Powerful Failure

I believe in the power of failure as the world’s greatest teacher.  Not enough young people experience true failure, failure of their own making, failure from their own shortcomings.  Young folks don’t experience healthy failure any more simply because of the protection deliberately afforded them by adults:  parents and educators.

While well-meaning, parents bend over backward to protect their kids from perceived and real failure.  The score isn’t kept at little kids soccer or t-ball games. Everyone gets a participation trophy at the end of every pee-wee sports season.  Parents work too hard on their children’s homework and make excuses for why students aren’t measuring up, “Oh, that’s my fault; I didn’t get him up early enough.”  “I’m sorry, I didn’t remind her to do her homework,” when what they should be doing is telling Junior that when he or she is late to school or with an assignment, there are natural consequences.  It’s simple logic. If Junior has to stay after school or his grade drops, perhaps he will make sure he’s up on time or getting her assignment in. It’s not mean; it’s just real.

We in education are no better.  We bend over backward getting students to just “pass” classes.  We work so hard and offer so much assistance and multiple chances so that they can earn that D- when what we should be doing is letting them fail.  That’s right. Flunk the class. What’s a slew of D-’s going to do for a student anyway? It’s far better to fail at this stage of the game than to delay the learning that comes with failure until later when the stakes are much higher. The military doesn’t give endless chances to get it right.  Colleges don’t. Certainly, employers and industries don’t either. And neither do most relationships.

When students experience failure at a younger age, in a natural way, they learn how to bounce back.  That’s resilience. They figure out how to get up and move forward. They recognize their weaknesses and strengths and can operate accordingly in the future.  This is a powerful intrinsic learning experience. When these students learn to accept failures and how to turn them around, they are teaching themselves the grit they will need later on in their lives.  

Standing between young people and defeat delays genuine failure to times when the consequences are too great.  We need to let kids stumble and fall when there is a healthy safety net, when they’re practicing in an environment surrounded by support systems of important adults in their lives (parents, teachers, family members, church leaders, coaches, sponsors) who teach them how to address failure, not find ways to prevent or excuse it.  If they never have that practice, what happens when they fail outside of all that prevention that was cloaked as protection?  The stakes are too high then and they may not be able to hold a job, persevere in difficult classes or training programs, function independently outside of the orb of their parents’ influence.  We need to destigmatize failure. We don’t need to downplay the importance of success or diminish the consequences of failure, but we need to reframe the experience and let young people own it.   

While embarrassing, failure is not shameful.  It’s a natural part of developing as a person with grit and resilience.  I still fail at things all the time. You’ll find my lesson plans littered with post-lesson comments like “Nope” and “Didn’t work,” even “Disastrous.”  I use these failures to drive me forward and to craft better lessons. When I fail miserably with a parent--lose my cool, take something personally--I may be embarrassed, but I’m not ashamed and I know I’m human and will do better the next time I’m faced with a similar situation.

The bottom line is that when we, as adults, stand between young people and failure, we are doing them a great disservice, and we hurting them.  It’s time that adult stop preventing kids from failing, but rather help them navigate through their failures instead.

Bragging Rights

I’ve always been slightly jealous of my children’s pride in their father’s childhood in New York.  His stories made it seem so exotic and they were fascinated by his tales of NYC in the 1950s. Hey, my family were homesteaders, they lived in freaking sod houses and broke the land and settled virgin country, for God’s sake.  Those things somehow never measured up to New Years in Times Square or swimming all summer in the Atlantic Ocean. My childhood in Minnesota and the northern plains growing up around skiing and skating, lakes and fishing should have seemed ideal to outdoor oriented children like ours who loved camping and playing outside like kids from a different generation.  Yet, my Minnesota stories somehow trailed off in the telling to an increasingly indifferent audience. “Daddy, tell us about Big Ma, the bootlegger again,” they’d clamor as I tried one more time to glamorize how my grandmother ran the post office in Charbonneau, North Dakota. . .  This strange competitiveness with my husband for who-had-the-coolest-childhood afforded me one of my most embarrassing moments of mothering. Ironically enough, it occured at a beloved lake.

It was on one of dozens of camping trips we took to Gull Point State Park in Okoboji, Iowa with our young children and grandchildren.  This campground, its accompanying trails, playground, and beach were fixtures in our children’s summer adventures. This trip was no different.  On this particular summer afternoon, the sun glinted off the calm lake water as I stood on the beach surveying the kids playing. I could feel the warmth of the sun’s rays on my shoulders as shouts of swimmers echoed off the trees along the bank behind me.  I looked down, wiggled my toes in the cool perfectly clear glacier formed West Lake Okoboji, the sand squishing up between my toes.

