Teaching Failure

Writing at the Times Literary Supplement, scholar/classicist Mary Beard asks “How long can it take to write a paragraph?”

The answer in her present example is “three days,” and she describes a process with which many of us may be familiar, the fits and starts of “repeatedly getting a few lines down on the screen, then either deleting them or transferring them to a separate document rather sweetly entitled ‘bits and pieces’ and starting all over again.”

Because writing is thinking, and sometimes it takes time for thoughts to form in a way that allow the right words to come forth, these struggles are inevitable.

But reading Mary Beard’s musings I was reminded how difficult it is in writing instruction to allow and encourage students to engage in this particular – I would argue, fundamental – learning experience.

The hardest part of writing for me, and I’d guess for many, is learning the difference between, “good enough,” and “can’t be better,” and when “good enough” is truly good enough. Sometimes that means spending three days on a paragraph.

Unfortunately, because of the nature of school and assessment, very few students are even introduced to the concept, let alone allowed to explore and wrestle with it. “Good enough” is whatever the teacher decides is a B or better. Once that threshold is met, it’s time to move on.

Given the structure of the semester, the demands of curriculum and assessment, there simply isn’t time to allow students to battle an idea for three days. Even three hours would be unusual. Through conferences and reflection (mine and my students’) I have come to know that students themselves recognize the “incomplete” nature of their own work, but are very rarely, if ever, asked to go beyond that incompleteness.

To expect students to truly exhaust the potential of a piece of writing in a single college course may be too much to ask, but I believe we can at least help students understand the inevitably incomplete nature of their work as way to extend writing instruction beyond the classroom.

Rather than settling for some marker of “proficiency” at the end of the semester, what if instead, we asked students to catalog and understand their “failure?”

This past semester, I purposefully designed “failure” as part of the curriculum. Let me be honest, though. In reality, “failure” – in the sense that students do not get to exhaust the potential of a piece of writing – was already encoded into the DNA of the course. They are given 3½ weeks to revise a short story that they drafted earlier in the semester. This sort of timeline, particularly in the context of the busy academic/work/life schedules my students maintain is entirely unreasonable if we expect a work to be “finished.”

I have stories that take literally years from initial draft to completion. Looking at my hard  “posts in progress” folder for this space I see twelve files, one of which is 22 months old.

So in reality, by designing around failure, I simply made obvious what was already there. Judged against a criteria of “can’t be better,” every single student in the class was going to fail as a matter of course.

But rather than judging those efforts a kind of sliding scale of achievement or proficiency, I asked students to acknowledge and reflect on their “failures” and in conference we had a simple conversation based on two straightforward questions:

Through revision, 1. What did you do? (and why?), and looking at the results as they stand, 2. What else do you want to do? (and why?).

In many cases, the revised version of the initial draft is objectively “worse” than the original. In order to get to the ultimate construction, it’s likely that the author has torn down something that will later need to be rebuilt. Such is the inevitable nature of revision, as Mary Beard’s struggle with her paragraph illustrates. We cannot do everything to a piece simultaneously, and addressing one issue may exacerbate another.

Through reflection and conversation, I’m asking the author to understand the mess they’ve made and consider what the next steps might be on the path to cleaning it up. This is the work writers must do every day, and it is therefore an experience I want students to have.

To some, this may sound like a depressing end of the semester, an acknowledgement of failure, but I can report that the opposite is true. For me, and in talking to students, for them as well, the semester as a moment of “completion” is a fiction and engenders far more frustration as they feel cut off from the chance to continue to make progress from what they’ve learned and how they’ve grown.

From my perspective, it’s simply more honest. No, they aren’t done; there’s more to do, and most importantly, it’s not the teacher who gets to tell you when you’re done.

By focusing on the “revision experience” as opposed to the revised artifact, I’ve opened the door to reality of writing, that one is never done, that even if they take something to “can’t be better,” six months or a year after that they will look back on a piece and suddenly see there’s more to be done.

It’s probably unreasonable to imagine a curriculum that both allows for the kind of necessary freedom that Mary Beard writes about that also satisfies the strictures of education, but it bothers me that so much of writing instruction in school hides from students so many of the realities of what it means to write.

Failure is inevitable. They may as well be acquainted with the pleasure of knowing there’s always more to be done.