Timothy King – Page 16 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Ready Launch™

A momentum driven motorcycle turntable.

We pulled in to the garage yesterday and I wished for this: The Ready Launch™. Backing the Concours out of a single car garage and around parked vehicles can be onerous, and as we rode right in and the door closed behind us it reminded me of the Bat Cave. When Batman does it he drives the Batmobile in and it rotates for a quick getaway; I want that.

When you pull in to your garage and brake on The Ready Launch™, it transfers the forward braking momentum of the bike into a mechanical system that produces a slow, rotating motion spinning through 180° before locking again.

With some calibration and gearing it should be no trouble to capture all the momentum of a stopping motorcycle and pour it into the rotating platform. It would be a zero energy system, reliant on the bike pulling on to it and stopping to produce the energy needed to spin, and it doesn’t need to spin quickly or far. After a few test stops a rider would know how hard to pull the brakes to produce the energy needed for the 180° turn.

http://functionspace.com/topic/3704/Converting-Rotational-motion-to-Linear-motion-and-vice-versa

The braking mass of the bike is applied to the piston, which then turns the gears to make the platform rotate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
http://interactagram.com/physics/dynamics/MechanicalAdvantage/gear/
The rack being pulled is where the bike parks, spinning up a flywheel that rather than lifting a weight transfers to a rotational plane under the platform. With proper gearing the heavy platform slowly rotates using the short but heavy stopping momentum of the bike.

Thoughts on Bump Starting a Motorcycle

It’s been one of those days. I have a 21 year old motorbike but the 10 week old battery in it failed and almost stranded me on my way to an exam.

I’m still not sure how the Concours found a way to start with next to no electricity but I’m mighty glad she’s looking after me. I ended up making it to work in plenty of time.

The other day the Connie wouldn’t start, plunging me into despair. Had I wrecked the electrics with my wash last week? Had I wired something wrong? It turns out no, I hadn’t. On the upside, it wouldn’t start in my own driveway, which makes for cheaper towing costs.

Thanks to some quality engineering by Motormaster I was the proud owner of a 10 week old Eliminator battery that had a bad cell. Want to hear the sound of frustration (and Concours magic?), here it is:

I’m still not sure how the Connie got going again with almost no electricity, but she pulled it off and got me to work. I had the auto-tech teacher handy in case my bump start failed, so here’s how it went: I duck walked the Concours to the slight downhill out of the parking lot and got it going down the hill as quickly as I could. I had it in second gear with the clutch in. Dumping the clutch I got a couple of big chugs and then the bike stopped.

I’ve had a lot of experience bump starting cars. I was the proud owner of a series of Chrysler and Ford products in the 1980s, many of which seemed determined not to start. I’ve bump started everything from Chrysler Lasers to Ford Escorts and Mercury Capris (all manual shift, I’ve never owned an automatic). If it’s got four wheels, I can probably get it going.

Made in Vietnam this year or made in Japan 21 years ago?
I’ll take the 21 year old Japanese bits, thanks.

There is something you need to know about bump starting a bike if you’ve only ever done it in a car. When you get a car rolling you don’t need a lot of speed because you’ve got so much momentum thanks to the weight of the vehicle. With the bike you need to get more speed going because you’ve got much less weight. My first motorbike bump start didn’t because I didn’t recognize the difference in mass. Get your bike going faster than you do with a car before you drop the clutch.

Of course, no one bump starts anything any more because it would damage the on-board computers, so this is an academic discussion.

After a jump from the auto-shop at school I was rolling again. I got home, took out the battery and brought it over to my local Canadian Tire where it failed the tester in less than thirty seconds with a bad cell. Twenty minutes later (there was a lot of paperwork) I walked out with a new replacement. It’s since been filled and charged. Hopefully the new battery can keep up with the 21 year old parts around it this time.

What does a new battery do? Well, the bike starts the moment you touch the starter. It feels more awake. I imagine the plugs were putting out some pretty weak spark at idle on a dying battery. While riding the bike seems to lug less at low rpms and feels sharper. The lights glow brighter too.

