The Avinya Scoop

“Life is a game, you can play it safe and be good or you take a chance and be great”                                                                                                                                                          - Unknown Hello there! It’s the educators at Avinya taking over for this week. Staying true to Anju’s blog spirit we decided to start off with a quote that captures the essence of this week’s journey.  Our first week at Avinya ended with an intense game of Jenga. The word “Jenga” itself is derived from Swahili which means to “build” even though the purpose of the game is to break. We had an interesting debate on that exact same thing. Should we try to play it safe and keep building the tower or should we take more daring chances, which might topple the tower? In the end, we must give credit to Anju for the creative destruction of our tower.  Speaking of creative destruction, this game summed up our first week at Avinya. Initially, we were all about pla

This Monday, at our usual sprint planning call, we moved to sprint 7.  I looked at sprint 7 and scrolled down casually...and down and down and then some…you get my drift.  Sprint 7 is rather long! I almost put my head in my hands but I look over at Samisa, Rukmal and Dee and just shrug. 'We can do this' is the unspoken phrase in our eyes as we meet each other’s gazes and then we go back to scrolling.   Sprint 7 is indeed a long one, but we have reprioritised and made things work this week. Actually, more than just work!  This week has been a week of fire! But don't worry - the good kind of fire. I don’t think I've used fire in the good sense in awhile. Fire related phrases have been used with fire-fighting and burnt out in my vocabulary over the last few years. This time it’s that fire that burns inside you and ignites and reignites your passion to make a difference in the world! Though it was a week of fire…’good fire’… it did start with some flooding ;) Sorry, I must

Have you ever found an answer or a solution staring you in the face but you couldn’t see it because you were just too close to it? As contradictory as that may sound, I have to be honest - it’s happened to me several times.   This week has been a week of chaotic mornings and a mad rush to find answers and solutions, only to find after much pain and effort that it was right there, staring me in the face! I don’t just mean with work stuff, the answers staring me in the face all started this week with carrots. Yes carrots. (Ironically aren’t they good for your eyesight?) The other day I was putting in my weekly shop online.   I’m meticulous about my weekly shop. 1) I hate to be distracted during the week with missing items and surprise visits to grocery stores and 2) remember how we aren’t really the kind of family where everyone eats the same thing at each meal. Dietary restrictions I’m afraid. So, I make a weekly food plan for each person in our house. It’s the only way I can process th

“A cup of tea solves everything.” (Unknown) Right, I'm not really sure where I should start this week. Once you’ve read through this you will understand my conundrum of finding a starting point.  It’s been one of those weeks where everything has been happening at accelerated paces and parallel tug-of-wars.  So instead of starting at the start. Pun intended. I will start with milk tea and halapa :) You may ask how on earth we ended up talking about milk tea and halapa…well...we were discussing the student flow because we needed this for the design concept of our school building and to see what the daily student timetable should look like.  That’s when we stumbled on the topic of mid-morning breaks and what we should offer our students at mid-morning break. The suggestion from Sanjiva was why not something like milk tea and halapa?  Yes, why not!  Coincidentally, I’ve been doing some of my own research on halapa.  No, I’m not losing it (yet).  I've been working on a personal proj