Author: Tim

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Gasping For Breath: the lost art of pedagogy in Ontario schools

Written Feb, 2022:

Horses usually get put down when they break a leg.  They get euthanized because a three legged horse can’t stand on its own and ends up developing consequent health problems.  Keeping a lame horse alive is simply extending its misery.  These days, Dusty World feels like a lame horse.  I started this blog in 2010 after having attended my first ECOO conference and found it a valuable way to share my own ABL (always be learning) approach to teaching and learning effectively while navigating an information revolution.

Dancing in the Datasphere: thoughts on digital pedagogy from way back in 2011.

I’m sitting here looking at a dozen posts I haven’t published on Dusty World in the past year because I think there is no point.  It has been years since we focused on pedagogical best practices in Ontario education.  My reflections on this blog have always been focused on that slippery and often ignored concept.  Even at the best of times getting our education system to focus on pedagogical best practices has proven problematic, and we’re very far away from the best of times here in early 2022.

I’ve used pedagogical best practices to direct my teaching throughout my career, even when it made me unpopular with management, my union and even colleagues and students (many are happy to do less – learning is hard work).  In my mind, pedagogy means I’m focusing on maximizing student learning to the exclusion of all else.  The past two years have made so many educational workers (and students, and parents) disinterested in pedagogy to the point where I may be one of the only people left who gives it any thought.  Many weren’t into it in the first place, others have bailed for their own survival, and some have even actively attacked the idea of learning as a focus in schools, usually for their own political ends.

Pedagogy in Ontario public education has been set back decades since 2018.  These days we’re reduced to focussing on student wellness (usually while being driven to destroy our own) rather than teaching, but good pedagogy leads to student success which also brings with it meaningful (rather than proscriptive) wellness, though that is much more difficult to do than simply tossing learning out the window in favour of proscriptive wellness.  I didn’t became a teacher to provide daycare or be an emotional councillor, I got into teaching to teach.  In an attempt to survive this ongoing disaster, Ontario education has given up on teaching and learning and has fallen back to wellness as a last raison d’être.

Pedagogical best practices have always struggled to survive in our educational bureaucracy.  I’d honestly hoped that a change in government in Ontario would create efficiencies and opportunities in a system too long under single party control, but the new guys are just as (if not more) duplicitous and manipulative as the old guys, and obviously not focused on pedagogy.  This loss of faith in our provincial education system is what had me daydreaming about a student bill of rights for all Canadian students.  Unfortunately, Canada’s colonial history tends to systemically abuse disenfranchised people (like students under 18), leaving me worried for the safety and efficacy of learning for our children.

For me, the point of Dusty World is to allow me to transparently reflect on my teaching practice in order to improve it.  I have always done this publicly in the hopes that other people might find it useful, but the unpublished posts I’m looking at feel more like hopelessness than they do constructive reflective practice.  Every time I post something I get blowback from exhausted people who are trying to make nonsensical system-think work in practice.  The best thing I seem able to do as one of the few people left in the system actually interested in effective teaching and learning is to not publish reflections on it, which breaks my heart.  We seem to have lost the plot entirely.

***

Systemic Pedagogical Failures Continue…

Not posting anything doesn’t mean there are still major problems in our system.  So far this year I’ve had graduates tell me they are in real trouble in post-secondary maths classes.  How an A+ high school student can suddenly find themselves failing in post secondary raises very concerning questions about how we are teaching and learning.  Other students are able to use their maths like a toolbox to solve problems, but our grads struggle with rote learning that renders them ineffective.  My son had a senior maths class last year where the entire class failed unit 5.  The teacher said it’s ok, everyone fails unit 5.  If we were focusing on pedagogy we’d be trying to solve this.

This past year I had prominent STEM educators tell me that only academic/white collar courses matter.  When I suggested we create content for non-academic technology courses I was told that they don’t matter because barely any schools teach them.  This STEM is more just S & M thinking is ongoing and obviously inequitable.  This is one of those things I’d hoped a change in government might address, but blue collar subjects (and students) are still an afterthought in our degree fixated system.  Were we considering pedagogy on a systemic level, this kind of thing wouldn’t come up in conversation.

I’m currently teaching over 70 students in grades 10-12 in computer technology and engineering, four of them are girls and there are no girls in my senior class.  Sexism and genderism is still a major problem in our system.  My partner had one of our local students in elearning last quadmester and she told the story of how, when she expressed concern about her course selections she was told, “you’re so pretty, you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing.”  I want to have trouble believing that this was said, but then I look at how genderized our course selections continue to be and wonder how this kind of systemic genderism can happen.

