Playing an Out of Tune Piano With Ever Changing Keys With One Hand Tied Behind My Back

… I can handle playing the challenging piano, just not when the concert hall organizers keep tying one hand behind my back.

This Year in Competition

In the past six weeks I have been managing four classes of teaching while juggling nineteen students who were competing in provincial and national finals in technical competitions ranging from 3d animation and geographic information systems through IT & networking and cybersecurity to electronics and coding, all while also managing in-school IT support and ewaste management.

We don't have the space to run those competitions in our shop because we're overloaded with the largest caps of any tech classes in Ontario and literally don't have the space.  My solution was to send students home on competition days for Skills Ontario provincials, which isn't very equitable and didn't allow those of them in physical competitions to produce their best work.  We send multiple staff out of the building every day to coach sports for the well-off students who have the resources to enjoy leisure activities in public school.  We'd never send sports students off on their own to compete for the school, but what we're doing isn't sports and it clearly doesn't matter as much.

We managed to hang on to our string of medals in IT & Networking with a bronze, but not being able to do the provincial finals in our lab (or live in Toronto which would have been the most equitable of all) damaged our competitor's ability to turn in his best work.  Our electronics engineering student was in the same boat, using inferior equipment in a less than ideal home lab rather than using the tools and equipment we have on hand to produce his best results.

Max & Kohan still hard at it in our tiny back
office long after everyone else has gone
home representing our school & board
at Skills Ontario Provincials in GIS.

In virtually focused competitions like coding, our competitor wasn't hamstrung with a lack of
physical support and performed wonderfully, winning us podium gold at Skills Ontario provincials.  Our teams of two ended up working in our tiny office, displacing teachers (who were also juggling classes) and causing me to pull hardware out of our stuffed lab for them to work on.  Doing that also had me frantically repairing our non-functional, student-built, getting long in the tooth DIY desktops to replace those taken for competition.  We're short technology because we've been told to stuff 31 student PCs in each room, even when it contradicts public health rules.

Our 3d animation team of two came together at the end of my game development class last fall.  We don't explicitly teach animation but our 3d modelling is advanced because many of our games depend on it, and in last semester's class I encouraged students to build animations to help us develop narrative in our game design.

We worked hard over the winter getting a handle on animation principles.  The boys did provincials on our used-when-we-built-them-in-2019 SHSM VR PCs using free software.  If we didn't have SHSM support we wouldn't exist at all.  Up against specialist animation programs (including one in our own school board) with tens of thousands of dollars of newer tech, using paid-for-software, our team created incredible work with limited resources that earned them provincial gold and a place on Team Ontario at Skills Canada Nationals in Vancouver, though this year being what it has been, we only got to attend virtually.

What did that mean?  Trying to juggle doing a national competition three time zones away isn't easy.  National competition usually provides proctors on site, but since secondary was fully remote guess where all the proctoring got downloaded to?  Yep, the teacher coaches.  Mandatory training had us having to miss classes for online training didn't work and had to be done again on the weekend.  The 'you-must-be-on-Pacific-time' demands became increasingly absurd, to the point where we were being told students had to take an hour off for lunch at 4pm in the afternoon where they'd be sitting and waiting in an empty school for no reason other than aligning with a competition happening three thousand miles away.  Thankfully, Skills Canada came to their senses (in our competition at least) and allowed us to work in our local time.  I was still teaching full time through all of this.

My co-coach and I both had to take a day to proctor the competition and the boys did fantastic work in two six hour marathon animation sessions, winning us not only our first national medal, but making our team of two the top secondary 3d animators in Canada.  Not bad for a rural composite school on very used technology surrounded by storage in a tiny office with no room to move using free software.

