regardingjohn

Falling Over

I believe we are failing in teaching our students how to fail. We learn quite effectively through failure. When we remove failure from learning, we have to rely on other ways to get lessons across. Here’s one way we teach failure at camp.

One of the first things we let campers learn at Flying Moose Lodge, is how to rescue a canoe (we call it “airplaning” but it’s the standard T-rescue). Why?

• the biggest fear in new paddlers is flipping
• in order to be rescued, they have to flip
• it’s fun and safe when supervised
• in purposefully flipping, they get familiar with the stability of the canoe and subconsciously develop “canoe legs”
• it takes away much of the fear of flipping, simply by making it a “known” entity (“it’s no big deal, I’ve done it before, there’s nothing to fear because I’ve practiced and know how to rescue/be rescued”)

Essentially they’re learning how to fail, how to have fun with failure, how to pick themselves up after failing,  and that failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes they learn this particular skill (flipping) so well, and have so much fun with it that they flip at times we don’t want them to (at end of game, before meals, when we’re trying to move to the next thing), but all in all, I’d suggest that this out-weighs not learning how to flip. You can see the difference between someone who is comfortable in a canoe and one who isn’t. If you’re not, you flinch and stiffen at every wobble — and stiffening makes the canoe less stable, which in turn makes you stiffen more. It’s a downward spiral that often leads to a panicked flip (which only reinforces the “badness” and scariness of flipping, and makes you less comfortable in a canoe).