I’m one of the few that has tried to keep extracurriculars alive in our aimless wander through COVID and have had many difficult experiences and observations about how student performance is affected by long term trauma, but that too can’t be publicly reflected on because it doesn’t matter anymore, and doing so only seems to aggravate the situation.  Having an opportunity to reflect, share and talk to other professional educators about my practice has been a valuable ‘breathing’ process for my teaching, but like trying to teach through a mask every day, I’m left gasping for breath.

My current situation (massive classes while trying to teach hands-on engineering skills without the space needed to do it) has always been an issue where I teach, but nothing changes because I’m expected to hurt myself making it work every year, at least until there is an injury then it’ll be my fault.  I recently had a student in my post-secondary bound senior computer engineering class (capped at 31, like an advanced calculus class) who is credit poor, essential level/DD and has a history of violence.  When I asked guidance why this student was directed into our class I was told that he had selected my course, which begs the question: who is being guided?  We have resources set aside for students like this, but when we don’t guide them into those programs we reduce the efficacy of everyone else’s learning.

Speaking as a parent as well as a teacher, I’d like our education system to focus on teaching and learning best practices, which should include gender unprejudiced and level appropriate guidance.  I suspect the dearth of maths skills in our grads is also a result of the ‘pick-what-you-like’ (unless you’re female) approach.  It’s hard to cover pathway appropriate curriculum when a significant portion of every class has neither the inclination nor background to engage with it.  If pedagogy mattered, we’d be resolving these problems instead of ignoring them.

The world has many problems and I feel that pedagogically focused public education is the answer to many of them, but because of politics and circumstance, schools in Ontario aren’t focused on being schools anymore.

Meanwhile, the digital information revolution is, if anything, accelerating, and we’ve thrown hundreds of thousands of staff and students into the digital divide in an attempt to weather the pandemic, all with no time or training to tackle any of it with pedagogy in mind.  I’m rejigging my entire curriculum again for the 3rd major change in scheduling in the past 18 months (with no time given).  It’s like trying to build a plane while it’s in the air… again.

Inconsistencies have poked so many holes in the fiction that is our public education system that many people are now questioning it in ways they wouldn’t have before.  The one-two punch of a vindictive, populist government and this never-ending pandemic has left our schools angry and confused.  That loss of faith is hard to recover from.  Trying to honestly reflect on pedagogical best practices in this void only seems to aggravate the situation.  It might be time to send Dusty World on sabbatical for a while and focus on something where I can give it 100% without other people constantly telling me to do less.  I didn’t get into teaching to do it at low intensity, the kids deserve more, but that’s where we’re at.

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Music, millenials and the lost art of curation

The other day I asked my senior class how millennials listen to music when they get their first car.  They seemed confused by the question.  I’ve noticed that young people don’t like to manage files any more (many grade 9s don’t know how to find files on a desktop), and since music turned into file management around the turn of the millennium, it’s all about file management these days, isn’t it?  It turns out it isn’t.


When I started driving near the end of the 80s the couple of cassettes in my pocket turned into a briefcase of tapes.  That briefcase contained whole albums by artists, both what they released and B side stuff.  When you went to a concert you’d hear the released stuff, but you’d also hear the unreleased songs, and the majority of people in the audience were very familiar with it; they were fans of the artist who had spent a lot of time in a long form medium (the album).

That process continued into the 90s as my tape collection evolved into compact disks.  The smaller form factor resulted in flip books of disks.  The plastic box with the album art on it got left behind, but I was still listening to whole albums and collecting the works of specific artists in a detailed, long form, album based manner.  I was introduced to mixed tapes in the mid-90s by my hot, new girlfriend, so the idea of designing your own playlists have been around for a long time, but albums were the main point.  We spent a lot of time curating our collections.  You’d discover new artists in friends’ collections, you’d hear unreleased music while in their car.  At a concert you knew the words to every song, even the unreleased stuff.  What happens at concerts nowadays?  They play their released songs only and then do popular covers so everyone can sing along?

I went digital early.  From Napster to modern mp3 distribution, I kept cultivating a locally based, artist focused collection of music, but that isn’t the way that the industry has gone.  Nor is it the way that teens today relate to music.  The gigs of music I’ve curated aren’t the future, it’s me using modern tools to imitate my past relationship with less fluid, physical mediums, but is that a bad thing?  I’d argue that my relationship with an artist’s music was deeper and more intimate because of the limitations of our mediums.  When you have the collected works of Dire Straits (six original albums plus four live ones) on hand, you are diving deep into what they did.  Surely deeper familiarity breeds a more loyal fan.

