I've been thinking and wondering why that is. What is it that keeps me from blogging?
What I have discovered is it's not the expected answer - TIME. The truth is I have time for what I want to have time for. And yes I ended that sentence with a preposition and am beginning this one with a conjunction - it's Summer! :)
No - what really freezes me out of this blog is the fear of saying something that will make me look stupid, of making a comment that someone else will disagree with, or showing my ignorance - in a word it's a fear of failure.
Good grief! The most ridiculous part of that premise is that someone is reading this blog - and we have't really established that yet.
And - well it's just an excuse I would not accept from my 4th graders. But, as I attempt to put my thoughts on the internet for my peers I realize the vulnerability my students felt. It's a scary endeavor. We are always one step away from the chance of total failure buried somewhere inside this task.
I have been reading different blogs recently - trying out some new ones, and I came across a 17 year old New York student, Nikhil Goyal, who is really shaking things up. He is a published author, conference speaker and thinker on school reform. One of his posts focused on failure...
Here’s a radical thought: Let’s make ‘F’ the new ‘A.’ Failure early, fail often. For instance, Thomas Edison performed 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb. From cardboard and duct tape to ABS polycarbonate, 15 years and 5,127 prototypes later, Sir James Dyson created his successful bagless vacuum cleaner. Compare entrepreneurship to the J-curve of returns: the failures come early and often and the successes take time.
Schools, on the other hand, paint failure in a terrible light. The poster ‘Failure is Not An Option’ is plastered on walls of brick and mortar classrooms far and wide. Kids crack under the pressure to be perfect all the time. Get that ‘A’ in science class or else you won’t be successful in life. It is simply ludicrous.
We are creating grade-obsessed students to “do school” — memorize enough information to perform well on a test, regurgitate, and then forget.
http://goyalnikhil.tumblr.com/
What if we incorporated this idea into our classrooms...failure is part of life
we demonstrate it
we acknowledge it
we accept it
Could we do that, as teachers?
I think that is what paralyzes too many of us from incorporating technology into our classrooms. We are so afraid of failing and looking stupid that we can't bring ourselves to try - unless we have perfectly orchestrated the situation. Maybe we need to turn that on it's head and create learning opportunities for our students - demonstrate how to deal with failure and move on to a new solution.
Just a thought!!