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SPIT-BALLING SUCCESS
(Using Failure As A Learning Tool)
by Steve Young
Y’got a kid sitting in the back of the room. It’s where both his grades and his passion meet. At a crucial time of trying, he was quickly smacked down by his lack of...everything. There was nothing in school that he had any interest in. And if he had any, there was nothing he could do well. So he sits in the back. Far from the teacher. Even further from education.
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
--A. A. Milne
How do you reach this kid? It’s not like any teacher can spend one-on-one time trying to shove the information down the student’s throat. Even then, he’d been spitting most of it right back out.
This situation calls for spit-balling. That is, finding out what the kid knows or does well, even if it’s what others consider his failures. Even if it’s making spit-balls.
How can such an obvious waste of time be used as a teaching tool? Because the failures that came before lead us to the place we are today.
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
--Horace
When a child takes a test and scores a 40 out of a possible 100, you can pretty well assume he has failed that test, and rightly so. The student gets an "F" for his efforts (or non-effort). In most cases, that’s where it ends. The "F"stands, the student falls. If a teacher is concerned (and has the time...ha!), more likely than not she’ll attempt to teach that student the other 60%; the 60% the student did not know. How? By re-teaching what did not sink in the first time around. This approach may be heroic, but not very efficient. In most cases, a student who didn’t get it the first time around, unless he just had a bad day, there’s no sense that he would do much better trying to learn the same things a second time. That student falls further and further behind. The teacher knows it, and worse, the damaged student does too.
It is often the failure who is the pioneer of new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.
--Eric Hoffer
How do we repair the student? How do we prepare the student for when the teacher will appear? Well, instead of starting with what the student had wrong, why not start with what he had right. I’m not speaking about false praise or kudos where none belong. I’m talking about what he can get a grasp of; and in the best scenario, what the student does know and begin building there.
Creators court mistakes as part of their creative process. They learn that a drip of paint on their canvas, a wrong chip in the marble, even a mistake in an otherwise well-planned experiment can lead to a major breakthrough. When a mistake show up most people despair. But the creator seizes the mistake as a way to break out. Seizing upon the mistake, the mind suddenly bursts into the open and takes a new route toward vision. This approach is very different than the one taken by our education system which punishes mistakes and marks them wrong. This may well be one reason that creators as a group don’t do well in school.
--John Briggs, Fire In The Crucible
JUST SPITBALLING HERE
For pure example’s sake, let’s say what the student does best is creating, and then shooting, spitballs into space. Not very academic, huh? It depends how we choose to use those saliva-laden wads of small scraps of crumpled paper. But done right, ladies and gentlemen, we can start something new and wonderful.
TREATISE
Have the student write about how he creates a spitball. Make sure he doesn’t miss a beat. Make him be as specific as possible. Remind him not to forget how much saliva, how much paper and what kind of paper would be best for sticking to blackboards and sundry types of skin and hair that is your target. Don’t worry about grammar here. That comes later. Our objective is to get the pencil, AND the brain, moving. Any similarity here to an academic thesis is purely intentional. It’s amazing how more effectively we think when it’s about something we’re familiar with.
ARTWORK
Now, let’s get to work on the visuals. Draw up the spitball plans, the blueprint for that soggy bad boy. You don’t have to know how to draw well, only be able to put down on paper some semblance of your masterpiece. Seeing on paper what is in your brain let’s you expand on the possibilities. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it only has to be.
CREATIVE WRITING
Here’s where the learnin’ becomes fun. Have the student use his imagination on something he understands. If you create the most unusual, the most powerful or the funniest, or even the most historical, what would it be? How big, how small; how powerful, how superific?
ANIMATE
Give it life, a personality, a voice. How would it sound? How would it act? What could you do with it? What could it do with you?
What is most important in any teaching proposition is to establish the proper place to start. In failure, there is actually a place of knowledge, a place of comfort, and therefore a viable learning tool.
Some recipes are filled with bizarre ingredients. It’s up to you to whip them up into something scrumptious.
–Anonymous Chef
In most cases our educational process makes an effort to teach the same thing to every individual student, using the same techniques expecting the same result. What happens is that some will excel, some will just pass and some will fail. With each student’s individual experience and level of expertise, as Harold Gardner might propose, how in the world would you expect any diverse group of children to learn on an equal level? Everything being equal, a sedan will not run its course as quickly as a sports car. Let’s not blow the engines of so many wonderful kids.
THE 60 MINUTE PROPOSAL
While having teachers work with each student on some individual and separate curriculum seems like a time-implausible task, but it can be done. We don’t have to spend hours on this, just enough to give the kids a start, a bit of momentum.
Once a week set aside an hour in which the students work on a project of their own making. The concept should be theirs alone. Again, spit-balling plays here. The teacher spends five-minutes with each student making sure to remind the students of their original visions. The teachers should suggest educational directions...writing, art, etc, but nothing grammatical or structural. That’s for another class, another time.
The idea is not to judge, not to stifle; not to kill the freedom and energy that creativity breeds.
______________________
In reality, the concept relies on an objective look at failure. Students must learn that it’s okay to fail. Learn that we learn from failure.
It’s also the lemons into lemonade principle. But we must allow the students to create their own lemonade. It may not turn out as "sweet" as what we think it should be, but we’re not aiming for our own gustatorial results. In fact we’re not actually after lemonade at all. We’re after the student’s heart, soul and enthusiasm, that part of the student him that says "I can do it." Let’s teach the kids to take risks in the classroom, not on the streets. Once that’s set in motion, the miracles will happen. Let’s not dampen that gusto. Let’s do what we can to help our youth make their own miracles. | 
