“Teachers recognizing my efforts — not just successes or failures — allowed me to hold my head up. What I find myself saying to my young son most often is ‘I love how you try.’ ”
SS (former student)
My response:
It is really hard to get students to see “failure” not as a conclusion but as a step. But often, failing at a first-time try is a much more productive step on the path to success and understanding. I began every school year by telling kids that if they get everything right the first time, it means they already knew the material and didn’t learn anything new (and that went for both the subject matter and self-knowledge).
More about a successful failure:
In 1986 I was a junior at UMass-Amherst, majoring in Chemistry. While I’d found many classes in my major to be fairly easy, this was the year when things got challenging.
I was carrying a heavy load: my second organic chemistry class, analytical chemistry, a course in teaching secondary education, and music appreciation. Four classes … just like most semesters. But those chem classes each had four hour labs, and the TAs made sure we worked every minute. Besides my coursework, I was working at the dining commons as a student supervisor. The hours I worked there were long, but at least they didn’t pay well (ha!). When I called home to ask for a little extra cash, my mom lined me up to work at various grocery stores as The Sample Guy — the dude who stands in the aisle and tries to get you to take a nibble of Price’s Jalapeno Cheese Dip or a Betty Crocker Bundt Cake.
And as the semester progressed, things got busier, and more difficult, and busier, and more difficult … By the end of the semester I was miserable. I was struggling in class, struggling to find joy. I felt like a failure. Worse, I thought I might have wasted the previous 2 ½ years. I wasn’t failing any of my classes, but I came close — especially in analytical chemistry. I’d never earned a grade lower than a B before, ever.
So I decided to step back and take spring of ‘87 off. I felt relief — but also a little nauseated. For the first time, my plans for teaching chemistry or taking a job in the industry seem more like fantasy than reality. My future and my identity had been defined by what I’d done in college. Now it all seemed to be at risk.
But with no school to occupy my time, I had to get a job. The least I could do was pocket some money so when I got back to school I wouldn’t have to pass out samples of Tyson chicken nuggets at the local Price Chopper.
After a few interviews, I ended up at the Museum of Science-Boston. I won the illustrious job of Visitor Assistant. I took tickets, stood in various parts of the museum as a kind of human pylon, and chastised kids who played on the escalators. Most importantly, I told people where the bathrooms were. I wore a snazzy tie-and-cranberry-blazer ensemble every day.
The job wasn’t glamorous — but it was exactly what I needed in January and February of that year.
Because by March I started to get bored with being a bathroom finder and elevator operator. I started reading the descriptions on the exhibits. I gained an appreciation for the people behind the scenes creating and maintaining them.
To give you an idea of the brain powers that exist at the museum, when I was there, one wing featured a display where you could watch crystals slowly form as liquid water froze into ice. It was a work of science and a work of art! The display was also very fragile and sensitive to everything from air pressure and the temperature of the room to the pH and salinity of the water. Other very smart people tried to maintain this exhibit, but its curator Jim was the only one who really understood how it worked…to the point where the Museum had to remove the exhibit when Jim passed away a few summers later. That’s the level of brilliance I was around.
And I wanted in on it. I started asking the museum’s curators and scientists to lunch so I could pick their brains. (They’re still some of the smartest and most innovative people I know.)
And once I did that, I started to love going to work…which is something I hadn’t felt about college in at least a year. As I became happier, noticing all the great science around me, I also started noticing the visitors and their experiences. And, I started contributing to their experiences.
The museum’s mascot was a Great Horned Owl named Spooky. He was found as a hatchling in 1951 and brought to the museum. He lived for 38 years — much longer than any owl in the wild. He also didn’t really know how other owls sounded. So when I stood by his display one day and hooted, he would hoot back, basically telling me, “Go away! This is my space!” (Owls are very territorial.)
Some afternoons, I would wait for a visitor to walk by, not reading all the incredible information available to them, and I would quietly, ”hoot”. And Spooky would resoundingly hoot back, sticking his head out angrily at the visitor, startling him. Unknowingly, I was becoming a museum docent. I started doing things like this in every part of the museum. Not always hooting, but helping people with the Chladni Plates (a device that allows users to visualize sound) or tracing the motions in a sculpture called the Archimedean Excogitation, which is basically a Tinker Toy from Hell.
I had found my joy again. I was helping people. Crucially, I wasn’t telling them things. I was guiding them to learn for themselves.
That summer, I was promoted to Visitor Assistant Supervisor. But supervising the people who tell visitors where the bathrooms were wasn’t a responsibility I was all that excited about. I started researching the museum’s exhibits, writing up small histories about them and making suggestions about what we should be pointing out to visitors. I was not truly assisting visitors!
And someone at the museum noticed. Because, while my time at the museum had recharged my love of learning and prompted me to return to school, the museum invited me back the next summer to do presentations in the exhibit halls. They paid me to play with snakes, bugs, and skulls! That led to a gig the next summer working in Public Programs, where I was now doing full shows including Science Magic, Liquid Nitrogen shows, Live Animal demonstrations, and the Lightning Show in the Theater of Electricity.*
This experience is the embodiment of a Successful Failure.
Not because I got a job I loved…though I did.
Not because I returned to school and managed to finish on time…though I did that too.
Not even that I re-took Analytical Chem and scored an A…that that happened as well!
The real lesson is that I saw that I wasn’t one dimensional. I had always pictured myself as an academic. I defined myself by external standards like grades. I saw only one path ahead of me.
What I learned by struggling and nearly crashing out of my Life Plan is there really is no Life Plan. Instead, there are many paths through life, none of them straight, and all of them with spurs and tributaries.
And I learned that I am a humanist. I found that I was happiest when I was helping others to learn. I found the most joy in the smaller things like hooting like an owl or having people do and understand the old yank-the-tablecloth trick.
That experience laid the foundation that helped me become an effective teacher for more than three decades, during which I taught MIT students how to teach, built an astronomical observatory, showed students how to tag sharks, … and so much more.
Failure, confusion, feeling lost…they are our greatest teachers, because they teach us about ourselves. And it’s only when we know ourselves that we are best-positioned to truly help others.
By the way, failure can also teach us about fire. Like the time I started a fire in the Theater of Electricity that required two ladder companies from Boston and Cambridge and emptied the Museum for more than an hour. But since I was now an expert in fire, I was later hired to upgrade the theater’s generator. Score another win for failure!
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