Paging Maggie!

As a person whose heart stops when I see a stick or old piece of rope on the road, and it is vaguely shaped like a snake, I get it! Your recent blog post surrounding Creative Confidence struck me. First, with a mutual fear of snakes, your observations of students and yourself in regard to failure, and later with a very realistic “Oh crap!” kind of moment.

I am going to break away from some course content to elaborate on the snake stuff first! I was chased by a snake as a kid, and that phobia — I use phobia because I know where I live, I don’t actually have to worry about snakes harming me — and it has never gone away. I have touched boas, read books, watched documentaries, tried to hold them, or be in the same room with them, and my fears don’t abate. Which ever secret process they had for getting over it, I want in, but also…not. Because, snakes. ANYWAY!

I always tell people that I will be ten times harder on myself than anyone else can ever be to me. I finished my User Guide and immediately thought of several things I should have done differently. My guess is that basically every did. Just think how amazing these will be by the time we have redone them three times! Or seven! The push to fight or avoid failure is long, and hard, and in the end not helpful or healthy, so I applaud your attitude of taking a step back to reframe your view before moving forward.

This quote is where I want to go on. Our students.

I also found that my students always felt lost in creating in open ended ways, or with the idea that failure would be a part of the process. Somehow we define ourselves by how often we do or do not fail. I always found that the most difficult part of teaching children to roll with their failures was to ease the minds of the parents! My young students would be fine, but then their parents would react in such negative ways, I had to tread very carefully when there was a fail forward scenario. I knew that over time my Second Graders would take on those same types of judgements as their self directed thoughts on their work. This leads me to my question.

How do we help reframe our students thoughts on failure? When their experiences are so based on measurements of failure and success equating to bad and good, how to we shift this idea that success AND failure are good?

If you have an answer, if anyone has has answer, I think we all need it!

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