Today's
Quotation:
When nothing seems to
help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering
away at a rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a
crack
showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it
will split in two, and
I know it was not that blow that
did it--but all that had gone before.
Jacob
Riis
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Today's
Meditation:
I
have to remind myself often that the work that I'm doing is
only part of the work that goes on in the lives of my
students. Because I've always lived in a
results-oriented society, all of my experience and learning
has driven in the point that results are what
matter--quantifiable, verifiable, permanent results.
This is the warped view that continues to insist on
standardized testing, for example, despite research that
shows quite clearly that standardized testing is a pretty
invalid measure of learning and/or knowledge.
Ironically
enough, my work in military intelligence in the Army was
probably the most clearly defined--we knew only what we were
supposed to know, and our knowledge was only a certain piece
of the puzzle that also was being put together by other
intelligence agencies. It was refreshing to work in an
environment that allowed us to focus on what we do and not
have to split the rock ourselves with the first blow.
Our work was painstaking and seemingly without results--we
had to trust that others were doing their work, too.
Sometimes
it's easy to get frustrated when we don't see results
quickly enough. Sometimes we think that the rock's
never going to break. It's tempting to stop in
frustration and say, "Look--I've hit the thing fifty
times already, and nothing has happened. It's about
time I got the hint and moved on to something that will work."
But if we don't keep on going until that 101st blow, we'll
never know the taste of success in this particular endeavor.
We
can be nice to someone who's crabby to us for months and
never get a positive response, but when it comes, it will be
worth it. We can try a particular recipe fifteen or
twenty times before we get it right. There are so many
things to which we have to give time and patience if we ever
hope to see the results that we've been looking for, yet so
many times we give up just a bit too early.
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