In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s success | Hacker News Reader

In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s success

news.nationalpost.com

54 pointsyonibot20 comments

Here's a link to a FAQ I have prepared for my local mathematics students, "Courage in the Face of Stupidity,"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php

designed to prevent exactly the kind of problem mentioned in the article kindly submitted here. School curricula in many parts of the United States (and perhaps elsewhere too, as I note the article is from Canada?) are designed so that most pupils will succeed in school assignments most of the time. That doesn't provide enough practice in taking on HARD tasks, and inadequately prepares young learners to succeed in either

a) study of more than one really difficult subject at the same time

b) successful problem-solving in adult life in private employment, when the problems are often open-ended and ill-defined.

As a parent of four children, and as a teacher of elementary-age pupils, I'm all about first bolstering children's expectations that initial failure is not a sure predictor of never succeeding, and then introducing CHALLENGING problems into their education so that one thing they practice while young is overcoming failure.

I'm partially only writing this reply as a slightly more "+1" than a simple upvote, but from my experience employing and leading people (programmers, generally) this certainly applies in the UK as well. Not only at elementary school age either, but right the way through education. More and more in the past few years I've come across people who've achieved degrees in subjects without ever really coming across a problem without a potential solution discussed in the near vicinity - perhaps an adjacent chapter.

When presented with just a problem, and no hint of where to find a solution, the end result has often been a mix of horror/terror/anger/paralysis. They have all of the knowledge required in the toolbox, but no practice at applying it in non-directed ways or of having to try (many) failing ideas before one works.

Very good luck with your teaching - I wish we had a lot of teachers over here who thought the same way.

One of the most useful parts of school for me was "failing" a science fair project. I reolized I did not want to be juded subjectively so perusing science was a terrible idea.

Your part "b" reminded me of a robotics program I did in High School, FIRST robotics - http://www.usfirst.org/ . It's not an exaggeration to say that my success and passion as a developer comes almost entirely from this program. They give these teams of high school kids a real, unsolved, damn hard robotics problem, and you have six weeks to come up with something. It's far more educational than sitting slack-jawed in a classroom, and fun as hell.

And no, there's no cushion for failure. One year I was in this program we had a robot with a drive system that was completely non-functional (we used a worm gear on the drive motors, so the robot basically couldn't coast at all), and as the programmer, it frustrated me almost to the point of tears to not be able to do anything about it. I tried to write code that would simulate coasting by spooling down the wheels slowly, but I wasn't that good at writing code yet, and it didn't work at all. In the end we lost horribly, and our consolation was to do better the next year, the end.

This is the kind of learning I would like to see more of: Work on real problems with no clear solutions, and learn old problems with clear solutions incidentally as the need arises.

It's odd they don't mention Carol Dweck's growth- vs fixed- mindset stuff. Quick overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck An interview with a little bit of depth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck one from stanford news http://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.ht... She's been on HN a lot, so search should reveal more.

I want to add that along with letting kids figure it out for themselves, or explicitly teaching them might be supplemented by examples of failure. e.g. Steve Jobs getting kicked out of Apple; Usain Bolt stalling early in his career; and of course Edison's "I haven't failed 1000 times; I've discovered 999 ways that don't work". But these are distant. Seeing an actual person you know fail and then succeed right in front of you is very reassuring. This is why, when I was demonstrating/tutoring at uni, I never tried to cover up my mistakes in front my students. Instead, highlight them, and show how to recover from them. I'm pleased to say those students did really well.

My grandfather was a psychiatrist and hypnotic therapy was one of the last resorts he would turn to for chronic patients.

So one day, when I was about 8-9 years old a young boy maybe 4-5 years elder me to was brought to my grandpa for consultation. The case I figured was very severe. I couldn’t somehow accept that kids my age can have these issues; I had only seen middle-aged patients till then.That kid went through a lot of trauma. He went through hypnotic medication and was finally shifted to a permanent treatment facility.

Life passed on and one day I asked my grandfather about that case. The kid, he explained faced a failure for the first time in his last year of high school that he couldn’t accept it could happen to him. His parents were so obsessed seeing him be the first ranker (an Indian school system grade) in the class; he was trained to be that all throughout his life. Until this happened.

I think failing earlier on in life gives us that ability to not freak out when it happens later on.

If you have kids do yourself and your kid a favor and read "Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings"

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Resilience-Children-Teens-Giv...

> and if kids of privilege have never experienced setbacks, they’ve never learned to persevere.

And this is why ordinary schools are harmful to the intellectually gifted: too low expectations don't provide opportunities to learn perseverance, resilience, and will-power from failure.

(Disclosure: personal experience, not scientific truth)

Speaking as someone who went through a gifted program, this is a good thing to recognize, but not enough. I never remember having anything challenging enough to fail at in my gifted courses (and I'm not that "gifted"). Even into college, I never failed (although I scraped by many a course because I could pass with no effort), but when I was challenged, I enjoyed it. It wasn't until the working world that I experienced failure.

