Oscar Pistorius at the 2012 Olympics

Oscar Pistorius is the first athlete to participate in both the Olympics and Paralympics. I will be using this with my students when we discuss rethinking failure and resiliency.




You can check out Oscar Pistorius's website here. One of my favorite quotes from his website:

You are not disabled by the disabilities you have, you are able by the abilities you have.

Wreck this Journal

Due to the nature of my teaching position, I come across a lot of students with a fear of failure, a dysfunctional attraction to perfection and characteristics of obsessive compulsive disorder.

Some are middle/high school girls with depression, very low self-worth and an eating disorder, while others might be middle/high school boys with heightened anger and asperger/autistic characteristics. And some are any combination.

Every child comes with a complex case. There is no template.

I continue to develop a wide variety of projects that attempt to meet their very complex needs. Here is one of the projects I have had some success with for students who are paralyzed by their pursuit of perfection.

I purchase Keri Smith's Wreck this Journal for my students and encourage them to destroy it. While you might think all children would love to be given permission to decimate a book, you would be surprised how many children find this task to be at best tedious and at worst torture.

Here are some of things we talk about:

• Perfection is not motivating. Perfection is paralyzing.
• Some of the best things in life can't be planned. In fact, sometimes the best things in life are mistakes that we make the most of.
• Mistakes are our friends.
• If you're not making mistakes, you're not living.
• Mistakes are not only ok, they are necessary if learning and success is to take place.
• Society hides our mistakes and failures but flaunts successes. This can be deceiving. 
• The only way to make your journal unique is to wreck it.

Here is what one of my students had to say about her experience with this project:

I found the "Wreck This Journal" project incredibly challenging and difficult. To push myself to deface any sort of material (let alone a book) felt like a death wish. It was a tedious task at first; being told to tear out a page or doodle on the front cover.. but as the project moved forward I was able to let go and embrace the experience... I think spending time on this project has given me a new outlook on life, and made me realize that striving for perfection is an unrealistic and costly goal. 

Blogging mistakes

I love to blog. 

I've come to experience blogging as one of the best ways to support my learning, and so I've dedicated myself to publishing one piece of content almost everyday for the last year and a half. 

While I can't say that it hasn't taken the time and effort that some work requires, I also can't say it hasn't been fun.

It's been fun.

Learning via blogging has become a passion of mine.

But to do this, there are times when I make errors. These errors can come as content and/or grammatical. While I do work hard to make sure that all errors are kept to a minimum, I have only so much time and effort to expend and so by definition, there will be lapses in what I can catch or proofread.

Sometimes I have to decide whether to focus more on what I say versus how I say it. You won't catch me writing about the glory of rewards and punishments or how grading can be better used to garnish compliance from kids, but you will find the odd spellng mistake, type-o, or run-on sentence.

Don't get me wrong, I do proofread my blogs. I almost always read and re-read out loud so I can both see and hear what I have written. I work diligently to get the big ideas right, but I won't lose a wink of sleep over a spelling error, missing word or sloppy apostrophe.

One incident in regards to this topic comes to mind.

On June 29, 2010, I wrote a post for the second last day of school titled Made to Learn, and the first comment was left by anonymous:

You have to do better job proofing your work.

That was the whole comment. One sentence in response to my entire post. Guess how I felt. How would you feel? How would your students feel if this was the comment you left them? I'll be honest, this petty comment angered me, but then I took that anger and turned it into a teachable moment.

Here was my response to this anonymous comment:

@anonymous: Do you provide the same, cold, short, indifferent, and utterly unhelpful comments to your students or do you reserve such unproductive, ignorant one liners to only bloggers who try and publish one peice of thoughtful content every day? 

The words we say are important, but often the words we don't say are even more important. Think about that. 

Can you imagine how it might feel to be a child who works his tail off on a peice of writing only to get a response that takes the form of an uninspiring, one sentence critique?
If you feel the need to say such things, please feel free to dispense them on me. I will take them gladly if it means your students or children are not subjected to such thoughtless judgments.