The parts desk at Canadian Tire said they’ve never had an Eliminator fail like this before. If it’s a one off I’ll shrug and take it as bad luck. If I’m swapping it out again under warranty then I won’t be buying another one. There was no real cost because it died in my driveway, but had it died on the far side of Georgian Bay it would have been much more expensive.

The Mediocrity Virus

So I’m sitting there with a room full of people who have just won the bronze medal world-wide in the most recent round of ‘who’s got the best education system’. After years of diligent effort and insightful leadership, Canada is ranked third worldwide in educational performance, and is very close to toppling the two leaders. In every metric you care to apply, we are awesome.

We’ve applied differentiated instruction, we push technology as far as our budgets will let us, we professionally consider every angle that we can to improve student achievement, from student centred learning to expanding non-academic stream programming in order to meaningfully serve our entire student base.

Are there still problems? Certainly. We still have to work to get every member of our team to produce a peak performance, but this too is happening. Our professionalism, our dedication and our society’s values allow us to compete at the highest level.

Into our victory celebration comes a guy from a team that didn’t even make the olympics. They’ve suffered a precipitous drop in performance, dropping from the mid-teens (the highest they’ve ever been) to thirty-third over all in terms of student performance. Their teaching profession is in shambles, and their society generally views educators as over paid loafers who take summers off. Their public education system (like their prison system or their military) is being taken over by private contractors who are more focused on simplistic metrics, like their own profitability.

He tells us that we have to drastically simplify what we’re doing, go back to drilling students on facts, strictly limit teachers to curriculum and install discipline back into education; this is the only way we will get them all back on a college track. He exemplified teachers who drill their students and run their classes with a simple, military efficiency. He floated odd statistics like, students who already know a lesson will learn 400% better if they are made to repeat what they already know over again, rather than differentiating and enriching their specific learning.

He was statistics driven and awash in his country’s educational expertise (almost exclusively driven from privatized schools). He suggested that we might be ‘a bit ahead’.

The coach in me suggests that if your team is performing well, you keep doing what you’re doing. Certainly you tweak it here or there, but when you turn in a world class performance, you don’t bring in a coach from a team that didn’t even make the show to give suggestions, but we did, because we’re Canadian, and the one thing we have even more than an awesome education system is a giant inferiority complex with our big cousins to the south.

Dinosaurs & Motorcycles

The only thing cooler than hunting with velociraptors on a
motorbike is hunting with velociraptors on motorbikes!

I don’t know how Triumph manages it, but they got a Scrambler into most of the scenes that involve chasing dinosaurs in the new Jurassic World flick. We just got back from it today and it’s a good time, especially if you’ve seen the original.

You see Chris Pratt fiddling with the bullet proof fuel injected Scrambler in an early scene, then he breaks it out for the big hunt half way through the film. The kids in the film point out, “your boyfriend is pretty bad ass!” – well of course he is, he’s riding a classically styled form before function bike!

My hair never looked that good,
even when I had some.

So just in case David Beckham riding into the unknown (except for the people who live there – they know about it) on a Triumph Scrambler wasn’t enough, you’ve now got hunting dinosaurs WITH DINOSAURS!

The former might have pegged the hipster meter, but the later turns it up to eleven!

Needless to say, the interwebs couldn’t resist, and it didn’t take long to get a parody out of it:

I didn’t realize I was sitting on a
movie star at the Toronto Bike
Show this year!

The Triumph Scrambler seems to have this magical ability to look like a capable off road bike while weighing over five hundred pounds (handy perhaps if you’re riding with dinosaurs).

I’m still looking for my basic dual purpose machine, but I can’t say that Triumph’s cunning placements don’t have be jonesing for a Scrambler, at least until I’ve had to pick it up out of the dirt a couple of times and discovered that the retro look is also very breakable, then I’d be begging for the two hundred (!) pound lighter and more robust Suzuki I’ve been longing for, though it wouldn’t be nearly so nostalgic and hipster chic.

