Earlier this week, Johnathan and I were talking about the importance of students being met at their growth edges, experiencing challenges, failing, overcoming obstacles (i.e., learning how to struggle). This idea of struggle has been popping up lately in other conversations as well, so I’ve been reflecting upon how we learn to struggle productively.
Several years ago, while living in East Lansing, I joined an all women’s Dragon Boat team. I had never rowed or had much experience with boats, but when this invitation arose, it felt like a great opportunity to try something new, make new friends, be outdoors, develop some new physical skills, and work with others as a team toward a common goal. Through splashes, banging paddles, and a lot of practice and feedback, I learned how to row in synch with my teammates, and we won second place in our competition that season. However, as a child, my attitude toward learning a new sport and being part of a team was quite different.
During my elementary school years, many of my friends were athletic. They swam on our neighborhood swim team or played soccer and softball with our local leagues, but when I tried my hand at team sports, I felt like a failure. I was afraid of the ball in softball, so I would close my eyes when it came toward me, and according to stories my father tells, I got upset during soccer games when my teammates wouldn’t pass the ball to me. My softball and soccer games usually ended with me crying in the car the whole way home. “If this makes you so upset, Carrie, you should just quit,” my parents would advise. And so I did.
My early experiences with team sports reinforced a response to adversity that I had to unlearn as I grew older: if something is challenging, then just quit. In my later years, I had to learn how to not give up in the face of a challenge. I had to learn that, at the outset of learning a new skill or concept, I won’t be good at it. And through my experiences as a yoga practitioner, performer, writer, and educator, I have realized that, with deliberate practice, I can get better at something if I am willing and able to endure the necessary productive struggle.
(Granted, sometimes, “quitting” is absolutely the best and healthiest decision. When it comes to quitting, context matters. As Annie Duke explains in her interview “The Science of Quitting” with Maya Shankar on the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, “[…] from a narrative standpoint, we’d prefer somebody push past the point of sensibility and persevere and actually perish to somebody who rightly quits early.”)
As a child, when I chose to quit softball and soccer, I was robbing myself of the opportunity for productive struggle, which would have also inevitably involved failure.
Failure is taboo in our society. Talking about our failures inevitably elicits sympathy or reassurance. Failure is interpreted as a weakness; it’s something we aimed to achieve and didn’t, or worse, couldn’t. At the same time, extremely successful people always refer to how frequently they failed while working toward their goals.
Perhaps it’s only socially acceptable to talk about failure once you’ve reached your goal, in moments when you’re enveloped in praise and accolades, receiving your medal or giving your speech. Then, as if to reassure those you know are striving and failing just like you had, you pronounce that you had to fail a lot to get to where you are today. Only then is failure seen as an inevitable part of growth.
When a child is learning to walk and they fall down hundreds of times, we view this as a natural part of the process, but somewhere not too far down the road of life, that child learns that their failures should be hidden, kept secret, because no one wants to hear about those. It’s success that matters. The less you struggle, or even seem to struggle, the better.
As educators, we can create learning environments where learners can take safe risks (within bounds), try new things, fail openly, and try again. Learning involves encountering and overcoming obstacles, facing fears, and reflecting upon how we grew as a result of an experience or project. I can understand why my parents encouraged me to quit – they didn’t want me to be miserable. But to this day, I wonder how my life’s path may have been different if I had learned, much earlier on, how to not be good at something for a while.