Why I Don’t Mind Failing

Last weekend I attempted to make ice cream for a book club meet I was hosting. The recipe I was following was from Nigella Lawson and was one that I have successfully made countless times before. For some reason this time it didn’t work with the cream splitting, leaving me with home-made butter and whey that had a distinctly minty orange flavour. Staring failure in the face I made a decision just see what would happen if I froze the whey and use the butter in some other recipes.  This led me to make some orange and mint flavoured scones, orange and mint frozen whey and cartons full of orange and mint caramel popcorn for a friend’s barbecue….

Joshua Morris in a recent tes.com article comments on how we have perhaps become too concerned with success and do not allow our students the option of failing. With the now obsessive culture of school, teacher and student success we are at the stage where everybody is scared to get things wrong. I have recently seen this myself at school where, in an examination, students would rather leave a question blank rather than put an answer that they think will ‘make me look stupid’. I find the situation unfortunate as it means that the students are not willing to take risks and experiment, that is unless they feel that they are doing it in an environment where they will not get caught trying things out.

Throughout my own studies I always felt that some of my best ideas came from when I made mistakes, for example such as playing chords with wrong notes in them or adding in unintentional passing notes to a melody. There were also times when messing about on an instrument allowed me to come up with effects and techniques that I later used in pieces. 

In cooking I have also found that not having the correct ingredients means that I have to improvise with other items which sometimes results in a disaster, but on the whole usually comes up with a meal that is more than edible. 

From reading Morris’ article and from thinking about how my students have been scared to take the risk, I am now looking at rewriting a number of my schemes of work to incorporate elements in which they might fail, but less emphasis is put on the correct answer and more on the process they went through.  I am also thinking about how to strengthen the teaching of the underlying skills and knowledge that will allow the students to recognise where they went 'wrong', how this happened, what they might do differently next time and the confidence to work through these failures.  Hopefully through doing this they might create something more successful, albeit in a manner that they did not originally intend or imagine.  I will also look at using famous musicians as examples of how this has worked, people such as Igor Stravinsky (struggled with writing organic, developmental forms), Bob Dylan (60 years and he still cannot play that harmonica) etc.

Before you ask, whilst a little dry, the orange mint scones were fairly tasty (note to self, the next batch needs more liquid), the frozen orange mint whey actually made for a nice light dessert (which in these present summer temperatures is always welcome), and the orange mint caramel popcorn was a raging success.