It's a week after New Year. School has started. My girlfriend had to go back too. She teaches. The week past by fine. Then on Friday, something happened that left her thinking, which she told me about. That left me thinking.
Once orientation's done in the first two days or so, lessons start. On Thursday, she was relieving a couple of periods for a teacher who was away for some reason or other. It was math class. After explaining the steps of the new topic and giving out the assignment to the new batch of primary 1 students, two students cried. One after the other. Apparently, they were afraid of making mistakes in their work. And that bothered them enough to cry. Needless to say, she had a lot of reassuring to do. So that was the incident that left us both thinking.
Why are kids afraid to make mistakes? As a child, these are the times to make as many mistakes without shame. It's their learning years. They're entitled to their fair share of mistakes.
Or are they?
This led to a sensitive and controversial question. Are kids being raised to feel ashamed of making mistakes?
And to end the questions: If they're so afraid of making mistakes at their young age, how about when they're older? How will they handle their personal challenges that require some guts be it in career or in relationships?
Mistakes are part and parcel of how we learn and improve. Observing the failures of others also helps better ourselves. To paraphrase a quote I remember reading once, "A smart man learns from his mistakes. A smarter man learns from the mistakes of others."
To conclude this little thought with a personal opinion, kids need their parents' support and assurance that it's perfectly fine to make mistakes. As long as they learn, pick themselves up, dust themselves off, move on and try again, it's alright. In doing so, they learn a lot more than just the lesson of the task. They get additional lessons in determination and letting go. Lessons in dealing with success and failure.
It's how we live.
It's how we grow.
I learnt to cycle that way.
Food for thought,
~K
