Michael Jordan Says It's OK To Fail

I am currently reading Mindset by Carol Dweck. I'll save my overall thoughts on the book for a later post, but a train of thought that started while reading her book fits into this week's theme of sports and school. The basic thesis of Dweck's book is that there are two kinds of people out there, those who believe that our abilities are malleable and therefore work to improve themselves, and those who believe that we're basically stuck with what God gave us and therefore whine and complain a whole lot. I am seriously oversimplifying here, but you get the basic idea.

In her chapter on sports, Dweck runs through a series of athletes who display the "growth mindset," the belief that ability comes as the result of a lot of hard work. She mentions the following Nike commercial featuring Michael Jordan (I love YouTube; you can find anything there).



Her point is that successful people take each failure as a chance to improve, something they know they have to work harder at. For me, this is one of the lessons of sports that is most valuable in the classroom. In sports, you practice. You play a game or a match. You either win or lose, but even when you win, you make mistakes; so you come back to practice, and you work on improving those skills so that next time you do better.

The classroom should function on a similar cycle. You learn new material. You take a test on that material. The vast majority of students will make some mistakes on that test, so you come back in and you work on learning from those mistakes and further expanding your skills.

As a Spanish teacher, one of the biggest impediments to learning in my classroom is the fear of making mistakes, and therefore the fear of speaking at all. I try to get my students to see that it's just like practice, and that if they don't give themselves a chance to fail, they will never learn. If it worked for Michael Jordan, it will work for them.

How to Gain 4 Pounds in 3 Days, and Finish Report Cards at the Same Time

The last few days were spent trying to find a balance between enjoying the holiday weekend and writing narrative reports--know around here as comments--on 66 of my students (22 more are due on Friday).

My wife and I took advantage of the long weekend to drive down to South Carolina to visit a friend from my wife's PhD program and her family. We left DC at about 5:00 on Friday with a couple more friends in the back seat. The traffic wasn't too bad (high gas prices have their upside), and we made it into Greenville at around 2:00 AM. The rest of the weekend was spent eating, and finding things to keep us busy until we got to eat again. Our friend is Indian, and apparently it is part of Indian culture to feed your guests until they explode. Fortunately, her mom is an unbelievably good cook, and every stomach stretching bite was delicious. It was also a great education. Despite my above-average familiarity with the American and British restaurant versions of Indian food, almost every dish was new to me. Eating all kinds of different foods is one of may favorite things about traveling. While this wasn't quite as exciting as actually going to India, it was a pretty good subsititue.

When I could escape from the weekend activities, it was comment-writing time. In independent schools, comments serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they are intended to give feeback to the student on his strengths and weaknesses. They are more descriptive than a simple grade, and therefore ideally more constructive. On the other hand, they are a customer relations tool for communicating with parents. A well-thought-out comment shows parents that you know their child well, and that all the money they spent so that their son or daughter could have small classes and lots of individual attention was worth it. A bonus from the teacher's perspective is that writing comments also give you a chance to stop and think about your own work, and whether you have been getting through to these kids at all over the course of the year.

As important as I know they are, writing comments is one of my least favorite aspects of teaching. They almost always come at the times of year when both you and the students are worn out and are getting really excited about a break. And finding 50 different ways to say either 'keep up the good work,' or 'Johnny would be doing OK in this class if he ever did his homework,' is a mind-numbing chore.

On the other hand, one of our friends who was traveling with us this weekend was telling me about her high school back in Michigan. The way they did report cards was to generate a list of ten possible comments, things like 1: participates in class, 2:does not complete assignments, etc.. The teacher would then just enter the appropriate numbers for the particular student, and be done. It is an efficient system, and would have saved me many hours of work this weekend (hours I could have spent getting a cultural education in Bollywood movies), but I can't help feeling like it robs the students, not only of a thoughtful comment itself, but of the feeling that their teachers are really thinking about them. There is a lot to be gained from knowing that your teachers are really seeing you as an individual.

More on grades, comments and other means of assement on another ocasion, but now it's faculty meeting time.

Does your school do anything especially good or bad when it comes to grades and comments?

Interesting Commentary on Standardized Tests

Assessment and testing is a topic I have been saving until I get a little further along in developing the things I hope my school will teach. But there was an interesting commentary on NPR this morning on the subject of standardized tests.

Without getting into a major discussion of the topic, I generally come down on the "standardized tests are bad because they force teachers to teach test taking skills instead of other things they should be teaching, don't really measure what they say they do, and cost schools a lot of money that could be better put to other uses" side of the argument. The commentator, a former teacher in a Philadelphia charter school and current ed school student, does a good job of discussing her own issues with standardized tests while recognizing the ways in which they are attractive to parents whose children have been so under-served by their school systems in the past. It's a thought provoking piece.