Then there are things like "rejection therapy" which to me sounds like something that shouldn't be necessary, ie, you learned to deal with rejection and failure through living.

Another thing to consider: I found Salman Khan's TED talk very interesting when he talked about looking at different "snapshots" of students' progress, and some would look like they were way behind ("remedial"), while others were way ahead, but in the end, they all reached the same level of progress by the end of the course. Picking a point in time and then binning students via that one data point is, quite frankly, retarded.

This can actually get worse for people who are really good at something. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756

I didn't see any data in that article. Does anyone know if there is any validity in that point of view? I mean from a moral sense, it sure sounds powerful, but does it really show results?

Failure doing what you are passionate about is an opportunity to learn, to get better, to come back stronger.

The key driver is to become elite. To be elite and respected usually means you have talent coupled with an intense work ethic..

That's what I associate with American culture looking at it from here in Ireland...I would say that in Ireland for too long failure was frowned upon and it stifled innovation to a degree, whereas now that fear of failure is much less prescient.

Personally I have never feared failure maybe it was my upbringing, I always have been a trier, driven by my passions. I frequently set myself goals and timebox them, keeps the mouse running around the wheel!

Well, stop disclosing students' grades to anyone but the students themselves, and that cuts out that problem. (At least most of it.) Especially don't disclose to future educational institutions.

As an adult, no one gets my grades. They are for my personal growth and no one else's business. If someone wants to evalute my abilities, they have to do it by sitting down with me and figuring it out themselves, or looking at Github or something.

If I'm responsible for a child's future, and for her/him to have a decent future I have to do certain reasonable things that some backwards educational culture considers "cheating", I'll do it.

(Of course, I wouldn't want to put the child in such a toxic environment in the first place, where her success might put others at some weird disadvantage. There are more enlightened schools.)

Its all context I guess. If you signed up for the honor code, then violated it, you have some moral difficulty there.

I agree though, that the ultimate idea is to educate. If that can be achieved through a back-and-forth exchange with a group or a graduate assistant, then that's maybe how it should normally be done. Maybe all semester, not just during the 'final'.

That cuts off the motivation to compete against their peers and deprives them of the data that would allow them to analyze themselves in relation to others.

At a university level, that was the original idea of the University of California Santa Cruz, which gave students written evaluations of what they had done well and poorly on in each course, rather than numerical or letter grades (though you could still fail a course). As a result, there were also no GPAs or rankings. My understanding is they eventually abandoned it precisely because external people wanted to see the grades and rank students: employers and grad schools like looking at GPAs. So even if pedagogically it worked great (I would need to read more to determine if that were true), external factors made it difficult to continue with.

The college I attend only uses narrative evaluations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_college_of_florida

Neat. I like the idea. As a prof a school with grades, I'm often disappointed by how grade-oriented, rather than learning-oriented students are, being much too concerned with what precisely is going to be on the test, how many points each thing is worth, etc. But it's hard to blame them personally for it, when the entire incentive structure of grades, GPAs, and class rankings is set up to encourage them to focus on it.

Kids tend to compare grades anyway, though - they want to have a rough idea where they fell on the curve, if they beat "the smart kid", etc.

An alternative to grades is to just have passes: all your transcript should comprise of is which classes you've passed. Then, require students to take a certain number of courses, and to pass a lesser number of them (or just require students, in order to graduate, to pass a certain level, such as English 11 and Geometry, in order to graduate, in addition to attempting a specific number of classes). This makes it easier for teachers to have high standards, because they can see it's hugely unfair to their top students to allow students with no understanding to pass. Furthermore, it teaches students it's OK to challenge yourself, because no one will know that you didn't manage to get through Calculus or upper-level English, while if you do manage to get through it, you'll be able to be proud of the accomplishment, rather than embarrassed of a C.

Brown's curriculum was created with some similar ideas. No one sees which classes we fail. However, we still have A/B/C (though we got rid of Ds, because if you are getting a D, you shouldn't be getting credit), and the C grade is often deflated, which means taking a class pass/fail is seen by many as "slacking off." I really do think it'd be better to just have everyone take every class pass/fail, with the fail cutoff at a little above where most Cs are given now, but external audiences (read employers, med schools, etc.) really seem to dislike that, so the pass/fail option is way underutilized. At the very least, it would make sense to require all freshman-year classes to be taken pass/fail, because students come into college with such different backgrounds, that they need the first year to ramp up before they can begin to be evaluated on level ground (otherwise, students with less rigorous high school backgrounds can get a 2.5 their first year, and never have a shot at being seen as a "successful" student). As a personal anecdote, I've gotten more out of most the classes I've taken pass/fail than for a grade, because they were either the ones I pushed myself the hardest just to be able to pass, or the ones that I cared the most about the material, rather than how tests work/memorizing material, etc.

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