Walking the talk, slowing down, cold dipping

As I am writing the summary of the second part of “becoming an everyday changemaker” (summary of Part I here), I am trying to apply what I am reading, and intellectually agreeing with, to my life. Habits are so hard to break… Anyway, I have known for a long time that cold dipping and swimming in the sea is really good for my mental health, and my good mental health is not only important for the quality of my work, but also for how good a person I can be and for how happy I am, so I have made it a daily habit again. “No time” is just not a valid excuse any more, then something else has got to go. It definitely helps that early mornings now look like what you see in the pictures!

After my dip this morning, on the bus to the office, I read a post by Neil Selwyn about how GenAI — much like vacuum cleaners when they first came up — probably isn’t actually going to be saving us a lot of work. Our standards of cleanliness — or quantity of feedback to student work, or speed with which we write lesson plans, or number of languages we translate content to, or whatever we might want to use GenAI for — is likely going to increase and take up any time that we might have “won” by being more efficient at doing other tasks.

And that really ties in with other questions I am asking myself at the moment. What should I be spending my time on, what do I want to spend my time on? How do I balance the things I want to urgently do in the world with not burning out? And, more concretely, what do I want to achieve specifically in my job, in those 8 hours a day that someone is buying my time and attention? What is the purpose of education that I am employed to help improve? What does “improving” in this context even mean?

No answers on that quite yet, but please enjoy some more pictures from my morning dip! :-) (Yes, it was cold!)