Make Perseverance (and failure) Count

Countless stumbles, topples, and face-plants eventually led us to walking and then running to explore the world around us.  Through mostly humorous grunts, squeaks, squawks, and yowls we gained facility with a mother tongue, giving us the ability to communicate our needs to those around us.  Without perseverance neither of those vital life skills would be possible.  How quickly we let slip our grasp of the relentless lesson perseverance taught us, enabling us to learn to walk and talk.  Fostering and recognizing perseverance in students should be an achievement goal in its own right.


The video below happened to grab my attention the other day as I was doing a quick blog check of one my frequent favorites reads, The Fischbowl .  The story of how Myshkin Ingawale tried and failed, but eventually succeeded, in creating a new medical device to diagnose anemia non-invasively connected in a timely way with work I have been doing recently with students.  A group of 5th & 6th grade students chose to produce a short documentary video for the National History Day competition.  The process of making a video is nothing if not a study in perseverance.  After careful preparation and planning comes the actual recording.  Therein lies the caveat.  Students quickly come to see that even when it seems to be going good, and the words are finally flowing fluently, the inevitable happens.  A door is opened, someone sneezes or coughs, a paper is rattled.  "CUT!"  Getting it all just right takes many repetitions and a good measure of luck.  Making mistakes, even failing, and then persevering is essential and vital to learning.  Students focused on success and achievement only learn to have an aversion to mistakes and risk taking that can paralyze the learning process and certainly stymie creativity.


Being able to hold it together and to keep reaching for your goal is perseverance.  And perfection is not a goal, it is an ideal.  Giving students the opportunity to work on projects that are by their nature are studies in perseverance, and the chance to learn that success is not perfection, is a necessity.  The lessons learned can be used as reference when it comes to areas of study where students have been trained to avoid persistence.  Math and reading take a hard hit when it comes to students' capacity to persevere.  Subjects perceived as individual learning ladders to climb many times leave students stranded with what must feel like a too short ladder.  Connecting successes from other areas of work and being given credit for perseverance as well as measured achievement can make a big difference in overall performance.


Let's make the old college try an elementary, middle, and high school try!  

Exponentially Before Our Eyes

It was just a few short years ago that the buzz of "Did You Know?" had educators and even some business leaders thinking and talking about change in a never before light.  The light of technological revolution that was leaving even the most tech savvy among us breathless.  In a no less thought provoking manner Social Media Revolution 2011, part of the video series "Social Media Revolution" by Erik Qualman, based on his book Socialnomics, takes that exponential leap forward.


Before our eyes, as we have grappled with the shifting sands under our feet, social media has become the driving force in technological change.  Take a look and start a conversation with a colleague.

It Starts Here

While deleting endless strings of letters on my way to the first blog post for Hyper-Connected, this TED talk came to me today in tweet.  It isn't about technology or cool new tools for the classroom or social media.  The topics that get me reading and sharing and thinking.  What I was all charged up to write about.  It was a whole lot simpler and about something that has shaped my own life for the past 18 years.  Being a good dad.  Being a good parent.  Maybe not even just being a good dad, though that would certainly make a difference in my kid's lives, but being the best dad I could be.  Making a commitment to parenthood in a way that isn't about showing the world what a great job you are doing. A more subtle commitment to the life of a child.  One at a time on an individual basis.  A moral imperative to act in a way that makes it clear to that very young human being that they are a priority in your life, and that their life is indeed important to you.  That they, by their very existence, are important to the world.  Seems like a no-brainer, but you need not look far to find neglected, abused, or simply overlooked  kids. 


Working in education gives one the opportunity to see the world from a unique perspective, through the eyes of children. Lots of them.  All different.  All from different places.  Facing untold challenges day in and day out.  Often, least of which is how to do long division or come up with what they think the "author's purpose" is.  Really, author's purpose???


So, I clicked on this link in a tweet from @Nunavut_Teacher, as many of us do several times a day, and was stopped in my tracks.  The story is overwhelmingly poignant in its own right, but the big picture message is the nail on the head.

This is where the work we all do as a community, local, regional, global, starts.


Watch it, share it.