Fail Better

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

– Samuel Beckett

I have two rules: bring your A-game, and fail. Fail better, fail harder, and fail more frequently. The first rule is easy. Few adolescents lack heart when properly motivated; they almost always give me their all. It’s the failure that’s so hard.

Recently 60 minutes aired a fascinating episode on face blindness, which is an inability in certain people to recognize faces. The reasons why some people lack the ability to distinguish faces is still unknown. Nancy Kanwisher, a Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, gave brain scans to a group of face blind people to test her hypothesis that the problem lay with the Fusiform Face Area.

She sat across from Leslie Stahl and explained her results.
“I really did not expect to see a Fusiform Face Area.”
“So you thought there’d just be nothing there.”
“That’s right. And we looked at the data, and the face area was beautiful – it’s textbook.” Professor Kanwisher smiled, broadly. “But see, that’s the fun of science. It’s fun to be told you’re just completely and totally wrong. Because now you have to go back and think anew.”

This is not a perspective most students enjoy. Our current culture discourages failure. We’re expected to be perfect right out of the gate, free of mistakes, blemishes, and missteps. Society views failure as an unwelcome destination, rather than a temporary state, and I see that message clearest in one of my 6th grade students.

Richard hates math, or rather, he hates failing at math. When I started working with him a year ago he was frustrated, disorganized, and pretty awful at math. Now he’s frustrated, organized, and much better at math. Last semester he pulled a 98%, which surprised even me. His math teacher hugs me when I see her and, though Richard still struggles with concepts, we work through them and he ends up understanding. But his frustration remains.

So where do we go from here?

My goal for Richard is not a 98%, or a solid understanding of linear equations, or even a love for math. It’s for him to discover concepts on his own – to attempt and fail and attempt again until he’s failed so many times that he gets it right. Once he’s got that he won’t need me anymore and I can move on to some other kid with a disorganized binder and a misorganized mind.

But how do I get him there? How do I teach him that failure is not a permanent state?

I’ve tried working the lessons into hacky sack, one of our break-time activities. Like everything else that he does, his threshold for hacky sack frustration is limbo-low, and despite never practicing he expects to be expert at what is a difficult activity. I prodded him on the challenges of the game while our uncoordinated feet flailed, asking him how he might improve. That bit of life coaching didn’t work; all it did was kill the feel of break and give him even more pressure to excel.

I’ve tried helping him connect the dots through meta-cognition – talking about how his failures have added up to successes in a repeating, reliable pattern. That, too, has been unsuccessful.

This is not a column about my success teaching Richard how to fail. What I’ve done so far hasn’t worked. He’s getting much better grades, so that part is going well, but in terms of my goal to help him embrace temporary setbacks on the path to greater understanding, I have failed. He’s told me that he still hates math and that he doesn’t really understand.

But see, that’s the fun of teaching. It’s fun to be told that what I’m doing isn’t working, because now I have to go back and think anew. And I’ll probably fail again. But eventually, I’ll succeed – and he’ll get the hang of failing.