***

Small Town Inferiority Complexes

I've spent too much time on aeroplanes coming home empty handed from Skills Canada nationals.  One of the most difficult parts of coaching students where I am is convincing our small town inferiority complex that it is capable of national swagger, but our small town thinking doesn't just come from students, it's also systemic.  Adults around our students constantly remind them, usually subconsciously, that they're not worthy.  The super-students we're up against from specialized hand-picked (700 applicants for 90 spots) Gattaca urban schools don't face any of these doubts; they're being trained to become masters of the universe.  We face off against these hand-picked geniuses who "came into computing through a mandatory Grade 9 computer science course" (we've cancelled on-site comp-sci in my building) with significant challenges.  With few exceptions, most of my students wouldn't get invited to learn in those hallowed halls of future Davos attendees.

In 2016 our national finalist was catching it from all sides for missing THE PROM; the small town static was never ending and ensured he wasn't focused on his best performance.  Talking to other coaches, their schools and communities went out of their way to support their students at nationals.  Our school intentionally places prom at the same time as them (but makes sure it doesn't interfere with the sports schedule).  In 2018 our national finalist went out to play soccer the week before - a pickup game with the 'adult' mens team and got his ankle broken, putting him on his back foot (quite literally) and preventing him from doing the business in Edmonton.  Sometimes it feels like our small town thinking devalues what we're doing to such a degree that the sabotage feels intentional.

This year, with skills being virtual, our two competitors were juggling previous commitments like Bronze Cross training and weren't even inclined to ask if they could be moved (it's not your place to ask, you're no master of the universe).  The solution was to give up almost half a day on the last day of competition to honour these local commitments and toss hopes of a national medal away.  Had they done that, they wouldn't have landed where they did.  We had to fight for days on end to get an equitable approach to the competition as our community simply doesn't value it enough to prioritize it, though I think it fair to say that if you're not flying us out to Vancouver to compete live and you're downloading all the work of competition onto us, the least Skills could have done was develop a more equitable and responsive timetable that recognized that we were all still mired in our local circumstances.

I don't mind facing down all of these challenges in coaching technology competitors at my school.  I grew up in a small town and do not like the idea that urban super-kids with seemingly infinite socio-economic privilege and access to specialized education and technology we can only dream of get to walk away with the trophy (though they usually do - the irony that they're given monetary rewards for being rich isn't lost on me either).

In 2018 at our last National Skills run we got interviewed by the local radio station and the presenter asked a good question: "do you think working with ewaste and lacking resources makes you more competitive?"  I think it genuinely does and I'm proud of the DIY ethos we've created.  Every year my senior IT students repair hundreds of Chromebooks, giving our school the highest (by far) rate of active technology in the board.  Being DIY is value added not just for my students' sake, but also because it helps our building as a whole, though not enough to provide us with the space we need to do the job.

I like being an underdog.  We didn't beat the Millionaires' Row specialist schools from North York at CyberTitan this year (well, we beat most of their teams, just not their top ones), but we did beat a cyber-academy and all three teams from a semi-private, charter specialist school.  And we did it with students from all streams, many of whom are also neuro-atypical.  We represent the diversity of the vast majority of students unable to participate in these competitions.  That charges me up.

I can push back against our small town inferiority complex by continuing to develop a program that is nationally known for innovation and diversity.  I can open up digital career opportunities for our students on pathways from workplace through college and the military to university, but not if I'm being inequitably under-resourced.

Our top finish at Skills Canada nationals prior to this year went to college, not university.  We've had more ASD cyber captains than neuro-typical ones, and our teams have been gender equitable years before the top schools we were up against got around to it.  We managed that even though our conservative rural school goes out of its way to genderize career pathways for girls.  I'm proud of our diversity, it strengthens us in a building that has struggled with racism and gender prejudice over the past few years.

One of our pioneering CyberTitans got into Waterloo for computer science (actually, two of them did).  The next year he saw another student from one of the super-schools wearing his CyberTitan t-shirt and told him he was there at the same national finals in Fredericton.  The other kid told him it wasn't possible, only the top schools attended that (we actually beat his team to a 5th place nationally).  From moments like that I can show our students that they aren't inferior and that any superiority coming from the urban-uber-schulen are usually arrogance and complacency, not superiority.  I can show students the work of our grads (who they know in our community) and make the impossible possible.  I can remind our school that we shouldn't be identified by sportsball entertainment for the wealthy few and that our students can compete on a national stage with the best Canada has to offer.  Coming from a small town doesn't mean you're inferior.