I’ve always gone for function over appearance in my motorbiking, but Chris Pratt on a Scrambler isn’t making it easy.

Max & Tim’s Around The World Expedition

Everyone gets all kitted out with monster adventure bikes to travel around the world. A monkey could get a big KTM or BMW around the world, and they’re all adults with giant production budgets and crews!

I want a challenge!

Max & Tim Around the World Expedition!

My eight year old and I do the long way around from Ontario, across the Atlantic, through Ireland and the U.K., across Europe and Asia, through Japan and back through San Francisco and the Western U.S. to Canada.

The Over Map, you can click on pieces to get a breakdown of each leg

MAPS

1. Canada East 3223kms

2. Europe 4377kms
3. Russia 4300kms
4. Mongolia 2272kms
5. China 1925kms
6. Japan 1503kms
7. America West 2619kms
TOTAL: 20,219kms on the ground, plus trips across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Leave Ontario April 1st and put up with some dodgy weather in Canada before making our way to Ireland in May and out of Europe. Across Russia and Siberia in early summer, and then south through Mongolia into China in later summer. End summer across Japan and then do a fall drive through the Western U.S. back to Ontario, returning before Hallow e’en. 214 days, 10 days crossing the Atlantic, 20 days crossing the Pacific, so 184 days on the road, which makes for an average of about 110kms/day, which should be more than possible (with some days off too!). It’ll be slower in some places, but easily doable in developed areas. 400kms/day would be a comfortable five hours of riding in Canada, Europe and the States, as well as Japan and most of China.

So it’s a big impressive map, but we aren’t doing it on a giant adventure bike, we’re doing it on what has always been in my mind the toughest looking motorbike there is!

A Classically Styled Bike & Sidecar!

The bike and sidecar has faded into history as a cool means of getting through anything, but I still have memories of seeing them in action on the roads of England in the ’70s, and a chance to resurrect the awesome cool of a bike and sidecar on a modern adventure ride is too much to resist. That it allows my son to enjoy biking without being perched on a saddle is also nice. I haven’t seen too many options for adventure touring with a bike and sidecar so we’d get to explore some interesting new ways of loading up a three wheeler for an expedition!

Engines of the Red Army! The
classic sidecar and bike!

My weapon of choice would be a Royal Enfield Classic with a matching sidecar. The Classic is modeled on the old Royal Enfield bikes but with modern technology. They are easy to get into and take care of, and the modern touches make it a dependable, tough piece of kit. Besides, everyone and their dog has gone around the world on a BMW, or other big adventure bike. The Classic with a sidecar would bring an entirely different vibe to the macho around the world trek.

With the bike itself and the sidecar capable of carrying gear we could make some interesting choices for building an expedition ready motorbike. I imagine a bike that is capable of carrying spares, as well as camping gear and all our kit in a more elegant way than the typically overloaded adventure two wheeler.

If they can hold machine guns and ammo, they can certainly carry what we need for our expedition! Once we’ve got our kit worked out and our aesthetic set, we need to work out…

Logistics!

The bike will be kitted out with Gopros and we’ll have a video/still camera on hand for video diaries. The trick will be to create a narrative from the media we create. As we collect footage from each leg we’ll hand off the media to our Production Manager (Alanna) and take a few days with her in each place before loading up for another leg. Some ideas for narrative might be an ASD father/son relationship as we cross the planet or a look at the history of motorbikes around the world. No matter what, I’d want to film it pushing what technology can do to capture a live experience. To that end, I’d like to create a videoblog of the trip as it happens, as well as a travel documentary when we’re home.

April to October would be travelling, then the winter would be resolving the footage into a story in post-production.

