"Only the journey matters..."

"What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?" (Routman 82). I would sing in public, play the piano for my son's wedding, publish a book of poems, learn Latin dances, and cultivate huge gardens. I can say all that, but still the possibility of failure is attached to the task and I hesitate to try. With the chance of failure inherent in everything we do, I reframe the question: "What would you attempt if you knew it was okay to fail?" My culinary attempts aren't always deserving of a place in a cookbook, but at my house it's okay to fail knowing that my husband will graciously eat anything. So I keep trying and take enough pride in my cooking to blog about it.

My acupuncturist heard a lot from me in the hours I spent being needled on his table. He knew that I was frustrated with teaching and, in particular, a poetry writing class I was taking. I felt that my work wasn't up to the quality of the more experienced writers in the class. Knowing that I was a perfectionist and accustomed to good grades, he proposed the related questions, "What if you gave yourself permission to fail? What risks would you take?"

I started writing poetry with more abandon and took risks because I was writing out of my own need with myself as audience. (And I didn't fail the class since I was writing for authentic purpose and audience.) I have increasingly been willing to take risks--quitting my job being one of the bigger ones--and the rewards have been more joy and satisfaction.

So what do my ramblings have to do with our students? We need to give them permission to fail and encourage them to write so much that they can indeed expect some less than perfect pieces of writing. We can't expect to read everything they write anyway. "If you're reading everything your students write, they're not writing enough" (Routman 65). We can structure our assignments so students can submit their best work for the grading period as opposed to requiring that they submit for a grade all assignments they've tried. (If you wish, give participation points for having tried the exercise.)

It's time to celebrate risk-taking in our classrooms as a way to promote excellence. I've substituted "writer" for "photographer" in a Harry Callahan quote to make it apply to the English teacher's classroom: "To be a writer, one must write. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of writing. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an writer. Only the journey matters..."

Routman, Regie. Writing Essentials. Portsmouth,NH: Heinemann, 2005. Print.

Ready to Get Messy?

I taught myself a new skill this week and it was messy. I wanted to create a promotional video for our upcoming talent show, but I hadn't planned ahead far enough to capture some really great pictures. All I had available to me was the audition video created with a Flip camera, shot by some 8th graders. It served the purpose of helping us select performers for our event, but it wasn't the quality needed to be a stand alone promotional video. So I spent a day learning how to create a finished product. I got messy, and here's my desktop to prove it. The process was exhilarating overall, and the product was satisfying. Am I willing to let my students be as messy?

Our community talent show is in its third year of making money for projects that serve students in the school. As adviser to the Junior National Honor Society, the sponsoring group, I am in charge of the event. With my current break from classroom duties, I've had some additional time to add digital tools to make the job easier. I maintain a wiki for the group, applications and ticket sales are online courtesy of GoogleDocs forms, and audition times were scheduled online with Doodle.  I created a MovieMaker video to solicit entries in the talent show.


I was familiar with MovieMaker. I staged the pictures with two willing NJHS members and used PicMonkey to make the photos black and white for a unified look. It was only my second try at adding narration, but I was not learning something entirely new. The only thing that I had to learn for this video was how to upload to YouTube so it could be shared easily.

The movie I created from the audition films required me to learn two things: how to capture still pictures  from the video and how to clip audio files from the videos. I resorted to the snipping tool to capture pictures--not completely satisfying because the severely cropped pictures ended up with a lot of black space in the MovieMaker frames. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if we had taken still pictures the night of auditions.

I got so frustrated with the audio portion that my husband wisely avoided me while I googled for help.  When I read that audio can't be separated from video, I was ready to quit. In the end, what worked was JUST MESSING AROUND! I dragged the entire video to the audio track and then shortened and faded the audio on the track.

It's had 39 views in the day that it's been up, and I believe I have viewed it at least that many times just out of a sense of accomplishment. 

When speaking about people who make things, Mark Frauenfelder says, "Most people loathe failing so much they avoid trying things that require pushing past their current abilities. It's no coincidence that many of my favorite DIYers either dropped out of or never attended college. A few even dropped out of high school. Maybe they were lucky to have escaped the educational system; in school, mistakes result in punishment in the form of poor grades. Because we've been trained to believe that mistakes must be avoided, many of us don't want to attempt to make or fix things, or we quit soon after we start, because our initial attempts end in failure" (20).

The day I spent learning to make a one minute movie was exhausting and messy. I have yet to order the chaos on my desk, but I am certain that I will make more attempts because the result was so satisfying. I was present when a group of high-school students watched the piece, and there was an audible "Oh" when the cute preschooler appears. Precisely the reaction I was hoping for--people will come to the show to watch cute kids!

I prefer order. What does my classroom look like if I let my students get as messy as I did?

Frauenfelder, Mark. Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-it-yourself. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011.