What I don't understand is why the people we're representing would want to intentionally and inequitably withhold resources from us while we're doing this difficult thing.  I've never asked for special treatment, just equitable access to resources.  We find real value in offering hands-on IT experience by supporting technology in the building and our school directly benefits from it, but we are given no space to do it.  Programs in other buildings enjoy smaller class sizes and specialized equipment in specialized shops even when they do none of the things we're doing.

We get held to class caps equal to those in academic streamed English or maths classes while being expected to provide hands-on learning (and shouldering all the safety hazards implicit in that) to classes that include students from all pathway streams.  Our coding provincial champion was learning in a stacked senor class with students who couldn't read this year.  Stretching to cover that range of ability in a single class with over thirty students stuffed into it is absurd.  I've brought this up with pervious principals and they have gas-lit me, implying that I'm lying about class sizes elsewhere even when I provide information directly from teachers in those schools.  Our new principal broke that string of gas-lighting and acknowledged that there is no consistency in class sizes across the board in a recent meeting, so I live in hope, but if I've had my head held underwater for a decade over this so I'm not full of it.

Less successful programs in our building see tens of thousands of dollars in technology and tools that we don't.  Other schools throw resources at specialized digital programming that we don't see, and then we beat them in Skills.  Our school cancels local computer science, leaving us with the burden of carrying those students with no resources provided.  Given equitable access to space and equipment, we could help more students find their passion and express excellence in it, even if they have special needs, but the lack of equitable resources means we are reduced to taking opportunities away from our students, usually the most disadvantaged ones.

I have no doubt we'll be seeing more PD on equity in the future, but my efforts to provide it are continually frustrated by systemic prejudice.  When we've managed to achieve what we have (which produces a lot of positive press) despite our school rather than because of it, I'm left feeling frustrated and disenfranchised.  I love what we do and want to keep at it, but in the past school year I've had five job offers.  It's getting increasingly difficult to ignore them knowing that we'll be intentionally under-resourced even when compared to other programs in our own building.

I have learned to play this out-of-tune piano with its missing and ever-changing keys over the past decade.  The difficulties in that are many.  I can never assume that our successes one year will lead to growth in that area the next because I don't always have students ready to step on the shoulders of their peers and go further.  I'm increasingly running out of the will to provide that encouragement against overwhelming odds, especially when they're made overwhelming by local decisions.

Our diversification into different competitions isn't just a reflection of our wanting to be excellent in many areas, it's also a response to playing that piano with changing keys and going where the will and talent is in my classroom in a given year.  I've never taken on robotics before, but we have two very strong mechanical/robotics engineers (both farm kids with fantastic hands-on technical skills) developing who will chase that down for us next year, assuming I'm still here barking at the moon.  I'll help our students take on giants, but not if we're so under supported that they have no chance of victory - that isn't competition, it's a systemic reminder that you don't matter, and I don't want to be a part of that.

Competitive Urges: Skills Canada National Finals in Edmonton, 2018

I've hesitated to post this because I get the sense that competition is generally sneered upon in Ontario classrooms these days.  With earnest people saying everyone is a genius and anyone with the urge to pick up a tool is a craftsperson, something like Skills Canada might seem like a cruel and unusual way to show that as obviously incorrect.

I've always had a competitive streak and think there is real value in both winning and losing, but losing really bothers me (hence, competitive streak).  This was written on a long flight back from Edmonton as I struggled with failure.  Contrary to popular belief, I consider this to be a good thing.

Can you feel the heat?  Skills Canada Nationals is a pressure cooker of excellence!

I was in a foul mood when I started writing this, but by the end I'd thought my way out of the frustration, which is the most I can ask from a reflection...