Tyler, Ellie and Nicholas stood nearly chest deep in the water in this protected inlet, and I soon could see that they were trying to skip rocks.  This was a losing prospect. It is nearly impossible to skip rocks from that depth. The angle is all wrong. To adequately skip a rock even one skip, the plane surface of a pancake thin rock must smash flatly on the water’s surface to make it bounce.  This demands a special sideways flick of the wrist that sends the flattened stone skimming above and then along the water.  These kids were clueless.

“Let Mommy show you how to skip rocks,” I said grandiloquently to Nicholas.  I unnecessarily reminded Tyler and Ellie, “Grandma grew up in Minnesota. I know how to do this.”  I approached them, and Nick handed me a perfectly shaped and sized rock for skipping. I stood closer to the shore illustrating that they couldn’t be so deep into the lake and achieve the appropriate angle.  I held the rock between my thumb and index finger in my right hand, cocked my arm out at the elbow, then quickly snapped my arm and wrist chucking the rock as hard as I could directly into Nick’s face.

He dropped like a 50-pound sack of potatoes into the water then bobbed up screaming and sputtering lake water, his hand over his eye.  Tyler squealed in delight and Ellie began to cry. I rushed to him as fast as I could flailing through the water, cupped my left hand behind his head and clapped my right hand over his mouth as we now had drawn the attention of all the other beach goers.  “SHHHHHHH” I said as I pulled his hand down to make sure he still had two eyeballs. It was fine. An angry red welt was forming under his left eye, but it’s not like the skin was cut or anything. Geez.  Calm down. I looked furtively left and right over my shoulders, hoping no one had witnessed by mother-of-the-year nomination ending behavior.

I’m not proud of this reaction where I was more concerned for my public embarrassment than my child potentially losing an eye, but, the reaction was genuine, and the regret has served as a reminder of my hubris on a couple of different levels.  I needed to learn to let go of the competitiveness with my husband--just let it go, if not for my own well-being, then for the safety of my children! Clearly, it was time to quit worrying about who was scoring more points with the kids with their legacy stories.  So I did just that; I quit thinking about it.

My son came to me recently stewing over designs for an addition to one of his tattoos, an addition he wanted to thoughtfully incorporate all aspects of his own personal background, including me, and my side of his family.  It reminded me again that my children are their own people made up of their own experiences from their individual childhoods.  My husband’s and mine are largely irrelevant to the memories they will share with their own children down the road.  So it turns out that my big mistake wasn’t the rock to my son’s face; it was obsessing over and competing for the best childhood.  Still, I can hope that among the stories my son shares with his own children some day will be the one of his dangerously reckless mother nearly putting his eye out, teaching him how to skip rocks.

Empathy Project

I started class one day asking students what the difference was between sympathy and empathy. I showed this video in class as a writing prompt for my composition students.  I immediately wanted to use it when Joe showed it to us in our SIC time.  I think or would like to think that I do a fairly good job of empathizing with students, although it's something I need to consciously do every day.  

But, what this video reminded me of is the fact that I'm maybe not always as empathetic with my colleagues.  Ok, not maybe; I know I'm not.

I get annoyed when people don't do their job or drop the ball on something--especially with a student, but I don't know everything they are going through.  Who am I to judge so quickly?

I often think about how sometimes kids are experiencing something so huge outside of school that I can't imagine how they able to focus at school, and I marvel at their ability to do so, but those overwhelming times don't stop when you grow up.

Adults experience them, too.  God knows I have, and I've been on the receiving end of tremendous grace and empathy from both students and staff.  I need to be more outer-aware in that sense with not only the young people in my life, but the adults, too, especially those colleagues I work with every day who really are my work family. While most people don't want sympathy, most everyone appreciates true empathy.

Understanding + pity = sympathy

Understanding + dignity = empathy.

The Weird Concept of Pride

So, today in class we asked our students to journal about what they are proud of, and we wrote about it too.  I started with just a list before I settled in to explore one of them.  Here is my (surprisingly) short list:  my kids--the relationships I have with them, my extended family, my ability to use language, my career--for the most part.  That's all I could come up with.  Why?  In theory if someone asked me if there were a lot of things I'm proud of, I would have had a resounding "yes!"  But when it came to actually articulating what they are, I was stumped.

