We have to model failure

I played Rock Band for about an hour last night at some friends' house. The friends have an eleven-year-old daughter who is in 6th grade at the school I teach. Although I teach in a school with seven 6th grade teams and almost 600 students in 6th grade, it just so happens that she is on the team that is in the same hallways as mine. I see her multiple times every day. I also see her often at church and when we hang out with our friends. She's comfortable enough to call me Russ outside of school, and mature enough to keep it to Mr. G in school.


I tell you that to give you the background knowledge needed to trust me when I say that she is comfortable around me.


Now, if she's that comfortable around me, why wasn't she comfortable enough to fail in front of me last night?

If you're not familiar with Rock Band, it's a video game where people have fake musical instruments and play along with the music on the screen. I was playing the guitar and she was playing the drums. There are four difficulty levels on the game: easy, medium, hard, and expert. 

We played a couple of songs together with me playing guitar on hard and her playing drums on easy. Neither of these difficulty levels were proving to be much of a challenge to us -- let's just say I enjoy video games and leave it at that -- so I suggested we bump it up a notch. I moved up to expert and she moved up to medium. The first game we were both terrible. The (fake) venue we were playing at in the game actually shut the lights out on us.

"You go back to hard and I'll go back to easy," she reasoned.

"I'm going to keep working on extreme," I said. "I think I can get it after a couple more songs. Why don't you keep trying on medium?"

"No way," she said. "That was waaaay too hard (it wasn't)."

This is just an example of what I see fairly often with my students. 

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I watched a TED Talk shared by Mark Stock a few minutes ago that put the bug in my head for this post. The TED Talk is titled "Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids." It's nine minutes long and worth the watch.

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We have to model failure for our children.  



We cannot short change this vital piece of the learning process.


It has to be seen as better than OK to fail.