"One Thing"

This will be an educational blog. My first post, however is not. One Thing, a song by Canadian rockers Finger Eleven is an important song for me, as well as the 'theme' for me on this blog.

Each school day, I will endeavor to share "One Thing" in this space. It may be about something that happened at school (great or otherwise), something I learned or something fun or funny (Fun Fridays). By doing this every day, I hope to be able to get people to view the blog consistently and keep me writing consistently. In a way, it's similar to the 184 Days of Learning Blog concept that the Parkland School District runs. I just learned about this from George Couros, an educational tweeter extrordinaire" who was a guest speaker at the BCPVPA conference I attended on Friday. Thanks to the conference and George in particular for inspiring me to finally get this going. I had the blog title, concept and everything ready to go since September 2012, but it's been on the backburner until today.

George asked administrators why they weren't blogging and many said because they had nothing to share. I disagree (that's why I want to share) and found this quote from Josh Stumpenhorst very appropriate: "If you're not doing work worth sharing, do different work, or change your attitude about the work you do." I want people to see what we are doing at school. This is one way to do that. So is our Diefenbaker Technology blog that we have just set up this year: http://diefenbakertechnology.blogspot.ca/ where we have a page for each class and some classes are posting some of the work they are doing there.

So, back to the "One Thing" for today...Sometimes it takes a few listens to a new song for you to figure out exactly what the lyrics are saying and what they mean. For me with the song One Thing, I understood what was being said the first time I heard it. While I am sure the songwriter had a different person in mind for the “One Thing” he was writing about, to me, the lyrics meshed perfectly with what had recently become the most important thing in my life. You see, I had become a father for the first time in June of 2003 around the time this song was released. My son, Nolan was now everything to us. Every time I hear it now, it takes me back to how my life changed when he arrived and how excited I was to have a son and to see him grow up. These days my "One Thing" is actually "two" things; my two children, Nolan and now Bronwyn. They keep things in perspective for me, make me smile every day and the three of us are realizing that we are stronger together.