In an article that appeared in KQED’s Mind/Shift, Holly Korbey (August 12, 2015) discusses the lessons that students lose in their strive for perfection...
What Do Students Lose By Being Perfect? Valuable Failure…
 |
| Illustration: https://goo.gl/2LhvVe |
In the first pages of Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz writes, “In our
collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity
but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy.”
This cultural terror of messing up, combined with modern modes of parenting and
schooling obsessed with narrow versions of academic and career “success,” are
making students more than risk-averse.
Books like How to Raise an Adult and Teach Your Children Well say kids are
coming to college “underconstructed,” at best unsure of who they are and where
they fit, at worst anxious and depressed, because their parents have protected
them from the uncomfortable and unacceptable state of being wrong. Focused on
getting the grades or winning the game and excused from helping out around the
house, these children have internalized the pressure, and it’s morphed into a
monster that paralyzes kids in their ability to take risks, screw up, find
out the consequences and learn from their mistakes.
Parent and educator Jessica Lahey, author of the new book The Gift of Failure, wants parents (and
teachers) to back off. She said it’s time for adults to do the responsible
thing and let the children fail. Trying something and failing, she writes, is
how children learn and make discoveries about themselves and the world around
them. This applies to unloading the dishwasher as well as the science fair.
Becoming autonomous gives children pride in themselves and their abilities, and
makes them independent thinkers and doers who can cope with the ups and downs
of life.
Stop bringing forgotten homework to school, Lahey tells the parents of her students.
 |
| Cartoon: https://goo.gl/NxeFAs |
But it will be messy, and adults should expect as much. To Lahey’s
credit, The Gift of Failure defiantly rejects the binary choices of either
“triumphant or bumbling adulthood” as end goals, and sees growing up as a
series of peaks and valleys with lots of time to figure things out in between.
Instead, she offers practical advice, steeped in the latest research, on how to
let kids find their own way as parents and teachers guide them, the key word
being guide — not instruct, dictate, or enable. Giving kids
autonomy may or may not make them a big “success,” but the research
supports that it will make kids happier, less anxious and depressed, and more
fulfilled to work towards agency in their own lives.
Lahey taught middle school for more than a dozen years, and said that in
that period of time, she watched as kids went from cautious to take risks to
too terrified to even make a move — write a sentence, for example —
without considering what people might think or how it would affect their grade.
“The thing I began to notice was not the fear of an ‘F’, it was the fear
of any mistake,” she said. “It’s not that students couldn’t get to a final
draft, they couldn’t get even their ideas down. From a teacher’s point of view,
that’s a nightmare! If they can’t take a risk, then certainly they aren’t
raising their hand with an I-wanna-try-this-idea-out kind of thing.”
Many educators already know this, but what to do about it? Educators can
play a crucial part in helping kids to get comfortable with failure, which
Lahey calls “autonomy-supportive teaching” and goes hand-in-hand with
“autonomy-supportive parenting.” She says there are ways educators can
encourage parents to let go, and here are a few:
Encourage parents to think of raising a child
as a long-haul job
Stop bringing forgotten homework to school, Lahey tells the parents of
her students. And stop stressing over how your daughter will do on next week’s
quiz: instead, focus on what your daughter can learn if she does it all
herself, without nagging and pestering and pressure. If she does indeed fail
the quiz, she may be forced to ask herself what went wrong, and what she could
do better next time. Parenting is a long-haul job, Lahey says, and parents and
teachers need to think more about what’s going to make kids happy in the long
term. In the case of the quiz, the short-term goal is getting an ‘A,’ but the
long-term goal of self-sufficiency eclipses that minor ‘A’ by a long shot.
“It’s so freeing!” she said. “You can stop worrying about the stupid
details of the moment-to-moment junk, and start focusing on the big things.
Just think about where your kid was one year ago today. They’re amazing!” Lahey
said she’s not sure if adults just forget, or worry that’s not true. She
suspects, though, that parents don’t see the amazing growth in kids because
they aren’t given the opportunity to show it very often.
Focus on Process Instead of Product
Lahey confesses this is a tricky balance, especially since schools today
are inherently — almost obsessively — focused on product (and may inadvertently
be contributing to parents’ anxieties over academic success). But there are
ways to get around that, she says.
Adjust expectations (and grades) to make room for real student work. In
the book, Lahey asks a kindergarten teacher what her kids can do that their
parents don’t think they can. She responds: “Everything!” In
autonomy-supportive teaching, work that students plan and orchestrate
themselves will look like — well, like a kid did it. That means no more science
projects worthy of their own Nobel. “Teachers need to move their expectations
as well. Our lines for where grades should be have creeped up anyway, based on
our expectations for what the product should look like. Our expectations have
been skewed by the work of the parents.”
 |
| Illustration: https://goo.gl/xAPU9J |
Lahey knows that teachers love to hear that a parent has decided to make
the child more responsible for his own learning: “If you tell your teacher
you’re making the move to more autonomy-supportive parenting, and to please
hold your child to consequences without letting the kid off the hook? If you
ask the teacher to help you through this — that this is the only way your child
is going to learn? Just knowing when a parent is interested in supporting a
student’s voice and ability to speak up for themselves: a teacher will kiss you
on the lips for that!”
Back away from the parent portal
One of the biggest pitfalls to autonomy-supportive parenting, Lahey says,
are the parent portal websites, with access to up-to-the-minute feedback
about scores and grades. Lahey and her husband decided to forgo the parent
portal for their older child. They handed the password over to their son,
telling him he’d need to let them know if he was in academic trouble. Some of
her friends were shocked, “as if we were defaulting on our parental duty,” she
writes. “I disagree. Checking in on children’s grades is a type of
surveillance, which is one of the forms of control and is often mentioned in
the research as an enemy of autonomy and intrinsic motivation.”
For parents who decide to forgo the parent portal (or only check it
occasionally), Lahey recommends sending a note to teachers about the decision,
explaining that your student is now responsible for her own communication
information.
Consider the Fear of Failure May Affect More
Kids Than You Think
Some educators have called out the rash of overparenting books as only
written for a few upper-class parents; some have called The Overstressed
American Child “a myth.”
Many students are well-acquainted with failure, both their own personal
shortcomings as well as the systemic failures of their schools and homes. While
Lahey openly admits that The Gift of Failure doesn’t apply to
everyone, she cautions that it’s not just the 1% who are terrified of their
kids failing: “What I did find out by talking to teachers, is that it’s far
more pervasive than we thought,” Lahey said. “We’re talking about a big chunk,
a lot of middle class kids are getting the same kind of pressure,” as kids at
the top. Many times, she said, the pressure’s even greater if a family doesn’t
have the means to pay for college — especially when it comes to sports and
scholarships.
Fear of failure destroys the love of learning
In chapter 2, Lahey relates the story of one of her students, capable
and intelligent Marianna, who has “sacrificed her natural curiosity and and
love of learning at the altar of achievement, and it’s our fault.”
We taught her that her potential is tied to her intellect, and her intellect is more important than her character. We taught her to protect her academic and extracurricular perfection at all costs and that it’s better to quit when things get challenging rather than risk marring that perfection. Above all else, we have taught her to fear failure, and that fear has destroyed her love of learning.
And this is the real shame: fear of failure taints the waters of
learning, keeping kids from taking risks. Making failure normal — even
celebrated — Lahey contends, may be uncomfortable in the short-term, but in the
long haul makes for happier, more confident kids.
 |
| Photo: https://goo.gl/8w4ym2 |
