This is my reduced teaching philosophy, if I needed a short one:
We learn by failing and trying again. We lost that in academia a long time ago, and now everyone needs to get their A in order to feel okay. That’s a travesty. That’s now how the world will work later, that’s now how the world will ever work. You won’t ever amount to anything of value if you don’t realize that the most important thing to do is to fail and keep going and learn from it. We need to mess up more things.
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Right now, as I write this post, I am dealing with a group of students who I have very high affection and esteem for. They’re my academic version of family, people I have willingly given so much of my spare time to that I skipped out on sleep, that I’ve pulled my car over on my drive home to sit on a parking lot and text them, to Skype with them, etc. Right now this particular group thinks I’m trying to interfere and mess up what they are doing, but I am actually one of the two people who believed in them when they made a few huge mistakes and talked them out of trouble and got them back on their feet.
I asked Julie yesterday, as we were driving around Indianapolis, “I need your advice. My kids [I call them that] are about to put on an event that I am pretty sure is going to be awful. It’s going to depress them, I think, and I just can’t see a path to it going well. Should I stop them? I think I need to let them struggle through and fail to learn from it, but I don’t want them to embarrass themselves and hurt their status with status. They’re such good kids, and they’re trying hard. It’s just not going right. They made too many early mistakes to recover.”
We had a long talk that I won’t recount here because, hey, what happens in the car is above you clearance.
But the point is that failure is necessary. Sometimes, though, failure is hard. When we mentor and we teach, we want to see students succeed. We want them to feel valued and talented. We want them to feel like the world is wide open and they can achieve their dreams.
I see students regularly who are doing just that. One of the students I worked with got her dream job. A student who I think is bored in my class but who others in our program nurtured got her dream job, too. One of my best students ever just got accepted to the best grad program in his field. One of my younger students just ascended to a leadership position that she’s going to do great things with. I’ve helped students make classes. I’m about to work with a group of students who are going to make a first-of-its-kind video. A bunch of our students just did a 48 hour straight streaming marathon. One of our Sports teams just placed 2nd in the first ever all-varsity esports tourney.
But sometimes students have to fail. Just like we had to fail.
I tell people when they ask me about my life that I haven’t had a bad life. And I honestly feel that way. I’ve had some really bad things happen to me, personally, academically, professionally. But it’s not bad. I’m happy. I have more than I ever thought I would. I get to do what I want to do.
But if I were to measure my failures vs. my successes, it’d be a relatively even split on the big things and a landslide victory on the small things. I mess things up frequently. I’ll try to make something (food, art, code, building something) and it just goes horribly wrong. But I learn from it. And the next time it goes better. I can’t think of many things in life I tried to do and couldn’t. Eventually. I might be finally pulling off the hardest of them– more on that soon.
But when I look at this group of students I’m working with right now on this project, I see the failure just looming over them like a black cloud. They’ve already failed several times in the process, and while there’s going to be an end product, I am fairly certain that by any standard they would themselves apply it will be a failure.
The hard part is they aren’t seeing the failure. I think after a labored lecture on my part last night they are starting to, but it’s not something they see clearly. They aren’t learning from it. Yet.
I hope they do, and I hope I don’t regret my belief that letting them fail will ultimately make them better at what they do. I feel bad for them, like I am failing them, too.
But I’ll learn something.
I always do.