CLICK BELOW TO REDISCOVER HUMANITY
A DECADE+ OF STORYTELLING POWERED BY THE BEST WRITERS ON THE PLANET

Mac Bogert

VISIT MY WEBSITEhttps://azalearning.com/
I fell in love with learning, language, and leadership through the intervention of two professors—I had actually achieved a negative GPA—who kicked my butt for drifting through my first couple of semesters at Washington and Lee University. After graduate school at U. Va., I started teaching English at a large high school in northern Virginia. A terrific principal lit my fire, a terrible one extinguished it. I left after five years (the national average, as it turns out, maybe the only time I did something normal) and started an original folk/blues/rock band. That went well for a time until the record company sponsoring us folded. I toured for some years as an acoustic blues musician, primarily as an opening act for bands like the Muddy Waters Band, Doc, and Merle Watson and such remarkable talent. As that market dried up (disco), I earned my Coast Guard Masters License and worked for the next decade as a charter and delivery captain and sailing instructor. At the same time, I was working part-time as an actor and voice-over artist, selling inflatable boats and encyclopedias, and working as a puppeteer. Itchy feet, I suppose. I came back into the system in 1987 as a teacher specialist in health and drug education in my county school system, also part-time as Education Coordinator (and faculty member) for Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts. I ‘departed’ both jobs in 1994 (therein lie more stories than 350 words could hold) and started my own business. AzaLearning is the career I’d been dodging for decades. I serve 200 clients around the country, helping with all kinds of coaching, planning, transforming conflict, creative problem-solving, communication, and mediation (I also trained and worked as a community mediator somewhere during sailing and teaching): learning, language, and leadership. In 2016 I published Learning Chaos: How Disorder Can Save Education and actively contribute to a couple of online education magazines as well as publish a newsletter, a blog, and the learning chaos podcast.

ENJOY MY PUBLISHED ARCHIVES

Ambiguity Opportunes Efficacy

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown." ...

Character over Category

"Gender Crap is our attempt to look at the complexity of gender labels from as many different viewpoints as possible. We are not political, not self-righteous, nor attempting to change any ideas." ...

Nice-olation

"Can you think of a time when you offended a loved one, friend, or colleague and were confused because you thought you were being nice?" ...

Thirty Trillion Occupants

"It takes courage to face our fears. We can take that tiny bit of emotional inflammation upon ourselves. We can treat it with acceptance and compassion. We then carry the antidote: forgiveness." ...

My Humanity Does Not Diminish My Value

"She helps people find their own, and others around them, paths that tie value to humanity, and she understands that "leaders are not doers, they're the developers of doers." ...

The Great Pause

"Roger and I take a wonderful hike together through the pandemic, organizational culture, quitting smoking, neuroscience, and human capacity." ...