Q: The staff at the local high school have been working hard to help a student improve his grades since his mother died. A conference was held to devise a strategy, but the student stopped the process with a question: “What are you doing? Don’t you get it? I have rights too. I have a right to fail.”
He was right. We were treating him differently than we were the other kids. To him, failing was far less of a problem than to be identified as different than his classmates.
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In light of that, how do we help this student?
A: It sounds to me like your struggling student was correct. He has a right to fail. The problem is not whether he passes or fails. The problem is that the conspiracy between his teachers and his family tends to pit success and failure as opposites. They are not.
Success and failure are different steps enroute to the same goal of success.
Those who have quit smoking often tried several times to stop before they finally made it. Any number of wealthy people checked into either poverty or even bankruptcy before they finally had a decent bank account. Successful writers can show you dozens of rejection slips before someone finally took a chance with their written work and published it.
I don’t want to downplay the value of getting a great mark in high school. That would be folly.
The point is that failure is only failure if all of us don’t learn what we can from whatever misadventures we have. Failure might mean that a person does not have various talents she needs to travel down the developmental road she wants to follow in search of a career. It might be time to develop a new daydream, hypothesizing new goals. Failure might mean that various learning strategies need to be reconsidered and new methodologies for learning need to happen. Failure might reflect a lack of interest in required courses. Instead of avoiding failure, the trick is to learn what we can from it and then move forward.
Instead of avoiding failure it might be better if you, your fellow teachers and the young man’s family sat down with those low marks to try to figure out what all of you can learn from them. But you can only do this if he agrees to it. Remember, failure is his right. It is his right to fail and it is his right to learn what he can from all those disappointments that clutter the highway to success. Your job, as his teacher, is to offer to help him but then to back off until he is ready to take that next step forward.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
