
In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s success - yonibot
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/02/in-praise-of-failure-the-key-ingredient-to-childrens-success-experts-say-is-not-success/
======
tokenadult
Here's a link to a FAQ I have prepared for my local mathematics students,
"Courage in the Face of Stupidity,"

<http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php>

designed to prevent exactly the kind of problem mentioned in the article
kindly submitted here. School curricula in many parts of the United States
(and perhaps elsewhere too, as I note the article is from Canada?) are
designed so that most pupils will succeed in school assignments most of the
time. That doesn't provide enough practice in taking on HARD tasks, and
inadequately prepares young learners to succeed in either

a) study of more than one really difficult subject at the same time

or

b) successful problem-solving in adult life in private employment, when the
problems are often open-ended and ill-defined.

As a parent of four children, and as a teacher of elementary-age pupils, I'm
all about first bolstering children's expectations that initial failure is not
a sure predictor of never succeeding, and then introducing CHALLENGING
problems into their education so that one thing they practice while young is
overcoming failure.

~~~
kolektiv
I'm partially only writing this reply as a slightly more "+1" than a simple
upvote, but from my experience employing and leading people (programmers,
generally) this certainly applies in the UK as well. Not only at elementary
school age either, but right the way through education. More and more in the
past few years I've come across people who've achieved degrees in subjects
without ever really coming across a problem without a potential solution
discussed in the near vicinity - perhaps an adjacent chapter.

When presented with just a problem, and no hint of where to find a solution,
the end result has often been a mix of horror/terror/anger/paralysis. They
have all of the knowledge required in the toolbox, but no practice at applying
it in non-directed ways or of having to try (many) failing ideas before one
works.

Very good luck with your teaching - I wish we had a lot of teachers over here
who thought the same way.

------
6ren
It's odd they don't mention Carol Dweck's growth- vs fixed- mindset stuff.
Quick overview: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck> An interview with a
little bit of depth: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck> one from
stanford news
[http://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.ht...](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.html)
She's been on HN a lot, so search should reveal more.

I want to add that along with letting kids figure it out for themselves, or
explicitly teaching them might be supplemented by examples of failure. e.g.
Steve Jobs getting kicked out of Apple; Usain Bolt stalling early in his
career; and of course Edison's "I haven't failed 1000 times; I've discovered
999 ways that don't work". But these are distant. Seeing an actual person you
know fail and then succeed right in front of you is very reassuring. This is
why, when I was demonstrating/tutoring at uni, I never tried to cover up my
mistakes in front my students. Instead, highlight them, and show how to
recover from them. I'm pleased to say those students did really well.

------
Cherian
My grandfather was a psychiatrist and hypnotic therapy was one of the last
resorts he would turn to for chronic patients.

So one day, when I was about 8-9 years old a young boy maybe 4-5 years elder
me to was brought to my grandpa for consultation. The case I figured was very
severe. I couldn’t somehow accept that kids my age can have these issues; I
had only seen middle-aged patients till then.That kid went through a lot of
trauma. He went through hypnotic medication and was finally shifted to a
permanent treatment facility.

Life passed on and one day I asked my grandfather about that case. The kid, he
explained faced a failure for the first time in his last year of high school
that he couldn’t accept it could happen to him. His parents were so obsessed
seeing him be the first ranker (an Indian school system grade) in the class;
he was trained to be that all throughout his life. Until this happened.

I think failing earlier on in life gives us that ability to not freak out when
it happens later on.

~~~
sinnerswing
If you have kids do yourself and your kid a favor and read "Building
Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings"

[http://www.amazon.com/Building-Resilience-Children-Teens-
Giv...](http://www.amazon.com/Building-Resilience-Children-Teens-
Giving/dp/1581105517/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1359920737&sr=8-3&keywords=Resilience)

------
MakeUsersWant
> and if kids of privilege have never experienced setbacks, they’ve never
> learned to persevere.

And this is why ordinary schools are harmful to the intellectually gifted: too
low expectations don't provide opportunities to learn perseverance,
resilience, and will-power from failure.

(Disclosure: personal experience, not scientific truth)

~~~
npsimons
Speaking as someone who went through a gifted program, this is a good thing to
recognize, but not enough. I never remember having anything challenging enough
to fail at in my gifted courses (and I'm not _that_ "gifted"). Even into
college, I never failed (although I scraped by many a course because I could
pass with no effort), but when I was challenged, I enjoyed it. It wasn't until
the working world that I experienced failure.

Then there are things like "rejection therapy" which to me sounds like
something that shouldn't be necessary, ie, you learned to deal with rejection
and failure through living.

Another thing to consider: I found Salman Khan's TED talk very interesting
when he talked about looking at different "snapshots" of students' progress,
and some would look like they were way behind ("remedial"), while others were
way ahead, but in the end, they all reached the same level of progress by the
end of the course. Picking a point in time and then binning students via that
one data point is, quite frankly, retarded.

------
ap22213
I didn't see any data in that article. Does anyone know if there is any
validity in that point of view? I mean from a moral sense, it sure sounds
powerful, but does it really show results?

------
shaydoc
Failure doing what you are passionate about is an opportunity to learn, to get
better, to come back stronger.

The key driver is to become elite. To be elite and respected usually means you
have talent coupled with an intense work ethic..

That's what I associate with American culture looking at it from here in
Ireland...I would say that in Ireland for too long failure was frowned upon
and it stifled innovation to a degree, whereas now that fear of failure is
much less prescient.

Personally I have never feared failure maybe it was my upbringing, I always
have been a trier, driven by my passions. I frequently set myself goals and
timebox them, keeps the mouse running around the wheel!

------
calibraxis
Well, stop disclosing students' grades to anyone but the students themselves,
and that cuts out that problem. (At least most of it.) Especially don't
disclose to future educational institutions.

As an adult, no one gets my grades. They are for my personal growth and no one
else's business. If someone wants to evalute my abilities, they have to do it
by sitting down with me and figuring it out themselves, or looking at Github
or something.

If I'm responsible for a child's future, and for her/him to have a decent
future I have to do certain reasonable things that some backwards educational
culture considers "cheating", I'll do it.

(Of course, I wouldn't want to put the child in such a toxic environment in
the first place, where her success might put others at some weird
disadvantage. There are more enlightened schools.)

~~~
mjn
At a university level, that was the original idea of the University of
California Santa Cruz, which gave students written evaluations of what they
had done well and poorly on in each course, rather than numerical or letter
grades (though you could still fail a course). As a result, there were also no
GPAs or rankings. My understanding is they eventually abandoned it precisely
because external people wanted to see the grades and rank students: employers
and grad schools like looking at GPAs. So even if pedagogically it worked
great (I would need to read more to determine if that were true), external
factors made it difficult to continue with.

~~~
deskglass
The college I attend only uses narrative evaluations.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_college_of_florida>

~~~
mjn
Neat. I like the idea. As a prof a school with grades, I'm often disappointed
by how grade-oriented, rather than learning-oriented students are, being
_much_ too concerned with what precisely is going to be on the test, how many
points each thing is worth, etc. But it's hard to blame them personally for
it, when the entire incentive structure of grades, GPAs, and class rankings is
set up to encourage them to focus on it.

