All the Rage

The scream was long and it was loud. It slammed at the windows of my car, banged against the doors, built on itself in my eardrums. When the screaming stopped, the echoes remained. First the actual echoes, then the other, more salient ones. A burning in the back of my throat. A sharp, painful ringing in my ears. A severe shortness of breath. Outside the car, traffic glided calmly through the San Francisco night. Inside the car, the pain quietly left my body, but the agony of failure stayed for the ride.

For the past twelve months I’d been learning to fly. What I had failed was an in-house check ride – a flight with someone who’s not my instructor to determine if I was ready to advance to the next level. Clearly, despite the hundreds of hours I’d spent studying and flying, I was not. In-house check ride failures are common and carry no negative repercussions. Further, they help point out deficiencies that once addressed may, some day, save a life. And, as I look back now, from a few months ahead and as a freshly certificated pilot, I see what we all know I’m supposed to see – the gigantic benefits of failure. 

Still, in the moments after my failure had sunk in, I was overcome with rage. I specialize in the process of learning – how had I become so angry? 

When we talk about learning, and the increasingly popular growth mindset, we often forget how much failure hurts. And damn does it hurt. It’s important to get up and try again, learn from failure, celebrate failure. Failure failure failure. But failure threatens our sense of self, our sense of worth, and, despite how much benefit we eventually derive from mistakes, experiencing actual failure sucks. 

All of my students deal with this. The more they care, the harder it hurts – and they all care. In his groundbreaking book Lost at School, Ross Greene notes that “Kids do well if they can.” Which, he admits, doesn’t sound very groundbreaking, until you think about the inverse and compare it to popular (mis)conception that kids do well when they want to. If they aren’t doing well, according to Greene, they must be lacking skills, not desire. The moment I read those words my tutoring work improved dramatically. I have never seen a kid who doesn’t want to succeed. What I see are kids who lack the skills to succeed. But do they care? Big time. And when they fail, do they cry, or shut down, or maybe even scream in a car all by themselves? Oh yeah.

It often falls to me to disabuse my students of the idea of easy, immediate results. “Memorizing” a list of forty vocab words by skimming over them once or twice, and then being mystified when they bomb a test. Sitting down for 45 minutes to write an analytical essay without any outlining or a strategic approach and then pulling a C minus. Many students haven’t yet connected the level of work required to achieve a desired skill. Success in these cases feels magical and miraculous and almost always unattainable, a sort of alchemist hope that in the dim light of a late night study session they may somehow turn lead into gold. 

The actual science of success is straightforward: it equals hard work multiplied by time. The caveat here is that the hard work must be smart work – it’s got to be a solid approach. Earned success – not getting lucky, or benefitting from the (misplaced) generosity of an English teacher who can’t bear to give yet another bad essay grade – feels amazing. Getting good feels good. But it takes a long time – this is why we have movie montages. 

These relatively coherent, reasonable thoughts were not in my mind when I failed my check ride. It was only much later, when the sting had subsided and I was able to rationally appraise the situation, did I think about how success is achieved. Had I put in the consistent, hard, smart work? Not quite – there were certainly areas where I was lacking, and the check ride found them. 

I’m on the other side of the official FAA check ride and, true to purpose, every single screw up from before paid big dividends when it counted. Those dividends came from another countless set of hours running emergency protocols in my head (while doing the dishes), articulating how fuel systems work (while folding laundry), performing pretend take-offs and landings (while sweeping the house). Shoring up any areas of potential weakness and making sure I knew my stuff cold. 

The FAA private pilot check ride is a six hour test – half oral exam on the ground, half flight test up in the air. When my FAA examiner shook my hand and slid my certificate across the table, I didn’t leap up and shout for joy. I didn’t let out the opposite of an anguished scream. Instead, a calm warmth spread throughout my body. It stayed with me on the quiet drive home, and its echoes still ring in my ears.