I recently made a point to colleagues that there is a great chasm between avoiding failure and creating success. In an effort merely to survive, many schools and administrators default to the former. The irony is that to survive, we must default to the latter.

Tonight, as I was scrolling through Obsidian,¹ I came across this quote:

Atkinson proposed that behaviors are the result of the conflicts in an individual between these two tendencies to approach success and avoid failure.²

I have no active recollection of reading that statement or of entering it into Obsidian, but clearly, I did. So, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, the question is… Did I steal the idea from Atkinson, or did Atkinson pre-steal the idea from me? Atkinson’s point is not even related to the context in which I have been commenting, but the idea is not original to me, as much as I would like for it to be.

I’m happy to have had the reminder tonight that reading with a pen in your hand (or a keyboard under your fingers) works and that tools like Obsidian can help us link ideas. This idea will return in a research paper later this summer.

¹I’m still not comfortable with the way I have Obsidian set up.
²Carifio, J., & Carey, T. (2009). A critical examination of current minimum grading policy recommendations. The High School Journal, 93(1), 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1353/hsj.0.0039