Kids are still into music, but the digitization of the medium has resulted in a much more fluid relationship with it.  I frequently watch students randomize YouTube videos as background music and then click through a song in the first ten seconds if it isn’t grabbing them.  Their’s is a high input low attention threshold relationship with the artist.  You can hardly blame modern artists for producing shallow, catching songs – the cloud based medium that has descended upon us pre-selects that kind of music for success in a fluid, digital landscape.

Laying on a bunk at air cadet camp in Trenton on a hot, un-air conditioned summer night in 1985 and getting lost in Brothers in Arms on a walkman isn’t something millennials consider doing with music, is it?   We started doing the skip a song thing on CDs in the 1990s, but it was such a pain on tape that you’d just listen to the song.  In doing so you sometimes came around to liking something that didn’t grab your attention in the first ten seconds.  At the very least you’re experiencing an artist’s thoughts and music in a more detailed fashion.

When I asked my students what they do when they get a car for the first time they were confused.  Spotify was the answer (it turns out Spotify is the millennial answer to any music related question).  I get it if you’re swimming in wifi at home or at school all the time.  Sure, it’s bandwidth and data ain’t free, but it is if you’re a kid in 2017 for the most part.  But what do you do when you’re going for a ride in your first car and have no locally curated music to take with you?  I figured they’d all have MP3s on their phones, but they don’t.  Spotify premium was the answer.  That’s ten bucks a month to listen to whatever you want, and you can evidently save it locally if you’re on the road, but do they?  If you’ve never had to manage a local music collection before I suspect it wouldn’t even occur to you to do it this late in the game, it’d feel too much like work.

So the young driver’s solution to the problem of never having cultivated a personal collection of music is to pay for a monthly cloud based service and then now begin cultivating a local music collection?  You could just hope your phone is willing and able to bring down all that data in a continuous way, but that’s an expensive prospect in Canada.  With some of the highest mobility costs in the world and lots of long car trips in store, Canada isn’t a comfortable place to be cloud dependant for your tunes.  If you end up not being able to pay the ten bucks a month for the pro version of Spotify, you lose all your local music.  Just when you thought the digital native’s relationship with their tunes couldn’t get any more ephemeral, it gets more so.  When you live in the cloud you don’t really own your data, do you?

Another problem with cloud-based digital music natives is the interactivity.  When you’re used to constantly inputting changes to infinite cloud based music it’s second nature to go looking for whatever strikes your fancy, or skip through the play list looking for whatever drifted into your mind as a must-listen-to song in the moment.  How long are your eyes off the road while you’re doing that?  If that’s your relationship with music then you’ve trained yourself over many years to surf through your fluid, digital music with frequent inputs.  I wonder how this is reflected in statistics…
Digital distraction for the win.
  • MADD stats on young drivers.
  • Young Driver stats on distracted driving
  • Transport Canada on distracted driving: “the highest proportion of distracted drivers involved in fatal crashes was in the under-20 age group (16%) followed by those aged 20 to 29 (13%)”
  • NHTSA on distracted driving
  • It’s a world wide issue, here is Australia
The texting culture is generally blamed for the problem of distracted driving, but I suspect this learned, constant input approach to music has a part to play in it as well, especially with younger drivers.

The long and the short of all this is that the music culture of young people is completely foreign to anyone over thirty.  For people who got into music before it got very cloudy in the twenty-teens, curating your own local music means you can jump into a car or go on a trip and never once wonder about access; you own your music.  Because of that effort you’ve probably also got a closer relationship with the artists you call your own.  For the cloud dependent millennial that move to vehicular mobility produces a number of expensive problems.  Of course, since you never really got into any one musician when you were younger because listening to more than one third of a song is boring, maybe you don’t care.

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Triumph Tiger 955i Fuel INjector Cleaning

We’re seeing temperatures in the low -20s these days and waves of snow passing through creating banks that are hard to see over.  To quote the Penguins of Madagascar…

The roads themselves are sanded and snow covered too.  We’ve got a major storm rolling in tonight that looks like it’ll pitch another 48 hours of the white stuff at us.

At this time of year I tend to be in a mood as it’s been far too long since I’ve leaned into any corners.  Compounding the lack of riding is the tricky nature of trying to find parts for the old Triumph Bonneville in order to keep that project purring along.  What parts there are pretty damned expensive too.  I’ll get back into it soon enough, but in the meantime I thought I’d give the new (er) Triumph’s fuel injectors a cleaning.

I’ve been in and out of the Tiger so many times that it’s second nature.  The tank removal process (which is pretty complicated involving removing 4 panels and many awkward fasteners) can be done (blindfolded!) in about 10 minutes.

Last year I installed a new regulator/rectifier, but didn’t install it properly because I didn’t want to dismantle the whole lot.  The first job was to properly fasten it down.

