When Things Get Sticky
A story from Spark Land Vol. 3 from our Assistant Director, Jeni Vash:
Have you ever had an idea of how something was going to go…only to have it turn out nothing like what you had imagined? What did that feel like? At times, it can feel like absolute failure, debilitating and disabling…even embarrassing. Defeat. But there is another pathway here for the taking: opportunity.
The Scientific Method Quest over at Spark Land has a motion lab. In this motion lab, learners can explore Newton’s laws of motion through play, engaging with games, challenges, and races! One of these races caused learners’ eyes to grow wide with anticipation and delight: balloon races. It looked so simple: tie up a string, blow up a balloon, and let it rip! Hahaha, well, as learners soon found out: things aren’t always what they seem.
The first hurdle came with threading yarn through a straw. While this came easy for some, others struggled with the fine motor control in feeding the yarn all the way through without having it fall back out…again, and again. Once the yarn was threaded, it was on to hurdle number two: blowing up the balloon. Wouldn’t you know it, for many learners, this was the first time they were able to blow up a balloon “all by themself.” This level of independence involved Guides getting real up and close with some slobbery blows, pinching balloons off between breaths so learners could avoid getting light-headed while working so hard to blow those balloons up! The pure joy of accomplishment on the learner’s face when the balloon was full was enough to make it worth applying some sanitizer and moving on to the next learner. Although the truly independent attempts came with many accidentally deflated balloons, learners blew their balloons up the second, third, and even fourth times all on their own. The balloon race activity set up continued with hurdles of getting the balloon pointed in the right direction, taping it adequately, getting the release to work swiftly, and not tangling the lines! With all of these struggles, an adult with all their schema of failure might expect learners in an open-choice environment to simply walk away, give up on the experiment, and move along to something easier. But that is not what happened with the learners here at Acton.
Just as some of the learners got the hang of getting the activity set up successfully, they naturally supported the learners who were struggling. The more learners that found success after continued struggle, the more helping hands and words of encouragement grew within the activity. Balloons of all colors began racing down the lines, with shouts of success and laughter and camaraderie in repeated failure. Races became increasingly complex, happening in multiple directions and even across tracks. Learners groaned at the sound of the chimes, signaling the end of Quest time for the day. They wanted to continue to try, knowing failure was a part of the process. It almost seemed as though the acquaintance with failure in the activity made it more motivating, humbling, and overall, more of an achievement. In Quest Launch, learners shared a variety of experiments that had been tricky. Some shared that they had to accept the experiment simply was not going to work out, while others were able to find adjustments that enabled the failure to turn into success. The common sentiment amongst all was that they had learned something and they were able to articulate this learning with great detail, as well as candor.
We can’t expect things in life to work out as perfectly as our dreams, but if we can allow ourselves to experience failure, the more we can learn to be flexible, resilient, to use creativity, observation, and imagination to lead us to opportunities we never even knew were there.
Fail hard, fail often, fail cheaply. If you need some leadership or guidance in this area, turn to the learners. The future is in their sticky little hands.