PITSTOPS (where we meet up with our production team)

Quebec City
St. John’s
Dublin
Norwich
Brugges
Warsaw
Minsk
Moscow
Novosibirsk
Ulaanbaatar
Beijing
Shanghai
Nagasaki
Kyoto
Tokyo
San Francisco
Omaha
Chicago

Our production/travel support team meets us at each pit-stop and takes our media while giving us fresh memory to save stuff too. We spend a couple of days at each spot touring about and resting up then we’re off on the road again as Alanna and team flies ahead of us to the next destination. Having a travel expert in country ahead of us should ease crossings and make entry into each new area more efficient.

Alanna could also help produce some establishing shots and other footage for the final product. Needless to say she’d need a production partner… she and I both think… Jeanette! They’d have a fabulous time.

Back To The Kit

Here’s a fun statistic!

Royal Enfield Classic 500cc = 183 kgs
Classic side car: 80 kgs
TOTAL WEIGHT: 263 kgs, or about 88 kgs per wheel

A BMW R1200GS Adventure weighs 260kgs or about 130kgs per wheel, so with a side car and another wheel to share the weight, the Classic weighs about the same as BMW’s big adventure bike, but has a much lighter presence on and off road.

Royal Enfield Classic with Classic Rocket Sidecar

With some handiwork we should be able to fabricate a tonneau cover for the sidecar that keeps Max warm and dry in nasty weather, but disappears when not needed. I’d also look at putting together a canvas tent that works off the structure of the bike.

The Classic Enfield also has a back deck we could fabricate a rack on for carrying, and the long nose in the sidecar could easily hold soft bags and other equipment.

The bike itself could also hold gear in front of the handlebars and behind the saddle. It isn’t a giant bike, but at 500ccs it would be more than capable of getting us down the road with our gear and would get good mileage too.

In parts of the world where lodging is available, we’d refocus the expedition machine on a lighter load with less food carried and minimal equipment. In places more remote, we’d reconfigure for camping and be sure to have the kit we need to get by in the rough.

A year off with an epic trip across the planet with Max would be fantastic! Seeing how he sees the world would be unique.

Secondary Like We Mean It

We’re getting squeezed for sections this year because bankers and multi-nationals wanted to play silly buggers with the world economy. Watching my school cut English sections down to the bone is making me question the validity of requiring mandatory English throughout high school.

Academic English is very university focused with the almighty essay as the be-all and end-all of high school writing. I’m an English major, I love essays, but I recognize that the vast majority of our students, even the university bound ones, will never write another essay in their lives after high school. Asking senior academic English teachers to consider reports, or labs, or articles, or any other writing output is an uphill battle. They don’t want to water down their subject; the essay is sacred.

I get that, so perhaps it’s time to water down their population. Instead of dragging all senior students through years of mostly irrelevant English skills development, why not separate the vital from the overly specific? Literacy is a vital skill the general population needs to have, regardless of whether they major in English in university or work at a cash register.

http://prezi.com/o3bt2rpkzl5f/reconfiguring-for-21st-century-education/

One of the biggest challenges in English is facing an always packed class (never off the cap) full of an astonishing range of students. A typical academic English class will contain barely literate non-readers whose parents don’t want them to give up academic options (and who may be more than capable in numeracy, science or technology). Academic English bludgeons them with essays and Shakespeare. The solution is to pare off literacy from what is really a specific skill set needed only by advanced students of the arts and humanities.

The idea for mandatory grade 9 and 10 literacy and numeracy courses comes from this logic. The grade 10 course is a survey/review course that works to assess students literacy skills in a granular and meaningful way. The opposite of a standardized test, these courses challenge students in order to accurately assess their skills in numeracy and literacy in detail. The end result would be a certification in two important foundational skills.

Students who are able to demonstrate these foundational skills are able to continue in high school in which ever direction they choose with a clear idea of their strengths or weaknesses in fundamentally skills, or move beyond the building and into apprenticeships or the work place knowing that they have displayed an appropriate level of literacy and numeracy. Their proven ability in these two vital skill sets will resolve many of the fears surrounding letting students leave school early. Those that stay in high school are offered a plethora of courses, local, remote or a hybrid of the two, that allow them to develop interests and abilities that are flexible, encourage their strengths and change with the times.