I'm not sure why this is so hard for me.  Pride is a weird concept or word.  I don't think I understand it the way a lot of other people do.  I don't take pride in others' accomplishments or abilities when I have nothing to be credited for regarding the accomplishment.  For example, I was watching America's Got Talent the other night and Heidi Klum was gushing over some act that has made it all the way to the semi finals, an act she has liked from the very beginning.  She said, "I'm so proud of you."  What does she have to do with how far they've come?  Does she means she's so happy for them?  That, I get, but she hasn't done anything to get them where they are.  I'm proud my dog, when he does a trick because I taught it to him, and his actually sitting down when I tell him to reflects on MY efforts.  Heidi Klum didn't have anything to do with how great that cute little girl belted out a power ballad.  

Am I wrong? 

LuAnne Erickson

I wrote this piece more than 5 years ago when I was participating for the first time in the Nebraska Writer's Project through UNL.  I think about this every year though.  The names are not accurate; I don't remember the actual names but created ones that were typical of the Scandinavian names I knew from my childhood.  In a sense I wish I did know the actual names; I would go back to the Minneapolis Star and research it.  I'm curious to know how accurate my memory is, and perhaps I could put this memory to rest.

LuAnne Erickson

       I am little, maybe nine or ten, eleven years old at the most, and it is Christmas time.  At the north end of our long family room in our home in Minneapolis, I am quietly working alone at a card table wrapping gifts.  I am absorbed in my project; I love to wrap presents, and all around me are bright bows and curling ribbons, papers, boxes, rolls of tape, extra scissors and tags.  Some of the gifts I am wrapping are even for me; my mom seals them and I wrap them because I love to.  It is the slow, methodical counterpart to the rush and hassle of Christmas that even I, as a child, know and sense in adults around me.  I can take my time and pay attention to every detail making each package unique and beautiful. 

       Separating my work area from the television are is a black vinyl love seat and our Christmas tree decorated with dozens of ornament old and new, purchased and hand crafted.  The colored lights blink a changing, yet repetitive design on my finished packages stacked on the corner of the table.  The coziness of the room belies the cold and snow raging outside.

       Over the back of the couch I can see the television and am listening to it as I work quietly at the card table.  It's late for me, 10:00 p.m and the news comes on:  they found LuAnne Erickson.

       I know all about LuAnne Erickson's disappearance two weeks earlier.  What details I missed on news reports I caught overhearing the hushed conversations between my parents about the Minneapolis girl who had disappeared two weeks earlier.  The holiday season had been marred in the Twin Cities with updates of empty clues and frustrating speculation as to what had happened to this local teenage and neighbor boy who disappeared shortly after she did.

       Now I pause and listen, watching the newscaster intently, the horrible story unfolds.

"Minneapolis police have confirmed the discovery of LuAnne Erickson's body in a south Minneapolis home.  Reports indicate that Erickson and 15 year old Bradley Swanson had been chained in the basement of the house since their disappearances two weeks ago.  Both had been beaten repeated, Erickson had 

. . . to be continued

http://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/week-pictures-august-5-12-n629571

Scar for a Lifetime

When I was about 5, before I started school, I was hit in the head with a croquet mallet.  Chris Vokac did it accidentally as I was looking over her left shoulder.  She took a swing more fitting for a golf club than a croquet mallet and caught me just above my left eye splitting the skin and crushing the bone.  I ran home (across the street) crying covering my eye.  My parents were certain from the blood running under my hand that I had lost my eye.  But, no.  Just the typical profuse level of bleeding from a facial cut.

My skull was kind of dented in which sounds horrible, but at that age, it was not a particularly big deal.  It bumped back out, so to speak, and really all I was left with was a corner shape scar cutting through my eye brow.

As a kid and adolescent I used to be sensitive about the scar.  I always wore my hair to one side to hide it.  I hated when I would get a zit on it because I felt like it drew attention to it.   AND it hurt like nothing else to have a pimple on the scar tissue.  In actuality, it was not that noticeable and certainly would never have been considered a disfigurement.  

Over the years it has faded and softened even more.  I don't think about it much anymore unless I get a way-post-adolescence-zit and it still hurts.  In truth, I don't know if it's even noticeable or visible anymore.

I'm going to go check.

Yep, still there.