I notice it in subtle ways.
In a couple of games I play on my phone, the characters always have a witty quip or are downright mean when you lose at a level.
Now I am not going to put too much stock in digital characters throwing insults at me but that made me think about failure and loss.
All failure is, is a lack of success but we treat it with such disdain that we not only have kids that will do anything not to fail but also kids who afraid to try for fear of failure.
We have a strange relationship with failure.
Recently I heard the phrase, if you’re not first, you’re last.
You do not want your kids to accept failure in a complacent way but really do we want kids thinking that failure is the worst thing that can possibly happen?
I recently saw a video from the founder and CEO of Spanx, Sara Blakely, done by Business Insider.
Her father celebrated their failures because it meant they tried. They failed but that meant that they tried.
This reframed her own definition of failure, she says.
“Failure for me became not trying versus the outcome. So many people don’t take risks for fear of failure.”
Blakely’s dad also made her evaluate her failures to find what she got out of it so no failure was ever a waste of experience. She always found something she got out of it.
We do have a problem with failure. The evidence is in the alarmingly high number of cheating in both secondary and post-secondary schools in Canada.
A CBC survey done during the 2011-2012 school year shows that 7000 university students in 41 universities were disciplined for cheating.
In a 2006 survey done for the report, Academic Misconduct within Higher Education in Canada by Julia M. Christensen Hughes out of the University of Guelph and Donald L. McCabe out of Rutgers University, 58 per cent of Canadian first year university students admitted to cheating on a high school exam.
Hughes and McCabe, say that the five most common forms of cheating range from group work when it was individual work, getting answers from someone who already completed the test, copying a few sentences of written material or from the internet without footnoting and faking lab data. For each offense, results ranged from 50-75 per cent of students admit to doing one of these and ten per cent of students admitted to doing all five at some point in time.
Around 13 per cent of those surveyed also say there is nothing wrong with this behaviour.
Especially with the internet, cheating is easy.
Essay writers advertise freely on the internet and even post on employment websites looking for writers to write these essays.
So what does cheating say about failure?
I have heard it said that kids who cheat are more concerned about grades than actually what they learn. Which does make sense. That is probably not the only reason; curriculum can also play a factor.
We do not have to teach our kids to take failure lying down. But failure is a part of life and we can teach them to celebrate failure as a step towards success.
We should not let fear keep us from trying.
From the words of poet, Erin Hanson:
“There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask “What if I fall?”Oh but my darling,
What if you fly?”
