Being the Adult

Education, by nature, is a very person-centered profession. As person-centered individuals, we sometimes have difficulty making decisions that affect another person’s life because we see the dozens of shades of gray in each option. Regardless of our consideration, a decision must be made and we move on from it. My mantra of late has been, “someone has to be the adult.”

I am not implying that anyone is being childish.

“Being the adult” means making the hard decisions that risk making someone unhappy. Parents do it on a daily basis because children do not have enough life experiences to keep themselves safe. As educators, we need to understand that sometimes our students do not have enough life experiences to make educationally sound decisions.

Finalizing the schedules for our high school students always brings up the question about whether a student should repeat a failed class or go into a credit recovery program while progressing to the next level. Conventional wisdom says that if you force students to repeat classes you only create dropouts. Such “wisdom” assumes that the students have already disconnected from school and the punishment only communicates that they will never be successful there.

Maybe the students have disconnected from school.

But what lesson are we giving them if we take away the consequences of failure?

If they fail a class in college, they repeat it.

If they fail at a job, they get fired.

Removing consequences in an effort to engage a student only reinforces lower expectations. In the end, we, the educators, scramble to cobble together a plan to meet requirements for graduation because we are too afraid of falling below a mandated completion rate – regardless of how prepared for college or career our students are. We work harder than the students to protect our ranking from public scrutiny.

When I was still in the classroom, I had a poster above the chalkboard at the front of the room reminding my students that it was ok to fail in my classroom because I wanted them to be risk-takers. In my classroom, taking a risk and failing did not change the course of students’ lives; taking a risk and succeeding proved to them they could do much more than they ever imagined. In truth (as most of us find in real-life) my students learned more from those failures than they did from the successes. Very few students failed my class, though many had spectacular failures in my class. In the end, they experienced success and satisfaction.

As educators and as an education system, we can change the stigma of failure into a genuine learning experience. Poor decisions lead to failure and that comes with a consequence. It can also be overcome. I do not advocate that we allow the students to continue without proper support. We must be responsible (the adult) for making certain they understand the situation and the various opportunities available to them. Despite the perception of a somewhat rigid system with credit (unit) requirements and testing requirements for graduation, myriad paths crisscross they system. Finding the right one builds resiliency and an earned sense of accomplishment.

We all know when we have worked hard enough on any accomplishment and when someone else had done the work while we have taken (some/all) of the credit. Why do we think our students are any less self-aware? Navigating the students through the system takes work, but by the time they leave the system, they should feel pride at the work they have done, not just relief that it is over.

Success at getting these challenging students through the system relies on our person-centered nature. In the last ten years, prompted largely by findings from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the three “R’s” have changed to Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. The first two are easy: we know how to design a high-level lesson and connect it to the world in which the students live. Having a positive, professional relationship with a teenager presents a world of challenges, but remembering “positive” and “professional” can guide us through the task.

Failures in life are not the end; just ask Thomas Edison, one of the most famous inventors of all time, it is what you do with the knowledge gained in each failure that matters. We can teach our students how to move beyond failure to success. It is what we learn from each of our students’ failures that matters. It is also what we do with that knowledge. Are we the adult?