I’m at a loss to explain how we can be so dominant in provincial competition and then fumble Nationals.  Two times now we’ve taken the time and expense to come out to Skills Canada Nationals and have come up short.  In the latest case I could not have possibly arranged things any better.  From coop to employment opportunities to multiple in-class opportunities and supports, my current candidate had every tool possibly on hand to achieve success, but we haven’t.  This is the worst possible time to ask me (on the plane, flying home, empty handed), but I’m feeling tired, frustrated and struggling to understand why I’d go through this again.

4am wake up for a 10am departure - moving hundreds of
people, many of them with hundreds of pounds of tools
is a logistical challenge.

A consistent issue with leaving our small town to come to nationals is circumstantial.  In our first go around, the social pressure around missing high school prom proved such a distraction that my candidate arrived with a pocket full of angry texts and little chance to focus on preparing for the coming battle.  In this year's case, a sports injury in a pointless local game the week before the competition led to a week away in wheelchairs and on crutches.  In both cases small town life conspired to produce the kind of static that knocked capable technicians off a medal.   But maybe there is more to it than that.

I don’t think the competition is particularly technically challenging.  There is nothing asked that my competitors aren’t directed to and encouraged to get a handle on.  This has worked so well provincially that we’ve medalled the past three years (two golds and a bronze), but at Nationals both times the wheels have fallen off the cart.  That we can do so differently at two near identical competitions suggests that our issue is psychological, not technical.

Team Ontario is a monster!

So, what about Nationals is so overwhelming?  The assumption (I think) is that Nationals will be next level, but Ontario provincials have many more competitors from many more schools.  Getting out of Ontario is by far the most difficult part, and we’ve managed it twice.  The people we face at Nationals aren’t IT unicorns; they’re kids, all with less experience in competition.  In some cases they only had to show up to get to Nationals because there were barely any provincial competitors.   I’d assumed that our previous ‘blind’ Nationals experience (where we placed 4th anyway), had prepared us for this one.  My candidate was more experienced, more focused (barring sports injuries and school plays) and had been given many more opportunities to develop their IT skills than our first go around, yet subjectively we’ve underachieved.  Our best hope now, prior to knowing the scoring, is a tie with our last attempt, but I fear that might be too much to hope for.

Got the kit...

Last year we blew provincials and didn’t go through.  I lay the blame for that entirely at my own feet.  The change to a Toronto based venue meant a cruel and unusual commute that made us exhausted and late; we didn’t have a hope of peak performing (yet we still managed a medal).  This year we did back flips arranging hotels and finding ways to minimize the financial burden on our competitors in order to ensure our best shot, and that worked.  Leading up to Nationals I made sure everything was taken care of and any possible need was filled prior to sitting down to compete.

Expectations are perhaps the killer here.  Our first time around I took Nationals to be a reconnaissance.  We’d already over achieved to such a degree at Provincials that I was just happy to be there.  Sure, a medal would have been nice, but understanding the contest was my real goal.  That we came so close to getting a medal had me convinced we were moving in the right direction.  This time around my previous champion gave a detailed rundown of what to expect on Nationals and we didn’t go in blind, yet we have failed to capitalize on that information.  This could mean it was bad information, but I doubt that.  It could also mean we simply didn’t make the time to make use of that information because my two competitors have an unhealthy competitiveness between them.   We have underperformed, yet the competition was described as too easy, and we knew what was coming.  How are we bottom half?  With the medal ceremony behind us, I’m left wondering where we are, and, as a coach, I don’t like the feeling - the lack of understanding feels like a failure on my part.

This might sound like whinging or poor sportsmanship, but I didn’t spend all the time and money and stress to not place again.  This isn’t even a case of gold or die, just knowing we were there or thereabouts would have met my expectations; I don’t think that’s an absurdly challenging goal.  If we didn't want to be competitive, why did we compete?

Pre-contest huddle.

One of the more surprising aspects of this trip was just how different my competitor was.  On our first go I had what looked like an Eastern European rock star who had the swagger to go with it.  He had the technical chops, but his cockiness also meant he’d tackle problems aggressively and with some verve; he wasn’t intimidated by anyone or anything.  I suspect that fourth place finish was as much the result of that fearlessness as it was his technical skill.

