Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Make mistakes now!

Failure is good when you learn from it.

My fear of 'failure' has kept me from being independent. Instead of falling down and learning how to stand back up, I opted to just not fall down alltogether. For many years I thought this made me better than the rest. My self esteem depended on it. Perhaps this is why my self esteem was so shaky all those years.

Now that I'm trying to do my own thing in life, I feel so ill-equipped. I can't remember all the things I thought I learned in grade school and I sound like the uneducated ass I do NOT want to be. Wait, I AM the uneducated ass I do not want to be! I used to learn things with the goal of getting a pretty little letter of praise from the school officials telling my family what a wonderful person I was because my grades were better than the average joe. Whoopiefriggindoodle! Those numbers are so impersonal and meaningless to me now. Now I want to learn for myself. Now I want to learn because I have worthy goals for which to use my knowledge. I am no longer scared of a failing grade. Well, that's a lie. I am still a little averse to that icky letter F. But now I am able to accept that F in all its F'ing glory (hah sorry) and learn from it. I want to create knowledge, not just reuse it!

And another point. My 4.0s and steady stream of gold stars throughout grade school set unrealistic standards and expectations for other students. I think our grading system is so skewed now. The common view is that if our students aren't passing with straight As, then surely our teachers aren't doing a good enough job. So now teachers are pressured to pass out As like free candy. And that is an issue because our standards have lowered.
And the kids who failed all their classes? Complete failures, right? Well it seems as though that's what our education system would have them believe. Their self-esteem is lowered to the point that they literally have no reason to care anymore, and I can't blame them. Once their grades get so low it really can appear pointless to keep trying in a broken system that is not well-adapted to their needs. The systems of our society so violently shove these youths down the ladder and make it exceedingly difficult to climb back up to the top! Or at least society's idea of 'the top.'
But what kills me most is that many of these kids are so much more gifted than many of the golden children with their beautiful 4.0 gpas. These children know what it means to fail, and they figured it out early on in life. Now would it not be beneficial to support these 'failures' and offer them other methods for achieving their goals? And I don't mean, 'hey, sonny there's a community college you can go to. It's your only option since you F'ed up.' There is such a BS social stigma attached to that. Like if you don't spend obscene amounts of money for your 4-year degree then you are clearly not an educated individual or something. Bull. Shit. I sit everyday in my classes with a bunch of blind bats paying obscene amounts of money to sit in classes they hate so they can get a fancy degree and make their parents proud. They aren't learning anything that they enjoy, and they are NOT benefitting our society as a whole. Instead their scholarship money is being wasted when kids paying for community college out of their own wallets could be using it to achieve something worthwhile.

Let's get our heads in the game. Let's enjoy our lives. Let's enjoy learning. And let's do these things for our own selves. I quit playing into the system. I give up. I have some dreams and I want to achieve them. I am going to ask questions in my classes. And I'm not going to dumb myself down so I can feel like I fit in with a group of dweebuses. I'm not a dweebus. I finally learned to have a little respect for myself, and I'm going to exercise my right to take care of myself. YOU ARE INTELLIGENT! YOU ARE WISE! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL! YOU ARE YOU! OWN IT! Feel free to make mistakes. Learn from those mistakes. And then go kick some life ass with those learned lessons.

2 comments:

  1. New insight into my unwillingness to fail. Relates VERY well to last night's conversation. Thanks Hayley.

    ReplyDelete
  2. All my thanks goes to you dear. Maybe it isn't an unwillingness so much as it is a fear. Let's work through our fears.

    ReplyDelete