It’s never good enough

Our first on-line course by the Julia Institute will be offered on January 14. There are so many thousand other details that I would like to add. I would like to do more testing to make sure every little thing works perfectly, that the mp3 files and movie files will work with every computer in the world. Unfortunately, Turtle Mountain Head Start did not have ten million dollars and forever for us to develop the course.

The frustrating part about the Internet is that it is a moving target. There are more possibilities every day. Two years ago, our courses did not include video clips and this one has one every 3o minutes or so. Our only means of corresponding with us was by email. Now we have web forms, a forum and comments on blogs. Already that seems like so dated.

Last week, an expert on marketing to the younger generation gave a speech in Los Angeles. One of her points was that email is for old people. Young people text message or IM. So, today I signed up for my yahoo messenger account. (If you read The Julia Group Forum, you’ll know my ‘special interest’ is Yahoo!)

So, that brings me back to the Autism course. One of the points I don’t feel that I have addressed enough is “special interests”, but you just  can’t put everything about Autism into a one day course.

One of the quotes I like best about education is from the poet, W.B. Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.”

You know what, though? The reality is that being a great teacher or having a great course takes time and work. What I need to accept is that the best we can do for Monday is not a perfect course but a good one. The next time will be better, and so will the next time after  that.

The goal isn’t to be perfect. It is to get better every day. I think I am going to have that tattooed on my forehead as a reminder, right under where it says Yahoo!