Wisdom from a first grader

Being called to the principal's office can be a defining moment for a child in school. How many of you remember your first trip to the principal's office? Most of you? I thought so.Whether it was for good news or bad, being called to the office is a momentous occasion in grade school.

Recently, Mrs. McShane (our Assistant Principal) told me about meeting with a group of first graders who were in her office to talk about misbehavior on the playground. One of the little ones, after admitting his transgression, tearfully told Mrs. McShane, "Failure teaches you how to grow up!" 

What a wonderful reaction! Obviously, someone at home (I'm guessing mom or dad) has talked with him before about how we react to failure. And he's clearly learned that lesson - he knows he's made a mistake, and he recognizes that this will help him learn (and he's tearful because he feels bad about it).

I thought about our little guy, and his reaction to a mistake, as I read all of the tributes to Steve Jobs this week. Steve Jobs learned this lesson more than once in his life. If you haven't yet read his commencement speech in 2005 to graduates at Stanford, I highly recommend it. In it, he tells the stories of his failures - rather spectacular failures, at that - and what he learned from them. He talks about love - of his family and his work, and about failure, and about death. All of the things that - at their heart - worry us the most.

His words on death resonated deeply with me: 

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

 I read another article last week, in the online blog Wired Science, titled "Why do some people learn faster?"  The short answer? "Education is the wisdom wrung from failure." The article summarized research conducted on elementary school children to distinguish between those with a fixed mindset (intelligence can't be changed) and those with a growth mindset (we can get better at anything if we work hard enough). The results were fascinating - when children were praised for effort, rather than for intelligence, they learned exponentially more than when they were praised for being smart.

The conclusion of the research?

The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence – the “smart” compliment – is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong – that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore – the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence.

I predict great things for our first grader - he knows, deeply, at a young age, that failure is how we grow. Potentially, it can be how we grow to do great things. I hope our work here at St. Paul can help our students to prepare for those great things: to learn from failure, to be persistent, and to make wise, spiritually healthy choices about the "great things" that we pursue.