The second job was to remove the fuel rail.  This is easy on the 955i Tiger (two bolts), but one was threaded (having a 19 year old bike as my regular runner does produce some headaches).  A cunningly installed second nut on the back of the threaded one had it all back together tight though.

For the fuel injectors I heated up the ultrasonic cleaner to 65°C and ran the vibrations for 20
minutes before cleaning them up with fuel cleaner.  The injector nozzles are very fine, so even a small piece of gunk getting past the fuel filter could cause headaches.

Once cleaned and sorted I press fitted the injectors back into the rail and reinstalled it back onto the bike.  The injectors press fit (there are thick rubber gaskets on each end) into the metal injector body on the bike too.  The only tricky bit was sorting out that threaded mounting bolt, but there is space behind the rail for a second nut and it did the trick.  While I was in there I cleaned all the electrical connections and put dielectric grease on the connectors to keep everything neat and dry.

It all went back together well and I had the tank back on and the Tiger back in hibernation before it knew what had happened to it.  I’m hoping the cleaning sorts a slow starting issue that developed after I solved the stalling issue last summer.
The old Tiger’s fuel injection is one of the crankiest things about it.  Early mechanical fuel injection is famously, um, personality ridden.  The latest (delightful?) bit of character is having to lean on the starter motor for several seconds before it fires.  It used to fire at the touch of the starter, so I’m hoping to get that back again.
We’re in the middle of semester turnover and I haven’t had time to chase the old Triumph parts guys (who like to do things old school on a telephone), but that’s next on the list of things to do before the weather breaks and I can lean into a corner again.

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Winter Photography in the Polar Vortex: Ice & Snow

Taken over the winter of 2021/22 with a Canon T6i DSLR and the STL Canon macro lens.  Backlighting created by opening a car door and shooting through the window into the morning sun. Click to zoom on image.

January 29th, 2022:

January 21st/22nd, 2022:

January 16th, 2022:

January 11th, 2022

January 3rd:

The Polar Vortex didn’t drop down on us until January.  December had a very different tone to it…

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Low Light Autumn 360 Camera On Motorcycle Photography

Taken around 4pm on a September 28th.  Sunset is about 2 hours off, but the sun is already low and a weather front is moving in bringing days of rain with it.  Not great light, but it shows you what a Ricoh Theta can pick up in poor conditions.  Most shots were taken while we were moving at 80+km/hr.
 

  
  

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Finding a Patch of Sun


As the sun rose on the shortest day of the year our little dog managed to find a fleeting patch of it and opened his solar collector ears to get as much as possible.  In a matter of minutes it was gone to be replaced by days of grey fog over Christmas; there was something in that moment.


If you get to fifty without any scars you’re not doing it right, and I have my fair share of scars.  I found myself struggling through another Christmas season feeling like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.  With a couple of weeks away from the emotional deficit that is Ontario education these days, I got some perspective and decided to try and make a conscious decision to find that patch of sunlight rather than dwell on the darkness.

The return to school started well enough, but you’re not just battling your own negativity, you’re also facing it in your students and colleagues.  With the end of the semester approaching and the system under attack from the elected representatives sworn to look after it, everyone is terse, but I was finding that my bonhomie was working.  I was able to calm and direct students, and when a colleague was rather unprofessional with my wife, I was able to help her through that too.

Yesterday was an epic shit show though. I got to school only to have my cell – which I’d forgotten in my classroom in a rush to get to the information picket the afternoon before – ringing off the hook.  It was my wife saying a snow plow had backed into her.  I rushed home to find the back window of the car blown out, glass all over the road and the ‘C’ pillar bashed in.  The plow had not only hit her, it had then pushed the car two feet sideways before stopping.

Alanna was ok but the kid driving the plow didn’t say a word.  His supervisor showed up and then the OPP.  It was all very amiable, but in retrospect this was them trying to manage an obviously at-fault accident.  The OPP officer (who never gave us his name) gave us an incident report number and that was that.  The township guys shovelled up the glass and  I followed Alanna over to the repair centre in Fergus to discover we were already $500 in the hole for a deductible.  They then said it might be a week before they even start working on it, and we only have 7 days of rental car coverage.  Nice to know our second most expensive car insurance in Canada rates don’t begin to pay for an accident that was in no way our fault.

Even with all that we were getting our sense of humour back as I drove Alanna to school.  As we approached the last traffic light before school I was in no rush and doing about 50kmh/hr.  I must have seen something in my peripheral vision because I suddenly found myself standing on the brake without knowing why as a mid-sized sedan blew through the red-light perpendicular to us.  I think we missed it by about fifteen feet.  At 50km/hr we were moving at about 13.9 metres per second.  Had I been moving at only a couple of kilometres per hour faster we would have been t-boned by that big, V6 sedan in our small hatchback and our son would have been an orphan.


