Well That Did Not Go To Plan...
It is Thursday evening (start of the weekend in the Middle East) and I find myself sat here at a loss. Tomorrow should be the 3rd Dukhan Triathlon with the longest event, in which I intended to participate, being an olympic distance race (1500m sea swim, 40km bike and a 10km run). Over the past six months myself and a few colleagues have been training up to 5 times a week, with blood, lots of sweat, and a few tears along the way, and working up through the previous super-sprint and sprint distance races in the aim of taking part in this 'biggie'. But then the weather had other ideas.....
Screenshot of Windguru.com - 6.6mm is a LOT of water!
Now, although not a preference, I do not mind swimming in choppy water or running and cycling in wet/windy weather, but the race has had to be postponed due to the accompanying thundery weather. The event will now take place in May but, due to the heat at that time of year will only be a sprint distance race (750m swim, 20km bike and 5km run), and I have done two of those already. My aim of emulating the Brownlee brothers will have to now wait until next year. :(
While I can do nothing about this, the turn of events has got me thinking about approaches that we take in school with regards to unexpected and disappointing outcomes. How do we prepare students for these? How can we help them learn to overcome negatives and even find benefits in them? These are important skills as some of the most successful people have created the product that they are known for. Off the top of my head a few examples of this are:
- Alexander Flemming through not ensuring he used a clean petri dish discovered penicillin;
- Richard Branson set up Virgin Records after a postal strike threatened to derail his mail order enterprise;
- Ernest Shackleton is more famous for saving the lives of his crew and leading them across antarctica dragging boats with them than his more successful expeditions;
- Roy Chadwick created the Lancaster Bomber from the dangerously unreliable Manchester;
- Mrs Beaton only wrote her seminal cookbook as a way to help her husband's struggling publishing company.
- Post-Its were not a planned product...
Tara Haelle in her article on http://www.npr.org argues that to help pupils succeed in dealing with failure and to move on from it, the skills required comes from the support at home. She does warn though that it is difficult - The challenge for parents is to support children without setting them up for failure. If this is so, how can we help the parents to learn these skills?
TeachHub.com suggests several strategies we can use in the classroom to help our students develop these skills, including avoiding making perfection an assessed part of a successful project, letting pupils see us fail (I do that many times every single day!) and teaching that sometimes success comes from serendipity rather than planning. While I like a lot of these suggestions, to be effective many of them do seem to be skills and techniques that would have to be used consistently throughout a school to be fully utilised by the students. Which means teaching staff to have the confidence to use these themselves.
Personally I will investigate some of these ideas further, keep the ones I like and discarding the ones I don't. I will also be down the beach with a friend next weekend and we will swim/cycle/run the olympic triathlon distances because 'we have trained for it so we are bloody well going to do it!' (Her words not mine). And in May I/we will turn up to the postponed race and try and better our previous sprint distance times (1 hour 14 minutes if you are interested). C'est La Vie.
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