Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

What failure means these days

A recent Twitter chat included the following exchange with Mark Crotty, head of school at St John’s Episcopal in Dallas. Mark blogs at To Keep Things Whole and I am a frequent visitor. He used it in a post entitled: Failure of Promoting Failure  that you can read at the link. He alerted me to the post in a tweet.…

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Education, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Edge: A sudden unplanned flight of fancy

         Come to the Edge We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew. Christopher Logue “Come to the Edge” frequently misattributed to Guillaume Apollinaire Sail in a new direction Simply by sailing in a new direction You could enlarge the world Allen Curnow ‘Landfall in…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Don’t panic: Experience success and failure … as information.

Probably the only two responses to constant change are: A. Ignore it (shrink back, retrench, resist,  go off the grid, become irrelevant, turn inwards, stay put, get run over, and so on) or B. Keep on keeping on with the learning life. Clearly Option A can take you only so far. But what happens if the modern  mantra of: “Keep…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

All this change ….

For adults like me who work in schools September means being confronted with a world of change.  There are new faces of course, and names to learn. There are new courses, fresh paint on the walls and sometimes new structures and renovations to get used to. And the familiar is unfamiliar too. Children have grown taller, and they return to…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Stop Praising Students

There’s a good article in the latest Educational Leadership: “The Perils and Promise of Praise”. It’s by Carol Dweck. The wrong kind of praise creates self-defeating behavior. The right kind motivates students to learn. We often hear these days that we’ve produced a generation of young people who can’t get through the day without an award. They expect success because…

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