None of this registered in the moment.  We were both already pretty shaken up by the morning and this was simply more nonsense piled on top.  We went to school and I got there about half an hour before my first class.  I spent most of that time sitting with my wife listening to the discussion with insurance.


With no breaks for the rest of the day I found myself unable to engage with my students effectively.  I told my seniors what happened and they went about their culminating projects and tried to give me some space.  I didn’t tell my junior classes, but our head of student support dropped by and when I told her what happened she offered to cover my class so I could get some head space.  It was nice to hear someone acknowledge how traumatic a morning like the one I had was.  I didn’t take her up on it and didn’t pursue leaving.  I’m anxious about asking for compassionate leave because I don’t have the greatest history when it comes to getting support while in crisis.


The next day I apologized to my junior students for being so short with them and found my way back onto the beam again.  After a weekend of biblical rain the sun rose on Sunday morning and the world had the colour turned up to eleven.  I just have to keep working on getting back to that small patch of sun, even when the world seems full of ineptitude and chaos.

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How Bespoke is Too Bespoke?

Owning a Fireblade checked a box, taught me
many things and was a zero cost experience!

I always try to balance out bike projects so that I land in the black on them.  I’ve gotten pretty
good at this.  The Fireblade Project cost me about $2300 all in and then I got to ride it for a season before selling it for $2500, which I then put towards the Concours14.  Even with fancy seats, windshields and other gubbins, the Connie only owes me about $7000.  Older model, double the mileage bikes are going for eight grand, so I’m still ahead there too.

People who throw big money down on customization that they like seem to think other people will pay extra to adopt their choices and tastes, which never made a lot of sense to me.  This goes for houses or in vehicles – just because you’re willing to pay a premium to get a certain look, doesn’t mean anyone else is, and expecting them to shell out for your choices is a bit naive.

The Concours was a cagey purchase that
still has me well in the black.

What does always sell is functionality.  As much as I’d like to get all romantic and throw money at the old Triumph I’m restoring, I’m more interested in making it work, and then riding it.  To that end, I’m not interested in creating a perfect replica of a 1971 Triumph Bonneville to put in shows, so modern touches (especially when they’re more cost effective than stock-at-all-cost options) are something I have no trouble with.  A bike that starts easily and runs sweetly sells itself much more quickly than a cantankerous but period correct trailer queen.  One’s a motorcycle, the other is art, and art is notoriously in the eye of the beholder.

One of the reasons I’ve always gravitated toward cheap and cheerful 80s and 90s Japanese restos was because the parts are usually easy to find, including hard parts from a breaker if needed, and they’re as cheap as chips to buy because people tended to use them rather than put them up on a pedestal.

My first brush with ‘vintage’ (I think a 51 year old air-cooled Triumph from before the collapse of the British bike industry qualifies as vintage) has me wondering if my approach still works.  The cost of parts is much higher than more recent Japanese bikes and this particular Bonneville was half taken apart by a muppet who wanted to be in Easy Rider, so I’m constantly finding parts missing or incorrect.  I’m also struggling with missing non-metric tools after having owned metric bikes my entire life.

When I’m reading Practical Sportbikes I enjoy the articles on DIY and the stories of scratchers who got a machine put together with their own hands.  When they run one of the ‘specials’ articles where it’s a rich guy with clean hands throwing money at a project, I lose interest quickly.  Classic Bike Magazine is similar.  When they’re talking about an owner keeping an old machine running on ingenuity and guile, I’m all in, but the minute it’s a millionaire adding to his collection with another bespoke machine put together by someone else, I’ve lost interest.

I just finished Guy Martin’s new book, Dead Men Don’t Tell Tales, and Guy ends the latest one
talking about trying to find what makes him happy.  This requires a fair bit of self awareness – something that most people don’t have.  Guy’s particularly difficult in that he will often act on an urge that turns out to be incorrect, but, as he says in the book, he’s evolving.

There’s a scene in Guy’s Garage where Cammy, his professional race mechanic mate, knows how to fix the car they’re working on but Guy has his own ideas and keeps bashing away at it wrong.  Rather than push the point, Cammy backs off and waits for Guy to realize he’s using the wrong tool for the job.

Guy is critical of Cammy for being slack in his approach to work in the book, but I’m left wondering if the truth isn’t somewhere in between:  what looks like a lack of effort from Guy’s point of view is actually a better use of his energy from the professional race mechanic’s point of view.  There’s more to all this than just jumping in to the physical labour, you need to be exercising the grey matter too.

