  The very spirit of the games that we all saw so openly each day through the service of the volunteers at events, for my money, was beautifully echoed in the participation of those kids from across Queensland and they deserve to be equally honored and cherished as such.

I think we need to be really careful when we criticise.  There is honour in heartfelt voluntary endeavour.  Some of the decisions that were made about that ceremony are right to be questioned, but overwhelmingly we should give thanks for that which is done on our behalf, without our request, in service of our greater good.

Particularly given we have just emerged from the Easter break.

Buen Camino

The Google Car

Last week at our Take A Peek At Prep morning I had the great pleasure of speaking briefly to a group of mums who are about to embark on their child’s 13 years of schooling next year.  One of the things I mentioned was how much the world is changing.  The world that we know and enjoy today is not the one that our current Junior School students will graduate into in a decade or so.  ‘Duh!  Of course!’, I hear you say.

But it’s true isn’t it?  I went through school in the 70’s and 80’s, finishing Year 12 in ‘85.  I can still remember my Year 4 teacher standing in the doorway of our classroom smoking!  I have vivid memories of teachers hitting kids with sticks across the knuckles and of the then ‘old-fashioned’ desks we had that still had holes for ink wells in them.  My generation was still using classroom equipment that was designed for a very different era, my mum’s era.

Anyway, my school days were different than my children’s by a mile.  My children have gone through school though in an interesting time of change.  Both of them were Primary School kids when the iphone and ipad came along.  They remember a time before 1:1 laptops and ipads in schools.  The old-fashioned computer lab is a thing of the past, a room full of massive boxes and huge monitors used to look and feel so modern, now it just looks like yesterday.  LCD, retina display laptops are everywhere, kids are using touch screens and even cabling is now irrelevant with the ubiquitous use of wifi.  I can’t remember the last time I actually plugged something into a network point.  WiFi, Bluetooth, the cloud, smart watch, I don’t even look at my phone for texts now, I look at my watch.

Man.  The shift is so fast, so sustained, so overwhelming.  And it’s all in schools.  If there is one institution that has to be at the very front of what is happening it is schools.  WE are the ones responsible for emerging young adults into this crazy world.  Preparing them for life that we remember as their parents, would be like my teachers in the 70’s and 80’s preparing me for a life of ink wells and slates.  Unconscionable. 

Anyway, back to my original point.  I have a confession to make.  I was wrong when is spoke to that group of mums last week.  I informed them that their child may never need to actually get a license because we are already well on the way to self-driving cars, that the Google Car has done over a million kilometers already by itself.

It’s 5 million.

In 2009 Google launched the self-driving car project.  By 2015 it had done a million kilometers (well a few of them had collectively), now, just 3 years later that number has jumped exponentially to 5 million kilometers.  The project is now called WAYMO and is an independent company whose sole aim is to get autonomous vehicles on our roads.  They exist, they are being used, it’s amazing.  5 million kilometers completed!

We have to be so careful that we do not cling onto our past.  We have to be so careful as parents, as educators, as a community that we are right at the front of our understanding of this stuff and that we are preparing our kids for their future in this world.

Collaboration, innovation, self-direction, synthesis.  These, and more, are the soft skills that our kids need now and moving forward.  The iphone is 10 years old.  It changed the world.  Anytime now the Google Car is going to hit us, it will change everything once again.  I couldn’t wait for my son to get his P’s so he could pick me up from the pub.  Your child may never need theirs.  What will they need instead?

Thank goodness that some things don’t change though.  Good schools still need good teachers, children still need stable and supportive families, our bodies need good food and appropriate rest.  We all need people in our lives both to care for us and to care for.  Little kids still need play-dough and plastic scissors, big kids still need Physics and Shakespeare, teachers need to be in supportive relationships with mums and dads and mums and dads need a pat on the back for all the things they do out of love for their kids.  And we all need to be loved by He whose name is Love.

Buen Camino