This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.
My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.
It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.
I was also an incredibly bad farm hand for a summer.
1 comment:
Transforming the experience of failure into something to be celebrated was a key part of the first Maker Revolution workshop I attended. It's part of what I love about string games--repeated opportunities for low-risk failure, with a high value reward at the end: I learned a new figure!
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