Writing a paper on our chess initiative

"The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better." Stephen King

Steve Carroll, Steve Tobias and I are co-presenting a paper at an international conference on chess and the community in Scotland later this month. As part of this paper, I am writing a section dealing with the introduction of the chess-squared project in our cluster of schools, which includes a brief story of the initiative, comments on the key role of the principals, the teachers and the tutors, a description of our distributed leadership and a number of vignettes from classrooms.

Earlier today I was discussing with a teacher the difficulty of kids not getting their work completed on time and how difficult it is to develop this responsibility in kids. I mentioned that I always told my students that I'm a deadline person unlike my wife, Pat, who when given a task just gets it done. I begin the task and for some reason that I can't figure out, I leave it unfinished until pressure mounts as the deadline approaches, and then I go flat out and complete the task. I'm wondering were many teachers conscientious students who got their work done early and always on time?

Well, today I felt good because I sat down and wrote about 900 words for the paper.

I began this post with a quote about writing from Stephen King and I thought I'd end with one from Hemingway that sums up my feelings about the first draft:

"The first draft of anything is shit." Ernest Hemingway