Page 15 – Mechanical Sympathy

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.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/eSZlAPq
via IFTTT

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.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2hrZgXs
via IFTTT

Dream Project Motorbikes

Some dream project bike builds…

Stock (before)

1970s Honda CB750 Cafe Racer Mod

I’d take the standard CB750, strip it down, refinish it and modify it into a cafe racer along the lines of this Dime City Cycle build.

I’d modernize the pieces that need modernizing. This isn’t a period remake, it’s about creating something new with old bones.

A cafe racer build (after)

The CB750 that Dime City put together gives you an idea of what could be done in customizing an old CB750, but I’d do something different.

I’d hope to be able to pick up the bike for less than a couple of grand and then put at least that much into it again as I stripped it and put together a personally customized cafe racer. The CB is a big bike, which would turn into a bike cafe racer for a big guy.

Being Austin – build my own Mondo Enduro Machine

Austin on his mighty Suzuki DR350

Find a Suzuki DR-350 or DR-400, hopefully one that’s been sleeping in a barn somewhere, clean off the straw and strip it down to nuts and bolts.

In rebuilding it I’ll not only end up with a dependable long distance off roader, but I’ll also have laid hands on the entire thing before it inevitably breaks somewhere far from anywhere, meaning I’ll know how to get it going again.

Long distance and modernizing modifications would include a long range tank, updated suspension and an engine rebuild with performance carbs and a re-bored engine.

Find a 1990s DR350 Suzuki dual sport
bike and prep it for long distance off
road work, Mondo Enduro-ize it!

The goal would be a minimalist go-anywhere machine that isn’t all about branding. So many adventure bikes are all about the BMW-ness or whatever. This bike would be a capable, light-weight all rounder that isn’t about advertising but all about going anywhere.

Anime Dreams: taking the bike I loved as a kid and building an anime custom

The bike that was on my wall when I was younger was the Honda Interceptor. With a complex, powerful v-4 engine and the sharp edged eighties styling, this bike was the bomb.

I’d want to do a rebuilt / customization that keeps the feel of the bike but also feeds into the Japanese animation fixation I’ve had forever.

Influencing the build would be Akira and Robotech. BBB-Bike has already done a Cyclone customization, which is a bit more comicon than I’d be aiming for.

My Interceptor would still be an Interceptor, but with little tech-touches that bring out the anime in it. LED lights, a customized, anime inspired seat/rear cowling and mirrors, that sort of thing.

Real Restoration: a Triumph Bonneville the same age I am

an new old Triumph Bonneville

Henry Cole did a restoration on a ’70 Triumph Bonneville in the last season of The Motorbike Show on ITV (not sure why ITV isn’t offering a webpage for that show, they should be).

What they started with

Henry and Peter Thorne (the restorer), of Aspire Restorations, take what can only be described as a complete wreck (a frame and fairly useless lump of engine) and completely rebuilt it. It ends up pretty much being a new 1970 Triumph Bonneville.

I’d like to find a British bike built on the same day I was born (in the UK) and do a restoration on it, then we could both age gracefully together.

Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

Wired at 20 years old

My favorite magazine is WIRED, and I’m a magazine guy. No other magazine dares me to think as widely and as daringly about the times we live in (if you’ve never picked up a copy, give it a go!). Wired will go after interests of mine (internet culture, technology, etc) but it will also introduce me to the leading edge of fields I have only a passing experience in, and make me care about them.

This month they turn 20 years old. They’ve been daringly guessing what will happen next for two decades now, and while they don’t always get it right, they always make you realize what changes are upon us.

As I read a new edition I usually want to link and share the ideas they stir up. This edition is full of them as Wired goes over an alphabet of ideas considered in the last two decades.

Neurodiversity is a topic that hits close to home. With a son diagnosed, I’ve come to recognize how I’ve dealt with ASD myself. One of the reasons I love reading Douglas Coupland or William Gibson is because many of their characters are neuro-atypical, and it’s nice to read about people like yourself; I find much of mainstream media quite alienating.

I’ve struggled with my inability to care about social distinction forever, and I feel for my son while he does. I also think that difference is wonderful. When we heard the diagnosis I said, “excellent! Who would want to be normal!?” I guess the normal people do.

WIRED’s take on all this? Neurodiversity is like biological diversity; it develops resiliency. The neurodiverse might not all be geniuses, but the ones that are (and geniuses by definition are neurodiverse) may very well save the human race. Diversity allows a species to survive in extreme conditions, conditions that we’re making for ourselves. As long as we’re hammering round pegs into square holes, we’re not allowing human beings to be as neurally diverse as we naturally are… and we’re hurting ourselves in the process. Normal people really need to get off their high horses.

