Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review July 7, 2003 / 7 Tamuz 5763

Steve Young

Steve Young
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
James Glassman
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports


The failure of our schools stems from our schools' failure to understand the value of failure: Profiting From an Ignored Resource Saves Money And Kids


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Vouchers? School choice? Get rid of the unions? Strengthen the unions? Leave no child behind? Seems like today's reform efforts are more about leaving everything behind, including many of the children. It's the throw out the dishes with dishwater approach. Problem is, the new dishes are unaffordable and they soon will get dirty.

This week, in announcing new dishes ($7,500 vouchers per eligible student to use as they see fit, for public or private schools) for Washington's schools, President Bush said, "The District of Columbia is setting a bright example of what is possible in education reform. I'm here to praise the elected officials of Washington, D.C., for your willingness to step out and to confront failure when you see it and to praise success when you see it, as well."

Confront failure? It's like failure is a bad thing, and actually, there seems plenty to substantiate it. Take a look at how the fine folks at Merriam-Webster define it:

'fail-ure': 1. the state or fact of being lacking or insufficient 2. a losing of power or strength; weakening, dying away. 3. not doing; neglect or omission. 4. not succeeding in doing or becoming. 5. person who does not succeed.

It's hard to deny it's validity. In baseball, if someone strikes out with the bases loaded, we boo. In show biz, if a person's stage performance is poor, we pan it. In school if a student takes a test and gets 40 correct out of 100 questions, they receive a failing grade.

40 out of 100. That's close to 40%. Of course it should be failing. 40 % stinks. Webster's knows what it's talking about, right?

But what about the Major League baseball player who gets 40 hits every 100 times he bats. What is he, besides nonexistent? That hypothetical .400 hitter would be one of the best-- if not the-- best baseball player of all time. Not much of a failure, huh?

Merriam-Webster must be wrong. Perhaps. What about the scientist whose research takes him through countless experiments to finally bring him to his finding? Were all his unsuccessful trials along the way failures? Would Merriam-Webster call them failures? By definition, yes. Now does Merriam-Webster have it straight? Perhaps not. This is the crux of the problem and if my hypothesis is correct there also sits the solution.

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity"

--Albert Einstein

Sen. Christopher Dodd, the senior Democrat on the Senate Children and Families' Subcommittee said of the Act to Leave No Child Behind, "This measure ensures that infrastructure isn't neglected by injecting critically important new resources into initiatives that we know work..."

"Important new resources." What about an old resource? What about a resource that for far too long has been ignored? What about a resource that we've long ago bought and paid for that we've never given a chance and still sits waiting to be capitalized on without additional... capital? What about failure?

Donate to JWR

Failure has been assigned so negative a value that it has appeared to have no value at all. But what if we allowed ourselves to think out of the box. To judge failure not for what it doesn't include have but what it does. To look at what the student knows, not what he doesn't.

When a child takes a test and scores a 40 out of a possible 100, you can pretty well assume he has failed that test, and rightly so. The student gets an "F" for his efforts (or non-effort). In most cases, that's where it ends. The "F"stands, the student falls. If a teacher is concerned (and has the time...ha!), more likely than not she'll attempt to teach that student the other 60%; the 60% the student did not know. How? By re-teaching what did not sink in the first time around. This approach may be heroic, but not very efficient. In most cases, with a student who didn't get it the first time around, unless he just had a bad day, there's no sense thinking that he would do much better trying to learn the same things a second time. That student falls further and further behind. The teacher knows it, and worse, the damaged student does too. So he sits in the back of the room. It's where both his grades and his passion meet. At a crucial time of trying, he was quickly smacked down by his lack of...everything. There was nothing in school that he had any interest in. And if he had any, there was nothing he could do well. So he sits in the back. Far from the teacher. Even farther from education. A failure.

"It is often the failure who is the pioneer of new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression."

--Eric Hoffer

How do we repair the student? How do we prepare the student for when the teacher will appear? Perhaps instead of starting with what the student had wrong, why not start with what he had right. I'm not speaking about false praise or kudos where none belong. I'm talking about the information he can get a grasp of. In the best scenario, what the student does know and begin the building there.

