When Failing Is the Best Thing You Can Do
I want my students to fail.
Stay with me. I know failure is the big “f-word” for students. It was for me. I used to be so afraid to fail - or even be perceived as failing - that I would lie, avoid, or side-step any situation in which I might not be perfect.
My personal brand of avoidance peaked in high school. I would get a typical assignment; let’s say an English paper on the symbolism in Othello. In class, I had answered a question wrong, and the teacher had corrected me, saying “Nice attempt, Amanda, but actually…”
So obviously, I knew nothing about Othello and could never write a whole paper. What did I do to get better? Procrastinate, of course. And finally, the night before the paper was due, I would scramble to put together a few paragraphs about Desdemona’s handkerchief and call it a night.
Then I would do something truly self-sabotaging. I wouldn’t hand in the paper. I would tell my teacher some elaborate story about how I couldn’t get the assignment done in time and beg for an extension. If the teacher was forgiving, I would get it, and slide my already-written paper surreptitiously onto their desk a week later.
Why, why did I put myself through this? Two reasons. If I procrastinated, then my paper would not be my best work. This was good because if I got a bad grade, then I could excuse it by saying, “I wrote it last minute! I totally could have done better if I had actually tried.”
But why hadn’t I handed the paper in on time? I had it with me – it was there, burning a hole in my backpack. I was so afraid of being judged for sub-par work – aka being stupid - that I couldn’t bring myself to hand it in.
You might have noticed the paradox. If I was so afraid of being judged, why hadn’t I worked on the paper more? If I wanted an excuse for a bad grade, why didn’t I just hand in my rushed essay? You’ll have to ask my high-school self – I wasn’t making the most rational decisions back then.
I’m going to dive into more details around procrastination in a later post. For now, I want to focus on one of the root causes of procrastination or self-sabotage: fear of failure, the thing that was so debilitating for me in high school.
The best way to get over almost any fear? Exposure. Psychologists do this all the time, whether the fear is heights, commitment, or spiders. It holds true for the more abstract fears as well. Afraid of failing? Step one: Fail
Now, there’s definitely a ‘good’ way to fail. Ideally, good failure has these components:
Your life, health, and/safety or the safety of others is not dependent on your success/outcome
You will have a chance to attempt it again, ideally many times
You have a supportive coach or guide to help you identify how you can improve
So, in the context of my students, when do I want them to fail? ALL THE TIME…in practice. When they are attempting practice exams, answering my questions, reviewing flashcards, the best thing they can do is get the answer wrong.
Have you noticed that the questions you struggle with, or answer incorrectly, are the ones that stay in your head the longest? That’s the system we use when we learn. We try something, it doesn’t work out, and now we are engaged, surprised, invested. I can practically see my student’s brains light up when they get an easy question wrong. Shock! Confusion! What?! Excellent responses – the surprise helps the brain identify information that needs to be stored for later, so that we are more prepared next time.
My students who fail frequently and choose to learn from those failures are the ones who succeed on test day. I see the most improvement from students who start off our sessions by saying, “Okay so I got every question wrong on optics yesterday, but then I did some careful review and I figured it out! I keep getting confused with the lens equations – can we go over how to use them together?”
One of the (many) issues I run into with our current education system is the myopic focus on outcomes (see: grades). In my academic experience, the only times my teachers saw my work was when I was being graded on it. And those grades were the outcome of my performance. There was no opportunity to learn by failing, because every grade mattered. All the work to get to the “right” answer was done on your own.
As an adult, I can now see that I had many opportunities to seek help from my teachers way before the tests and papers. I could have gone to my teacher after that first Othello class, and gotten quality coaching on where I went wrong and how I could do better.
But as a teenager, who had been told all her life that she was so smart for learning things on her own, I couldn’t fathom asking for help. Asking for help was the equivalent of admitting I was stupid.
If you resonate with any part of this story – if you have a hard time asking for help (in any capacity), or assume that if you get things wrong you must be stupid, I get it. It’s a hard habit to break. Still, I encourage you to try something new to help reframe failure into the goal, instead of a fear.
Choosing failure
Pick something you care about and struggled with in the past (examples: learning to speed read, cooking a perfect poached egg, drawing a proportional human)
Decide to fail at it every day
Read number 2 again. Winning = failing
Then actually fail at it every day. Reflect on why you failed and seek ways to fail differently tomorrow
Keep failing in different ways…until you don’t.
Give it a try! Focus on increasing your number of failures, and you just might find more success.
Until next time,
Amanda
