Weigh Risks Realistically

Don't worry more than you need to! Figure out what real obstacles you face, and then plan accordingly. The sky is not going to fall, no matter what this cat thinks. [next]

What if the sky were to fall? 




Additional comments:

Since fear is such a strong emotion, it's often easy to overestimate the real threat that a danger poses: fear can make us treat unrealistic dangers as if they really were imminent threats. As a result, a tiny and unlikely threat can keep you, or your students, from moving ahead, frozen in the paralysis of "What if? What if?"

One good solution is just to fearlessly imagine the worst possible scenario, and then make a plan to deal with that event, should it occur. You might discover that there are some simple and even useful precautions that you can take which will make it easier to cope with that admittedly unlikely danger. So, for example, you can do backups of your cloud-based data on a monthly or even weekly basis. I don't think Blogger or PBWorks will disappear on me before the end of the semester, but just in case, I do back up my blogs and wikis so that I will be able to cope with that unlikely event. It just takes a few minutes — and so I also encourage my students to do the same; doing local back-ups is not a required assignment, but it's a bit of extra credit they can earn while also developing some good back-up habits. Here's how that works: Back-up and Check-up.


The image above is another one of the LatinLOLCats: Quid si caelum ruat? What if the sky were to fall?

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