Estimated reading time: 9 minutes, 50 seconds

I find it amazing that as a male, raised in the Mennonite faith in southern Manitoba, Canada, that we share many of the same identity stories. I’m known as someone who always wants to be right, but I just want to know as clearly and fully as I can, and that means discussing until I (and the others) come to some agreed understanding or lack thereof. I don’t call it arguing, which to me is more about trying to get someone else to take my view. I too am learning when to stop.

Trying to run a self-determined, rhizomatic, flexible learning environment within a traditional education building is a huge challenge. My care for individual learners and the hours that we spend talking about our learning and lives is what I’ve come to accept as my job. It’s different than the “teaching” I did when I started my career over 25 years ago.

I love discourse analysis and critical pedagogy. Turns out many others don’t like being challenged with “whys”. My “relaxing” is reading (too much) and writing (not enough). And focus?? I should be preparing for a presentation, a guest blog post, an article for a journal, a seed funding application…at least I got in a 11.5 km run in -20C.

And proofreading. That’s that need to have everything right. An extra space or an en dash where an em dash should be sets me off if it’s a public publication.

So, keep being you. You seem to have a pretty good grasp of who you are. You take the courage here to make yourself vulnerable, a quality I believe is lacking. When we protect ourselves from the judgement of others, we also limit our ability to judge ourselves, to know ourselves, to evaluate and change ourselves.

I’ve benefited from your hypernetworking and I say, keep going. Thanks for putting yourself and your voice “out there.”