One day I will find the time and the means to attend a TED or TEDx conference. I relish the exposure to insightful commentary and interesting ideas — especially about education.
Maybe it’s because I’m a parent of two school age kids now and maybe it’s because I see their mother assert the same pressures on them that eventually turned me off to school and maybe it’s because I was brought up in a culture that respects standardized testing as a viable measure of intelligence and success, that I am so determined to give my children the education I was denied.
One of the first things they teach you at “teaching school” is that learning is a process. What they don’t emphasize enough is the time required for the effects of that process to materialize. What’s also neglected sometimes are the strategies for satiating a product-based society with little tokens – tchotchkes – that show learning is occurring and progress is being made.
My child’s first grade teacher did a really smart thing. Each month since September she had the children in her class draw self portraits. By January, her students were writing captions to describe the pictures they had drawn or about an accomplishment they were proud of.
In my eldest child’s classroom they do “weekend news” – short journal entries about what they did over the weekend. Growth was evident despite the length of a piece (Some weekends are just better than others). But growth wasn’t the only thing these weekend news reports tracked. My eldest’s teachers were also able to diagnosis slippage in performance and address it.
Dr. Tae assesses his progress by videotaping and saving recordings of his various attempts to successfully complete a particular skateboarding trick. In his TEDx presentation at Eastside Prep, there is a still shot of him skateboarding in front of an elementary school.
He observes:
There’s a touch of irony in this image which is if you go back to October 31, 1991 [when the picture was taken], whatever conditions I had at the time in skateboarding allowed me to work without much progress for years on something and I wasn’t even sure if I ever was going to get it. The funny thing is I don’t think we do the same thing inside that building in the background [the elementary school]. It’s strange to me…
He makes a comment on the differences between the learning experience in skateboarding and the learning experience in schools. About three and a half minutes into his presentation he shows a video of his attempts to learn a new skateboarding trick. It is a series of failures. Though there are moments when he almost gets it, the attempt immediately after fails (meaning he takes a step backwards in his progress). In the end, however, he gets the trick and has gone on to demonstrate mastery through successfully completing more complex tricks.
“Failure is Normal,” he states. And it makes sense. How often have you attempted something for the first time and got it right? Or maybe you got it right the first time, but how did it go the second time? The third?
So why do we stigmatize our failing students? Sometimes it feels like a competition to see who’s better at emotionally scarring our students when they fail – parents, teachers, principals, or the general public?
When we read about poor test scores or even when our own children perform below our expectations, we immediately condemn and assign blame. It’s hysteria! It’s thoughtless! And damaging! It serves no educational purpose. What it does do is satiate our own egotistical needs and ambitions.
We need to tell our students it is OK to fail. We need to tell our students they can try again and again and again until they’ve gotten it. Dr. Tae states it succinctly: “No one knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything.”
He also says: “Work your ass off until you figure it out.”
This is where we, in our hysteria, do the most damage. In our demoralization of our failing students, we inadvertently devalue what they are learning. They “work their ass off until they figure it out” because they see value in what they learning. Once that is taken away, so is their desire to succeed at it.
Dr. Tae’s presentation at Eastside Prep is my second favorite Dr. Tae video. His ability to make common sense connections between a hobby he is passionate about and the learning process is an engaging reminder of what trained educators sometimes forget when they get too tangled in the politics and the catchwords of education.
