Navigating Challenge
How Difficulty + Learning Go Hand-in-Hand.
I’ve been thinking a lot about learning and making mistakes. Maybe it was watching the 8th grade in The Little Mermaid? There is a girl who makes a seemingly big mistake, but also rights the wrong and saves the day. I keep thinking about how our children crave independence and how incredibly scary that is for us as parents. Teaching a child to ride a bike comes to mind. We try everything to ensure success – tricycles, balance bikes, training wheels – we even hold on and run alongside them just in case they take a tumble. In the end, if we want them to learn, we have to be prepared for them to get some bumps and bruises. This is true with all learning.
“Storm, norm, perform.” This is a team-building philosophy, but I think it can also apply to growing. Something happens that unsettles us and we are forced to change. That change becomes our new norm and then things get better. This happens in schools all the time. A student has trouble on a math assessment, help is given, supports are put in place, and then they do better. Friendships are like this, especially in the younger years as they learn to play together. Teachers and counselors spend lots of time talking through what happened at recess. Buddy benches, Fort Councils, and sometimes outlawed games are all methods to help students navigate the delicacies that come with relationships. The truth is, whether riding a bike, learning in school, navigating friendships, and like with so many other things, we can’t really protect our children from everything. All growing requires some bumps along the way.
It is so important that we embrace the difficulty. We must, as is the GUS tradition, value learning from mistakes, encourage students to try again and maybe even again, and to sometimes let them stumble. There is as much to learn, if not more, from failure as there is from success. At Back-to-School Nights, I always joke that ‘this is going to be a bumpy ride,’ but there is truth in my joking. Growing up is not easy. It’s not something young people can cruise through. As my dad used to say when he taught us to ski, “if you don’t fall down, you aren’t really trying.” I definitely want my children (and yours) to go after life with that kind of abandon, but I also don’t want them to get hurt. Finding that balance is truly the key to our children’s success. We just need to hold on through the difficult moments and learn to “trust and go forward.”
On trips, I always like to say “bad weather, better bonding” which I really do believe is true. It’s easy in the sunshine, but there is something about rainy days that pull the kids together closer. It’s like weathering the storm together makes the knot that binds them tighter. Together, home and school can work together to see the strength that comes from the difficulty, to hold our students through the hard moments, and celebrate them when they come out the other side. It may hurt. It may not feel great, but what may be could be even better. Look at Taylor Swift, she has made the rainy shows a badge of honor!
As a school, we have had our share of bumps and rainy days, and we have also grown from it. While I know we are all tired of hearing about the pandemic, that time definitely taught us a lot, as has our return to normal. We were faced with challenges and choices, a real storm during those days and the days that followed, and now we have realized a new normal. That time of difficulty has proven beneficial in that it helped cement who we are as a school. We learned what we can and can’t do without, and we know who we are and who we want to be. As we begin to dream about the GUS of the future, we’re exactly where we need to be.
While I’d rather avoid difficulty, much like I wish my daughters never fell when riding a bike or that I could forever shield their hearts from pain, and wish no child ever felt discouraged when they looked at a math problem or contemplated a writing assignment, I know all these things lead us where we need to go. Each difficulty has something to teach and shapes us into a newer, better version of ourselves. It’s true for our children. It’s true for us as parents. It’s even true for GUS.