Celebrating Failure

(cross posted at TechLearning.com)

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Alva Edison

This week, one of my favorite movies has been released on DVD: Meet the Robinsons. I have it waiting at the top of my Netflix queue, but alas, the good people at Netflix assure me that there is a long wait for it. I might just need to buy it.

My daughter and I enjoyed this in the theater last spring, and though I’m not a big Disney fan, and can be a bit of a critic to some of their “packaging”, I was really amazed at this film for one reason: because it celebrated failure. I remember sitting in the theater simply stunned that this message was being delivered on the big screen and I kept turning to my daughter, and saying things like, “See? See?” and “It’s okay to fail! That’s how we learn!” She finally “shushed” me and I held my tongue until we got out of there and I could go on and on about my theories and beliefs for learning. Poor kid!

Actually, we’ve had many conversations about the film, and we both often refer to it when we talk about learning. In a world where the message is predominantly that “Failure is Bad,” we invoke this movie often to try and find some balance.

For years I have been witnessing a contradiction in the classroom, mostly in the subject of Math. Students have repeatedly told me they are no good in Math, that they hate Math, that they’ll never be good at Math. Tears have been shed. Panicked faces have stared back at me. All measures of avoidance have been implemented. I understand all of this, for I was the same as a child. I constantly tell my students that if someone had told me in 4th grade that someday I’d not only be understanding and enjoying Math, but actually be teaching it, I would have laughed until I passed out. Things change, I tell them. Someday it’s going to click. Don’t hide from it. Have fun with it. But I know: I can say it all I want but Math phobia is a strong cultural albatross that many of us carry our entire lives, and not only that, is an acceptable fear to blatantly confess in most circles. Rather than hide from it, however, I’ve spent considerable time trying to convince students that it is alright to make mistakes, and even experience failure in Math. That through the failure, we learn. “That’s why were here at school,” I’ve said to many tearful students. “If we already knew it, we wouldn’t be here! We’re supposed to make mistakes!”

And guess what? Not one of them has bought it yet.

Now here’s the contradiction: these same students, who are hiding and embarrassed by their “failure” with certain concepts (again, I see this mostly in Math), have no problem when they come in and fail at some computer game in the lab, or when they play XBox, Nintendo, Playstation at home. You see, in computer games, that’s really the only way to learn: by making mistakes, by failure. The only way to understand most game levels is to explore. In exploring, your avatar will probably walk off a cliff or something. You lose a “life” in the game, but you gain the knowledge of the fact that you shouldn’t walk over by that cliff. You try a different route and become successful, more powerful, due to your previous failure. So what that you lost a life? There’s more where that came from!

So why oh why can’t learning at school be like this? Why is failure shunned, avoided, deemed a negative experience? Reading Mark Prensky’s work really made this message hit home with me, and made me double my efforts in trying to not only understand what makes failure in gaming socially acceptable and failure in education a mark against one’s character, but to also create an environment in the classroom that is similar to “gaming.”

I belong to a Professional Learning Circle at my school which has recently started blogging. Some great conversations have started over there, motivated by one of the articles that we’ve read: Art for Our Sake. The article centers on why Art is so important in schools. Many reasons are given (and I commend the entire article), but I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the points: that Art instruction is one of the few areas in school that the habit of persistence is taught. Because students work on projects “over sustained periods of time,” the opportunity is given for “meaningful problems” to arise in which the students need to “persevere through frustration.” Therefore, there is the “willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes.” Now that sounds like learning to me.

The above article reminded me of one of my favorite articles: Inside the Black Box (by Paul Black and Dylan William). It talks about the value of formative assessment over summative. One of the findings they site is that “teachers’ feedback to pupils often seems to serve social and managerial functions, often at the expense of the learning functions.” Another way to look at this is that we are serving numbers and grades before we serve students. So maybe this is why we as a culture fear Math. Those numbers have become our masters. We’ve become obsessed with them. We think they are so absolute that they can neatly define very complicated organisms, such as human beings.

In Johathan Kozol’s article in the Huffington Post, he talks about encouraging teachers to “develop mischievous and inventive ways to convince [the NCLB overseers] that whatever they are teaching that moment, no matter how delectably subversive it may be, is, in fact, directly geared to one of those little chunks of amputated knowledge, known as “state proficiencies,” they are supposed to be “delivering” at that specific minute of the day.” You see, just like in Video Games, there are always “hidden strategies” that can be deployed. Kozol has entered a “higher level” in the game than most of us, however, as he continues his partial fast to persuade Senator Ted Kennedy to “champion some substantial changes” to NCLB.

I’d like to thank Mr. Kozol for putting his life on the line to help bring about change.

My daughter and I will anxiously watch the Netflix queue to see if Meet the Robinsons will ship to us this week. I will anxiously watch the continued news of Kozol’s fast. We will all look anxiously over our shoulders, keeping an eye out for the NCLB overseers.

And I will continue to look for the bridge between the learning that happens in gaming and the learning that happens in the classroom in order to help those students who are anxiously avoiding failure rather than embracing it as they do during game time.

As one of the characters from the movie says: “From failure you learn; from success, not so much.”

______

Citations:
Winner, Ellen and Lois Hetland. “Art for Our Sake.” The Boston Globe 02 Sep 2007 24 Oct 2007 <http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/art_for_our_sake/>.

Black, Paul. “Inside the Black Box.” Phi Delta Kappan v80(1998): p139(9).

Kozol, Jonathan. “Why I am Fasting: An Explanation to My Friends.” The Huffington Post 10 Sep 2007 19 Oct 2007 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.html>.

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