When I student taught at a highly rated public high school, most of my language arts classes were honors classes. At this particular school there were four tracks, honors, accelerated, regular, and I’ve forgotten what they called the lowest track.
In the minutes before class would start, I’d love to listen to the kids talk amongst themselves; it was always a fascinating experience for me.
One day as I listened to their conversation, I realized that they were discussing their ratings. Now you have to understand that these students were already in the top 5% of the school. I soon realized that they were bragging about who was in the top 1%.
The Top 1%
I was pretty blown away by this. I never cared that much about grades when I went to high school. When I realized how arbitrary the grading system was (in some classes I would study really hard to get good grades and in others I would knowingly turn in bad work and still get an A), I stopped caring all together.
In fact, I could have graduated a semester early because I had the credits but my parents said no. So I turned in zero homework, wrote to friends and read books I wanted to behind textbooks, never studied for tests, and still managed to get a low B average.
As I listened to the students talking to each other, I thought about our time together in class. I did a lot of talking, and they did a lot of listening. For the most part they didn’t want to participate in any deep discussions. That is, not until I decided to change the grading system so that a big part of their grade came from class discussion participation.
Then they were very talkative.
When I tried to bring in some things that I thought they would find fun, the first thing out of their mouths would be, “Will this count towards our grade?”
No Room for Failure
They were extremely afraid of failure. To them anything short of perfect was failure. If I wrote suggestions for improving their writing, they saw that as failure instead of a chance to become better writers.
If they liked something we were reading and I suggested they read a similar type of book, they’d say they didn’t have time with all the other homework they had to do – extra reading of their own choice wasn’t an option when they had straight A’s to maintain.
But what happens to these straight A students when they get out of a system that rewards them for following the rules, for methodically checking off all the things they must do to be “perfect”? What happens when they want to think outside the box, to start their own companies, to be innovative, creative and become thought leaders?
About six months ago I watched a wonderful clip on YouTube. It was of a high school senior named Erica Goldman, a straight A student, giving her valedictorian speech at her high school graduation.
If you haven’t heard it before, please take the time to listen to it below.
Erica is now travelling around the country with another unschooling family and finally trying to get in touch with what excites her, what interests her, and what she’s passionate about – something she wasn’t able to do while working hard to get those As.
I hear parents bragging about their students making the honor roll or getting straight As. How much do these same parents sit down and have long, interesting conversations with their kids about what they’re learning? If their children received all C’s but really enjoyed what they were learning, if they had lots of chances to experiment, to try new things, fail miserably at them but allow them to see a topic in a whole new way, would those same parents be as proud?
If perfect grades aren’t the answer, what is?
Is it worth having a child who has to be perfect in everything, but it’s at the expense of really learning those things that matter? Is it worth studying hard for tests just to forget what was on those tests a few weeks or even days later? Does your child fear doing anything less than perfect because they know you’d somehow be disappointed in them?
As college degrees are more and more devalued because everyone is getting one, how will they stand out in the crowd? Do you think it will be because they received perfect grades? Do you think it will be because they score high on standardized tests?
To be great at something, you must fail. And you must often fail miserably. To fail miserably you need to spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of how working on something over and over again. It takes a lot of patience and determination.
Schools don’t allow for failure. They can’t because they’re based on a grading system. If a child wants to work through something, to spend weeks working on a project or experiment, they can’t. They’re shuffled along to the next thing. If they get an F, maybe they can make it up, but they better do it quickly. And if they do it quickly, they’re just doing enough to pass a test – they’re not really learning something or gaining new understanding.
If your child is learning at home, you’re not immune from this thinking, either. In fact, in some ways it may be even more difficult to escape this perfectionist mentality. If our children aren’t doing work at the same level as the public school kids, we’re seen as failures, too, which is not the way we want to see ourselves.
Many homeschoolers still view their children in terms of grades. They are third graders, or they score in the 95th percentile, or they even assign grades to their kids at home. All of this despite the fact that children are all individuals- they each have strengths and weakness that can’t easily fit into a graded box.
Failure – The Road that Leads to Greatness
As most of my regular readers know, my kids don’t go to school. They would be called Kindergartners, but we don’t follow a grading system in our family. I won’t ever have a 3rd grader, or a 5th grader, or an 11th grader. I’ll simply have children who love to learn no matter how old they are. They aren’t in a grade because their skills, talents and interests will always defy an arbitrary aged grading system.
I want them to experience failure, a lot of failure. I want them to know what it’s like to get frustrated, to not have things turn out like they thought they would, and to work through problems and set-backs.
It’s through this failure that they will come closer to real learning, real understanding. The most successful people in any field will tell you that they’ve had far more failures than successes.
The kids who work so hard or hardly work for straight As will receive a rude awakening when they encounter failure, and encounter it over and over again. When they want to do something truly great, they might find they’re not able to reach for greatness because they haven’t developed the strength, persistence and self-determination that grow out of falling down over and over again.
At the first sign of failure, many kids who’ve only focused on grades will not have the passion that it takes to focus their time and attention to go towards a single, focused dream – especially when no one is holding a carrot out in front of them in order to get it.
So, encourage failure in your house – lots of it. It’s the road that leads to greatness.
Photo Credit:gareth1953
What are you feelings about failure? Do you see it as a stepping stone to accomplishing great things?