(Thank you to Aviva Dunsiger for sharing this learning)
What Did I Learn Today?
Today, I learned about the power of perseverance. Yes, I’ve heard many times before that we should persevere, keep on trying, never give up … but how many times have I done the opposite of that?
The funny thing is that my learning happened in the strangest of ways. Our Board is launching a new email system beginning tomorrow. I email my parents all the time through a group mail list, and I needed to get things up and running so that I would be ready for tomorrow. I could access our new system today, so I was going to try and move my contacts over.
Quickly I got frustrated. I couldn’t figure out how to add a mail list. I eventually saw that I could create a group, but as I tried to type in a parent’s email address, it wouldn’t work. So frustrating! At this point, I was about to tweet one of our 21st Century Learning Consultants for help, but I decided that I wasn’t going to give up so easily. Since making a group wouldn’t work the way I thought, maybe I needed to try a different way.
I decided to add each of the parents to My Contact Folder. Then I was able to add the contacts to the group. That was until I got to one of the contacts that had a name before the email address: I couldn’t find him in my email directory. Why? Okay, I exited from the group and added the contact with just the email address. Then it worked!
The whole process took me over an hour, but in the end, I was able to send my parents a group email, and yippee, they got it! How does this relate to education? If I’m going to ask my students to search out the answers to their own questions, problem solve, and try again, then I need to model this as well. I need to be willing to make mistakes. I need to be willing to try something, see how it works, make changes, and try again. I need to experience this same feeling of joy that comes from perseverance, and today, this is exactly what I felt!
What are your own tales of perseverance? Why is it important for educators and students to persevere? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
Aviva Dusiger is a Grade 5 teacher at Ancaster Meadow School in Ancaster, Ontario.
Twitter: @avivaloca
Blog: Living Avivaloca: http://adunsiger.com/
Photo Credits:
OSSEMOOC 
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