An Epic Fail (or "Licking My Wounds" or "Ralphie")

I've been licking my wounds at work all week...

...Each year, the federal government releases some technology grants called by various names, but for the sake of brevity, let's go with the short name of Ed Tech. These grants are distributed to the states and then broken into two types: competitive and non-competitive. EVERY school district in the state gets its share of the non-competitive grants, but only some of the districts in the state are eligible for the competitive grants, and those districts must--as the name suggests--compete against each other for those grant monies.

I don't know about the other 49 states, but in Kentucky who is eligible for the competitive grants has to do with the poverty rate of the school district. The poorer the district, the better the chances of qualifying for the grant. My school district has never qualified for one of these competitive grants...until this year. Thanks to a) the federal government pumping money into the grant through federal stimulus funds and b) my school district's deteriorating socio-economic status, we finally qualified for this grant. In fact, thanks to the influx of federal stimulus funds, something like 110 of the school districts in the state (out of 175) qualified for the grant, and the Kentucky Department of Education said about 75 or so of those districts would get the grant.

It wasn't a huge grant, but it wasn't anything to sneeze at, either, and any amount of money for technology is useful in lean times. So I set out about three months ago to get this grant. I worked on and off for about five weeks crafting the proposal, and if I'd worked for 8 hours a day on the thing, I probably would have put eight full days in on it. I got assistance from the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the district finance officer, and the principal at the school that would be--the way the grant was written--the primary benefactor of the money. I told all of them that it was a virtual shoo in of a grant because a) with 75 out of 110 districts going to receive money, all we had to do was not come in the bottom quartile of grant proposals, b) I'd volunteered in the past to score these grants and had done so, knowing that doing so would give me some inside information into what the scorers were looking for in case I ever did get the chance to apply, and c) I had never written for any grant before and not gotten it. I told everyone that we should go ahead and start planning for the grant because the announcement was just going to be a formality.

I'm assuming you can guess where I'm heading with this blog entry...

...And you're right. Tuesday morning I received an email stating that the scoring of the grants had been completed and that the results would be emailed later that day to all applicants. I emailed all of the interested parties and told them that hopefully we'd have the official word later that day. When the email did come, right at about lunch time, I opened the email, assuming that my district's name would be on the list, and hoping that the scores would be arranged from highest to lowest because I assumed that my district's name would be near the top if not at the very top. Indeed, when I opened the email and went to the website linked to in the message, the district's names WERE in order from highest to lowest (at least initially--someone at KDE noticed this error and quickly rearranged them alphabetically...but I'd already seen). I scanned quickly through the top of the list and didn't see my district's name anywhere. Oh well, I thought, it's in here somewhere. I went all the way down the list, though, and didn't see it. My district's name is NOT easy to miss. It's two odd, German words with a hyphen in between. Off the top of my head, I think it's probably the longest school district name in the state. I searched again. Still couldn't find it. I bet I looked up and down the list six or seven different times before it even began to sink in that it wasn't on the list. 77 OTHER school districts were on the list. My district's name was nowhere.

I was devastated. Not just because we didn't get the grant. To be honest, more than once I had told myself that I really would be better off if we DIDN'T get the grant, because it just meant more work for me next year. What devastated me was that I really thought I had written a good grant, and I REALLY assumed that I would be somewhere in the top 10. In fact, if I'm going to be honest here, I'd entertained thoughts that at the state technology conference next month someone from the scoring committee was going to come up to me and whisper in my ear, "You know, we're not supposed to say these things, but I just have to say it: I've scored these Ed Tech grant proposals for years, and yours was the best I've ever read! You have a gift!" I'm not exaggerating for effect here--that's really what I thought was going to happen. But no, there I was Tuesday, sitting at my computer, staring over and over again at the list, waiting for my school district's name to magically appear somehow.

It never did.

My world had been rocked, and it has taken me days to recover. I pretty much got nothing done for the rest of that day. I tried, but I kept looking back at the list. I emailed the person in charge of the scoring and asked her if I could have the evaluators' score sheets so that I could see where I needed to improve. I received those very quickly, and so I spent a big chunk of the day reading them. My grant had been read by four scorers. I basically got a B, two C's, and an F-. And I wanted to tell myself that the problem was that fourth scorer, that if--by the luck of the draw--someone ELSE had scored my grant, I probably would have gotten funded. And there's probably some truth to that. But when I read the VERY thorough comments written in the F- review, it was obvious to me that the fourth scorer hadn't scored too low--the others had scored too high. There were serious flaws in my grant, and if I'd been scoring it, I would have scored it low, too.

I was so upset about my epic fail (Yes, if you've read this blog before you know how much I HATE that expression, but in this case I think it's fitting and appropriate to label me with it) that I pretty much told everyone exactly what I've written above, and everyone tried to comfort me. They told me that grant writing is just like this, that sometimes it's just the luck of the draw. I told them I could have accepted that if there had been 110 applications and only 5 had been awarded. Then I could have comforted myself with the idea that maybe I had just missed out on the grant. Maybe I'd been 6th. But no. I was AT BEST 78th out of 110. AT BEST, I was at the top of the bottom quartile. And the way I felt that day, I was pretty sure I'd been probably closer to 110 than 78.

I went home that day in such a bad mood that I didn't want to be around anyone. I couldn't sleep Tuesday night I was so upset. Wednesday I wasn't feeling much better, and I went into my superintendent's office and apologized, telling her I felt like I'd let the district down. She used the same lines I mentioned above to try to comfort me, and I told her about how I wasn't buying it--my grant just stunk. I laughed, though, and told her about what I thought that scorer was going to whisper in my ear in a month, and how this had all been such a slap in the face. Today I was feeling a little better, well enough to write this anyway.

I guess, to sum it up, I guess I felt like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he wrote his theme about what he wanted for Christmas: I thought I was going to get an A++++++++++++, but I ended up getting a C-. Worse than a C-, though. I failed. An epic fail.

Why am I telling you this? I don't know. Part of it, I guess, is that this is how I process stuff, by writing it down. Another part of it, though, is that--like everyone--I sometimes can let my ego get the best of me. It's good for me to fall on my face every now and then. I'm not saying it's fun. It's not. But it's good for me. It reminds me that I'm not perfect, and (once I get over the 48 hours of grieving) it gives me resolve to redouble my efforts. If my district ever qualifies for this grant again, you better believe I'll spend 16 days next time getting the grant ready.

So the 48 hours of grieving is over. It's time to get back to work.

(I can't see the video.)