Failure IS An Option
My first year of teaching was, as I will share in my upcoming book, The Overly Honest Teacher, a very, very rocky road. As an educator who firmly believes in the power of collective novel studies, I kicked off the year reading Breaking Through by Francisco Jimenez with my class. Aiming to expand my students’ understanding of the migrant experience—the novel’s central theme—I pulled additional stories and accounts from several other books, most describing the perils and heartache that so many migrant families experience.
By mid-October I was absolutely exhausted. Learning the ropes of being a first-year teacher had me absolutely spent—I was working days, nights, weekends, trying to keep up with grading, lesson planning, and figuring out how to handle my classroom full of pre-pubescent Seventh Grade students. Sleep was at a minimum, and stress was at an all-time high. Needless to say, my attention-to-detail at this juncture had taken a full hiatus—unbeknownst to me, of course-- as I was just too tired to realize it.
So, one morning, I decided to start class with a non-fictional narrative of two migrant farmers who were stuck in a field as a crop duster flew overhead, dousing them in pesticide. The story itself was harrowing and gut-wrenching and all the things that I wanted my students to know about the inequity that exists in our agricultural industry. But, as every student was holding their copy of the prose and taking turns reading it aloud, my eyes glanced ahead one paragraph—a normal strategy I use in making sure that I am aware of what’s to come in any story.
But, this time, I discovered content of a whole different kind. I panicked. There, in all its printed glory, was the mother of all curse words: F - - k.
To say I lost my mind momentarily is an understatement. I am a stickler for language. My classroom always had a large cache of dictionaries and thesauruses for students to peruse; we’d run spelling bees with SAT words; pause when reading aloud to decipher and define any unknown terminology; and, I had, as I still do today, a zero-tolerance policy for derogatory language of any kind. So, you can imagine my utter disbelief… shock... horror in realizing that not only did I fail to screen this story properly ahead of time and catch that word, but I passed it out to every one of my students.
Meredith! Are you kidding me?!
What do I do? Can I run away?
I’m so fired for this.
How is this even happening right now?!
Just a few points of inner-dialogue with myself in that moment.
Frantically, I raced around the room, up one aisle and down the other, snatching packets from every student’s grasp like they were on fire. My kids were already accustomed, as most pre-teens are, to looking at me like I was a crazy person, so this seemed par for the course. Red faced, out-of-breath, and desperately trying to play out how I would explain this to my principal and my students’ parents, all I could do was turn to face the whiteboard and burst into tears. (Not a recommended teaching strategy!)
Did I get fired?
No. My boss acknowledged that it was certainly a less-than-ideal slip up, but she reassured me that even despite our best efforts, we are going to make mistakes.
Did my students call me a hypocrite and were they forever scarred because of this?
No. They actually made me a card, all signed it, told me that it was going to be okay.
Did I learn from this moment?
YES!
Failing is a chance for us to grow. It’s a moment in time when we learn some of the greatest lessons that life can teach us. This epic failure of mine highlighted my students’ capacity for grace and understanding. This failure taught me the necessity of slowing down, making time and space for paying better attention to details, screening my work as I so often remind my students to do. This failure still repeats to me, so many times, how important it is to forgive ourselves for the screw ups, the missteps, the “I can’t believe I just said that … did that … bungled that” moments which we are all prone to making.
So, I have to ask-- how do you handle failure in your family?
Is it something that is scorned and silenced, or embraced and reassured?
Do your kids know that it’s okay to try something and fail at it?
Do they see you fail and fix your mistakes?
Do you hear you apologize for an expletive uttered, a hand gesture given, an impatient clap back when you have no more patience left to give?
Our kids look to us to set the bar for how they should relate to the world. If we give them the grace to know that they aren’t always going to get it right, aren’t always going to have the correct answer or make the right decision, then we are freeing them from the paralysis caused by the fear of failure. We are allowing them to take a step out of the nest, knowing that we will be there to catch them if they fall. It is our responsibility to teach them the importance of making sound decisions, thinking before they talk and act, assuming the tenacity to study for a test, prep for a presentation in class, attend basketball practice regularly to be ready for the weekend’s big game. But, for all of us, even our best attempts can often yield lackluster results, and it is essential that we encourage our kids to get back up, dust off their bruised confidence, and go right back to trying once again.
How can you do this?
Make conversations around failure an intentional practice.
Encourage your kids to try things, on their own, and cheer them on even if it doesn’t end exactly as you hope or they plan.
Strategize with them, when they fail, about how they could have done things differently and what they will do, instead, in the future.
Don’t expect perfection—from yourself, from your kids, from everyone else.
Hope for the best. Plan for the worst. Learn from the in-between.
There are a lot of naughty “F” words out there—let’s not let Failure be one of them.