That difficult first post

Nicki Winstone
A bit like a new exercise book, everyone wants their first blog post to be perfect; interesting, inspirational, a literary phenomenon, and just like a new exercise book, the pressure is sometimes too great. What sort of learner were you at school, the one who carefully underlined and colour coded your first page writing in slow motion to ensure perfection? The one who ripped their first page out at least 3 times in order to avoid a crossing ot on that all improtant page of perfection, or the one who scribbled on the front cover, because if you deliberately ruined the front of your book, any mistakes inside could be justified as you being unwilling, not unable to do the work set? I'm the second category, no patience to take my time and plan, and wanting to erase my mistakes from public display. How I envied those people who could simply put a line through their errors and carry on regardless, confident in the knowledge that their mis-spelling wouldn't make people think any worse of them. One of the things I love about teaching is that chance, every September, for a fresh start, students and teachers get new books, new pens, new classes and new opportunities to try again, to make a fresh start and this year achieve what wasn't quite managed in the last. So, as I sit here with my new planner, my new pens and new lesson plans, i'm considering, what is really going to be different this year? Well, I think for me, this year should be the celebration of mistakes, because as Henry Ford said: " Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." and "more intelligent" is what I want from my students and myself! So, this year we will all take risks, we will all do things differently and most importantly we will record our journey, so we remember how it feels to get things right and wrong. As for that difficult first page, well I reckon we might just leave it blank - a page for reflection at the end of the year, so we can look through the book and highlight the pages where our best learning took place. That way everyone has a perfect first page, a record of their personal achievements and a reason to be allowed mistakes on pages 2-49, because without mistakes there cannot be any real success, and if we don't celebrate those mistakes some students will continue to work really slowly, some will rip out their pages until their books are empty and some will continue to scribble on every page and there will be no way to measure success through the risks taken. So, my blog starts here, I'm already not happy with my first page, but I'm not going to edit endlessly until my words have all gone, I'm going to post and risk failure in order that I can do better next time. So begins my learning journey for this year.