Think back to when you were a child. You experienced the sweet taste of success but not before its predecessor, failure surrounded you time after time. That’s the thing about failure; it goes hand in hand with success. Without one, you cannot have the other. Recently I came across an article stressing the importance of giving students problems that don’t necessarily have a solution. These problems must be posed in a way that is both relatable and interesting for students, while ultimately leading to failure.
We as adults fail so much before we succeed. Think about all of the times you have applied for a job and been rejected until you ultimately find success. Think about when you learn a new concept such as the Pythagorean theorem. When you first try to solve the problem you might make a mistake, but these mistakes are a key part of the learning process that ultimately make you understand the theorem itself. Similarly, children experience failure each and every day. Toddlers when they are learning to walk and talk. They fail time after time until they succeed. It is extremely important to remind children that failure is not bad, While society places a negative connotation on failure, one must stress to their children not to be discouraged by failure but to take it with a grain of salt. As parents, you are responsible for making sure your children understand this. Studies say, “How parents answer the question of whether failure is a positive or negative experience has a large influence on how children understand and view failure. Parents are a really critical force in child development when you think about how motivation and mindsets develop,"
It is true that failure is a hard topic for discussion because no one want’s to be the person that failed, everyone wants to be the person that succeeded. Deepak Chopra argues, “I’d like to reframe the whole relationship between success and failure so that both become part of a single process: your personal evolution”. Success and failure are intertwined in each other. It’s about taking the failures and working with them to succeed. “Early educational reformer John Dewey said it best: "Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes " (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/failure-essential-learning-bob-lenz). Always remember, the bitter taste of failure is what makes success all the sweeter. As Bill Gates said, “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure”.
Link:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/failure-crucial-students-success/PBS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/is-failure-necessary-for-_b_8172056.html