Those interested in post-secondary can still take advanced English and mathematics courses, but these are entirely optional. They may also be specific to future needs. Science and technology students may take English that focuses on report writing and presenting analysis in clear and concise ways. Arts and humanities students may focus on more traditional English, such as literature and essays.

If we’re not going to do literacy and numeracy properly by underfunding it into oblivion, perhaps it’s time to separate the vital skills from overly specialized, academic English and mathematics and reconfigure for flexibility in our curriculum.

Forming an ECOO Presentation

Originally posted on Dusty World in October, 2012…

There were three key books I read in the past year that have clarified for me a direction we could head in educational technology. Ideas from each of those books, which at first appear to be in direct odds with each other, helped form the content of my ECOO presentation this year.

After reading The Shallows, Nick Carr’s carefully constructed argument held a lot of weight – the internet and how it is being adopted by the general public is actually making people less effective as both thinkers and doers. As educators, we should all be concerned about this result. At a conference this year a frustrated, thirty-something CEO said of the twenty-somethings she’s tried hiring recently, “I just wish they could finish a thought! I can’t even get them to close a sale because they are checking Facebook!” This problem goes well beyond education (where any teacher can tell you it’s an epidemic). Everyone involved in education should read this book, especially if they are trying to implement technology in the classroom.

From The Shallows I took a serious concern about technological illiteracy and habitual use of computers actually injuring people’s ability to think.

I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularlity is Near as a counterpoint to Carr’s very accurate, and very depressing Shallows. Kurzweil’s giddy optimism in our engineering skills verges on evangelism. He is a wonderfully interesting and eccentric character. His belief goes well beyond merely living in a time of transformative change. The singularity he refers to is a moment in the near future where we are able to develop a greater intelligence than a single human brain, or even a group of them. He goes into mathletic detail about exponential growth and how this is occurring in computers. Very soon we’ll understand things in finer and more complete detail than we’ve ever been able to before and our management of the world will take on omniscient proportions. Technologically enhanced humans exist beyond the technological singularity – living in a world that looks as alien to us now as ours would to someone from the middle ages.

From Kurzweil I recognized how technology is evolving in increasingly personalized ways. This is an argument Carr makes from the other side too. From external machines, we are on a journey to technological integration. This integration is going to well beyond smartphones, that’s just the latest step in an inevitable trend. If education does everything it can to present technology as generic and impersonal, it is failing to notice a key direction in technology, it’s failing to produce students who will be useful in their own futures. This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of my BYOD/differentiated technology argument, but I believe it’s a fundamental part of our technological evolution. Computers want to become a part of us. We’re not going to develop a Skynet or Matrix that will take over. Our technology IS us, and it wants a more perfect union. This probably scares the shit out of most people. My argument to that is: if you’re going to amalgamate with other systems, make sure you the one directing them effectively.

Matt Crawford’s wonderful philosophical treatise on the value of skilled labour goes well beyond simply being handy. He argues that skilled labour psychically protects you from consumerism and makes management doublespeak and creative economies an obvious joke. The value he places on objective, quantifiable skills development often savages the feel-good ethos of a lot of educational theory which then sounds like management double-speak nonsense. I read the book after taking my AQ in computer engineering, and it made me re-evaluate (and recognize) the value of my skilled labour history – something I’d walked away from in becoming a teacher. I’m loving being a tech teacher this year and working with my hands again.

From Shop Class For Soul Craft I took a recognition of the importance of hands on, skill based learning. It brings real rigor to learning, and should be a vital part of developing past the poor digital literacy I see around me. One other experience kicked this up a notch. In the summer we visited the Durnin farm and Heather talked about how her husband teaches people to use the farm equipment. He gives them the tools, and expects them to figure it out and get it done. It’s a high expectation, immediate result environment that puts a great deal of expectation on the student; Crawford would approve. I tell my students, “no one ever learned how to ride a bike by watching someone else riding a bike” – it’s an experiential thing that offers real (often painful) immediate feedback… what effective learning should be.