This time around I had an anxious perfectionist who I couldn’t read very well and (I fear) I didn’t coach as effectively as I could have.  Maybe, in this case, a less acerbic approach might have served us better, but my approach to coaching and teaching has always been to encourage an independent and experiential approach to the challenges of technology.  I give students the gears if they make a silly mistake, but never penalize them for it.  The ones who stick around end up resilient, self-aware and technically superior.  I don’t baby students and hand them answers, I’d rather see them struggle to a solution themselves.  The result is a technician who might not know all the answers, but damn well knows how to find them.

Like herding cats...

Except at Nationals.

This time around I had a university bound, academically strong student for whom this was just one of many feathers in his hat.  This is his second national final in an ICT related field in as many weeks.  At the CyberTitan National Competition, on our first go at it, we placed as high as I’d hoped we would and that trip was (I think) a great success.  My expectations here were actually similar this week, to finish in the top half, but we’ve failed to do that.  There were only 7 competitors in the national IT & Networking final – three provinces and all the territories failed to produce candidates who could meet national standards – so finishing in the top half would have meant a medal.

My first national finalist was a college bound kid who had been on the verge of failing in the years before and found his way out of that mess though finding his genius in info-tech.  He ended up going to college for IT and considers his Skills experience a vital piece of his career (as he should).  I never once heard my first champion say, ‘it’s just IT’ when someone asked him what competition he was in, but I heard that too many times this week.  Downplaying the field of study (I fear) when competing at the national level in it was a reflection of the doubt that plagued this medal run.  At one point I heard, "I don't understand why I'm here with all these people" (meaning experts in their skilled trade).  I thought it might have been false modesty, but it in retrospect it was doubt, which is a disaster when you're in a pressure cooker like Skills Nationals.  Maybe I should have identified that and talked about it earlier, but if years of straight ‘A’s in computer and software technology courses, multiple provincial medals, full time summer employment as a  network technician, a top five finish in the related cybersecurity contest nationally, detailed notes from all the competitors who came before and a coop in IT wasn’t enough to instill some confidence, I fear nothing will.  I don’t think this result was a deficit of technical skill.

Watching mastery across such a wide range of skills
never gets old.  If you get a chance, go to Skills Nationals.

This year in electronics we took a giant step backwards, to the point of me wondering if we were ever moving in the right direction.  My competitor was crushed by our poor result and this prompted me to chase down her judges and request some clarification on our results.  She'd actually ended up in the medals on the two toughest categories (building circuits), which helped restore some confidence.  Then we got clarification on what we missed, which has shed such a bright light on what we need to do that I can’t believe we won’t be contenders next year.  Her response to all of this was stubborn anger.  I can work with that.  One of the judges encouraged her to hang in there saying, 'it’s the failures that toughen you up and eventually make you a champion.'  It’s that kind of thing that makes me want to do the hours and hours of volunteer work it takes to build up to winning provincials again and perhaps going through another exhausting and potentially hope crushing week at nationals.

Maybe one of the things I need to be doing when I’m looking for candidates to take on this overwhelming challenge is to look for the tenacious scrappers who can’t, won’t and don’t stop.  Maybe that was missing this year.  A student following in his brother’s footsteps for whom things had fallen into place, winning medals even when he claims the whole thing was a disaster was suddenly doubtful of his place in the competition.  I don’t know what to do with that.  Maybe that judge is right – it’s overcoming the setbacks that make you commit to the competition and fight with conviction.  Win or lose, if we left everything on the competition floor I’d be happy with the result, but something stopped us from doing that this time.  Perhaps it was the injury, perhaps it was nerves, perhaps I'm just the wrong coach for a this particular student, which is a shame for us both.

I didn’t do well in school.  You can count the number of ‘A’s I got on one hand.  Things generally have never come easily to me, I have had to fight for them.  I dropped out of college, out of an apprenticeship and struggled to get into and through University.  I’m good at many things, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a natural at anything.  The things I’m good at are the result of determination and stubborn disregard for failure.  It’s that kind of tenacious student that I’m best able to help because I can identify with them.  I find the honour roll perfectionists alien and don’t always know how to work with them to bring out their best.  Perhaps the best thing I could have done here was to send another teacher instead.  If I could go back and rerun this week over and over again Groundhog Day style, that would be one of the variations I’d try.