I wish I could convince the school system of this as it focuses exclusively on short comings in hopes of making the exceptional ceptional.. If they could improve my son’s image pattern recognition (which is astonishing), his special skills would be enhanced, instead they rush to make him fit a mould. The system presses him to be as widely and flatly skilled as ‘normal’ people in hopes of making him what, normal? Upcoming standardized tests won’t examine his superhuman abilities, they will focus on what ‘normal’ people are expected to do (they have charts). When he fails a literacy test because he’s unable to verbalize what he knows in a manner that suits the testers, we’re left with the pieces.

Some might suggest that alternative school systems might offer a response to this, but I doubt it. Adding money to remove expectations isn’t what is needed here.

Like eating factory produced meat, driving SUVs or buying sweatshop made products, how we treat the neurodiverse is going to be one of the things that points to our backward (hypocritical) thinking in the early twenty first century. Like the eighteenth century person who thought slavery was perfectly acceptable, this social ignorance makes us look like fools to history.

Fortunately, I don’t really care what most people think about it.

Metacognition Missteps

What Mr. Cleese is so eloquently describing above is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, something that didn’t receive a moment of notice in the metacognitive PD we recently received. Metacognition is often seen as a way to encourage student directed learning, and I’m generally a fan of the idea, but this bias deserves some consideration, especially if we’re trying to improve student learning.

In trying to break this down I came up with the Venn diagram to the right in hopes of understanding what should be a process toward enlightenment rather than a barrier to it.

There is a degree of stupidity so intense that it is self-consuming. People trapped in that tend to reinforce their own ignorance and simply can’t hear alternative points of view, even if they are self evident. These people tend to wallow in limited, habitual action. If you want to see it happening watch most digital natives on a computer. In that kind of stupidity you’re going to be hard pressed to learn anything, let alone expect any kind of accurate self assessment.

Ignorance is bliss, you’re going to be happy if you think you know everything. Anyone who lives in an Earth centred universe and thinks their species the darling of creation is that kind of certain-happy. People like this make a point of surrounding themselves with like minded people.

If you can begin to take in evidence from around you, certain self-evident truths will begin to make you question your beliefs. That would get you out of the stupid vortex and into ignorance. The more you realize you don’t know, the more rapidly you’re able to move toward knowledge. Humility is a vital component in this process, and where metacognition could begin to help.

In the realm of knowledge you may know many things but your experience with them is limited, so while you know theory you are unable to successfully interact with it in reality – this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching tech so much (reality doesn’t coddle you in your learning). You’ve read about riding a bicycle but you’ve never done the deed. The final step is to do as well as know, only then do you graduate from talking head to doer.

Metacognition is a valuable tool in creating the kind of self-aware humility that can move you from ignorance to knowledge, but applying it too early will push you in the wrong direction. At the early stages of learning you are incapable of knowing what you don’t know, so you’ll think you’re better at something than you are. This appears especially true in mind based, academic work because your math equation doesn’t burst into flames when you do it wrong.

At no point did our metacognitive training suggest that there was a threshold where you should (carefully) begin to implement self-analysis of learning, rather, it was suggested that we do this continually and throughout, which appears to be just what you shouldn’t do if you want to get somewhere with it.

I like the DIY motive here, but getting to “learning to self correct” is a tricky step
that can push you the wrong way if you do it too soon.

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.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/4I6ESDcj9
via IFTTT

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…

from Blogger https://bit.ly/3IMV23A
via IFTTT

Riding to a MotoGP Race, Next Level

Riding to Indy was a blast, one of the highlights of my summer. I was all keen to sign up for the whole weekend next year, but then this happened. With no Indy on the calendar any more, the chance of me riding south to see Valentino and Marc do their thing has just gotten quite a bit more extreme. If Indy was level one, here is what more commitment would look like.

Level 2: THE RIDE TO TEXAS

Riding to Texas, ironically, takes us right past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This one’s a bit tricky. The Texas race next year is in April. We can still get snow in April so it would have to be a weather permitting exit and then get south as quickly as possible to get clear of impassable roads.

Indy was a ~780km ride, Texas is over three times further at 2564kms; it’s basically a diagonal trip across the majority of North America. The IBA has a Bunburner 1500, and the ride to Texas just happens to be 1593 miles. Could it be done in 24 hours? If it could, it would need some recovery time afterwards, and some serious physical and bike prep beforehand.