Into that mix of big ideas of warning, optimism and rigor I also mixed in the standard PLN secret sauce. Concerns over BYOD abound with teachers online. The idea that BYOD should just be thrown into curriculum struck me as simply wrong. As Andrew Campbell suggests, it’s more about stretching a divide (or Carr would argue intellectually crippling idiots) than it is about increasing digital fluencies.

Teaching competency, flexibility and self awareness on digital tools should be a primary goal of current educational practice. We’re graduating students who are dangerously useless to employers. The idea of a continuum of digital mastery based on objectively developed skills linked to a gradual loosening of restrictions and access to increasingly diverse tools and online content was the result.

I present on Thursday, and I’m more interested in the discussion that ensues than I am in telling anyone anything. ECOO is a wonderful braintrust, and usually super-charges my educational technology awareness. I’m looking forward to the brain soup we create out of this!

Diversifying Edtech: the key to a digital skills continuum

Dealing With The Impossible

Two decade old parts mean things don’t fit together.
Making something work in this circumstance seldom
has anything to do with following directions

The other day I was trying to install carburetors on an old motorcycle (I was a millwright before I was an IT guy). I wasn’t even sure if what I was doing was possible. I spent a couple of frustrating hours trying before I pulled it all apart and did it over a different way.

What I love about technology and engineering, especially when it involves free-form building rather than following directions, is that you have no idea if what you’re doing is possible. This never happens in digital environments – they’re all designed for you to eventually succeed. Kids think video game wins are wins, they’re not, they’re a conditioned response.

Any teacher who thinks free form building is just for fun is the kind of teacher who only wants students to perform conditioned response with a predetermined outcome (I’m guessing so they can control the situation). A lot of people (students and teachers alike) think that’s learning. I think it’s all about management and control, and it’s one of the emptiest things we can do with students.

We shy away from stochastic processes in the classroom because we believe that failure is the inability to do something rather than an opportunity to better understand complex and open ended situations.

When trying to put together those carburetors I was unsure if the process I followed would lead to a successful outcome. That uncertainty filled me with doubt and made me question what I was doing in a way that no lesson ever would. We desperately hope for metacognition in student learning and then stifle it with overly restrictive learning goals. No student ever starts a math problem, writes an essay or even plays a video game wondering if what they are doing is possible, yet most of the world, when it isn’t a digital distraction or a lesson, works that way. I suspect the cockiness I see in student attempts at engineering is grounded in the fact that most of their world (digital, educational, or worst of all: both!) is a coddled exercise rather than a stringent test of reality.

In a classroom we like controlled circumstances with defined and plausible outcomes because they suit easy analysis of work completion, collection of assessment data and cement the teacher’s place as the all knowing master of learning, but that limited circumstance doesn’t offer much in the way of learning real world outcomes.

What would a learning environment look like if it wasn’t modelled on data collection and teacher insecurities?

Copyright is sticky business

I read this which led me to this, which made me want to write this: (!)

Copyright is a sticky business. More often than not it isn’t the artist that is being protected by copyright so much as the distribution company that owns the rights. The music industry is still trying to get itself out of being a manufacturing and distribution concern, which is where the copyright habits we’ve developed with music started.

When you’ve got to justify stamping millions of CDs to make music financially viable, the focus shifts from the artist to the manufacturing/distribution system (where big infrastructure costs exist). In order to protect this distribution system, a robust, aggressive and quite jackassey legal specialization developed that has nothing whatsoever to do with the art it claims to protect.

It seems we’ve arrived at an age where an artist can be stimulated by influences and then effectively prevent anyone else from evolving ideas out of them. The Beatles, perhaps one of the biggest offenders in this, freely stole ideas and even whole pieces of music from the black R&B musicians in the US that proceeded them. Later in their careers they made art by evolving influences from Indian and other world music as well. They then aggressively locked down the rights to the art they freely took from other people.

