Showing posts with label Failure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Failure. Show all posts

Thursday, May 31, 2018

Poetry Friday -- The Final Golden Shovel



Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right. ~Henry Ford


Blessing 

You are going to fail, whether
you want to or not, in big and small ways. You
can spend your time worrying about that, or you can believe
that failure is valuable. It’s the way we learn. You
are in charge of how you think about your mistakes. You can
embrace them, trying to fail better every day, or
you can wallow in your catastrophes. What you believe
will determine how well you
live. I can’t
predict your future, but I have a good feeling that you’re
going to be more than all right.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018



In April, I wrote a golden shovel for each of my students, using a quote chosen by each student as the striking line. Only one poem was missing from the collection: mine. Here it is. Number 31. It is the blessing I bestowed upon the Hahn Squad as I sent them out into the world and off to middle school. 


Buffy has the Poetry Friday Roundup for today at Buffy's Blog.

And it's time to gather Roundup hosts for July - December. That post is here.




Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Failure



11 Experiments That Failed
by Jenny Offill & Nancy Carpenter

I can't wait to start celebrating failure with a new group of fifth graders.

I can't wait to ask them these questions as they work:
Did you have to change your plans?
Did you fail?
Did you struggle?
Did you get a new idea?
Did you cooperate?
Did you listen?
Did you share?
Did you think?
Did you solve a problem?
Did someone help your thinking along?
I can't wait to share this book with them, and talk about a character who designs and conducts completely original experiments that mostly seem sure to fail right from the outset.

Connecting to the character in this book, I can't wait to share about the 15 year-old Iowa boy who is running for president, and who is the most successful independent candidate since Ross Perot. Last time I checked, there's no way a 15 year-old can be elected president.

So, why bother performing experiments that are sure to fail?
Learn.
Make a point.
Get one step closer to an experiment that won't fail.
Have fun.
Discover something new.
Tell a story.
Happy Failure!