Creators court mistakes as part of their creative process. They learn that a drip of paint on their canvas, a wrong chip in the marble, even a mistake in an otherwise well-planned experiment can lead to a major breakthrough. When a mistake show up most people despair. But the creator seizes the mistake as a way to break out. Seizing upon the mistake, the mind suddenly bursts into the open and takes a new route toward vision. This approach is very different than the one taken by our education system which punishes mistakes and marks them wrong. This may well be one reason that creators as a group don't do well in school.

--John Briggs, Fire In The Crucible

It's not like any teacher can spend one-on-one time trying to shove the information down the student's throat. Even then, he'd been spitting most of it right back out. This situation calls for finding out what the kid knows or does well, even if it's what others consider his failures. Even if it's telling jokes, making spit-balls, or even, being angry.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

--A. A. Milne

How can seemingly obvious wastes of time be used as teaching tools? Most important in any teaching proposition is the establishment of a proper place to start. In failure, there is actually a place of knowledge, a place of comfort, and therefore a viable learning tool. The objective is not perfection. The intention is only to get the heart AND the brain moving; to have the student use his imagination on something he understands. Any similarity here to any academic thesis is purely coincidental, but it's amazing how more effectively we think when it's about something we're familiar with. The student's effort doesn't have to be flawless, it only has to be.

Some recipes are filled with bizarre ingredients. It's up to you to whip them up into something scrumptious.

--Anonymous Chef

Of course there is cost. I propose the expenditure of sixty minutes a week. While having teachers work with each student on some individual and separate curriculum seems like an time-implausible task, but it can be done. We don't have to spend hours on this, just enough to give the kids a start, a bit of impetus.

Once a week set aside an hour in which the students work on a project of their own making. The concept should be theirs alone. The teacher spends five-minutes with each student making sure to remind the students of their original visions. The teachers should suggest educational directions...writing, art, etc, but nothing grammatical or structural. That's for another class, another time. The idea is not to judge, not to stifle; not to kill the freedom and energy that creativity breeds.

In most cases our educational process makes an effort to teach the same thing to every individual student, using the same techniques expecting the same result. What happens is that some will excel, some will just pass and some will fail. With each student' individual experience and level of expertise, how in the world would you expect any diverse group of children to learn on an equal level. Everything being equal, a sedan will not run its course as quickly as a sports car. Let's not blow the engines of so many wonderful kids. The repair costs are enormous.

So, President Bush, Secretary Paige, before educational budgets are cut, public school systems are decimated and new expenditures are spent, please don't ignore the power of failure. And isn't it about time Merriam-Webster add to its definition of failure: A stepping stone to success.



JWR contributor Steve Young, Prism Award winner and Humanitas Prize nominee for his television writing, is contributing editor at the Writers Guild of America's "Written By" magazine. He is the author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful: Mistakes, Adversity, Failure and Other Stepping Stones to Success," "The 130 Tales of Winchell Mink," Harper Collins (Winter, 2003) and the director/writer of "My Dinner With Ovitz." His website is www.greatfailure.com. Comment by clicking here.

