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Do you have a colleague who is the Ying to your Yang? The calm to your storm? Someone who is measured, quiet, and modest? A colleague who knows more than you do, but speaks less? Who listens to understand, rather than as a pause between talking? Who has an amazing and varied academic background, but who is reluctant to share her or his accomplishments?
I have such a colleague - and we call him Brian.
This week I was in the middle of one of my all-to-common e-mail rants about the limitations of this LMS feature, the lack of that LMS tool.
I want my learning management system to do exactly what I want it to do. To have every feature that I want without any of the complexity that I don't. To be elegant yet full-featured, modern yet consistent, intuitive but not dumbed-down.
In response to my latest rant Brian sent along the following words of wisdom:
"Josh,
You simply need to accept the profound wisdom of yielding to, rather than opposing, the flow of the LMS. The only place where you can experience the flow of the LMS is the Now, the Current LMS Features. So to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you yield, but just the tiny segment called the "Current LMS Features."
-Brian
*Adapted from The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle"
Ironic? Maybe.
Somewhere between tongue firmly in cheek and profoundly wise? Definitely.
Brian may have been gentling pulling my chain. Getting me to understand that not having my edtech platforms do everything exactly as I want them to do right now at this moment might not be a reasonable cause for existential angst.
But even if Brian's note was 4-parts fun and 1-part true - well - that 20% of truth is something to ponder.
Many (most?) of us get into edtech because we are impatient with the status-quo. Doing things the same way as they have always been done bores us. We are optimists and progressives.
The future of education is for us to create!
These qualities can make us royal pains in the ass.
We need our calm, judicious and enlightened colleagues to gently make fun of us every now and again.
