I don’t think I could have designed a better childhood for myself, than the one I had. I had glorious amounts of freedom growing up in the countryside, building dams, climbing trees and making dens. My brother and I, with our friends, used to explore our surroundings. We used to try stuff out, like balancing on a fallen tree to cross a stream, seeing how far we could run down a hill before our legs couldn’t keep up with our body. When the ground was frozen, I even remember taking all the wheels off a skateboard and boarding down a big hill on the solid earth, with no way of controlling direction or speed. They were great times. And I think we learnt a lot about ourselves. We learnt how to run, how to take risks, and how to fall.
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I realise I tend to start many of my posts with a quick reminisce. I think that happens because these memories spark off a thought that gets me thinking about how things are right now. And I don’t see many children having the same kind of childhood that I had. Kids at my school are sometimes so mollycoddled that they are not learning these things. Their whole day is already planned for them. They have no time to explore. They are not learning how to fall.
My students can now probably repeat the mantra, ‘use failure to learn, you just haven’t got it yet’. Even now I am rethinking my phraseology here, Maybe ‘failure’ isn’t the right word, it sounds too permanent. But, equate experiencing failure to falling, and an analogy starts to form.
Falling happens when you take a risk and it doesn’t pay off, or something unexpected happens that causes you to fall. If you trip over a step, you learn there is a step there. If you fall off the tree crossing the river, you learn where the slippy bit is, and try again. Or you learn that slippy logs are not the best way to cross and find another way. When you fall running down a hill, you learn where the limit is, if you want, you can adjust how you run to see if you can make it all the way. But you also learn how to fall without destroying your confidence, you learn how to get up, dust yourself off, and move on.
When you don’t get it right when you are learning, you realise you need to find another way. Or you need to practise more. Or you need to adjust. You definitely learn to dust yourself off and get on with things without collapsing into a jabbering wreck.
My concern is, just like children these days are less able to learn their limits and less able to practise dealing with falling. They are also less able to deal with being wrong, with failing, with making mistakes. They are so often required (by parents, themselves, ill informed teachers) to get things right, that they are inhibited by a fear of being wrong.
And the fear of being wrong, is the enemy of learning.
