Do you ever feel like you aren’t making progress in your efforts to teach students, improve schools, develop curriculum or whatever it is you are doing?
Some days, does it just feel like you are trying to push water uphill?
I’ve been feeling like that for the last year, but then today I realized that we have more than doubled the number of options for our educational software, from 22 to 51 ! Let me brag for a minute. Here is how it played out:
We went from 4 iPad games to 10, from 3 games for Chromebooks to 7, and so on.
Sometimes, we would release two games in a week. Then, we wouldn’t release a new game for a month and I would be thinking,
“Oh my gosh, we’re not getting anything done!”
I wouldn’t really think about those two games that were released a month ago because I was too focused on the fact that we hadn’t gotten out whatever I wanted to get out this month.
When I look back on the year, I wonder how did we get so much done without me noticing it.
How was it that at the same time I was feeling that we weren’t making much progress we were doubling – or more – the number of games we had on each operating system?
Now, I feel that way all over again. I’m working on a resource site for teachers and it feels as if I’m moving at glacial speed. This will never get done!
Every day, I’m just getting one lesson plan done or one webpage created. Julia is helping me by doing a couple of video review pages each week. Diana is going to help me as soon as she gets done mailing flyers to schools. See what I mean? Progress is slow as molasses.
When I get discouraged these days, I remind myself this is how we went from 22 options available for our games to 51 in the last year.
It wasn’t leaps and bounds. It was sometimes a few hours each day from each person on our team.
Those minutes add up. Maybe you think you aren’t getting through to that student. Perhaps it feels as if you are teaching the same old thing that you’ve taught forever. I’ll bet it’s not true. I’ll bet you that if you looked at what that student could do a year ago and what he or she can do now will be very pleasantly surprised. If you look at your lessons from a few years ago and what you’re doing today, you’ll probably want to give yourself a pat on the back. You’ll probably be like me and ask yourself,
“Wow! How did I make so much progress without ever knowing it?”
The answer is this – even if you feel like you only have a few minutes a day to devote to coding or lesson planning or making new instructional videos, those minutes add up to hours and years and 51 different game builds.