Nothing succeeds (sucks seeds) like a budgerigar

This is an excellent message for students everyone!

Persistence pays off. Never give up, never surrender!

I need to remember Thomas Edison's message when I'm dealing with Spark over a broadband/ internet issue.

It's easy to give up when the chatbot leads you down a blind alley. It's easy to give up when 'book a call' freezes. It's easy to give up when no one answers the phone at the local Spark office and you have to leave a message and no one gets back to you and you feel like bashing your head against the desk in frustration.

But, then I remember Thomas' message. 

I haven't failed. I'm not discouraged. The failures are a series of steps forward.

Your stairway lies on the whispering wind (Led Zeppelin)

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Weirdly, I've heard Stairway to Heaven twice on the radio in the last week.

Seems to me it's a song about searching. Searching for the ideal, the mythical, the unobtainable, But it's an honest search. A worthwhile and laudable search.

Our lives are like that, and part of my life, a big part, is the search for doing what I can do better as a leader.

This morning, my students gave me a good lesson in persistence. Fittingly, while searching for a photo. 

Somehow, a class photo had slid between two parts of a couch in the Learning Centre. Many theories were advanced and tried. But without success.

It seemed a hopeless case and rather than wreck the couch getting to the photo I thought it best to pay for a new photo (they'd just been handed out so it wasn't a tragedy and not difficult to pay 15 dollars for another copy).

My students threw back at me my 'never give up, never surrender' mantra. It took 30 minutes but together with me operating a crowbar and them devising a sticky tape ruler device - we snared the photo.

Cue - much - 'see Mr P, you should have been more positive' comments.

Quite right they were, too. Quite right!

We're growing up little by little (Celebration)

And so to the last of Ann McMullan's five critical skills that my students need.

5 Persistence.

Again, it is hard to argue against this as a necessary skill. She defines persistence as "the ability to continue with a task and maintain attention despite setbacks, resistance, or distraction".

As I've indicated before, my classroom door has a Maori phrase on it - Whaia Kia Maia - pursue it until it is conquered - so, yeah, I'm a fan.

It IS important that students learn how to keep focused, despite challenges. No problem there. 

But where does this come from? I'm a strong believer in intrinsic motivation (rather than external incentives and rewards). Getting a student to believe in the power of effort and hard work goes a long way towards ensuring perseverance when the going gets tough. But having that belief is tricky. Very tricky.

Like students anywhere, my students are on a continuum from very low persistence levels to intrinsically motivated workaholics. Most fall into the bell curve middle ground.

What do I do to help them? 

Having regular checkpoints works for some students. We have a couple of humungous assignment style standards that last two terms and hopefully the progress checkpoints enable students to build on a pattern of success.

Secondly, our English courses are now set up to provide stacks of choice, which, again hopefully, increases their motivation and engagement.

So - that's the five - a recap for you from her article:

1 Self-Direction 

2 Evidence Based Thinking

3 Persistence

4 Calculated Risk Taking

5 Tolerance for Ambiguity

I think you'll all agree (oh blogosphere-ites) that she's onto something with this list!