Month: August 2016

Failure is interesting partly for the fact that successful thinkers actually make more mistakes than those who give up easily and therefore preserve their unblemished record of mediocrity, and also for the fact that mistakes can usually be set right by trying again.

Martin Covington (1992, p. 231)

Covington, M. V. (1992). Making the grade: A self-worth perspective on motivation and school reform. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

I can’t say that I read the original work. I encountered the quotation on page 30 in:

Felten, P., Gardner, J. N., Schroeder, C. C., Lambert, L. M., & Barefoot, B. O. (2016).The undergraduate experience: Focusing institutions on what matters most.San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass.

Occasionally, these classic one-liners (although this is a long one) capture something you need to hear, just to get you out of a slump, or just when you feel a little defeated. Because those days will come, even when things are going as you’d like them to. If you have the support which will churn out these necessary platitudes, then that’s great! Sometimes you just need to sink your teeth into the comfort food of a boldface platitude, bite, chew, and swallow with gusto!

I like the expression “to slay.” It evokes the triumph of accomplishing something challenging, à la  slaying dragons and all that. Not HBO-GOT’s dragons, because these creatures are too magnificent to be wilfully destroyed. And I don’t mean the use of slay to compliment someone on getting dressed well.

But I think I’d like to start saying, “I’m going to Simone Biles this challenge coming my way.” Not because Biles is trending and not because I just want to hop on the bandwagon of admirers (and there is much to admire in this young lady’s talent), but because I wonder what would happen if we tried using words and expressions, metaphors with less violent roots.

Every time I think I am ready to let this site go live, I pull back. I look at the content here and I know it is already in the public domain. Somewhere out there, there is a record of all the information on the pages here. However, there is something a little bizarre about putting it on display. It is the same sentiment that has made me extremely uncomfortable with social media. There is some kind of connection between this discomfort and my reluctance to be public with my creative writing that I have not quite understood, but I am hoping to make sense of it, or even get past it.