Written by Now that I am back to blogging it seems that at some points during my day I am thinking through ideas for several blog posts at a time if I let my brain ‘flow.’ My recent thoughts for posts surround topics such as:
- Christmas feelings and what to do about them;
- How failing forward looks and if I model it enough when I teach; (keep reading)
- Whether it would be possible to make a template for the chemistry Breakout EDU I designed; and,
- Whether my methods for scheduling Rosseau Lake College‘s personalized exam week is of interest to anyone.
So there you have it: feeling, failing, gamifying, and scheduling are at the forefront of my mind this Christmas eve. Yes, I may very well be the most boring person on the planet. Sorry about that!
What I have to offer at this juncture relates both to failure and to what I am also doing during my free time as I contemplate all of the above: photography and birding. I have four feeders strung up such that I can sit and type whilst bird watching and deciding whether or not I need to yell at the melanistic grey squirrel again. It’s naturalist multitasking at its finest.
I fail at bird photography a lot. I created a cute little graphic of my most common customers, originally intended for use as a Christmas-themed Instagram post. I decided instead to take a look through my fall photo collection to see just how many times I had tried for a photo of each species before getting what I deemed to be an Instagram-worthy shot. As such, and without shame, I present to you the statistics for how many shots it took to get one good photo for each of:
- male downy woodpecker (Picoides pubescens, below, top left)
- black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus, below, top right)
- female hairy woodpecker (Leuconotopicus villosus, below, bottom right)
- white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis, below, bottom left)
It serves to remind me that the nice photos we see on social media are just the tip of what is most likely a fairly mundane iceberg. It also reminds me of the quote variously attributed to Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky:
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Thanks for reading!
Love these thoughts on failure @lfarooq! I’m currently trying to get into the headspace to write a short talk for Monday morning on failure and risk-taking, and this was just what I needed to see at this moment! The Instagram example is something that will likely resonate with the students – do you mind if I borrow this idea??
Not at all. I am glad it is helpful!