In 1932, Beckett wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers, he decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1993). Despite his failure to find a publisher, Beckett used his unpublished work as a source for many of his early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks. Over the summer I chatted with a Country Day student who loves books and managed to read several Harry Potter novels over her vacation.  That made me a little curious about J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter.  Despite being one of the best-selling authors in modern history, 12 publishers, 12, rejected her original manuscript for the first novel in the Harry Potter series.  Imagine if Rowling had given up after the tenth rejection. Neither of these two authors would have achieved the acclaim and success their writing bestowed upon them had they not taken their disappointment and failure and converted it into resilience.

 

As we contemplate creating a new academic schedule that will better meet the needs of our students, the term design thinking has often surfaced.  Design thinking is about creative problem solving.  The process requires “design thinkers” to solve problems by creating models that are tested, critiqued, redesigned, and retested until a breakthrough is discovered.  Failure is an inherent part of the design thinking process.  Absent perfect thinking, ideas when tested, will not always work.  This is a good thing and exactly the kind of experience which promotes meaningful learning as well as develops resilience.  Peter Gow, a veteran independent school teacher, administrator and advocate for design thinking notes that, “When kids see that failure is giving them important information, they don’t give up—they incorporate the information (https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/spring-2012/an-experience-of-yes/)." Teacher and writer, Mark Guay observes, “The classroom can be a tremendously valuable safe place to learn failure (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-w-guay/using-design-thinking-to-_b_5482438.html)."

 

In my previous blog on creativity and imagination I noted that we have become a risk averse culture trying to avoid failure at all cost.  The Miami Herald ran a story in August reporting on the huge and growing demand for counseling on Florida college campuses and the inability of higher education to keep up with the demand (http://fw.to/k2C1fbE).  A 2016 American College Health Association survey found that well over half of students in the previous year reported feeling “overwhelming anxiety” and 37% acknowledged feeling so depressed “it was difficult to function.”  Among the reasons offered by experts for the high levels of anxiety and depression that are sending college students to counseling offices in record numbers is a “lack of resilience.” 

 

These four chance encounters on the importance of failure and resilience got me thinking.  As parents and educators we don’t like to see our children and students fail.  At some point in American society and culture the concept of failure took on a negative pale.  Failure became a bad thing and needed to be avoided at all cost.  When I entered education 38 years ago this was most certainly the case.  Beginning in the 1960s one saw a lot of discussion about self-esteem.  One psychologist even created an inventory for assessing self-esteem.  Naturally, we began worrying about young people’s self-esteem and how as parents and educators we might somehow damage it.  Armed with a superficial understanding of what self-esteem really is parents and educators sometimes came to believe that failure is the archenemy of self-esteem.  We wanted our children to avoid failure and discomfort at all cost.  Truth to tell, as the parent of two young boys in those days I worried myself.  In conversations with parents I often heard the comment, usually in the context of a discussion about grades, “I don’t want to damage my child’s self-esteem.”  In hindsight this aversion to failure did not serve our children well.

 

In life failure is inevitable.  Human growth and development is impossible without resilience and resilience is impossible to develop without the crucible of failure.  It’s encouraging to see that our society is beginning to take a different view of just how important failure is.  It’s not that failing is a good in and of itself.  Rather, how we approach failure and what we do with it is what is important.  In the case of Beckett, he pressed on and used his unpublished writing as the basis for later collections of poems and short stories.  The college student, denied opportunities to fail while growing up lacks the resilience necessary to negotiate the challenges of university life. The problem solver takes the failures inherent in design thinking and converts them into useful information to move them a little, or maybe a lot, closer to finding a creative solution to a problem.

 

When I fail these days I think about the wise Beckett: “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”  I guess sometimes in life to feel better we just have to fail better.  Teaching our children and students to fail better may be one of the most important lessons they learn.  It’s one of the reasons that resilience is part of Miami Country Day School’s, Portrait of a Graduate.

To learn more about Miami Country Day School, please visit www.miamicountryday.org.