It seems that Boomers are unique in many ways, not the least of which is their self-claimed right to take everything that came before them and own it entirely forever. US copyright has led this erosion of artistic license for many years, continually expanding and pursuing the entertainment industry’s right to own a piece of music, eventually (they hope) forever.

One of my favorite cautionary tales is Sita Sings The Blues. An artist going through a breakup creates an animated piece that integrates the 1920s music she is listening to at the time with an ancient Indian myth and her own relationship disaster. It’s very thoughtfully done. Give it a look if you’ve never seen it before. The details are on the website, but here’s the summary: when she went to get the copyright for the 1920s recordings (long out of copyright) that she wanted, she discovered a copyright law firm (one of many that buy up copyright-passed, older material) contacted her back and wanted a quarter of a million dollars for songs they didn’t own by an artist they never represented.

This is the state of copyright nowadays: a savage wasteland of corporate vultures looking to pick the bones clean of any work of artistic merit. It’s a completely unsustainable system that stifles art and kills creativity. Had Shakespeare been alive now, he would not have been able to publish any of his work (almost all of which borrowed heavily from proceeding material). Corporate vultures would have swooped in and killed Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth or Hamlet stone dead.

I make no bones about artists being able to make a living from their work, I’m an artist myself. My hope is that digitization of the workflow will free us from the vultures that have been feeding (and killing) the artistic process for the past 60 years.

Many artists are beginning to push content directly to fans. Courtney Love famously once said, “I work for tips” when she was talking about how little she made from CD sales. Doing tours made more, but even live performance requires covering a lot of hangers on.

The irony in all of this is that the music industry claims to be the protector and savior of music, yet it is the very thing stifling creativity, and it’s doing it to protect an archaic manufacturing system that barely exists any more.

Ok, so after all that? I think NerdyTeacher’s blog is a great opportunity for Taylor to step into a new era and develop fan based appreciation through Twitter and social networking. Those students, and the people who see the performance will know of her willingness to share her art. What I fear is that she isn’t the one to make this decision. A legal firm representing her music industrial complex will make that decision, and it won’t go well.

Thanks to @dougpete and @TheNerdyTeacher (and twitter) for the impetus to write!

National Skills Competition Reflection

We’re back from Skills Canada’s National Competition. It was my first time as a Team Ontario coach and it was a spectacular six days in New Brunswick. The sight seeing was frenetic and then the opening ceremonies astonishingly loud and boisterous. To say we were revved up would be an understatement.

After a weekend waiting for competition to start we were finally able to do what we went there for (compete), except we didn’t. I’d hoped for a top half finish. Ontario’s provincial skills are much more competitive than most other province’s simply because we have the biggest population and therefore the most contestants; we had to beat more people to get to Nationals. Aiming for a top half finish didn’t feel like a long shot, especially when we’d done so well in provincials (a gold medal and one of the highest technical scores in all competitions). I fear our good provincial results meant we didn’t drive at Nationals like we should have.

I prefer Bull Durham’s
dissonance over the pat
just be humble quote.
There is a place for
swagger in competition
as long as it doesn’t blind
you to what you need to do

You need a bit of arrogance when you walk into a competition because, despite the platitudes, everyone isn’t a winner, in fact the vast majority are losers. When you dangle yourself out there in competition you need a bit of cockiness to survive the failures. There were a steady stream of people bursting into tears and running out of the awards ceremony when they didn’t medal. Humility wasn’t helping them keep their composure when they lost. If you don’t think composure in the face of failure matters you probably haven’t competed much.

IT & Networking came up early and because of a screw up on the screen I’d realized we hadn’t medaled before they actually made the announcement. In that moment all that hope evaporated and I was struggling with disappointment. As a coach, I felt protective of my student who wasn’t happy with the result but didn’t run out of the room in tears. Since we were announced so early we had another hour and half to sit there watching others succeed. It certainly set a reflective mood.

