This past week at Forest School, things didn't go as planned. Greg has brought an awesome camp stove that he had and his child had made together – an ingenious device made from the ends of two aluminum cans. He'd used it before to cook lunch!
The students were excited to learn about the stove and how it worked. They were especially excited about the hot water they could make into tea, cocoa or soup at the end of the lesson. Greg gathered them around to light it and…nothing. It wouldn't catch.
Together the students brainstormed what could be going wrong. Greg patiently tried various ideas – lighting it in different ways, smearing the can with petroleum jelly, using cotton to keep the stove hot. He did all of this with good humor and cheer, at one point laughing because he couldn't get a match to light anymore. (Somedays everything goes wrong.)
The kids stayed engaged. I took over for a little while as Greg ran down to the Castle Rock store to buy methanol (we'd been using the isopropyl alcohol left over from last year's May Day art project.) That worked a little better. Then the students and Greg huddled around to break the wind…then they built a wind shield with aluminum foil and…WARM WATER!
It took the whole Forest School to problem solve and figure things out. Greg was amazingly cheerful but apologetic — the kids hadn't gotten to cook! But I assured him the lesson turned out to be so much more valuable. The Herons had gotten to see an adult fail, assess, brainstorm, laugh, fail again, puzzle, persevere, harumph, try, try again and…eventually…figure it out. And they were a part of it all.
What a great lesson. So often, children see adults as utterly competent beings who are able to do everything perfectly (or almost perfectly.) They haven't seen our early dinner fails in our first apartments. They haven't seen the skinned knees we had when we first tried to ride a bike. They haven't seen the knitted scarves that were more holes than stitches.
More than learning how to cook, ride or stitch from us, they need to learn how to fail. Tell stories of your struggles as you learned something new – make those a part of your family lore. Better yet, learn something new along side your child – let them see how you handle the discomfort of not getting it…yet. Greg and I hadn't planned an epic fail – but how lucky we were to be able to share it with the Herons.
The Rookery 
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