Assessing the cost of failure

I wasn’t surprised by my students’ reaction to advice about failure.

Late journalist and teacher Donald Murray — and I dislike “late” in this context because Murray was alive when he shared the suggestion and presumably arrived on time for his funeral — urged writers to “seek instructive failure.”

“You try to say what you cannot say,” Murray wrote, “but in the attempt you discover — draft by draft — what you have to say and how you can say it. Failure is essential.”

Most of my students were having none of it. When I polled them recently, the vast majority disagreed with Murray.

Cue the refrain of “kids these days” who cannot process defeat. They have all been given participation ribbons and ice cream even when they lose and are sheltered from the Darwinian dog-eat-dog nature of the world. Tiny helicopter parents perpetually hover around their heads, ready to drop napalm on anybody who comes bearing hardships.

I can picture the stereotypical grandpa, parked in the corner of a wedding reception or wake, grousing about how we’ve created a softer generation, a lesser generation.

Yeah, maybe. But I don’t think so.

I believe, instead, that today’s children and young adults are keenly aware of failure. They have experienced it often and will thus go to great lengths to avoid it, not because their supposedly delicate psyches cannot handle it, but because they know all too well its cost.

Failure means moving off the established track that propels them through grade school to middle school, high school to college, a great job to a family, a big house to a secure retirement.

These kids have internalized a message adults send, perhaps unwittingly, that missteps are tolerated, but the bill for them will nevertheless come due. The payment could be fewer scholarships, a lower-tier college or a dead-end job.

Are students going to take a chance on failing to communicate a message in an essay, to “discover — draft by draft — what [they] have to say and how [they] can say it” when a grade waits at the end of the process? Or are they instead going to demonstrate audience awareness by writing what the teacher wants the first time, dotting all the compositional i’s and crossing all the rhetorical t’s?

No wonder students beg for rubrics. Just tell me what you want so I can do it right the first time, they think. Cut to the chase.

I teach in a building with a progressive policy about grading. We award formative grades, which are about practice, and summative grades, which are about performance. Many of the summative grades can be redone, giving the students a chance to fix what they did wrong and learn from their mistakes. Yes, this means they can take many tests more than once.

It’s a great philosophy for students who embrace the spirit of the policy. Schools should be places where learning is prized above grades. (Despite what grandpa thinks, learning and grades are not interchangeable.)

But one policy is not enough to change how society at large deals with failure. One misstep, one wrong answer in a college interview, one stupid mistake — each is enough for a guilty verdict in the court of public opinion, creating consequences that last for decades.

Or so kids believe, and perception is reality.

So when the economy takes a pandemic-inspired downturn, when thousands of students return home from college or university and begin learning from home, when sports seasons that could make or break athletes’ future chances are canceled, when twenty-somethings are forced to move back in with parents because their recession-proof careers wither … how do we expect they will respond?

Kids and young adults are resilient. They will bounce back. But it won’t be easy — emotionally, socially or financially — especially for those who view the world as a perpetual hamster wheel where one misstep sends them topsy-turvy.

Because this is the world we adults have created for them, one where life’s biggest essays don’t come with redos.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

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