What I’m taking from this latest round of Guy Martin media is that you’re more likely to stay engaged with and finish big projects if they make sense to you.  To that end, I spent yesterday working out why the kickstarter on the Bonneville wasn’t working (the muppet had put it in backwards).

The goal is still to have gone through the whole bike and have it back in working order without breaking the bank.  The amount spent on it matters less than whether or not the project is in the black.  If a functional ’71 Bonneville is worth about five grand, then that’s what I’ll work to on the budget, while keeping an eye on what engages me most about all this:  putting a sidelined bike back into service again… and then riding it!

This morning I’m looking at Motogadget’s mo.Unit Blue and considering how to best tackle a 51 year old wiring loom that looks to be in good shape but should probably get rebuilt if dependability is the goal.  An ignition powered by bluetooth on a smartphone is just the kind of steampunk anachronism that a riding focused buyer would dig.  That it’s also invisible means it won’t hurt the look of the bike (the only change is the ignition key isn’t there).

Got into rebuilding the Amal carbs only to discover the muppet who took them apart before didn’t install any of the air slider hardware for the choke, so now I’m hunting for hard parts for 51 year old carbs… in a pandemic.  Note my anemic imperial socket wrench set.

Ready to go and then stopped – neither carb has the air slider or hardware in it.  I’d normally call around to the local breakers, find a donor set of carbs and then keep them handy for situations like this.  That isn’t an option with a 51 year old British bike.

It’s coming along – slower than I’d like, but it’s coming along.  When it seems too much I remind myself why I’m doing it: one day soon that engine will turn over for the first time in decades and shortly after that I’ll be out riding the thing!

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DGR: Social Connections Challenge: Remember The Ride

I took a swing at the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride Social Connections Challenge with MOTR Garage in the last post, but that idea might not tick the “innovative and disruptive” box – motorcycle coops already exist, though not in the format I’m suggesting.  My angle was to leverage retired teachers to connect men inter-generationally, but otherwise it’s an existing concept and not particularly disruptive, though it is scalable anywhere public education exists.

I just heard back from Motorcycle-Diaries and learned that I did not win their 2020 Dream Ride Contest, though being a top 5 finalist worldwide was pretty good by itself.  The winning trip by Theo De Paepe on riding to the northern lights is a moving piece worthy of the win.  Participating in this contest and reading all of these moving dream rides got me thinking about how digital connectivity might be used to reach out to younger potential riders lost in the digital wastes of 2020.


My own piece for that contest was on riding my granddad Bill’s path though France as a part of the British Expeditionary Force in 1939 and 1940 before the Blitzkrieg swept them out of continental Europe.  William Morris’s war record was another one of those family secrets that wasn’t talked about, but his military service during World War 2 is the stuff of film.  One of only a handful of his RAF squadron that escaped occupied France, Bill recovered downed planes during the Battle of Britain and then experienced three harrowing years in Northern Africa fighting Rommel as a driver in the RAF armoured car division.  He finished his tour in the white helmets motorcycle stunt team, doing drill and stunts on motorbikes!


Discovering my Granddad’s history was a great way to reconnect with a man I was close with as a child, but lost connection with when we emigrated to Canada.  As I was working through that family history I uncovered another mystery the family had been very quiet about, the death of my great aunt Faye.  My mum’s middle name was Faye, but I hadn’t realized she was named after her aunt.  I also didn’t know that Faye had died in a motorcycling accident in Norfolk in the mid-sixties when she was hit by an army lorry.  My mother had always stridently opposed me riding, and now that all suddenly made sense.  That my great aunt’s death ended my granddad’s life long love of riding and also prevented me from getting on a motorcycle when I first started driving is a lasting source of frustration.


Motorcycling isn’t easy, but it speaks to your very being, and it tends to self-select a certain kind of person.  It tends to run in families because families are literally all certain kinds of people.  Trying to bury my motorcycling family history only worked on me because I was an immigrant child separated from his extended family.  While I had uncles and cousins riding in the UK, I was oblivious in another country.


Finding my way back to my motorcycling gene played a big part in me eventually getting my license, though I’m frustrated at the lost decades I could have been riding.  It got me thinking about how many people are separated from family and live in a cultural void where they feel like they come from no one and from nowhere.  But we all have history, and many of us will have ancestors who rode.  Motorcycles used to be transportation before they became recreation.  Any rider can tell you how often an old timer will come up and start chatting about a bike they once owned – it happens to me on the Tiger all the time (Triumph is an old brand with a long history and a lot of old-timers have owned one).


