If only progress happened faster

PROGRESS

This post is basically one big vent/whine, so I’m not sure what use it is to you as a reader. Maybe someone out there needs to hear “you’re not alone” if you don’t feel you’ve made enough progress on your projects and the technology is also not cooperating with you.

I attended an incredible session a few weeks ago at the Education Writers Association national seminar. It’s one of the two I was most looking forward to, and it did not disappoint. (It was Wes Moore and Erica L. Green talking about their book, “Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City.)

My goal since then has been to write a blog post for work about their session. I’ve outlined it in my head multiple times. It took all of this week to relisten to their session, get the transcript of it cleaned down so I could pick the points I wanted to write about, and write it.

That’s where I found myself today — finally writing it (yay) but also stuck in a bit of a negative thought cycle. I always tell people who are stuck writing to think, “What would I say if I were just sitting down to coffee with a friend to tell them about the topic?”

THAT seems easy. But Moore and Green said so much that matters in such a *big* way — there was detail about the relationships between police and students in Baltimore in 2015, a lot about how the deck was stacked against Freddie Gray from the beginning due to drug use (by his mom), poverty and lead poisoning — and there were big messages of a more overarching nature.

Wes Moore has been held out (rightfully) as an example of a success story. Part of his childhood was in Baltimore, not so dissimilar from Freddie’s environment, and he went on to be CEO of a huge foundation that helps eradicate poverty.

But Moore wrote the book partially because he knows it’s not about one person being held up as a success story because they worked hard and had a lucky break — he and Green both emphasized that the problems them both deemed “intractable” need to be addressed at their roots.

I just hope this post helps someone be inspired to do exactly that (when it’s posted).

(And I ran out of time before I got to whine about technology being uncooperative. Maybe that’s for the best.)

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” (But I can’t resist spell checking, as you can imagine.)