Perseverance to Excellence

​I find myself nearing the end of a long, yet, fast season of summer school.  Not as an administrator, but as a student.  Over the past 10 weeks my doctoral cohort and I have experienced some struggle with learning STATS I and STATS II online and developing our qualitative research and writing skills.  It has been a blur to say the least.

What have I learned?  Besides ANOVA, Regressions, and Qualitative Coding Techniques?

I am reminded of the importance of perseverance in education.

Throughout these past 10 weeks we have been grappling with very difficult content, hours of videos, pages of writing, and many, many, many long hours.  The thought of giving up comes to mind from time to time.  This is difficult stuff to learn this quickly.

​Then I am reminded of this:

Being successful in academics does not always mean that you are the smartest person in the room.  It does not always mean that you are first one to turn in the assignment or the first person to solve the problem.  Being successful in academics means that you did not stop until you achieved excellence in the task at hand.

Do we teacher this to our kids or do we just expect them to know what this looks like?

As educators, we cannot lose sight of this when it comes to teaching our kids.  We must teach our students the power of perseverance.  We cannot afford to let them give up, no matter how difficult the task at hand may seem.  Does your boss let you do less than what is expected for the task at hand because you do not want to do it or because it was too difficult to complete?  I highly doubt it.  We cannot afford to accept nothing less than their excellence.

How will you help your students to persevere to their excellence this year?  If you will not hold them to that standard, who will?

Think. Achieve.  Succeed. 

Jeff