DGR’s Social Connections Challenge wants to focus on disruptive, on-the-ground projects that help socially disaffected men who are more prone to suicide.  As a group, immigrant children are more socially disaffected than most, growing up in a strange country where they have no extended family.  The UN’s latest report has over two-hundred and seventy million people living as immigrants in countries they weren’t born.  On top of that there are many more people living without connection to their family history for various reasons.  Having grown up in a place where I had deep roots and moving to North America, I often meet people who have no idea where their families came from or even who anyone was before their grand parents.  In the early 20th Century motorcycles were transport, not a recreational activity, so many people have family history on two wheels they know nothing about.  I speak from personal experience when I say that making that connection is a powerful thing.


With that in mind, here’s another pitch to DGR’s Social Connections Challenge:

Granddad Bill on his bike in rural Norfolk well before I was born.

Inspiration:  As an immigrant child I’ve been separated from my extended family for most of my adult life and missed out on motorcycling through family as a result.  After my grandmother’s death I returned home to England for the first time in three decades and discovered secret family motorcycling history which prompted me to get my license.  Family connections have allowed me to bypass the postmodern amnesia many people face; that feeling that we are no one from nowhere. Ride To Remember would be an online resource that connects riders and would be riders to their family motorcycling history.  Realizing that riding is a part of your personal history is powerful.  Not only would this encourage new riders to ride by normalizing what is now considered a high risk activity in our sedentary, safety-first societies, but it would also reconnect us to a sense of continuity and belonging through our own family history.  Motorcycling is an acknowledgement of an inclination that often has roots going back generations.


Target Group:  disassociated men who feel that they don’t have a culture or family history related to riding.  The UN reports over 270 million people have immigrated internationally, and many others are separated from family through circumstances such as adoption.


Proposed Solution:  An interactive website/online community that collects and shares family history related to motorcycling: an ancestry.com for motorcyclists.  By connecting disenfranchised men to their family history, I hope to offer them the same sense of belonging and cultural connection that I have discovered.  By leveraging online connectivity and modern data management, Ride To Remember collates historical motorcycle related media in an easy to access database surrounded by a engaged community that encourages disassociated men to rediscover their moto-roots.


Project vision:  the pilot period involves setting up a .org site that creates an online relational database of motorcycling history using existing online documents tagged with details that allow users to search for material based on time, geographic location, names and other details.  A.I. image recognition software would be used to web-crawl and archive historical motorcycle related online images and online sources.  Long standing manufacturers, museums and vintage motorcycling organizations already have online presences that would provide regional structures in this growing information cloud.   With a growing data structure in place, analytics would allow users to quickly find connections.  They would also be encouraged to add information to the database, further enriching it.  We are at a pivotal time where a lot of analogue material will get lost in digital translation, this project would also encourage digitization of photos and documents for future motorcyclists.  The final stage would be an interactive database that connects people to their motorcycling past and reminds us that none of us comes from no one, nowhere.


Project leads:  writers, photographers and family historians who ride (like myself), anyone with family history in riding (motorbikes used to be family transport!) would be encouraged to share their ancestral motorcyclists.


Project title:  Ride To Remember

***

LINKS

The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride Social Connections:
https://www.gentlemansride.com/blog/dgr-scc


Over 270 million immigrants in the world today:
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/international-migrant-stock-2019.html


My granddad’s war history and my great aunt’s death while riding was hidden family history that, once exposed, allowed me to embrace riding in a deep and personal way:
https://tkmotorcyclediaries.blogspot.com/2018/03/walking-in-bills-footsteps-1940-france.html
https://tkmotorcyclediaries.blogspot.com/2013/09/biking-family-history-part-2.html

The Motorcyclist, by George Elliot Clarke – an ode to George’s father, who rode at a time when Canada made it difficult for black men to do anything:
https://quillandquire.com/review/the-motorcyclist/


We live in a broken world where families are torn apart while chasing (or being stolen) by globalism.  There is a power in riding that self selects a certain kind of person.  Remember The Ride will reconnect lost people to family two-wheel roots that run deep.


https://pier21.ca/home
Pier 21 in Halifax is the location of the Canadian Immigration Museum.  As a nation of immigrants, Canada is particularly prone to family amnesia.

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On Going Historical Research: 1930s Off road riding

https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/18221/lot/460/

1930 Scottish Six Day Trial bike and the enigmatic Ms E Sturt
UK military participation:  http://www.armymotorsports.co.uk/Disciplines/Trials
https://ssdt.org/past-trials/past-winners             https://www.tmxnews.co.uk/ssdt-winners-scottish-six-days-trial/
previous S6DT winners
https://ssdt.org/past-trials/1931
https://endurogp.org/en/a-brief-history-of-enduro-motorcycle

Beer, and war!

