Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
~ Walt Whitman; Song of Myself, 51

Last week I published two blog posts on the same day, which is relatively rare – but it does happen.

What is truly rare is that in these two posts I took completely opposite perspectives. In other words I made the case for simplicity AND complexity in the span of a single afternoon.

Specifically, in one post (F*** Nuance: A reflection on TPACK and theorizing), I rail against unnecessary theoretical elaboration (riffing of on Kieran Healy’s awesome paper “Fuck Nuance”), and in the next (titled quite appropriately Against Simplification: On the value of small rebellions), I defend the value of the complex and the messy against simplification.

So which is it? Should we embrace simplicity and reject complexity? Or versa vice?

The answer, as Walt Whitman might say, is yes.

This kind of contradiction often leads us into paradox—those logical knots where opposing truths somehow coexist. Of the “All Cretans are liars variety,” where the statement undermines itself by its very existence. Visual paradoxes, like the title image of this post (inspired by impossible objects of M.C. Escher), work precisely because they force us to hold two incompatible perspectives simultaneously. The stairs go up and down at the same time. The waterfall flows in an endless loop, and in the image above what is the floor for one person is a vertical wall for the other.

The apparent contradiction dissolves when we recognize that I’m talking about different domains entirely. Theoretical frameworks benefit from parsimony—clean models that capture essential relationships without unnecessary ornamentation. Educational practice, on the other hand, thrives on the kind of contextual complexity that emerges from real relationships between real people in real places.

Here is one way of thinking about it. As Alfred Korzybski, famously said, “The map is not the territory.” Neither should it be—he should have added. We want our maps to be simple and our territories to remain richly complex.

Borges captured this beautifully in his brief story (On Exactitude in Science) about an empire whose cartographers, obsessed with precision, created a map that was exactly the size of the territory itself—a perfect 1:1 scale reproduction. The map became useless precisely because of its completeness, eventually abandoned and left to decay in the wilderness. It’s the ultimate paradox of representation: perfect fidelity rendered the map perfectly useless.

The problem comes when we confuse the two—when we either make our theories so elaborate they cease to guide action, or when we try to make our classrooms as standardized as our frameworks.

TPACK works precisely because it’s a simple lens for understanding something inherently complex: how teachers navigate the intersection of content, pedagogy, and technology in their specific contexts. The framework doesn’t eliminate complexity; it helps us think about it more clearly.

This isn’t theoretical inconsistency—it’s recognition that different tools serve different purposes. Sometimes the most sophisticated move is knowing when to keep things simple, and sometimes it’s knowing when to preserve necessary complexity.

Or as some people smarter than me said

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
~ Oscar Wilde

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quoting smart people, of course, is the last refuge of the inconsistent.