“If you’re always right, you’re not learning.
If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching.
The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed.
But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential.” ~ James Clear
I’ve written about this as it relates to school a number of times… but I like this slant of ‘undershooting potential’. Our school system is filled with smart students who know exactly what to do to get ‘A’s. They jump the provided hoops, they strive for the 95%, rather than 88, or 90. They complain to the teacher about the 96% because they want 98. They know how to play the marks game, and yet they are nowhere near their potential.
No, I’m not saying that their potential is actually 100%… I’m saying the entire system allows them to underperform. They do a dance to earn an extra 2-3%, they read and re-read the criteria to make sure they hit all the targets, they spend an extra hour editing their work. But that work is nowhere near their potential. They are doing work that shows their answer is right. They are proving they can succeed at the task. They are winning at the good marks game, but they are undershooting their potential.
They are answering the same questions as their peers, they aren’t developing their own questions.
They are responding to questions that have a clear and definitive answer, they aren’t trying to solve complex problems with no clear answer.
They are following textbook experiments with pre-defined procedures which have been replicated thousands of times with the same results, they aren’t testing their own unknown variables.
They aren’t trying something epic and failing. Back in 2009, in a post called, Chasing the ‘A’, I quoted Bud Hunt,
“In no way am I suggesting getting good grades is a bad thing; that would be foolish. Getting good grades is not the problem. Allowing grades to dictate one’s life is.
Grades don’t guarantee success.
Passion + Determination + Positive Attitude = Success
I’ll give you an A if you transform the world.”
When you chase marks, good marks are the goal. Many students can play that game without really hitting their potential. The problem isn’t wanting good grades, these are still needed to pursue future dreams. The problem is a system where students always succeed without knowing what their potential is. I’ve said before that this is an injustice:
Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?”
The pursuit of an extra couple percent on a cookie-cutter assignment with uniform cookie-shaped answers is a system designed to allow students to undershoot their potential.
Students need to design their own learning challenges, and learn to fail and to overcome those failures along the way.
