This blog has haunted me for the past few weeks. My one lonely post has been staring up at me every time I visit the page.  I haven’t been able to write a second post.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I’ve written several second posts. Maybe more than several. I’ve even gone so far as to record a screencast video for my students showing my thinking process as I tried to edit through that second post so they could see what “writers do” to get to a final product.  Except, there’s no final product.  Everything fell short.  It all failed.  Miserably.  The Not-Good-Enough Gremlins came calling and my gosh, are their voices loud.

 

I have a good friend who’s in the process of turning his short film into a full length feature right now (I know, right?!) and over the holidays we chatted about this – the creative process – the constant voice in our heads that questions all our choices, makes this endeavor bigger than it needs to be, and that ever-present voice that tells us that we won’t be able to create anything new or good or original.  It doesn’t seem to matter that I’m writing a blog post for a readership of 3 (including my husband) and he’s making a film for Hollywood producers.  The terror is the same.

 

So as I was sitting down to write my 17^th revision of my second blog post, it struck me….Shouldn’t I be writing about this feeling instead?  Shouldn’t I share this very experience – this overwhelming feeling of stuckness?  Shouldn’t my students know that I don’t think everything I write is great…or even not awful?  Shouldn’t they know that this is part of the process of putting yourself out there?  That it doesn’t go away with age or experience or graduate degrees.  It’s all the same.  Taking a risk is taking a risk whether you’re 4 or 40.

 

We talk a lot in education these days about encouraging students to be open to failing.  We want them to embrace failure, to recognize that it’s an integral part of the learning process.  And it is that.  It doesn’t take much more than a cursory glance over my life to realize that my failures have taught me far more than my successes.  I think we all agree in theory on this one.  But the problem is that we are asking our students to be open to failure inside a system that doesn’t really reward it.  In fact, we ask them to fail inside a system that is set up to only celebrate success.  I can’t think of an awards ceremony that I’ve been to in recent years that celebrated any more than the top students. Our entire grading system is designed to create a division between those who fail and those who succeed.  No one gets a scholarship for failing exquisitely.

 

And there’s another thing that seems to be absent in much of our discussion about encouraging kids to fail – the fact that failing is really, really hard.  Failing is decidedly unfun and all our defenses have been built to avoid it at all costs. It’s self-preservation. I’ve been reading an awful lot of Brené Brown lately, because her research on vulnerability and shame is so profoundly important when thinking about what it means to live a full and wholehearted life and this is what she has to say about failure:

“…there can be no innovation, learning or creativity without failure. But failing is painful. It fuels the ‘shouldas and couldas,’ which means judgement and shame are often lying in wait.”

In one of Brown’s research studies on shame, 85% of the participants were able to recall an incident in school that was so shaming that it changed how they thought of themselves as learners. And 50% of those incidents were creativity scars, incidents wherein the participants were told they weren’t good enough as musicians, writers, dancers, etc. (Brown)

 

 

Who wants to risk that?

 

So my question is what are we doing to create classrooms and schools that support the kind of vulnerability that makes true failure possible but not soul-destroying? Are we setting up the example, first of all, of what it means to try and fail? Are we willing to participate as vulnerable co-learners right alongside our students? And what about our students?  Do they get to try again if it doesn’t work the first time?  Do they get a chance to meaningfully reflect on what may have led to their failure and is that reflection at least as important as the work that they failed on?  Are they as celebrated for the process of getting there just as much as they are for “getting it right”?  These are the questions I’m asking myself a lot these days.

 

And those questions are forcing me into some pretty uncomfortable spaces, this blog being one of them. But they’re rewarding places too.  So I want my students to know that.  Yes, there is the overwhelming, sometimes crippling fear of failure. Yes, there are all those very loud voices telling us that we can’t or we shouldn’t. But, if you stop to listen, you’ll hear, beneath the clatter of your overactive brain, a sometimes small but mighty voice that is saying “yes.”  That voice is you.  Listen to it.

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Brown, Brene.  Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. Speigel & Grau. New York.  2015.