"Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly"

You might wonder if the title of this post is a sign that I am going to write about the importance of failure in learning and innovation. I guess it is in a way. I was inspired by Shelley Wright's most recent post called "Blogging is the New Persuasive Essay". She is obviously an established teacher of writing and she talks about how her kids don't write very effective persuasive essays. She goes on to say how blogging is possibly a much easier and effective way for young writers to write persuasively. Blogging is simple, not bound by the conventions of traditional essay writing and has the possibility of reaching a far greater audience.

The reason I am so encouraged by this is that my class is blogging and I am at times discouraged by their progress. Our aim is to be persuasive and to use higher order thinking in our blogging. At times I am discouraged by the quality, frequency and progress of some of the students. Often I am happy and proud of what we have accomplished and at others I am not.

Shelly talks about how long it takes her kids to write well persuasively, how much they need to learn. I know I need to be patient with this work and that if I stick with it, they will evolve as effective and interesting bloggers/writers.

When I look at student posts and essays from now on I will need to remember her quote from her blog, "anything worth doing is worth doing badly"! Thanks Shelley for the words of encouragement!