My daughter’s teacher asked me to help out with a school project, one of the objectives of which is to expose the students to the basic elements of deliberate creativity (before they unlearn everything they know naturally). We started with an exercise about failing. The students were given an easy task but with time pressure. Each time someone failed, we applauded wildly. By the end of the activity, everyone had failed and they all thought it was funny. The bad taste of failure was stripped away, so we could look at it in a new way.
We talked about how in school – often for good reason – failure is something to be avoided. We don’t want to fail our tests; we want to do our best. But that in other situations, failure might not be such an awful outcome, it could even be a positive thing. The consequences of failing could be useful, at the very least we can learn from it. Keep reading »