Our approach to Skills all along has been one of the long game. Each competitor returns and brain dumps everything they can remember into a document that we can use to prepare better next time. Our current competitors are often able to get in touch with alumni (the benefits of a small town) and get additional support and advice. That’ll happen with our first go at Nationals as well, so when we get there next time we won’t be going in blind. The three who did medal in this national competition had all been there and seen the scope of competition before. Knowing what to expect is a key to success.

But there is another side to this that I need to consider beyond the long game. I was very hands off with training my competitor after our successful provincial run. He asked questions about subnetting and IPv6, and I provided him with material on it, but didn’t follow up to see if he’d looked at it. He hadn’t. I’d assumed he’d grabbed this opportunity with both hands and put his training into overdrive, but end of year distractions and a very successful provincial run had shifted him to glide. After a long, exhausting first day of competition we were both sitting there going over material that should have been second nature instead of resting up for day two. At that point hope replaced confidence for me. I hate depending on hope.

I’m a big believer in students, especially seniors and even more especially competitors, being self driven. I have no interest in hand puppeting students to a win, I want them to feel like it’s their’s because they are the prime movers in their own skills development. I don’t believe in moulding students in the likeness of my own learning, I want them to internalize it in their own most effective manner. My job is to do backflips in the background making sure they have the information and tools they need to efficiently and effectively develop their own skills.

High school seniors on the verge of post secondary work in technology should have a developed sense of professionalism as a part of their skills formation, which means not off-loading blame when you fail, and taking on responsibility for fine-tuning your own expertise (I drive this home in class constantly). Because these things didn’t happen I’m at peace with losing – we didn’t deserve the win – though it still irks me and has me wondering what I could have done differently.

Another reflective piece for me was remembering all of the curriculum I ditch in order to serve the relatively digitally illiterate students I get in computer technoology. As we were going over subnetting I remembered how doing this used to be second nature for me as a technician, but I can barely get basic IP addressing across to the majority of my students let alone binary subnetting. Dumbing down curriculum might make my program more palatable, but it didn’t help us get ready to compete at Nationals. That one’s entirely on me. If this experience means I’m not shying away from expected curriculum in the future, it might cripple my program’s ability to take in the digital dilettantes and guidance refugees I’m expected to serve, but at least we won’t get pwned again in competition.

When the lights come up and judgement begins, you don’t want
to be hoping you might squeeze out a medal after missing
questions and going in unprepared. Hope isn’t how you win.

After losing for years (see below) and putting a good face on it (I don’t like losing, I’m competitive by nature), I suddenly found myself, on only my third attempt, on Team Ontario, coaching my strongest Information Technology student yet. That we didn’t perform like we could have is the most disappointing part of this experience for me.

I don’t care if questions are repeated so students who have been there before have an advantage, I don’t care if the environment they put us in seemed intentionally designed to produce poor results (we were placed between an amplified loud speaker job presentation and millwrights hammering metal and running power tools) because everyone had to suffer through it. What I do care about is approaching Nationals with a self-driven, professional mind-set, and I think that’s what I’ll focus on next time around. Not shying away from complex material in my courses and keeping a focus on being properly prepared will help my competitors to do more than hope for a medal. The valuable information we gathered this year on how Nationals are scoped means we’re not going in blind next time either.

Losing for Years…
I stopped coaching soccer at my high school after a number of years because it was a constant hassle trying to get players out to practice (the fact that our talent pool was desperately shallow and we lost almost every game wouldn’t have shaken me off like indifference did). The time the student players decided (after losing another game) to just not show up at 7am the next day for the practice time they told me they had to have broke it for me. I’d paid for daycare, put my own child into it at 6:30 in the morning and was standing there alone on the pitch in the pre-dawn light when I decided I’m done volunteering for this kind of abuse. I’m glad I was able to find Skills Ontario/Canada as an outlet for competition that also helps improve my own program.