I’m most effective helping the stubborn, scrappy student I have much more in common with attain their mastery than I am trying to aim an honour roll kid at gold.  Those scrappy students also play to my love of underdogs.  As I said earlier, perhaps expectations are what make this so difficult to take.  This time I thought I'd brought a howitzer to a knife fight.  As fixated as I am in this moment on failing to medal again, in less fraught moments I’m more about a good struggle than I am about winning – but it’d sure be nice, just once, to sit on this long road home with something tangible to show for it.

***

A week after we got back we had an interview with the local paper.  When asked what I thought something like Skills Canada does for a student I immediately went to the degree of resilience it develops.  I truly believe that competition is good for us all, and that competition has to involve winning and losing.

At the opening ceremony the MC asked the audience of hundreds of competitors who was going to win a medal, they all started cheering - the unspoken disappointment was left hanging in the air, you can't all be winners.  More people come home disappointed after Skills Nationals than satisfied.  That's no bad thing.

My goal as a coach is to find ways to help competitors put their best foot forward.  This year has taught me a lot about how I can better do that.

This One's On Me

Last year at this time I was stunned by our first Skills Ontario gold medal and suddenly found myself on Team Ontario going to Nationals.  We'd been battling in Ontario provincial competition for several years before that break through.  In the year since I'm surprised by how engaged I've been in preparing to compete again.  Being hungry after years of failure is in my nature, I'm competitive, but I thought perhaps the win would tick a box and cause me to change direction; it has poured gasoline on the fire.  I'm proud to wear that Team Ontario jacket.

This year Skills Ontario has moved to a bigger venue, which was needed.  Unfortunately, instead of it being twenty minutes away through the country, it's hours away through the worst commute in North America.  The new venue is great and it fits this huge event, unfortunately it's located on the Moon - actually the Moon would be easier to get to.

I tried to be creative and cost effective and look for ways to make this impact our competitors as minimally as possible, but the school bus route was a disaster.  We were all up at 4am on the day of competition.  We were on the road just past 5am and it took us almost three hours of fighting interminable traffic piloted by people with dead eyes to get there.  We arrived late, tired and worried that we'd missed check in; not the ideal way to start an all-day nine hours of competition.

I got my people signed in and then I could unclench.  In IT this year I had the brother of a previous competitor who I think is one of my strongest yet, expectations were high.  He ended up getting stuck on something so simple that he was kicking himself pretty much the moment the competition was over, but I think that error was more the result of four hours of sleep, a miserable commute and the stress of getting there late.  Under the circumstances I think he did a fantastic job, but I failed to provide the logistics necessary for him to produce his best work.

After the early morning, three hour commute-from-hell in and nine straight hours of competition (my student didn't feel he could take a lunch and finish in time), we had to wait for everyone to finish and didn't leave the venue until well past 5pm... straight into evening rush hour.  It took even longer for us to fight our way out of the GTA and then we thumped into the twilight along miles of potholed Ontario roads on the leaf sprung school bus.  When we finally rolled in well after 8pm I was exhausted, my sciatica was screaming at me and I hadn't spent nine hours in intense competition; I can't imagine how the kids felt.

The hardest fought bronze medal you'll see.

I went home, took Robaxacet and passed out having not eaten anything since lunch.  The next morning I was up at 6am to get back on a god-forsaken school bus at 7am to go back to the same place we'd just left for the awards ceremony.  It took us nearly three hours to get there through the angry parking lot that is the GTA.  Getting to the ceremony late, we sat through the awards in an excellent venue.  My IT competitor managed to get a bronze medal, which I think is brilliant (he thought the whole thing was a write off).  He must have aced the rest of it considering the single mistake he made meant he couldn't answer many questions.

