Celebration of Failure

If we didn’t learn from failure and just gave up when we failed, no one would be walking. It takes a lot of falling down before one futures out how to stay upright. In those situations, the failures are small and are low pressure. It is not a person trying to take their first steps in a crowded gym as the center of attention. We have often said that school is the junior varsity level of life. You are not yet in the bright lights with a big Friday night crowd. It is Thursday afternoon in front of parents, who mostly are there to cheer for their kids. It is that lower pressure, productive failure that makes us better the next time around. It seems that failure was never anything to fear until a person goes to school. Once we are at school, one learns early on that if you don’t succeed, others may laugh at you or say something mean. After enough of that kind of response, no wonder kids are hesitant to volunteer or to put their whole selves into their work. What if they try their hardest and others don’t appreciate it? Rosamund and Ben Zander encourage people to participate fully by plugging into “‘the electric socket for possibility, the access to the energy of transformation’…by finding the tempo and lean our bodies to the music; dare to let go of the edges of ourselves…participate” (Zander & Zander 121)! 

Ultimately, we are looking for our students to outlearn not only those in the school, but around the world. To do that, they need to become dynamic learners who are willing to fail in order to learn (Staats 228). Celebration of failure appears in almost every discussion or explanation of success. The difference between those who end up being successful seems to revolve around reflection and asking questions. It does take courage of sorts to continue after failure, but sometimes there is no choice. The difference between laterally bouncing from one failure to the next is taking the time to stop and think about what happened and why. Possibly the failure was due to focusing on the wrong strength, the wrong details or ignoring an important detail.

Staats, Bradley R. Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive. Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.

Zander, Rosamund Stone, and Ben Zander. The Art of Possibility. Penguin Books, 2002.

Attributes for Success

 In his book Work Rules!, Lazlo Bock identifies four attributes that Google uses to identify strong candidates. First is general cognitive ability, which works for them because their business involves solving specific difficult problems. The second is leadership, more specifically emergent leadership where a person leads when their skills are needed by the group. That is a quality Arete could use in interviewing future students, or math teachers. The third is "Googleyness," which is a combination of willingness to have fun, be humble and conscientious. This would translate well into Arete almost directly. The fourth attribute is Role-Related Knowledge where they check that the person can actually do the job they are applying for. They believe that anyone who is curious and open to learning will figure out the right answers most of the time. We have found that curiosity may be the most important attribute of successful Arete students, along with leadership, teamwork and work ethic, but that may be related to curiosity. Despite us looking for the same type of people, Bock does not mention most of the qualities we associate with successful students in our program. I wonder if those are implicit Googleyness, or if they feel they can develop those qualities. 

Learning is Natural Law

Over the course of history and in different cultures, education has taken many different forms. In the thousands of years people have been going to school, no one has created the "perfect" way of teaching others. According to Yuval Noah Harari, "corporations are fictional stories created by human beings. Microsoft isn't the buildings it owns, the people it employs or the shareholders it serves--rather, it is an intricate legal fiction woven by lawmakers and lawyers. (W)e treat corporations as if they are real entities in the world like tigers or humans" (Harari 2018, 246). School, like business, is a creation of humans and can be changed to fit our needs. It is not natural law. We have come to accept the "rules'' of school i.e. sitting in desks, listening to lectures, taking notes, taking tests, and receiving grades are all part of the "rules." The word "learning" has come to be the equivalent of "school." As in the frequent student answer answer to the question: "Do you love learning?" is answered with "No, I don't like school."

Learning is natural law. Everything with a brain learns throughout their lives. Only humans go to "school."

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Five Minutes of Excellence

Instead of "Think Big. Do Something Awesome! Change the World," Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies disagrees. He wants people to focus on the small. Do something super cool by the end of the day...excellence is the next five minutes...Make the next five minutes rock" (Ferris 2018, 228)! The idea that we have been focusing on the big picture for years and have been somewhat disappointed with the outcome may be a result of putting too much emphasis on the future. Possibly focusing on the small, the next minute or five and putting together a series of five minute wins is the most accessible way to feel successful.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin      Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Experiential Flux Capacitor

Through either being ridiculed themselves or seeing others in that situation, people above  elementary school age  become adverse to risking being wrong or making a mistake. Avoiding failure is not reducing risk. A different risk emerges. The new risk is one that avoids anything new and then the person misses out on a new experience, or merely an experience. In his book Visible Learning for Teachers,  John Hattie contends that one quality of creating an environment for learning is to make mistakes expected (Hattie 26). This concept is similar to the Trojanball concept of encouraging kids to foul out of basketball games. If one fouls out, they have been playing harder for longer than other players. Usually, players are reprimanded for fouling out or for getting too many fouls. We wanted maximum effort from our players every second they were on the court and it started with everything we did in practice. Every drill, every day either the coaches or the other players themselves pushed their teammates to play hard either through their example or verbally. The difference in the classroom is the lack of actual cheering for others, and that students who are on the team are there because they choose to be. 

Seth Godin believes that one should work with the term “flux” rather than risk since flux means movement. Everything we do involves movement, either forward or backward. Not trying something new is actually moving backward since the gap between where a person is at the start compared to the others widens when one chooses not to undertake an activity that others are doing. 

Godin, Seth. Poke the Box: When was the last time  you did something for the first time?. Do You Zoom?, 2011.

Hattie, John. Visible Learning For Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. Routledge, 2012.

Importance of Asking Questions

"I am smart enough to answer the question, but am I smart enough to ask it?" This question from the book This Will Make You Smarter is supported many times over from the problem solving protocol 5 Why's to Yuval Noah Harari's statement "I would rather ask questions I cannot answer than to have answers I cannot question" (Harari 2018, 216). Again and again, seeking enlightenment, the truth or information is best done through asking questions and seeking the answers. Where does one learn more--from answering a trivia question, or asking why that situation developed in the first place? Whether it is in school, science or life, being able to ask questions is better than being able to answer someone else's questions.

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Pink, Daniel. To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 

2012.

Learning Is Embarrassment

Learning is growth. It brings vitality to life and is one of the reasons childhood is so magical. Kids are constantly learning and if they make a mistake, often it is easily overcome. "Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough," according to author Alain de Botton (Kleon 2014, 197). the embarrassment does not have to be public. It is embarrassing when one learns the actual lyrics to a song, rather than some nonsense that they originally thought it was. After a while, one may forget their previous understanding of it, but the key was not to be satisfied with what was thought to be known. Being open to new experiences and learning is a vital link to growth.

Kleon, Austin. Show Your Work! :10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. Workman, 2014.