Source: http://www.illusionsgallery.com/Grail-L.jpg
Steve Dembo (Teach42) makes this point about ignorant educators drinking the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid:

These are people that were happy, productive, and doing right by students before they got connected. Could it be that the PLN like the Matrix? Once you’re connected, you can never go back. And education is a lot dirtier than most people realized. Take the red pill if you want, but once you go down that rabbit hole, you may wind up depressed, disillusioned, and with a strong desire to seek greener pastures. Is being hyper-connected bad for morale?

At every point in my career, I have found myself being disillusioned about education leadership, how change is barred, how poor a job we do as educators to facilitate lifelong learning. I am half-convinced that learning happens in spite of administrators’ best efforts to create schools that are conducive to high stakes assessment and accountability, to legislators’ efforts to select the best and brightest to be the leaders. Has my vision cleared, the scales fallen from eye so that I am no longer blind to my own pride and that of other’s? Am I suddenly aware of how fallible human beings are and that we all quest after more than mud we are rooted in?

Is my disillusionment a result of a reality that is ever-worsening or that I have taken my eye off the prize, taken my eye off the Holy Grail?

When I am learning, I find that I am happy, content, and that sharing that joy brings me peace and reward. When I am trying to push an agenda, no matter how inspired it may be, when I try to seek greener pastures, I forget that I must bloom where I’m planted.

I encourage those who seek greener pastures to look no further than their own hearts, to re-double their efforts and begin again. As a colleague shared with me but recently….

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
– Jacob August Riis

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