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Brake System Maintenance on a C14 Kawasaki Concours

 I’m busy in the garage these days with the on-going 50 year old Triumph Bonneville restoration project.  It’s a big project that will take some time to sort out, but it’s -20°C outside with snow squall warnings of 20cm of snow coming, which means it’s also regular maintenance time on the two running bikes in the stable.

Tiger’s back in hibernation after last week’s sprockets & chain maintenance, waiting for a break in another never-ending winter of COVID for a chance to ride.

Last week the Tiger got new chain and sprockets.  I hadn’t done the sprockets on it since getting it over 5 years and 40k ago, so I figured it was time when I noticed the latest chain had stretch in it that made it impossible to set the sag properly.  This week it’s all about the Concours.

I got the Connie last spring in the middle of the second lockdown.  My son and I rented a van and drove down to The Beaches in Toronto and picked it up from its second owner who hadn’t been riding it for several years.  It’s a very low mileage bike (under 30k when I picked it up), but I like to cover all the basic maintenance so I can set a ‘zero point’ for future work.

As you would expect from Kawasaki Heavy Industries, the brakes on the GTR1400/C14 Concours are superbly engineered Nissin calipers.  I’d picked up the pads last summer but they hung on the wall until now because I was putting miles on the thing.  I did find the brakes were squeaking a bit, suggesting the calipers weren’t releasing properly – something that can happen in a bike that sits for several seasons.  Like I said before, I don’t like riding a bike where I’m not sure of the maintenance, especially on brakes, so it was due.

Doing the pads on the Concours is remarkably easy.  You don’t need to remove any body panels and everything is very accessible.  Undo the pin that holds the pads and spring that holds them in and then everything comes apart in your hands.  The pins were rough and there was some odd gunk stuck in the front right caliper.  I cleaned everything up and lubed it and then slotted the new pads into place with the now lubed pins (I think it’s a #5 hex head that does the trick).  All very logical.

If you’re looking for torque settings for the
brakes on a Kawasaki GTR1400/Concours
C14, here they are.

The rears are just as easy and a similar design with the same pin and caliper bolt sizes (everything is hex metric).  The back was as mucky as the front and I went to lengths to clean up the pressurized caliper slider and lube the pins and areas where the pads move.  The action immediately felt better afterwards.

Last spring when I got the bike I had to sort out a leak in the hydraulic clutch which resulted in entirely new DOT 4 brake fluid (what the Connie uses in both clutch and brakes).  Changing up your brake fluid removes impurities and moisture that can eventually cause real corrosion headaches in your brake system, so after doing the pads I changed up the brakes fluid on both front and rear systems.  The only fluid change left now on the Concours is the antifreeze.  I’ll do that at the end of next season.  When I tested it the fluid it was still bright green, looked new and showed good temperature range.

Getting all the air out of the hydraulic clutch so that it felt tight and had positive action was a real pain in the ass last spring.  The good new is that this air-line powered vacuum system did the trick then (it’s not crazy expensive) and takes the headache out of bleeding anything with steady, controllable suction.

In the case of the brake system, I set up the vacuum bleeder and then kept adding fluid in the reservoir at the top until it came out clear (the used stuff was darker and cloudier – it looked almost like water once the new stuff made an appearance.
Just a note:  don’t keep brake fluid laying around open.  It collects moisture and goes off pretty quickly.  As with all brake fluid changes, I opened the bottle and then immediately used it this time.
The front brakes took less than 10 minutes to completely bleed of old fluid and the rears even less.  If you’re doing your own brake/hydraulic fluid maintenance with any kind of regularity, let that hand-pump go and get one of these things (assuming you have an air compressor of course).
With the brakes sorted on the Concours and the sprockets and chain on the Tiger, both are waiting for a break in the weather for a cheeky winter ride to kick off the 2022 season.  As long as I’m not trying to navigate ice on the road, I’m good to go.  An above zero day and some dry pavement is all I need

Now that the regular movers (I was going to call them new but the Tiger is almost 20 years old and the Connie turned ten last year) are sorted out maintenance wise, it’s back to the old Bonneville project.  Next up I’m rebuilding the two Amal carbs, then it’s rebuilding the ignition system and then (hopefully) hearing the old thing bark for the first time in decades.

Sometimes the Bonneville can feel like it’s too big to manage, it needs so much, but with two other working machines I’m never going to be angry with it not being ready, though I would love to have it running in time for The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride on May 22nd.  A ’71 Bonneville with some early 70s retro style would be a blast.

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