Failing vs. Failure

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I listen to the TED Radio Hour on NPR.  While I don't agree with the worldview presented by every speaker, I believe we can learn something from everyone.  Recently, I was listening to the one by Stanley McChrystal.  While you may best remember him from the pseudo-scandal leading to his resignation as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, he had a long and distinguished career in the military.  His talk is on leadership, a topic on which he is highly qualified to speak.

In my favorite part of this episode, General McChrystal relates a story from the National Training Center.  After the operation, every error he made was pointed out at the "after action review."  He said, "I walked out feeling as low as a snake's belly in a wagon rut. And I saw my battalion commander, because I had let him down. And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, "Stanley, I thought you did great." And in one sentence, he lifted me, put me back on my feet, and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure."

Teachers aren't military leaders, but there is much we can take from this story.  Our students will occasionally fail.  Failure is part of the learning process.  If you never fail, you aren't setting big enough goals for yourself.  It is our job as teachers to, not only point out their failures to them, but also to help them learn from those failures.  If all we do is point out the mistake, we do not teach; we simply make them failures.  If we come along side them, show them where they went wrong, and show them how to avoid that the next time, we lead them.

As I write this, I have just finished grading exams.  My students are horrified by the fact that no one got a 100%.  They believe that means there is something wrong with the exam.  I point out to them that it is unlikely you could make zero mistakes on something that covers all the information you have learned for an entire semester.  There are 135 questions on this exam, some of them with very high thinking levels, some with great levels of detail.  Of course, a few of students failed the exam outright.  That doesn't mean that they cannot still learn from their mistakes, stand back up, and do better on the next exam. Education isn't about content.  I suppose I should say that it isn't JUST about content.  It is about training the brain to learn.  That happens as often from the times we get questions wrong as it does when we get them right, possibly more often.  Let's fight the trend from parents, school systems, students, and society at large to view a grade as an indicator of our value.  We must put them in the proper perspective, indicators of current performance.  In so doing, we can allow them to fail without letting them be failures.