Advice from Weiss: 01/13
The CommuterThursday, January 14, 2010
In the past few weeks I have been writing a series on “Student Success,” in response to a question I received from a student. Today, I thought I’d conclude the series by writing about the opposite: Failure!
The reality is that there is NO SUCH THING AS FAILURE. Not in the concrete, judgmental way we think of it. Failure is a concept. It’s not like a wall or an ocean, or a kiss. It only exists in our minds.
Now I know, after a dozen or more years at school, we all believe in failure as a concrete part of life. Many of us have spent a fair amount of our existence trying to avoid getting an “F for failure” at school. We’ve even seen it written on transcripts and grade reports. But I assure you it does not really exist.
What really exists is feedback. So, the first teacher to create tests, back in the age of the Greeks, did it so that he would know if his teaching was effective. He wanted to know if he was communicating well to his students (or at least that’s the story I was told when I was in college). For many, this is still the best use of testing in the classroom.
The same is true for grades. Grades are just feedback. That’s all. If you’re getting poor grades in Anatomy and Physiology maybe you shouldn’t be majoring in nursing or medicine. Or maybe you just need some extra tutoring and everything will be fine. But something needs to change… The same would be true for any field. Struggling in communications and psychology classes? Then maybe becoming a therapist isn’t in the cards, or, again, maybe you just need some help. Maybe your writing skills just aren’t strong enough yet for you to express yourself well and get credit for all that you know.
But there are always places where the feedback is strong. Where the grades should be blinking in red, saying, “This is it! This is it!”
I remember a student who was so sharp in math and science that she went on to get an engineering degree at an Ivy League college, and tutored calculus while she was there. But she lived in fear of writing a paper for her English classes. Another who was a really good writer and a natural with the social sciences thought he wasn’t smart because the men in his family had all become scientists, and he struggled mightily with science courses. I would have thought that straight “A’s” in sociology, anthropology and human development would mean something to anyone, but it took him awhile to understand where his gifts were, and that they were great gifts. When he did, he also went on to a university and is in graduate school today.
So, I say to you, “There is no such thing as failure. Just experiments with varied results, requiring varying types of action.” If the major you originally picked isn’t working for you, get some help from the Learning Center, Advising, Counseling, Tutoring, or Disability Services. But it’s also alright to evaluate and make another choice. We all have gifts; it’s really just a matter of knowing what they are. And that’s why there is feedback, not failure, in the real world.
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