Tag: end of year

2019 in review

I need to state that for me 2019 is a year I would probably prefer to forget.    It is not with any great ease that I say this however some of the events of 2019 have caused much stress, upset and difficulty.   On the other hand, and trying to take a positive from the year, myself and my family have progressed beyond the issues of the opening few months of the year and hopefully learned from them.   I hope that we are stronger for them but either way, they are now in the past and it is time to progress onwards.

So, looking back to my pledges as stated at the end of 2018 (You can read these here), what have I or have I not achieved.

Family

As mentioned above, as a family it was a very challenging year.   My hope had been to spend more time together and build more opportunities for memories, etc however this didn’t happen.   Time was spent however some of it building memories that would be better forgotten.   Sadly, I am not currently comfortable going into more detail on this topic but maybe some day in the future I will share more.

It is worth noting however that we did have our eldest down between Christmas and New Year which was very nice.   As he is now in his 20’s we don’t see him as often as we would like but he does have his own life to lead so it was very nice that he took time to travel down to us for a couple of days.

We did also have our 2nd annual holiday away which was very nice and something, for a large number of years, we lacked as a family.   It is now our hope that in 2020 we do something particularly special in terms of holidays and to avoid this becoming a wish/dream only we have actually went ahead and booked significantly in advance as opposed to our usual act of last minute bookings.

Exercise, Wellbeing and Reading

Finally completing Couch to 5K

On the exercise front I achieved my plan for completing couch to 5K, in fact I almost completed it twice, so I am very happy I managed to get into a constructive exercise habit.  I even ended up going for a run on both Christmas Eve and on Boxing Day which is something I didn’t foresee happening at the outset of the year.   For me this was significant progress as I have never really been a sporty or fitness person.  Sadly, following recent testing, it seems my blood pressure may be higher than it should be which means I clearly need to do more on the exercise front.

Again, I achieved my target of reading 12 books and a number of them I very much enjoyed and think they added to both my knowledge and understanding.   My library of books is starting to look quite impressive in my eyes at least.  The one issue I have had however is that my reading has not been constant enough throughout the year, instead being made up of a number of smaller sprints through books.  This is something I want to consider next year.

And feeling happier; That was an ambitious target.   Sadly, with everything that happened at the start of the year, various stresses throughout the year and my more recent concerns I am not sure I have achieved this.   And sadder still is the fact, if there was anything important to achieve this was probably it.   I suppose the challenge becomes asking what makes me happy and do I even know what makes me happy?   Not an easy question to answer.   And from my recent reading there is also the question of whether seeking to be “happier” is actually something I should be doing or whether I should be focusing more on taking all that I can from what I have.    Possibly a little too deep and meaningful a question for so early in the calendar year but maybe something for a future blog post.

Professional development

I think I have developed as a professional this year on several fronts albeit I haven’t done many Udemy or other courses and haven’t picked up many certificates.   What I have done however is read and explore topics, ask questions and challenge ideas and try to get more involved in communities discussing areas which I find of interest.   I have also attended and event presented at some excellent events.

Work

Development of an IT Strategy was a key focus of a lot of the year however as the school sought to clarify and launch a vision of its own, I decided that the IT strategy take a back burner.    Discussions on mobile devices were ongoing and some progress made including starting the trialing new devices.   We have also been made progress in relation to deploying One-drive and Microsoft Teams.    If I was trying to sum up the year, I would possibly use the word “momentum” as I fell a number of projects which had been slow burning for some time gathered pace and made reasonable progress in 2019.   Clearly in the year ahead this is something I need to build upon.

Overall

A year ago, I summed up my plans for the year with one word; Balance.    Sadly, I don’t think I achieved this as early in the year events threw things so far out of kilter that it most likely wasn’t until the middle of the year that I got close to achieving any balance.   From then it has simply been a fight to catch up.

As I said at the outset, 2019 is a year I would rather forget however to forget is to lose sight of the number of valuable, albeit at time painful, lessons learned.    I need to take as much as I can from 2019, one thing helped by my keeping of a journal through large parts of the year.    Maybe reflection will be something I need to spend significant time on in 2020.

And so with this it is on to 2020, with my plans for the year ahead to be shared shortly…

 

The end of 2015/16

The school year, 2015/16, has finished and we are now in the holiday period awaiting the start of 2016/17.

Its been an interesting year for me, being my first year in a new position, that of Director of IT, plus my first year back in the UK after a 7 year absence while out in the UAE.

Firstly I think its important to note that I am shocked at how quickly the year has gone.   It feels like only yesterday that I boarded a plane from Dubai airport to return to the UK in order to undertake the interview for the position I now hold.    In reality that was a year ago.   Yet, it also feels like I have been in the UK the whole time without ever leaving.    An interesting sensation which highlights the confusion of memory.

The year has been very much about adapting to changes in my routines.   During my time in the UAE I had developed various routines around everything from the commute to work, to meetings, to professional development, etc.     The routines I had worked well within the specific context I was operating in including the individual schools and projects with which I was involved.    The change in context resulting from my new role and relocation has required changes to my routines and also some totally new routines as well as the abandonment of some routines which no longer serve their purpose.   These often little things have a big impact on life.

It has also been a year in which I have been aware of a greater sense of the unknown, the random and of variability.   While in the UAE I had a number of years experience and this helped to make everything seem familiar plus to provide baseline information to help with decision making.   It got to the point that decisions and actions felt almost natural and requiring little in the way of conscious effort.   Within my new role, everything is new and therefore I am less comfortable due to a lack of familiarity with how things work, as well as with the people concerned.   Everything requires conscious effort.   Thinking back I cant remember having the same feeling in the UAE however I suspect this is a trick of my memory, allowing me to recall the later period of my time in the UAE, but preventing me from remembering how things were in that opening year.

With all the changes I have to acknowledge also the similarities.    During my time in the UAE I had built up an image of what I will call the “UAE way of doing things”.    This image implies that things in the UAE are different than they are back in the UK.    In some ways they are however I viewed education in the UAE as also being different.    Having come back to the UK I am now more inclined to same that there are more commonalities than there are differences.    Curriculum change, staffing issues, workload and centralised inspection are issues which concern staff in both the UK and in the UAE.   The nature of the concerns may be slightly different in either context however the overarching issues are the same.     How do we get qualified, experienced and skilled staff?    How do we handle changes to qualifications and the curriculum?   How do we manage to meet all the accountability measures and enact all the latest initiatives while maintaining a work/life balance?  (Note: I always found working in the sun while sat by the pool as at least a partial solution to work/life in the UAE.)    How do we handle the pressure and expectations resulting from school inspections and how can we make sure inspection findings are fair?   I suspect these questions reappear the world over.

The question I find myself asking is what can I take away from the year;  what have I learned?

I think the key thing I have learned is that we are all very adaptable to change however we are equally set up to be adverse to it.     Change however can be a good thing.     I also realise that our memories are not as factual as we believe them to be.  As such my memories of the UAE, for example, focus mainly on the later years and the period in which I had become comfortable and not on those initial years where everything was new and different, and therefore more comparable to the year I have just had.   It is important to be aware of this fact and to consider the implications when presented with decisions which represent potential change.

2016/17 now looms on the horizon.   The challenge is to meet it head long and to work to ensure that it represents a “better” year than the one just passed.    “Onwards and upwards”, as I often find myself saying.