Back on the bus again at noon, I took the competitors who hadn't eaten yet (7am departure) to lunch and we got back to the school at a perfectly reasonable time (no rush hour).  I'm already thinking about how to try and manage this next year.  My only goal is to deliver my competitors in the best possible shape early and on time to the competition.  We looked into hotels, but anything by the airport is twice what it costs anywhere else in Ontario.


There is no doubt that we needed a new venue.  They said in the ceremony that Skills Ontario has grown from two hundred to over two thousand competitors, and we'd outgrown RIM Park in Waterloo.  It's unfortunate that the only venue big enough is in the GTA, which gets further and further away from the rest of us in Ontario every year.  Having lived in Japan, it amazes me that I could access Tokyo, a city of twenty-five million, with ease, but the GTA with its paltry seven million is infrastructure inaccessible.

At lunch, one of our exhausted students asked why they have to start the competition at rush hour.  It's a good question.  Running Skills Ontario next year from 11am to 8pm would save a lot of people their sanity.  In non-rush hour times we're able to get to The Toronto Congress Centre in under ninety minutes.  Many of the student visitors don't get there until past 11am anyway, so it wouldn't impact that aspect of the show.

I'm disappointed at the results we got this year, but that's entirely on me.  As their coach, my job is to take care of the logistics and deliver them primed and ready to compete.  This year had new and difficult circumstances, but I didn't resolve them sufficiently and it hurt my students' ability to produce their best work.  That guts me.  I'll do better next time.

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.

Failing Forward

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the

road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
- C.S. Lewis

Four years ago I decided to show what we know in the information technology focused computer engineering course I teach at Centre Wellington DHS.  The Skills Canada I.T. and Networking Administration contest seemed custom tailored to do that for us.  That first year we took two competitors down to Guelph and finished second and third to an urban(e) high school in the regional competition.  We took what we learned from that first round and applied again the next year, this time winning our way through to the provincial competition for the first time.  Had we not known the competition by failing at it the first time, we never would never have been able to re-orientate ourselves and get out of the regional battle.

That first student we sent to provincials was a polymath, gifted at pretty much everything, but once again we were unprepared and we ended up finishing fourth overall.  Like mechanics and other stochastic skills, I.T. is experiential.  You can be the sharpest person in the room, but the more experienced technician will usually figure it out first because the problems aren't always obvious and linear; instinct based on experience plays a surprisingly large part in analyzing problems.  Still, fifth in the province wasn't bad for our second go at it.   Our competitor came back and debriefed on the provincial competition just as our previous students had with the regional competition.

Our third go at it had two competitors having to face off challengers regionally.  They finished 1-2 and we were off to provincials again.  Our second run at the big competition showed just how much the scope of the competition could change year to year.  We once again finished in the top ten, but didn't medal.  As before, our competitor came back and did a thorough debrief, helping the next candidate (the one who'd finished second regionally) get ready in more detail than ever before.  The old adage goes: I was able to reach so high because I stood on the backs of giants.  In our case this is completely true.  Had those previous students not leapt into the breach and shown us the way, we would never have seen the steady improvement that we did.

We just got back from provincial competition once again.  We gold medalled in I.T. and then finished top three in all technology competitions combined - meaning we didn't just beat other competitors, we also got a near perfect score in the process.  The first thing Zach, our gold medalist, did when he found out he won was shout out to the people who came before him, thanking them for the doing all that dangerous reconnaissance blind.

We're off to Moncton next month to compete in Skills Canada at the national level.  Ontario's is the biggest provincial skills program with the toughest competition, and we scored highly, but it's our first time nationally.  I didn't consider changing our approach.  Our goal is to go there and learn.  Zach has benefited from the failures of previous students, and now it's his turn to go first and pave the way.

Can a small town school compete against massive, urban
school boards?  Yes, yes we can.