06/23/03: AN OPEN LETTER TO AL GORE: I Pledge To Be A Great Liberal Talk Show Host
06/17/03: THE CLASS OF '03 MUST BE WILLING TO FAIL: An Unauthorized Commencement Speech
06/12/03: A lib's (maybe) last love letter to Sean Hannity
06/02/03: I WANT TO BE SEAN HANNITY
05/27/03: No popcorn refills? What's next, no stealing Sweet & Low?
05/19/03: Measuring failure of character is an uneven science: Failure May In Fact Be A+
05/16/03: Liar, liar, American Idol's on fire?
04/16/03: TAKE ME OUT OF THE BALL GAME: Politics pitched at national pastime and baseball strikes out
04/11/03: Goodbye Shecky Al-Sahaf, We Hardly Knew Ye
04/04/03: An open letter to the right...and left
03/25/03: Should we be funny during war?
03/19/03: The 2003 Academy aWARds
03/04/03: Energy shortage vs energy profit: A Political Primer
02/28/03: Celebrities for war
02/20/03: So you want to be a liberal talk show host
02/18/03: The Sting, Part II: Osama turns himself in
02/10/03: Michael Jackson threat level raised to "orange"
02/07/03: LET'S GET RID OF SADDAM --- ON EBAY!
01/23/03: Can we really blame HBO for terrorism?
01/09/03: You can buy your very own family...on eBay
01/02/03: A look back at a sorry but pretty funny year
12/30/02: Using 2002’s failures to make a successful 2003
12/20/02: McCartney Credit Reverse Sets A Dangerous Precedent
12/18/02: Radio talk takes a surprise hit
12/16/02: Apologies running rampant: The country is in a sorry state
12/13/02: Lott apologizes for his apologies
12/09/02: FDA OKAYS "SOLARIS" FOR TREATMENT OF SLEEP APNEA
11/26/02: Finding the McTunity within their McFailure
11/15/02: Can the Dems learn from Lincoln's failures?
11/06/02: The Day After... who'll comfort me now?
11/04/02: We can all fight ageism!
10/29/02: Was I totally responsible for the market's upsurge?
10/09/02: Finding The Bull Within: Wall Street Needs To Rethink The "F" Word
10/01/02: Merriam-Webster Needs To Rethink the "F" word
09/25/02: Held up in the passing lane ... and life's other positive curve balls
09/23/02: Shrinking the waist problem: Using Good Old American Failure To Lose Inches
09/17/02: Earth to Florida: No more elections
09/11/02: The humor will return. Just not yet
09/09/02: Bush coalition on fast track
08/30/02: N'Sync's Bass gets NASA okay: Former astronauts Gagarin and Glenn form boy band
08/21/02: Insider trading...it's a good thing
08/05/02: America goes Madison Ave.: The Selling of America
07/29/02: ROCKIN' RENO: The Newest Political Strategy For Filling The Coffers
07/23/02: Is Wall Street the enemy? No, but that's where the enemy hides
07/10/02: Cooking the books
06/27/02: Apocalypse now!?
06/14/02: Coulter for the defense?
05/21/02: SUICIDE BOMBER KILLS SELF! NO ONE ELSE INJURED! Inept bomber is refused entrance into Paradise. 72 Virgins breathe sigh of relief
05/19/02: Hey world! How about trying the shoe on the other foot hypotheses
05/13/02: AM Radio and Enron
05/03/02: "Deep Throat" to Be Revealed ... But will America Swallow It!?
04/29/02: Britney Spears next in line to blast off into orbit
04/22/02: Former Liberal Seeks Conservative Book Deal
04/15/02: If you truly care about America, you'll read this column
04/01/02: My Uncle Miltie
03/27/02: The Fightin' Righties
03/20/02: Woody Allen refuses to cast self...
03/18/02: The Realies
02/19/02: Greenspan Announces Lower (Television Network) Interest Rates
02/15/02: Ken Lay sells soul to the devil: Beelzebub loses life's savings
02/12/02: Enron's Skilling mistakenly takes the Fourth, forcing him to spill his guts
02/06/02: BOOSTING THE SAGGING ECONOMY: Let Green Stamps be our financial brassiere
01/24/02: "I'M THE ONE!"
01/16/02: Goodbye "Rincoln Continental," we hardry knew ye
01/14/02: "But He Was Such A Good Boy" gene, found to be defective
01/04/02: PLAY BUZKASHI!
12/31/01: Come on war. You can do better!
12/26/01: NOT MY OSAMA!
12/24/01: TIME caves
12/20/01: Finally! Friends of Color
12/14/01: Bin Laden's Funniest Home Videos
12/10/01: What if Catching bin Laden is in dispute?
11/30/01: Back to normal...too bad
11/16/01: Osama not enough for some
11/09/01: Networks at war!
11/05/01: Bridges Over Troubled Water
10/29/01: The other terrorists
10/16/01: Diary Of A Young Defense Department Comedy Writer
10/01/01: Playlands, burgers, and family sanity
09/25/01: Dissent is walking on red, white and blue egg shells
09/21/01: OPEN LETTER THE MOST HIGH (RE: Falwell and Robertson comments)
09/17/01: Gary, we miss ya
09/10/01: Smelling out a real hero
09/04/01: Don't give up on that dream!
08/24/01: Pitch day at the Mouse
08/21/01: It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Unlimited" Is
08/06/01: IN OPEN LETTER FROM THE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS AND TALK SHOWS OF AMERICA

Up

© 2002, Steve Young