The Rookery

About two weeks ago, I listened to a remembrance of a front line worker who had died of Covid 19.  Yves-Emmanuel Segui was a pharmacist in Yonkers, New York.  Originally certified as a pharmacist in the Ivory Coast, Mr. Sequi had worked very hard to both learn English and pass the pharmacy certification test in the U.S.  His daughter remembered when he first took the certification test and failed.  He took the letter, marked it with a "Number 1" and put it on the refrigerator.  When the second failure letter came, he marked that with a 2 and posted it along with the first. This continued again and again and again until he received "the one where it says, congratulations. You passed."

What struck me as remarkable was the way he displayed his failure publicly.  I think our human nature is the opposite – we tend to tuck away those letters if we save them at all.  But Mr. Segui shared his openly.  His daughter remembered the story vividly, inspired by his tenacious spirit and his determination to help people.  I was struck by this too, but I think it's stuck with me for another reason.

This spring, while we were distance learning, I was desperate to see students fail. When we are in a classroom together, I see all of the micro-steps of learning which necessarily involve failure.  (As they hear all the time, "If you haven't failed, you haven't learned."). But online, they weren't there for me to watch.  I didn't see the failure. I wasn't there to diagnose what was hard and support them with encouragement and more teaching.  Once in a while, a child would come to the zoom room because they were confused but, I think more often, when kids encountered something hard or new they shrugged and… stopped.

My colleagues teaching younger grades shared that they sensed parent anxiety when children were turning things in with incorrect spelling or other errors.  Families were expending a lot of energy getting their kids to perfect before the work got shared back with the teacher.  After all, we are programmed as a society that "doing well" is "getting it right."  It's really hard to not "help" a child by correcting their work.

One of the things I've been thinking a lot about for our distance learning scenario is how to capture failure.  What I need is a virtual refrigerator where kids are posting their fails.  The things that don't make sense.  The things that are hard.  Instead, so many of the tools on-line are geared toward finished products – not the messy middles.

The need to see failure goes beyond the superficial "celebration of failure" – how we fail determines the next steps for learning. One of the things I ask when a student is wrong or stuck is "tell me what you are thinking."  That's how we glean the information we need to chart a course through failure.  If distance learning is to be successful, it must have tools that illuminate what's hard, not just report what is done.

No small task – but one that I think is do-able, especially given the chance to develop our online community together from scratch.  We'll have a chance to determine together that learning online doesn't just mean getting it right – it means figuring out how to learn from what's wrong.