One of the best professors I had in college was an economics professor at Santa Barbara City College who loved Star Trek and whose mother owned a restaurant that served some of the best burgers in town.
Whenever possible he used either (or sometimes both!) Star Trek or the restaurant as a metaphor for some principle of economics he was teaching.
One night he walked in and began by saying we would be studying how to cook 26 burgers on a twenty-five capacity grill, the idea being that you had to always have one in the air.
Well, as teachers, we always have one in the air. That one is something we want to do, or someone we want to be with, someplace we should be but cannot yet go...because we are cookin' all the other things we've got going.
But some times, you just have to pull back, go with twenty burgers, leave a little room for the special orders of life--whether unlooked for love or unexpected loss--that come at you from nowhere. This eases the spring a bit, takes the edge of the stress.
It is within that space, that moment's extra peace and ease, that we can reclaim what we need to come up with such great lessons that our students will, as I do, remember lessons Professor Maroaka taught nearly thirty years ago, even as I laugh thinking about him comparing the macro economy to the Starship Enterprise and the micro economy to the little ships that orbited the mothership.
Good things happen in the margins. Margins matter.
Posted by: Brian in AK | January 21, 2011 at 11:42 PM