Fear and Terror and Failure

These days, does it seem like everyone is scared of everything?  There's always something to be terrified of. I mean, sure, everyone has their little fears, like public speaking, or spiders....you know.

But I'm not talking about that.  I'm talking being really, truly terrified of something.  Although they would never admit it, people are terrified of flying, or being blown up or shot...really anywhere now.

And Schools are terrified that students might think for themselves.  No, they won't admit it.  They might not even consciously know it.  But it's true.  It's just the system we have been raised in.

We all have little fears and big terrors.  But what happens when we confront them?  Better question, what happens when we DON'T?

I have found that my students do not even consciously recognize their fears.  I mean, yes, they are teenagers, filled with all the bravado that that entails.  But they don't even know how to think about their fears and how they might go about confronting them.  Among these huge terrors is that of failure.

Ok, so failures.  Justin has been thinking about Rites Of Passage all this week.  To me, one of the big Rites Of Passage is how you handle your first major failure without someone to handle it for you.  Often, up through high school, Mommy, Daddy, and Your Teachers deal with a student's failure for them.  No one teaches them to learn from it.  No one discusses with them how they might go about not having this happen again.  Our culture is full of messages that mistakes are bad and horrible and no competent, good person ever, EVER makes them.  So our students are scared of them and won't take risks in their learning, for fear that they MAY make a mistake.

The great Roman orator Cicero is famously quoted as saying: "Anyone can make a mistake.  Only a fool keeps making the same one."  How do we teach students that making mistakes is alright, as long as they learn from them?  How do we model learning from our own mistakes and failures?  What can we do to encourage learning from mistakes and failures?