After putting so much time and effort into writing day in and day out, this anonymous commenter's brevity came across as nothing but judgement that took infinitely less time and effort than what I put forward.

I swear, I will do my best to never do this to my students or children. And if/when I do, I'll make damn sure to apologize.

Rethinking Failure

Here is a project I've done with students on rethinking failure and mistakes.

The project is for them to create a motivational poster about failure. To gather information, we watch a handful of videos and read a couple short blog posts. Here they are:

First we watch this Michael Jordan commercial:



Here are some of the ideas my students write down from that clip:

• I've failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.
• Failure leads to success.
• Failure is good in many ways.
• Without failure its impossible to succeed.
• You'll never get good at something until you make mistakes.
• Failure lets us know what we need to learn.

Here are some of the ideas my students take from this second Michael Jordan video:

• Failure can give you strength.
• It may not be God that give you talent but it is your effort.
• Failure leads to talent.
• Pain can be motivational.
• You have to start small to create big.

Here's the final video we watch:

Some of the names like Lucille Ball, and Ulysses S. Grant were not recognizable for my students, but others such as Michael Jordan and The Beatles were. There are many lessons to be taken from this video, but perhaps none are as powerful as the idea that mistakes and failures are never the exception - they are the rule.

After discussing these videos, I hand out this small collection reading on mistakes and failures. Click on the picture to see the PDF.

I then provide the kids with larger poster paper and other supplies so that they can create a motivation poster on rethinking failure and mistakes.

Mistakes

I am not able to best describe what I wanted to blog about today.

Today, George Couras, elementary principal and author of the Principal of Change, said it best with his blog. Please go there and read his brilliant post.

Failure is an option

 
Failure is not only an option, it is inevitable. And we are better for it.
 
When we sell life as an exercise in mistake avoidance or perfection, we we end up lying to children who grow up to become adults who live their lives in fear of being wrong.
 
But if we are never prepared to be wrong - to make a mistake - to fail - then we will never create anything new.
 
When we say that failure is not an option, many kids really hear us saying that failure is something that should never happen - but then it does, and they are left debilitated and helpless. So they quit.
 
No one is successful all the time. Successful people see mistakes and failure not as something that should have never happened but as information to be used in the pursuit of life long learning.

to err is human

Michael Erard, author of Um shares an interesting take on how pervasive mistakes are in our everyday speech:

They [mistakes] occur on average once every ten words... If people say an average of 15,000 words each day, that's about 1,500 verbal blunders a day. Next time you say something, listen to yourself carefully. You st-st-stutter; you forget the words, you swotch the sounds (and when you type, you reverse the lttres - and prhps omt thm too). The bulk of these go unnoticed or brushed aside, but they're all fascinating, as much as for why they're ignored as why they're noticed.

The next time you are teaching public speaking or teaching students to write, remember that the absense of error should never be an objective. This means that every time you make a deduction in a student's grade for their mistakes, you are really teaching them that mistakes are something that should never happen - if they just tried hard enough - if they just prepared more - if they just studied more - if they just cared more - mistakes would never happen.

To sell life as an exercise in mistake-avoidance is not only impractical but it is wholly unhelpful and untruthful.

Mistakes are a part of our life - and we are better for it. This is why I proudly hang a sign outside of my classroom door that reads: Mistakes are our Friends.

Simple and Easy = Intimidating

When explaining something to someone, teachers like to be very encouraging and helpful to their students. Afterall, we tend to have their best interests in mind. However, sometimes our good intentions aren't good enough.

Consider this:

A student is intimidated by a certain skill or project, and so the teacher says to the student:

"Don't worry. You can do it. It's easy."

So the student takes your word for it. They make an attempt. And they fail.

My fear is that the student heard the teacher say the task was easy but they failed, and now they are left thinking that they must by dumb. Afterall, they couldn't even do something that was suppose to be easy!

My suggestion: there's no need to say something is easy. Let the student decide for themselves. We gain very little by saying something is easy - if the kid succeeds, it certainly won't be because you said it was easy, and if they fail, you saying it was easy will only complicate things.

For best results, encourage students, guide students but don't sell something as easy (even if you think it is).