Gayle Dauterive responding to JK Rowling - The Fringe Benefits of Failure
Who knew that JK Rowling had such an exceptional sense of humor! I thoroughly enjoyed her speech and it got me to thinking about failure. During my years of teaching, I have often said to parents and students, "Sometimes the best learned lessons are the ones that were the hardest to learn." I have made this comment when a student fails to do his/her work, fails to study, fails to pay attention in class, fails to pay attention to the details, and fails. I have also made this comment when a student has been caught cheating, forging a parent signature, or committing some other act that made either they or their parents feel like a failure. I'm sure that more than student has thought to themselves, "Easy for you to say." No, not so easy. I was once one of those student who failed to do their work or to study or to attend to details and earned that failing grade. I think the only difference between me and my current students is that when I failed, my parents let me fail. And, I always got back up, dusted myself off, and kept on going. It wasn't easy, but I did it and those were the lessons that I learned the most from. Many parents today don't want their children to have to fail; they don't want their students"to through that." Or maybe it is that they don't want themselves to go through that. What a shame. I believe, as JK Rowling pointed out, that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes....or at least as much.
I don't think that JK Rowling's thoughts on failure, or my thoughts on failure, fit in much with today's educational climate. As she pointed out, we are a society that measures success in schools by passing evaluations. Students must not only pass their class evaluations, but they must also pass grade level exit exams and high school exit exams, and standardized tests and college entrance exams and college exit exams..... Passing these exams means you succeed. And the better the grade, the better you are. Failing these exams means that you are a failure and will not be successful in life. Okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but I have been in conversations with parents of students who have failed a test and have thought to myself that the parents think that world peace depends on their child passing EVERY test they are given and passing with a C will mean only partial world peace. In fact, some parents don't even care if their child learns (as opposed to memorizes) the information, just so they pass the test. It is a sad commentary when success is measured not by the lessons that are learned (life lessons or others), but by the grade one makes on the test.
Yvette, I test on previously learned material also. The problem is that so many students memorize for the moment rather than learning for the duration. They absolutely hate to be tested on previously learned material because of the "cramming the night before the test and not really learning it" factor. Even funnier, their parents hate testing on previously learned material if their child did well on the material the first time but love it if their child did poorly on it the first time. I don't put A, B, C, D, or Oops on my tests either, only the fraction. When they ask what grade it is, I tell them to do the math - killing two birds with one stone: practicing math skills and finding out what their grade is. Listening to Rowling and thinking back about my own life, I can remember my parents accepting my failure and telling me to pull up my boot straps, learn something from the failure, and move on. I don't think it was easy for either my parents or myself, but I did learn how to handle failure and how to move on from it. Many of our students today don't get that opportunity to learn because their parents protect them from failure at all costs. I like that you said in your response to the TED talk that parents don't always see it as their child's failure but as their own failure. I think this is true in a lot of situations.
ReplyDeleteHi Gayle and Yvette, I agree with both of you. As a Kindergarten teacher, I already see the pressure put on these little ones. Kindergarten is so academic now, that we have lost the time in these young lives that maturity and past experiences have such an affect on how these little sponges have time to grow and learn. The teacher before me refused to let the children have erasers on their pencils. I found a box of pencils with all of the erasers pulled out. I could not understand this. I could only imagine how hard it was for these little ones to make a mistake and be ok with it. She had a pink eraser and only she could fix their mistakes. The first thing I did was throw this box away. I celebrate failures and make sure that they understand that we learn from our mistakes. When we check our work and someone finds a mistake, we cheer and clap because that means they are learning from a failure or mistake. I agree with how some parents will not let the student learn from their own shortcomings. This is crucial in order to grow and learn how to rely on oneself for improvement. I truly enjoyed her speech. It is always good to hear the benefits of failure. This is how we learn and grow.
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