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Failing or learning?
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"Our failures do not influence our grades, but our unwillingness to learn from them does." Wayne Cordeiro in his book Leading on Empty
I came across this quote while reading a book that was not about education, but the words resonated with me. I read the sentence over and over, thinking about what it means. I really liked the message it sent and decided it would be good to have posted in my classroom. It would be a good way to help my students to understand that grades do not make the individual, but effort and determination does. I've seen many students give up after that first failed test instead of learning from the failure and focusing on the next assessment.
I learned this my first year as a Biology major. Biology I for majors was a tough course. The professor talked and talked and talked throughout each class and I would write and write and write. I studied for the first exam and felt pretty good about the likelihood of my success. When I received my grade, I had failed the test. At first, I was devastated. Then I decided that was the last F I would receive. I realized that the failure in my case was because I was unfamiliar with the professor's testing style. She would ask a multiple choice question, give four or five possible answers and there might be one, two, three, four, or five answers that would be correct. We were not to choose the best possible answer, we were to choose all correct answers. I had never taken a test like that before, so I, along with most of my classmates, had chosen one answer for each question, which caused us all to fail the test.
I went through the rest of the year earning A's and in a few cases, 100% on that professor's tests. Why? Because I chose to focus on how to do better the next time. I figured out what had caused the failure and took steps to keep those things from happening again. What would have happened if I, like some of my classmates, had let that F define my success in that class?
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