Sunday, July 20, 2008

Failure as a path to success

I'm sorry, I don't understand how you can expect to succeed without experiencing failure. Students must fail from time to time to maintain motivation. Striving for excellence is a lifelong ambition and true excellence is something that's highly unlikely we will reach often.

I'm guilty sometimes of molly coddling my students and I have a great member of staff that says no.. make the test harder.. push them further. The test results come back and they've averaged 25%.. but they know what they needed to learn, we can review the content and give them a second go at it. They can analyse what they could have done better.. We can empower them to self evaluate and re-examine their work and study habits. They can make new connections and realise that resilience is a desirable commodity.

.. and they can feel the exultation of getting something that they thought impossible.

To me that is what learning and mathematics is all about.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hi, thanks for leaving a comment.. it's good to hear what people think!