Failure~ Good and Bad

I seem to react to student failure in different ways. Three students failed to get on the Accelerated Reader board while I was away on my trip. This means the class as a whole achieved phenomenal success (usually a teacher has about three students achieving great success consistently). But since no one in any class is a failure, no teacher should ever allow any student to continue failing to achieve.

Coincidently, these three students were also failing at the beginning of the year. With hard work and lots of love and patience to figure out their learning styles, and then being taught in that way, they all achieved more success this year than they ever had.

But in not succeeding in my absence, it means the teacher has not succeeded in helping them become independently successful......and with one month left of school, time is running out to do so.....

They know how much I care about them, which allows me to "drop the hammer" and push them harder in an attempt to develop their self-esteem. The message is that they are not failures, and need to get to the point where they refuse to allow themselves to "fail".

I've had to remove all student pictures and videos. I'm sorry.

Others, like Luis however, have experienced so much success with or without me that their self-esteem is sky high....and "failure" to them means they are one step closer to succeeding (ala Thomas Edison). They know they are not failures, even when they fail at something new. This allows me to push them into higher levels of failure in the role of a guider, versus a motivator and strength coach.

They try new things and inevitably experience failure, but learn from those failures.......have the courage to try again.....and experience subsequent new successes.....serving to further increase their self-esteem and intelligence. This in turn makes them more marketable upon entering the real world.

At this point they are beginning to truly become unstoppable, as opposed to the students in the first video who still let failure stop them.

In this video Luis is being taught how to use his student science textbook and two teacher books to come up with a better experiment to figure out why his previous experiment went wrong. He is learning how to pull specific information from resources and making his textbook work for him, versus having to sit quietly and obediently at his desk and working from his textbook.