At first glance it might look like those previous students failed, but they didn't, they were part of something bigger than themselves that has succeeded.  I know some people look at competitions like Skills Canada and wring their hands over how harsh it is on tender adolescent egos, but our failures made us better and our approach meant we were resilient in the face of those failures.  Even when we were sending different individuals year on year there was a team feeling as new competitors read over the notes, advice and encouragement of now long graduated students (all of whom are enjoying post-secondary computer focused success).  In many cases current competitors connected with grads through social media in order to further develop this mentorship.

The education system has focused relentlessly on student success.  A big part of that push is to mitigate failure wherever possible.  When failure is removed from learning you can't develop nonlinear, experiential skill-sets or take risks on new challenges because those things in particular demand failure in order to learn.  You also can't learn to fail forward or consider your learning to be a part of something larger than yourself.  No fail learning is remarkably selfish on a number of levels, damaging not only a student's ability to learn stochastic skills, but also weakening their resiliency, resolve and humility before a task.

The concept of no-fail learning is very academic in origin, no real-world learning process would consider such an approach viable.  It's unfortunately ironic that one of my best teaching experiences and a unique learning opportunity for many students has to happen outside of the classroom, where the many benefits of failure are still allowed to happen.

A couple of years ago I realized were were on a multi-year trajectory, so I started putting up posters in the classroom for each competitor so that new students would realize they are part of a dynasty!

Our school mascot is a falcon... geddit?

Lessons From Skills Canada

Friday I chaired the video creation Skills Canada regional competition in Guelph.  Ours was a competitive division with five teams who had to film, edit and post-produce a preplanned thirty second ad in four hours.  Only three teams could place and only the top team could move on to the provincial competition.

Some observations stood out:

• The hard deadlines came as a shock to many of the students, who aren't used to them any more (we don't really require hard deadlines in class any more)
• The competitive nature of the competition concerned a number of the teams, who couldn't comprehend being allowed to lose in school (we don't really integrate competitive winning and losing in class any more)
• The sense of satisfaction that resulted from getting a quality piece of work done in the time given surprised many of the students (we don't really allow students to develop a sense of satisfaction from completing work on time - on the contrary, a number of students recently told me at parent teacher interviews that they are sick and tired of knocking themselves out to complete work by deadlines only to see slack and idle students hand in the same thing whenever they get around to it).
• At the rewards ceremony many of the students were at a loss as to how to act when they'd won (stony faced and blankly indifferent were the norm, broken up by the odd grin).  They were also unable to recognize what losing gracefully looked like.
• In the automotive technology section the announcer said, "congratulations gentlemen" only to realize that one of the gold medalist was female (from our school!) and back pedal.   If we're going to break the gender assumptions around skilled trades, it starts here (and is).
• Skills Canada has reinforced for me (yet again) that media arts isn't an arts course so much as it's a technical skills course that includes artistic input (like carpentry).  We just got rather brutally cut for new students while being administered by the fine arts department, I think in great part because what we're teaching is being administered by a department that doesn't know how to present us or what to do with us.

Skills Canada is a wonderful program that empowers students to embrace their passions in the skilled trades.  Often looked down upon by the academically prejudiced teachers (all university grads deeply ingrained in academia), many of these students with smart hands and kinesthetically focused minds look like failures to the pen & paper classroom teacher.

Our school is fortunate to have a busy and wide ranging technology department with many course options.  Those hands-smart, kinesthetic thinkers must suffer in smaller schools full of class rooms and little else.

Having participated in Skills Canada for two years now, I'm a fan.  I plan to encourage our computer engineering students to put their names in for the IT competition, and our media arts students to jump into the crucible, they come out tempered by the experience.

As one of the grade 12s said at the end of the day, "I was put off by the competition and now I'm sorry I never tried this before.  It was a great experience, and a great challenge.  I wish I had a chance to do it again, now that I've tried it, I want to do it again better."  That is the greatest lesson of competition, it clarifies how you can improve in no uncertain terms, and then offers you another chance to show what you know.  Of course, as a senior he won't be here next year.

I've got to find ways to get younger students involved in taking this risk, the rewards are great, and by grade 12 they'll be weathered veterans who can take a competitive run at the medal stand.  Nothing they do in class helps prepare them for the world they are about to walk out into more.