Mary Poppins?

I slapped this into MusementParking almost a year ago as a placeholder, on 4/17/13 to be exact. Fortunately my powers of recollection have not failed me, and I can share with you now, dear readership, just WHY dear Mary Poppins has been the voice of my blog over my hiatus.

I pulled this from a MOOC [massively open online course] lesson on reward in game theory. What? I have to realize that of the lot of you, several may not know what even a MOOC might be, let alone much about game theory....and even if you know all that, you might wonder what a good ol' English teacher is doing prattling around all that. Might as well take up spellcheck with an  ouija board.

And that, the paragraph above, is likely why all I did was paste Mary Poppins in to entertain you. I have a shorter answer as to her advice being my standing word here for a year....in my current role in faculty development, I've come to realize that customer service really comes down to her jingle. A spoonful of sugar really does make even the most jagged and bitter pill easier to swallow. I've had to share some very bad news with my colleagues, and I've given ear to even more unpalatable things than I could share here. It helps, so very much, to sing a little sugar into even the most badass message. Customer service, then, is about balancing good and bad news, good and bad vibes.

You find the fun, and SNAP, the job's a game!

This is truly why Julie Andrews has been greeting my readers for a long time now. Though her actual song and dance are more memorable, this adage is the golden nugget (or golden ticket if you want to go all Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on me)

Long/short of it is that we need the juice in all our pursuits. We need the dopamine. We need the challenge, surprise, competition, reward--we need the stuff of games to thrive. To the extent that we can game life, we can enjoy life. I am finding this so very true.

In the small ways here at first, I set a timer or make a goal, then knock it out of the park and rejoice. Example: I'm going to clear this inbox in ten minutes. When I have, then bippity-boppity-bacon! In my head I hear the jingle jangle tune of the Wheel of Fortune slot machine payout and I do the happy dance. (You might not even know all that was going on in my head if you were just to watch me at the computer. Then again, I might seem especially strange at that moment. I don't know.)

Of course, this has more immediate connectivity to "the job" and in my case, gamifying faculty development, but I'll save that for my other blog presence over at BCC's Faculty Development site.