Currently... August

I am currently sitting in the Main Beach Pavilion Café. It's a Tuesday morning, 7.30am and I've just finished a 30 minute walk along the beach, followed by coffee and work emails. I have a few more minutes before I should leave for work so I thought I'd take the time to start off another blog post. 

Ella is training for her school gymnastics team this morning. It's a 6.30am start, which is a bit painful, but then allows me to have this amazing morning at the beach, so I can't complain. Ella currently has four early morning training sessions each week (three for gymnastics, one for netball), which can be gruelling. But we managed it last year so I'm sure we can manage it again this year. Netball is finished in a few weeks, and then we'll be down to three early mornings. And it really is stunning down at the beach at this time of day (see photo below). And overall, Ella is pretty good at getting up and ready, and we usually leave the house on time (ish) and stress free. As she is getting older the mornings are getting smoother and smoother.

Here are a few things I've been up to lately.

Reading The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Stout. I just finished this book about 57-year-old high school history teacher, Artie. He's been married a long time, has a full grown adult son, and is adored by his students. However Artie feels isolated and disconnected from everyone around him - for reasons explored in the book - and is contemplating suicide. He has a near death experience and soon after learns a family secret, which changes the way he sees thing. I'm not sure I'm doing the plot justice - but I loved this book. It's a character study and you can't help but become involved in the lives of Artie and his close family and friends. This was a 5-star read for me.

Watching the comedy Trying on Apple+ and America's Sweethearts season 3 on Netflix. Trying is five seasons in, but I'm new to it. It follows a couple in London who are trying, but unable to conceive. They decide to go the adoption route instead, and you follow their progress throughout. A serious topic and there are serious moments, but this show is also very funny. The couple live in London, so I love seeing parts of the city I once called home. The main couple are also great - funny but just so sweet and supportive of each other. We watched America's Sweethearts, the show about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, with Ella, which she loved. Three seasons in, I must admit I'm not that into the show (it all gets a bit same-same to me from season to season), but it's fun to be able to watch something with Ella that is not specifically aimed at kids.

Loving my new flannel sheets. I do not know why I never discovered these when I lived in Melbourne. They are a dream for cold, uninsulated Australian houses in winter. Even though the weather is much nicer here in Gold Coast than Melbourne, we still get chilly nights in winter, going down to 10-12 degrees. That doesn't sound cold to a Canadian, but it does make your house pretty cold when you have paper thin windows and no insulation. It also means that the sheets on your bed are very cold at night, making your first few minutes in bed feel freezing. Not anymore with my flannel sheets! They are so cosy and soft feeling, I don't want to get out of bed in the morning!

Drinking less coffee than I used to. I've switched to tea first thing in the morning, and then might have a single shot Nespresso coffee at school mid-morning, and that's it! I think it is helping my sleep improve over night. I have also discovered 'Melbourne Breakfast' and 'New York Breakfast' teas from Twinings. The Melbourne tea is vanilla black tea, and New York is caramel. I don't know why these specific flavours are related to those cities, but I do like them as a change to a regular 'English Breakfast' tea in the morning. The New York in particular tastes like a bit of a treat.

Eating I've discovered the combination of cottage cheese and jam on toast as a breakfast option (or snack) and wow, it's so good! I know that as a woman in my 40s I should be all over cottage cheese, because... protein... but I have somehow missed this current trend. Anyway. You only need to mix a small amount of jam into the cottage cheese, and then I have it on my preferred sourdough dark rye bread, and voila, a  quick, tasty and healthy breakfast. I am desperately trying to get Ella to try it but she is skeptical, I think due to the chunky weird look of cottage cheese. 

Needing some heavier dumbbells! I have been pretty consistently working out, lifting weights at home and in the gym, for over a year now. I like using the gym as they have a big range of weights to work with, but of course it is more convenient for me to fit 20-30 minutes in at home. Weights are expensive though! But I do need to add in a few heavier ones if I want to keep improving.

Feeling a bit despondent about the state of education in the age of AI. This is a big topic, that I have many, many thoughts about. I'll try and summarize my thoughts down to: the purpose of a general education is to teach kids how to learn and think (creatively, critically, ethically, etc) and using AI while you are still a novice learner allows you to offload that thinking. Therefore Generative AI currently has no place in a Prep - Year 12 curriculum. Maybe one day this will change, but I would need to see definitive evidence that AI has a positive impact on student learning in order to change my. mind - and I'd want that coming from researchers and scientists, not tech companies. As a parent, I'd like to keep my own kids away from AI as long as possible. For those who say 'but it's everywhere, students need to learn to use it', I would say that that is missing the point of a general education. It has never been the purposed to learn to use a specific tool, but rather to learn how to learn to solve problems and therefore learn to use any tool, AI included.

Two articles that I've recently read that articulate my thinking in this area - and have also encouraged me to evaluate my own use of AI, are an opinion piece from the New York Times: I'm Begging You: Never Write with AI, and the article I Hate What AI is Doing to the Minds and Happiness of the Young in the Guardian. 

Looking forward to spring! This is the last week of winter, and they days are getting longer, and that is always a nice time of year. Saturday netball and soccer are nearly finished for Ollie and Ella, so it will feel like we will have our weekends back a little bit, and I am looking forward to getting in some more regular beach days.