If the race is on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of April 8-10, 2016, I’d leave on Wednesday, April 7 (very) early morning, aiming to cross the border and be out of Detroit before anyone wakes up. Baring any major traffic problems I’d land in a hotel in Austin Thursday morning early, and pass out.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday would be practice, qualifying and race day, and then I’d begin the trek back at a more sedate pace. Five hundred mile days would mean a stop in Arkansas and Indiana on the way back, leaving Sunday afternoon and getting home late on Wednesday, April 13th.

Could a ride to The Circuit of the Americas be completed within a week from Southern Ontario? That would be over 3000 miles or a touch over 5000kms in seven days. Boo ya!

Level 3: THERE IS ANOTHER!

There is another MotoGP even I could ride to, but if you thought Texas was a stretch, this one is something else entirely.

The Argentinian MotoGP event takes place the week before Texas at the other end of the world. If you thought the exit for Texas might be tricky, this one is downright diabolical.

This is a 13,655km (8485 mile) odyssey that would mean riding across two continents and crossing one of the highest mountain ranges in the world (not to mention the rain forests and dozen or so international borders). Nick Sanders managed three trips up and down the Americas in 45 days, but he’s crazy, and legendary. John Ryan, introduced to me through Melissa Holbrook Pierson‘s fantastic book, The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing, did Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to the tip of Florida in an astonishing 86.5 hours, but he too was crazy, and legendary.

The ride to Argentina would have intention. This wouldn’t be a wishy-washy wandering around the world ride, it would have Terra Circa like intent. I’ve thought about riding the Americas before. Riding to Rio is about 16,500kms and I thought it would take 60 days (275kms/day – higher in North America, lower elsewhere). Riding to Termas de Rio Hondo would be marginally shorter. Pushing the average to 340 kms a day, it might be doable in 40 days.

That would mean a departure date of February 18th. If you thought leaving in the first week of April might be weather problematic, leaving in the third week of February is positively terrifying. I’d aim for a leaving ‘window’ between February 15-20 looking for clear roads to make a quick break south to get clear of the hard water.

This happens to fit nicely into a semester at school so it would be an easy absence to manage logistically. With that in mind, I’d find myself in Argentina in the first weekend of April. The end of the world is in the same country south of me, so hitting Ushuaia before coming back north and seeing Machu Picchu would be a nice idea. Going down that way is a few hundred extra kilometres out of the way.

At this point do I have to return the bike? If so, the ride back could take place over 18 weeks. If not, the flight back happens in just under one day (though coming back via Texas would mean I’m on a plane with a whack of MotoGP types!

What to take? Honda, Yamaha, Ducati and Suzuki all have factory presences at MotoGP and they each offer a viable choices:

Yamaha’s Super Ténéré is what Nick Sanders does his double ride up and down the Americas on. When they took it apart after the trip the engine still looked brand new. This is one tough bike. That story impressed the motorcycle Jedi I work with so much he bought one. It’ll handle less than perfect roads and swallow miles with ease… and it’s bullet proof. I’d get mine in Rossi colours. Whatcha think Yamaha Canada?

Honda’s African Twin is being resurrected next year. Rumours have this bike being off-road capable and more than able to manage anything Central and South America might throw at it. Canada to Argentina would be a solid way of proving the new Africa Twin’s metal, whatcha think Honda Canada? I’d get mine in Marquez colours.

Ducati’s Multistrada is a long distance beauty with lots of tech thrown at it. It doesn’t have the dependability rep of the two Japanese bikes above, but it appears a very capable all-rounder that would have no trouble managing the variety of roads to Argentina. It’s so pretty and I haven’t heard of any epic treks made by one, so it’s a bit of a risk, but what’s a trip like this without some risk? This ride would give the Multistrada that world beating rep.

I’d get mine in Ducati red, whatcha think Ducati North America?

Suzuki’s V-Strom is a road focused adventure tourer, but it has some off road cred after BIKE Magazine took one from the UK back to the factory in Japan where it was made. Anything that can ride across Asia can manage Canada to Argentina. Suzuki has only recently returned to MotoGP, it’d be nice to remind everyone that they’re there by riding a Suzi through all those countries. Whatcha think Suzuki Canada?

My opportunity to ride to a MotoGP race hasn’t ended with the death of Indy, it’s just taken on a higher level of commitment.

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.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2QpBoj1
via IFTTT

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.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/382G9rc
via IFTTT