Isabella Yan || ARTS EDITOR
As a student, I’ve heard the phrase, “It’s OK to make mistakes” all too often in the classroom. Within education, failure is advocated as a stepping stone for learning and succeeding as a student. Failure allows you to target your weaknesses and teaches the resilience and determination necessary in the process of success. It’s essential to be able to embrace failure, especially in the broader context of tackling the hardships faced in life after graduation. It certainly is a true, well-intentioned, and encouraging phrase, but I struggle to believe it in its entirety.
It feels like everything is at high stakes. Good grades equate to a good college, which equates to a decent and stable life. If you mess up a single step along that road, your life will be doomed—or so it seems. While that is often far from reality, it’s hard for many students to see anything beyond that scope of vision as practical. As such, there’s a hyper-fixation on transcripts and the lovely combination of numbers and letters they provide to auction your potential as a student to colleges.
“I don’t want to be penalized for making these mistakes, which puts a limit on my willingness to mess anything up,” said junior Sofia Fahkiri. When that is the environment that has been created, is it truly OK to make mistakes when every mistake is graded? As Fahkiri added, “It puts a pressure on students to always be perfect.”
The bar for failure has been set incredibly high and disappointment comes easily. Many students recognize any grades below an A-minus or B-plus as failure. “I’ve had tears. I’ve had breakdowns,” said chemistry teacher Sarah Fisher, referring to the reactions she has witnessed from students who received upsetting grades.
Often, the prospect of failure and the disappointment that it brings is so daunting that we would rather not try at all to step outside of our comfort zone. During class discussions, Fahkiri explained, “A lot of students are…scared to make mistakes so they’d rather not participate at all.”
This looming pressure to avoid failure has exhausted much of the joy in learning. It feels as though the question why do we learn? has been responded to wrongly. Of course, we should learn because it will benefit us to be able to apply our knowledge in meaningful ways as adults, but we should also learn because we want to.
The curiosity and hunger to learn are just not the same as they used to be when walking into an elementary school classroom that radiated an overwhelming excitement for knowledge. As high school students, many of us learn only as much as we are given. We do the bare minimum. We don’t learn what’s beyond the textbook because it’s not on the test. We learn as much as we need to do well on the test and can’t be bothered to dig further because that knowledge does not have an immediate purpose.
There’s a sense of satisfaction in overcoming failure, but I often notice that we as students focus so much on the result—the glamorous A-grade we received and how good it will look on college applications—that we fail to acknowledge the process it took to get there. As Fisher said, “[Students] get to that point and they’re like, okay, I did it. I got an A, moving on. It’s like, no, stop and smell the roses.”
So, are students really prepared to embrace failure in the real world? Last year I listened to a speaker, psychologist Jenny Wang who specializes in clinical psychology and mental health. Wang spoke at Phillips Academy, a school that is much more academically focused than AHS, and shared that many students who enter top institutions after high school often struggle when confronted with failure. Simple things like getting rejected from a job seem to gauge and destroy self-worth when you have been continuously shooting for and attaining perfection.
Whether it is failing at a recipe, failing at a relationship, failing at a business venture, or failing to meet a personal goal—we will continue to be met by failure after graduation. For good reason, educators will continue to preach that ‘it’s OK to make mistakes,’ but when students struggle to handle receiving a B grade, it raises a larger issue about our educational system as a whole.
We’ve created an environment that treats failure as something that is catastrophic rather than instructional. In the pursuit of fostering the highest academically achieving and the most career-ready kids, we’re failing to teach students the most important lesson to success: that in the journey to get there, they will always be met by defeat.
