Last week, Jessica Lahey, a middle-school teacher,
writer and blogger, gave her three classes of sixth, seventh and eighth graders
tests. Things did not go well. In her blog post, “Things
Fall Apart,” she wrote that the sixth graders were moving “from
regurgitation to interpretation and application.”
The first time we ask a sixth
grader to make that move toward a higher level of thought, they tend to freak
out. And they freaked out. They freaked out on a grand scale. Unfortunately,
that vibe went out into the ether, the seventh and eighth graders followed
suit, and I was left with a pile of tests that looked as if they were bleeding
red ink.
The failures continued as Mrs.
Lahey, who teaches both Latin and English, gave a grammar test — the same test
she’d given for the past four years. It’s a cakewalk of a test, she says, and
the other tests weren’t hard either. In past years the means were high. This
year, they weren’t.
What does a good teacher do when
her students fail?
That’s a question I’ve never
asked. I know what I do when my oldest comes home with a poor test grade
(although he’s only 10, and so our experience in this area is still limited). I
know what I did about a poor grade as a student. I’ve never thought about what
a teacher needs to do when not just one, but many, of her students completely
tank a test they should have passed.
I know Mrs. Lahey is a good
teacher, because two of my kids attend the school where she works (although
neither has been in her class). But if I didn’t, I’d know it from this: “When I
handed the tests back at the end of the week, my students were duly
embarrassed. … I handed out blank tests and, in well-planned-out pairings,
asked the students to re-take the tests as an open book exercise. The pairings
were required not only to find the correct answer, but to explain why all of the
other options were wrong. … In the end, one of the students who had initially
failed said, ‘You know, now that we have gone through every question, this test
really wasn’t that hard.’ ”
In the article “What
If the Secret to Success is Failure?” by Paul Tough, in the Sunday
Magazine’s Education Issue in September, David Levin, the co-founder of the
KIPP network of charter schools, considers which KIPP graduates managed not
just to go to college, but to complete college. “The students who persisted in
college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP;
they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and
persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to
recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back
from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and
stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help
after class.”
Mrs. Lahey didn’t reteach what
she knew she’d already taught. She didn’t change the grades on that test,
either (although she did award points on a curve). She made those students sit
down, figure out what they hadn’t bothered to learn the first time, and then
admit that if they’d tried, they could have done better.
I’m not sure you can teach a
child to learn from failure. Sometimes it seems like I don’t know how to
persuade my kids to “try” at all. But as a teacher, or even as a parent, you
can demand that they step up to that particular plate at least this one time,
on your watch. And you can hope that from that, they take away the knowledge
that maybe something they thought was hard — maybe the material itself, maybe
being tested, or maybe sitting back down to do it again — isn’t really too hard
to do.
Finding a moment to let your kids
fail, and then seeing to it that they figure out what went wrong, and try
again, will be harder.
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